Newsletter
Triago: There! That! Didst thou see ’t?
The card-sharp’s fumbling misdirect?
That tell-tale grin or worldly wink that
Cracks heav’n apart and for a twinkling
Throws rude light upon perfidious conjury!
Spy the dark-clad stage boy! How he flies —
Yet bolts a trice too late to beat the curtain’s rise.
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Enter Herculio eating an apple.
Herculio: How now, sweet Triago. What sorrow?
Triago: A browful, sir. In foreign paper, densely ink’d.
Herculio: Pray tell. (Aside) I would pray there were a choice
Had my prayers a hope of answer.
Triago: See here, Herculio. ’Tis a slip. Behold the oily wires.
O, Trickery! O, Falsity! Mark the cagey fingers
Cross’d behind thy back!
O, my career! My toil! My dreary occupation!
Has it all been but a prank, Herculio?
This long and wretched shift: just some saucy jape?
Herculio: All well-meant, good Triago. Be not sour —
These are not grapes.
Triago: Indeed not sir: rather, scrapes.
And scars and knocks — the job-lot doggedly sustained.
Herculio: (Aside) Some more than others. The odd one feigned.
But come, Sir Tig: what unrests you here?
Triago: (waving paper) A tract from a brother clerk in America.
Herculio: Cripes abroad. Grim tidings?
Triago: Forsooth: it wears the colours of a fight.
A word-scape stain’d with tightly kernèd face
And girded round with fontish weaponry.
Herculio: (inspecting the document) Verily, convenantry this dark
Speaks of litiginous untrust.
Wherefore such cruel indemnities?
Wherefore so dry a want of fun?
A merchant wrapp’d with better sense
Would just as soon injunct th’orbiting sun.
What is this pact, Triago? Who demands
Such fearsome consequence?
Triago: An entente of secrecy, no more.
Herculio: Secrecy? Do my deceitful ears mislead?
Say it again, my friend: secrecy, didst thou say?
Triago: I did, my Lord, I did. A trifling confi. An N.D.A.
Once in a long while[1] you see a giveaway. A tell: a knowing look, a sly wink, fingers crossed behind the back, a stray wire, a stage-hand scampering away a moment too late to beat the rising curtain — just enough to wonder: is this whole thing, secretly, a gigantic have? Are we stooges? Have we all been fitted up, Truman Burbank-style, in some epochal, multi-decade-long Game For A Laugh? Is the benign creator playing with us, for sport, like flies to wanton boys?
One of those moments arrived recently, in the shape of an eight-page, tightly-kerned, ten-point slab-style American tract: The kind of writing that suffocates you: it permits no breath, there being no punctuation nor artful use of space to break up the diatribe: girded-about with the weaponry of mistrust — indemnities, the mutual contemplation of equitable injunctions, covenants to destroy information utterly and salt the barren Earth.
It was a confidentiality agreement — the saucier parts of financial servery have not yet made their peace with OneNDA, so this does still happen, tiresome though it is — but what gave the game away was not the weaponry and ordnance with which it was armed, but its purpose: not a client list, sensitive KYC material, a sample trade portfolio or trade secrets, but for a newsletter.
When subscribers to a news periodical sign up on conditions of secrecy, we have reached a pretty pass.
The JC’s ever-so-occasional newsletter
We gave up on doing our own desk-top published Newsletter, which took months and use now sub-stack, which also takes months. It’s here: https://jollycontrarian.substack.com/.
There are no conditions of secrecy. If you sign up as paid subscriber, you get the premium JC for free into the bargain. Sweet, huh?
See also
References
- ↑ Once every three or four days, about.