Woke up this morning from a dream of the desert (maybe late winter desire to escape upstate New York, maybe compensation for having had to cancel next month's projected trip to Djanet, the south-eastern desert oasis in Algeria where friend Habib Tengour is traveling to this weekend, ¿quien sabe?). And dawn-dreaming of vast stretches of sand, of variously shaped sand dunes, though not able to remember the rich Arab vocabulary for their different shapes, I got stuck on the word "dune" — made a verb of it, "to dune," then a noun applicable beyond sand, then all of a sudden the word arose as a name, Mr. Dune, and yes, there is a Mr. Dune I knew, a distinguished Luxembourg poet whom I met only once, some thirty years ago.