"In Romania, on moonlit nights, the peasant women used to look down into a well until they saw the reflection of the moon."

"Then they let down a pail, slowly drew up water with the moon in it and, with a spoon, drank its reflection. Looking down into the well at that moment, they could see the face of their future bridegroom."

(A quote at the end of an essay by Saul Steinberg, found in a fruitless search for a drawing I remember or misremember with "we" and "they" —or is it "Who are they?" — drawn to signify the emotion contained in those words — a search undertaken after writing "So we they are not chomping cheeseburgers simply for sensual pleasure....")

"While witches enjoy popular support in Romania..."

"... many in the government view them as swindlers whose presence makes their country seem superstitious and backwards.... It seems that tensions will diffuse when witches feel respected by their government and Romania feels respected by the West."

"Will Dylan or Oates get literature Nobel today?"

Oh, how deluded we Americans are! Even to ask that question! The Europeans don't love us, and it's just embarrassing to publicly swoon about their possible love. Bob Dylan isn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature:

Before last year's prize announcement, outgoing permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said the United States was too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world, setting off an uproar.

Go ahead, Europe. Boost your ego at our expense. It's what you need. It's what we're here for.

However, England struck a different tone, saying that in most language areas "there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."

Engdahl, England... what difference does it make? Do we care what you think?

The contretemps has made people think there is a better-than-normal chance that an American will receive the prize.

Oates has been called a favorite to win for 25 years.

However, British betting firm Ladbrokes is giving the lowest odds to Israel's Amos Oz and German writer Herta Mueller.

And Herta Mueller it is.

In ... two works, Muller depicts life in a small, German-speaking village and the corruption, intolerance and repression to be found there. The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively. Because Mueller had publicly criticized the dictatorship in Romania, she was prohibited from publishing in her own country....

The novels Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jaeger (1992), Herztier (1994; The Land of Green Plums, 1996) and Heute war ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997; The Appointment, 2001) give, with chiselled details, a portrait of daily life in a stagnated dictatorship.

Well, let's see some sentences. Let's see some lines and passages. Let's see those "chiselled" details.

Meanwhile:

Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism.
Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws
And the sound of the keys as they clink
But there's no time to think.

Lampooning the balance between "would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space."

It's "Entropa," by Czech artist David Cerny, a 172-square-foot multi-part sculpture attached to the European Council building in Brussels. It's the Czech Republic's turn at the EU presidency, you see.

Entropa portrays Bulgaria as a toilet, Romania as a Dracula theme-park and France as a country on strike....

The Netherlands is shown as series of minarets submerged by a flood — a possible reference to the nation's simmering religious tensions.

Indeed, it's possible!

Germany is shown as a network of motorways vaguely resembling a swastika....

The old swastika — on a government building.

Cerny would like to know "if Europe is able to laugh at itself."

UPDATE: Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra says:

"I apologise to Bulgaria and its government if it feels offended..."...

"We wanted to prove that 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there is no censorship," said the former Czech dissident.

But he refused to share the platform with the artist, who insisted his piece was in the European tradition of satire, like Monty Python and France's Les Guignols.

He also denied that the Lego entry for Denmark was a representation of one of the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that appeared in 2005.

AND: Here's a picture of the Demark section.