I was teaching Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea yesterday and was going on about the importance of gossip in the novel, with its variety of narrators, as a subversive force, as a threat to the voice of authority (from one point of view, what are novels if not just gossip?). And now I see that Ignacio Jimenez, the mayor of Icononzo, in Colombia, agrees. He has banned gossip in Icononzo, telling El Tiempo newspaper that "loose tongues can cost lives in Colombia, which is in the grips of a guerrilla war involving Marxist rebels and far-right paramilitary outlaws". Meanwhile, more gossip in the fact that a member of Claude Cassirer's family (see the Pissarro post below) writes from Telluride to PdS Blog thanking us for the "humorous spin on the family's efforts to recover the Pissarro masterpiece stolen by the Nazis from my great-grandmother in 1939." May the best man win. Meanwhile, gossip might lead to very good things here - a once-unimaginable step forward. Will the opportunity be taken?