2007
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Harm and Foul
Saddam is the first high-level casualty of the New York and Washington attacks, and its most pathetic one. On September…
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Meds
Drug invasion. Walk into America unannounced and drugs become you — literally. You can fix blood pressure, erectile “dysfunction,” heart…
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No more summit
Reagan and Gorbachev in 1986. So it’s in the bag, or nearly. Surge is the word. A silly word. An…
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House
Laurie as House. Let’s recap. Italian men, according to a survey, envy Dr. Gregory House. Why? Apparently because Italian women…
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Free Beer
Privileged American students are bringing their norms to Italy under the assumption (common in college) that their own needs and…
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Table
Papal arrival ticket. Why a table? Where to put it? The living room is cramped. Mine were male questions. For…
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Cosa Nostra
The ultras revel in Nazi symbolism because they’re the spawn of fascism’s squadristi. It’s a rite of dissent and belonging.…
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Angelo’s Look
Angelo’s Look Angelo has the scared-rabbit look. It could be raining in the bedroom. On his sheets. On his children.…
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Shorthand
Midway through the motion, she’d smile. Shorthand, she told me proudly. To me, the peculiarity of the present was in…
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Java
You might be humbled or made to feel less like the center of the universe by a hot celestial body.…
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Vaguely
If you live in Italy, you need to learn to see the world approximately. This is how Italy works. Let’s…
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Flux
Western Catholicism is stopped cold because its emissaries have outlived their promise. “I’m here for the Easter blessing,” says the…
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The Spool
No, it’s not Orwell. It’s worse. Trawling the Web for unconsidered trifles I come across a mission statement by a…
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Calmor
Foreseeing trouble, I shuffle sideways or browse the beauty products counter for lozenges or balms. Iam at present a box…
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Rerun
Soft as mink, and as mean… Live long enough in a place and it’s your mausoleum. Old photographs, letters, and…
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Amanda’s Breasts
Man Ray, 1923. Breasts were Amanda’s growth industry. Both of them. She was a good promoter. Ten cents for one,…
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Fox
Cho’s writings apparently rattled those around him. So has mine at times. The skilled loner has an advantage over his…
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Dinosaurs
The three cars she’s pointing to, each tented over and battened down, haven’t been moved in at least two decades.…
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Pleasing a princess
No, said the clerk. Paper must be reserved. Prenotato. All was handcrafted. That Pineider made the most stylish stationary was,…
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Know Nothings
The Afghanistan triumph worked only in the abstract, as an arcane military-corporate takeover. In May 2002 I arrived in Washington,…
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Anterior Half
Two of them, the two that represent the first generation, the Adam and the Eve, increase to 258 by the…
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The Flavor Of Wind
You take her to where St. Peter’s has been inserted into a keyhole (or so you wish to say), and…
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Falling
Good mood is, say, a 77; sadness a 73; the day-to-day between a 74 and a 75.5. When the thin…
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Tan Man
He does not grin. He does not proselytize. He offers no literature. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a man and a woman.…
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Ein Berliner
One hundred meters away, on the street, police spool duct tape and set up security checkpoints and barricades. One hundred…
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Italian girlfriends
It’s not being American so much as being “poco Italiano.” First there was Veronica. Here’s what Veronica did. When annoyed,…
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Matilda
The secretary turns to the engineer: “Well, we can’t talk to the cat…” Mica possiamo parlare col gatto… In Rome,…
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Wink
Maybe someone told them to laugh… On my birthday my freeloading guests are eight laughing gulls that shudder and heckle…
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Vortex
Hogarth’s Bedlam. No neighborhood goes mad intentionally. Not at once. The mind’s pretty porcelain resents evidence of fissures. Lunacy’s club…
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Ottoman lesbians
“He posed as Eddine,” said Shasha. “He was crowned King Otto. He came dressed in medals.” The aging Albanian lesbians…
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Millions
I lean out the window and try to reason with the luxury builders. I want my summer back. The dentists…
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Numismatist
“The valuable ores once in the hands of the people are being taken away by the state,” he’d tell me.…
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Tarragon Olga
“Gentlemen, this tan… it’s from reading. I sit on my terrace and read.” Own a cubit of caramel skin and…
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Dora
Dora licks between my typing fingers, a sex goddess in the making… Dora the temptress is uneasy. Summer yields confusion.…
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The Good Lord
“You don’t breathe in Heaven ‘cuz you’re dead,” he said. Look at us! Two puddles and a sigh in a…
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Very cool
She drops me off, smiling. “You should try…” But no… Her palms fly up. Incoming. How’s your energy? I’ve flown…
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Morse
Hellos dancing up a pretend storm, which is how it is, or can be. She doesn’t write to me. She…
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The Tyger
“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the forests of the night” Here is what the Washington teacher tells her young teenaged student:…
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Phosphorus and Hesperus
Rire, he’d whisper. Here is a favorite word: Tergicristallo. Here’s another: Crepuscolare. In a Spanish mood I crave perro. I like the rolling…
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Worms
“They work slowly, from the inside out…” The florist invites me to see a giant worm. He’s a gaunt man…
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My dollar’s lifetime
Silver certificates, the redeemable kind, the ones worth their true weight, vanished in droves. The word “juxtapose” I learned when…
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Civility
Despot? The adolescent hostility faced by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his recent visit to New York City and to…
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Sorry
Gebrselassie. Little things can make me cry. Sentimentality is a dialect that aging depends on to make itself heard. Take…
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The Skim
The good old days… Via dei Fori Imperiali in 1953. Here, in a nutshell, is the latest from Italy: The…
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Miner
The former Krakow archbishop reveled in mountains and mine shafts… This is Rome’s season of impatience. Resplendence matures storms. Autumn…
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From My Mother’s Sleep
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. When they ran out of Boy Scout…
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108
Frank-turned-Percy is a kind of journalistic handyman: there are stretches in Germany and Italy… Unwise, I know, to lose track…
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Non c’è più
I found his old “lines,” typed, in a notebook glued to a folder of my love letters… Imet Rich Frady…
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Spleen
I busied myself painting the Visible Man’s trout-shaped liver — which the instructions referred to as “lover,” puzzling me further.…
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Ally allies
Yeti: big man with lots of hair who speaks no English… Before the Axis of Evil and after we disbanded…
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195. Swimming Pool
Nicholas Ray. You might pick another memory. A tan or a bikini, say. Or a starlet. It was that kind…
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Echoes
The giant echoes could be, and are very likely are, false alarms. Like the aliens at Area 51, helium dummies…
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Caprice
Senior and George W. in 1958. AU.S. intelligence report concluding that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons effort in 2003 is…
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Lazy
The Economist has long taken a detailed and critical view of Italy. Make believe that you’re at the optometrist. These…
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Dumbdown
By 1965 there’ll be total depravity,” says a character in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita,” made in 1960. “Everything will be…
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Awesome America
To appreciate America’s self-involved gusto — its “great hugeness,” as Jack Kerouac once put it — means accepting ruined attention…
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Claudio Cappon
Claudio Cappon: “My job isn’t to moralize RAI or change Italian culture.” In 1964, Columbia University-trained journalist Luigi Barzini published…
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Dead man walking
Maurizio Gasparri of Alleanza Nazonale made his views clear, while the situation in the Italian Senate has an eloquence all…
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Dream machine
Once upon a time… First — no, probably not first, but let’s say so — I came across a piece…
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Sex & lizards
She lay in the rowboat, idling away the afternoons… In 1960, facchino was my favorite word. When the train huffed to a…
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The dud
Lario, 50, and Berlusconi, 70, met in 1980 — he divorced to marry her. At the moment of her deepest…
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