2023
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“I want to die”
The Angel of Death by Edvard Munch. My friend’s line had me by the throat: I want to die. I get it…
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Because you can
Around 20,000 have been killed in Gaza, but many more lie beneath the rubble. Since the West went to war…
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On Kissinger
Goodbye to Kissinger. My father roundly disliked Henry Kissinger. Hindsight suggests this was prompted, at least at first, by the…
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Misunderstanding General Giáp
General Giáp or a Jewish American Princess? Amy Bernstein was over and under and into the moon, and I was,…
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Vengeance unleashed
How many times do we have to say “Never again”? And at what point does it become a lie? Israel…
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The lunatic
This is my house. I have to defend it. Iam the madman of my apartment block. I have this propensity…
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The basement war
The wheel of history. In June 1967, I was a scaled-down Moshe Dayan in my bunker-like basement. Like the Israeli…
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A shell game
Whisper, and they whisper back. As a child, I collected souls (but it was only when the deities slumbered). It…
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The great Great Falls mystery
Rene Magritte’s Le Plagiat. Iam not Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, or Philip K. Dick, writers who contemplated the imagined as…
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Humouring depression
Black dogs, symbols of gloom. Like a lounge lizard on mean-street rounds, depression makes itself at home with carcinogenic panache.…
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Benchmark
The boardwalk at Rehoboth beach, Delaware. August was a bench. That month’s bookmark. It was a place to which I…
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One man’s “ferragosto”
Rome, bereft of its citizens. No European capital sheds its August citizenry as decisively as Rome. The exodus is a…
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Tiger and snake
From Fellini’s La Strada. During my first decades in Rome, which began in earnest almost exactly fifty years ago, I…
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In real life
From back when words meant something. Some weeks ago — my sense of time these days is admittedly fragile —…
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Heaven in the heavens
Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Ionce fell for a girl who loved telescopes. Not astronomy or even the cosmos…
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Asunder
The cost of adventuring? Push tourism toward danger-seeking and it overflows into a voyeurism covered appropriately by a certain saying…
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Days of aqua pazza
Torrential rain floods Rome. What season of the witch has befallen almost-summer Rome? None that I have ever before encountered.…
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Business as usual
During the time of the Falklands War, a bomb was planted in the office of the Rome “Daily American.” As…
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Once upon a footpath
And all because of a footpath… Just over a decade ago, when the planet was more obsessed with terrorism than…
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A “gentleman” undone
Manners from another age. I am by nature impulsive. Some forty years ago that lifelong impulsiveness, complicit turmoil within the…
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February sun
A cat and a man come out for the sun. Finally, a resplendently sunny midwinter day in Rome — after…
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A day in the life
Without the warm sun, without light, without sight, one tries to go on. January 15, early morning: Queer, sullen days in…
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Bringer of bread
Without bread and without light, the mind begins to slip. In the dog days of early July, when all cooling…
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In the heat of the moment
So, when it’s really really hot, it’s important to stay hydrated. It is 11 a.m. on what has for days…
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Persistence before aptitude
A Winner left, a Winner came. There I was again. Hunched over my paperback Bible, stricken with doubt and eager…
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Twilight of an astronaut
An astronaut on the moon. Many moons ago I imagined myself an astronaut. I was then in my teens, but…
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