Latest work
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Ho! Ho! Ho!
Read more: Ho! Ho! Ho!The Jolly Green Giant. Ropes made me skittish before the start of the school year. Lyndon Johnson seemed morose. Even my baseball team, the Washington Senators, spent the summer losing most of its games. Sometimes I’d troop off to the stadium alone to watch my favorite player, Frank Howard, a…
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Prufrock
Read more: PrufrockMake the pain go away… The parents of my friends are dying. Cancer, Parkinson’s, bad hearts, the sheet music of scrawled farewells. To recession news my friends add surreal newsreels of their parents’ symptoms. My parents died when I was young and youngish, my father at 19, my mother at…
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Mœurs et coutumes
Read more: Mœurs et coutumesKings, presidents, tapeworms… In the mid-1980s, the insurgent national newspaper USA Today overhauled the postwar bond between newspaper and reader, anointing itself as the newsprint agent of a middle class national “we” whose habits and sentimental foibles it sought to satisfy by keeping things simple. Once reserved for necktie editorials, the “we”…
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Unto health
Read more: Unto healthSocial welfare: A recipe against revolt. The downtrodden citizens of late 19th century European states propelled the chaotic, lucrative and exploitative experiment known as the Industrial Revolution. They saw health care, pensions and rudimentary education as a collective bill for services rendered. Social welfare was variously introduced to fulfill idealism,…
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Relevant
Read more: RelevantLike being there… Just before the Moon landing, Chet told us about his first kiss. He had been hiding it, shyly, supposing we were distracted by the commotion. And there was commotion. In July 1969 we, a small brood of boys, were invited to grab our Kodak Instamatic 104 cameras…
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She-cat, lost
Read more: She-cat, lostPiazza Esedra in a 1950s postcard. There were lost elephants in my time of manners. And vanished big cats. Nothing like the latest news out of Crotona, deep in Italy’s charcoaled south, where a circus-master let an elephant loose to promote a smallish big-top. He apologized and was fined. Or…
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