Latest work
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All the names
Read more: All the namesHandwritten letters are now few. Afriend from university just sent me a postcard. It’s her eccentric way of maintaining a small but persistent dose of singularity. Doing what we think others don’t can make us interesting, or so we think. On the card is a surrealist image of a man…
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Limbs to lose
Read more: Limbs to loseHamburg, 1945: Wantonness, and then regret. Phantom pain occurs when a confused brain sends messages to severed limbs, rejecting the idea that the appendages are gone and leaving the victim in the thrashing throes of rage and despair. Carry this mournful paradigm into the political and social arena and some…
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Own it
Read more: Own itWhy be aware when you can own? Recently, a friend of mine acknowledged she talked too much. But she knew about the flaw, she explained. Not only that, she “owned” it — not “owned up” to it, mind you, but owned it, the way you might own a sofa or…
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Giovanni
Read more: GiovanniGiovanni spent most days seated on a straw chair. The superintendent of our Rome building when I was a boy was a Sard named Giovanni. He lived in the ground floor apartment with his wife Rosa and spent most of the day sitting tranquilly in a straw chair just beside…
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76 trombones
Read more: 76 trombonesRotary heaven… At a certain age, age becomes you. Like mourning becomes Electra. New inventions and refreshed conventions disdain all carping. You collect antiques without even wanting to, or they collect you. Take my landline phone. Once a stalwart rectangular box with a magic wire attached, it’s now a relic…
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Tighten up
Read more: Tighten upGavrilo Princip’s murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 led to Hungary’s declaring war on Serbia and opened the door to World War I. The final assignment was not simple. The course had covered European history in the first quarter of…
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