Italo Calvino | Binyavanga Wainaina | Time Present and Time Past | Tripoli | Fire and Movement | Garbology | Thomas Merton's Death | The Lamed-Vovnik | Viruses | 1940s American Radio | The Super-Ego Is Just an Old Nag

Under the Tripoli Sky
"My spirit is everywhere and nowhere:
I am the invisible visible, the interior exterior,
the absent presence, the sleeper awake,
the beautiful and the ugly, the merciless and
the compassionate."

The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price
Purveyor of Superior Funerals
"Sometimes Wilfred wondered if under those
Welsh hills there were great women, giantesses,
who had lain down on the earth in ancient times and fallen asleep,
and then the earth had crept over them, over their breasts and
their hips and the dips of their waists and tapering up
their strong thighs."

One Day I Will Write About This Place
"Here, one does get
a muddled picture of Africa,
but it isn't so much a jungle Africa
as a jumble Africa."
Into the War
"And the young Italo
and his friend Biancone would go off chortling,
that they had so fooled the old folks,
with their play war, which always
had a happy ending."
Transoceanic
"The message: Don't get married.
If you do get married, don't have a baby.
If you do have a baby,
don't do it in a Chinese hospital."
Time Present and Time Past
"What must it be to be a bongo?
A kind of antelope, its hide is
a sensational golden toffee color.
The bongos are ambling around
on their neat hooves, seemingly indifferent
to their own beauty."
Eight Mile High
"In the first few stories
he is often tender, wisely seeing a world now gone.
But in the second half of the anthology, things go
mad and brutish"
Great Reviews of the Past
The All American Poem
"We'll take a bus there. A bus is a diplomat.
It throws us all together, our books,
hats and umbrellas. I am never more human
than when I'm riding next to someone
who makes me shudder. If my body
touches his body who knows what will happen? Race issues
and cooties."
Notes of an Abject Reptile
"The flowers appear on the earth:
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle
is heard in our land.."
LETTERS
Poole's Paradise
MORE LETTERS
Viruses
EVEN MORE LETTERS
When Is a Rejection
Just Too Quick?

ARTICLES
Your Super-Ego Is Just an Old Nag
"The id is the nag Rocinante,
the ego is the mad Don Quixote, and
the super-ego is the sometimes amusing,
often good-humoured,
sometimes down to earth and
gullible Sancho Panza."
Great Articles from the Past
American Radio --- 1945
"Give me some orange juice for a pickup."
"Yes sir. And what do you want for yourself?"
(Sound of sirens and gunshots).
"She was only an optician's daughter.
Two glasses, and she made a spectacle of herself."
(Sound of machine guns and screams).
READINGS
Starting World War One
With Telephone and Airplane
"I sat all day and far into the night
ringing up all possible and impossible places in Belgium
not known yet to be in German hands: Soignies, Braine-le-Comte,
Hal, Tubize, Lens, Ath, Ghislenghien,
Lessines, and many others."
POETRY
Tito
"I'd run from room to room
when the doorbell rang
Hiding Lenin busts
And the complete works
Of Kim Il Sung
Khomeini, Hitler, Bin Laden
Something to offend everyone."
The History of the Minstrel Show
"Thus began the tradition, that one day a year
the slaves would paint their faces white and become
like the masters. The masters would paint their faces black
and become like the slaves."
Great Poems of the Past
Shiva Goes Surfing off Newfoundland
"Remember that fall in Newfoundland, mamá
We courted each other
Eyes as hot as sin
You surfing in my arms,
You hiding from the sun;
You and the eyes of wonder
Courting the last winds before dying
Blowing the spray around like venom."