Dave Press

i found christopher columbus hiding in the ash tray/what are you doing there if you please/no one smokes, he said, leave me alone.

My father used to say, when I would apologize for the usual mess in my office, ‘A clean office or desk is a sign of a sterile mind.’

As to the youths of Jersey Shore, they are playing grotesques, like all minstrel-show caricatures. They are amusing—indeed, more so than most clowns with sad eyes. They have clearly found their moment and clearly touched a nerve. To the term Italian American, which has carried so many strings of dollar bills and ropes of sausage, they have added a new chain of fetishes – a tanning bed, a tube of gel, an old summer thong bearing the legend “I Love the Situation.

You have to assume when writing online—like on Facebook, or anything else—that one day it may appear in the New York Times.

So this is not an elegy, it is an investigation, inquiry of beauty slipping, tumbling down the gentle sidewalk slope, catastrophe of flowers, complicit now with history, marks of what was done what we aim to do tomorrow. Everything revealed itself to us sitting on those thick rough granite blocks, giggling, eating grapes, but uselessly revealed, as if one saw one day as plain as a walnut the fatal bump under the skin, all clear, all present, but no more use in the event than a newspaper to a stray dog. We saw it as blueberries see the rain. Completely, and completely helpless. I am sitting in Paris alone writing now, was never able to write this at home. There, one must always DO something.