I interrupt my daily broadcast of Ohiowa Impromptu with a brief tip of the hat to the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. A native of the Venice of the North, St. Petersburg, Brodsky, from 1972 an exile from Russia, spent a good deal of his all-too-short life in the other, original Venice, where he is now spending eternity, in the cemetery of San Michele. He was mesmerized by Venice, by what he called in his 1992 book Watermark his "version of Paradise." He never had anything resembling an iti...

I’ve written a short memoir, available here if anyone’s interested. It’s mostly true, and where memory is a little vague I’ve put together the most likely script, given the facts as I remember them.  But it won’t be popular, because a) I’m little-known and b) I had a pleasant childhood in beautiful surroundings. No abuse, no bullying bar the usual pushing around on the playground, and no drugs, either, or anything more sordid than the standard writer’s Bohemia of wine, women and...

In the aftermath of that kitschfest that is July 4th (like all celebrations mandated by the powers that be), I was musing on Milan Kundera's several definitions of kitsch. He is the great expert, along with his fellow Slav-in-exile Nabokov, who defined poshlost, a Russian take on kitsch, as "the obviously trashy, . . . the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." But Kundera has boiled the real thing down to its essence. In his great comedy of man...

Last night I was browsing Molloy, as is my wont during the insomniac hours. The problem, in the wee hours of the night, is the occasional fits of laughter it still provokes..."She went by the peaceful name of Ruth, I think, but I can’t say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I disc...