KETIKAN-KU

The Sightseers Ben Bova                 My heart almost went into fibrillation when i saw the browncloud off on the horizon that marked New York City. Dad smiled his wiser-than-thou smile as I pressed my nose against the plane’s windows in an effort to see more. By the time we got out of the stack over LaGuardia Airport and actually landed, my neck hurt.                 The city’s fantastic! People were crowding all over selling things, buying, hurrying across the streets,gawking. And the noise, the smells, all those old gasoline burning taxis rattling around and blasting horns. Not likeSylvan Dell, Michigan!                 “It’s vacation time,” Dad told me as we shouldered our way through the crowds along Broadway. “It’s always crowded during vacati...

by : Tom Disch As we rise above it row after now of lights reveal the incredible size of our loss. An ideal commonwealth would be not otherwise, for we can no more legislate against the causes of unhappiness, such as death or impotence or times when no one notice, than we can abolish the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all energy,  without exception, is wasted. Still, under certain conditions it is possible to move to a slightly nicer neighborhood. Or if not, then at least there is usually someone to talk to, or a library that stays open till nine. And any night you can see Times Square Tremulous with its busloads pf tourists who are seeing all of this for the first and last time before they are flown back to the Republic of Azerbaijan on the shore of the Caspian, where for weeks they will dream of our faces drenched with an unbelievable light.