And i feel stupid for the last residual twinges of wishing i could make a poem of it. For there are some things greater than poems. There are some things too great to be written as art.

"A case in point is Svec, the sculptor who made the World's Greatest Statue of Josef Vissarionovich [Stalin], the one that for about six years loomed over Prague. The Party ordered the monument to be blown up in October 1962. But they had trouble carrying out the order. They could not liquidate the Thing by just one powerful charge because the explosion could have damaged a considerable portion of downtown Prague. So the pyrotechnicians nibbled him away, bit by bit, in a series of mini-explosions. It took them, I think, a couple of