The Comfort of Things
Looking around at the ornaments, it is only too easy for people from another background and a different system of values to dismiss these things as kitsch. Plastic and plaster, bright colours, not a single flower that is real. Yet to think in terms of kitsch is simply...
Forty Stories
The Educational Experience What a wonderful time you'll have, we told them, when the experience is over, done, completed. You will all, we told them, be more beautiful than you are now, and more employable too. You will have a grasp of the total situation; the total...
Marcovaldo
At the summons of the loudspeaker, the crowd of customers was gripped by a frantic haste, as if these were the last minutes in the last supermarket of the whole world, an urgency either to grab everything there was or to leave it there - the motive wasn't clear - and...
To Whom It May Concern
I was run over by the truth one day. Ever since the accident I've walked this way So stick my legs in plaster Tell me lies about Vietnam. Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain, Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again So fill my ears with silver Stick my...
Politics and the English Language
Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.