-Gertrude Stein, Reflections on the Atomic Bomb (1946)
![WSVN_GrandPiano-SandBar](http://www.mediabistro.com/tvspy/files/2011/01/WSVN_GrandPiano-SandBar.jpg)
Is it my imagination or is the news cycle becoming more and more hallucinatory? Not just the news coming out of Egypt, which is mind-fucking enough ("Plumes of rancid, thick smoke billowed over the Nile River as, by nightfall, chaos reigned in the bustling metropolis," describes a feverish CNN wire dispatch) but the fluffier news as well; I presume my readers have been following, at least casually, the saga of the Florida piano? Abandoned atop a Biscayne Bay sandbar by some pranking teenagers, the dilapidated grand piano had become 2011's most Dadaist conversation piece-- until the authorities, playing their expected part, ordered it removed. Now the latest twist, yielding one of the most linguistically bizarre headlines (CNN again) in recent memory: MYSTERY PIANO IS NOW WAITER, TABLE. I don't recall the line betwixt breaking news and high-modernist poetry ever being so blurred--what a queer epoch is upon us!