It is the storms of March that prepare us for the flowers of April and May. The Italians would be so naive. Regardless, the Italians, they know their fairy tales; this from an out-of-print collection, which only means that ultimately they will all need to be read, for the sake of the verisimilitude of indelibility. Just you remember who has it in print! Remember, and be thankful for March.

It’s so wet here and even upon peeling off my socks I can barely make out where the water ends and the feet begin. And then my olfactories open as the dog greets me with lick-to-nose and it’s the same thing: where does the wet-dog smell stop and the dog herself start? I dare not eat under these conditions, which remind me of Maugham.

In my ongoing efforts to impress upon you my unparalleled prowess at podCASTrophilia, I’ve spent the evening downloading all these applications that allow one to do things like “Normalise” and “Reduce Peak” and “Remove Hiss” and “Shift Frequency,” all of which I, with my many skills, understand perfectly well and can do with ease, while sipping tea with one hand and scratching my head in the other.

Nothing says Eve of The Second Coming of Christ like a longish existential short story by a forgotten Swedish Nobel winner (repeat: not nepotism) about a delusional old urchin who lives and preaches as the saviour of man.

I don’t know where you can find this in print– Jesus knows, I’ll bet. I have it in a tattered dimestore paperback anthology called The Existential Mind, Documents and Fictions,

Is it a revelatory outpour of inner monologue detailing one man’s confusion on racial, political, and sociological identity, leading to violence and resignation? Or could it be just another day at the office? We should all listen, briefly, then settle up and cose together for a nice long nap.

It was only a matter of time before we get here, deep unsettling irony, psychosexual abandonment, romantic antipathy and just a soupcon of background traffic. A passing bus, a ghetto lowrider, a few dollups of plaster falling from the ceiling, and if you listen very intently, introspection.

Much as I would love to read the entire Decameron, and one day maybe I will (when the sound quality is improved to the point where I no longer sound like a podcastrati… and yes I am working on it!), for now, here’s enough of an excerpt to give you pleasantest of dreams of romance in the time of plague. Besides, it doesn’t get much more hypercritically metatextual, reading a bedtime story that is a bedtime story being read.

If I were a more professional podCASTresse, I might have added a subliminal background track to this story, and if that were to have happened, you might have finished listening to tonight’s bedtime story thinking one thought: Paul Bowles Can Be Touching and Humanistic. But, I’m not a professional

It’s true, it is, that Miette has bought something special to aid in her PodCASTing, though in the true ghetto style she so cherishes, she (or rather, I, Miette), didn’t do much to prevent the background sounds of discs spinning up, or dogs turning to dervish, or other random technospatter.

It’s a lovely springtime afternoon, and you should be outdoors, at the park lazing about, not cramped inside looking for the cheap thrill of an afternoon bedtime story. Go on, go to the park now, and come back and listen later.

But I can only hope you’ve taken my advice, and I’ll assume that it’s later. So here’s a little Lawrence, replete with lovely Lawrencian descriptions of lovely springtime Yorkshire afternoons