Love Songs & Drone Stories
Langston Hughes 
Pastel drawing of Hughes by Winold Reiss
(February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967)
Jukebox and Love Song (previous post)
On Geroge Whitman and Langston Hughes by Alan Sondheim
I haven’t seen the film but in the 1960s I hung around Whitman’s bookstore and got to know him;
I also remember listening to Langston Hughes through the bookstore skylight, we were on the roof and I almost fell through and on him. There was a wishing-well in the center of the place. It was amazing.
1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.
2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.
4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.
5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.
7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.
Seven short stories about drones by Teju Cole
R.I.P Lucien Stryk (1924-2013) was an American poet, translator of Buddhist literature and Zen poetry, and former English professor at Northern Illinois University