Bridge of Sighs, Venice. Spring 2005.
How different is it from Spring 1935?

Mussolini is preparing to invade Ethiopia; World War Two
is about to vomit blood all over us. Since then we've split
the atom; rooted out the reds; cloned a mammal; colonized
the rain forests unleashing deadly microbes; spread ass-up
for Technology; committed multiple genocides on multiple
continents . . . The light is changing, humans are streaming
over the bridge, laughing and chattering in a babel of tongues,
yet nothing moves, I hear nothing, except, faintly, the lapping
of the turbid canal water in this fabled, sinking city of the mind.

- “Death of Jeans”

Harold Jaffe went to Grinnell College for his B.A., and received a Ph.D in Literature, with Distinction,
from New York University.

Professor Jaffe is the author of seventeen books: 14 collections of fiction, "docufuction" and creative
nonfiction, and four novels. These include Mourning Crazy Horse (1982),  Dos Indios (1983), Beasts (1986), Madonna and Other Spectacles (1988), Eros Anti-Eros (1990), Straight Razor (1995), Othello Blues (1996), Sex for the Millennium (1999), False Positive (2002), 15 Serial Killers (2003),  Terror-dot-Gov (2005), Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (2007), Jesus Coyote (2008), Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories (2010), Paris 60 (2010) and OD, a collection of texts featuring known people who have died either deliberately or inadvertently by overdosing on drugs, will be published in 2011.

Jaffe's writing has been anthologized in  Pushcart Prize on three occasions, in Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, After Yesterday's Crash, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, City Lights Review, and elsewhere. His writings have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Farsi, French, Polish, Turkish, and Czech. He has won numerous awards, including two NEAs for fiction; a California Arts Council grant for fiction; a New York CAPS grant for fiction; a San Diego COMBO grant; and two Fulbright grants to Pragueand to India.  Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.