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Year: 2025

A Foreign Correspondent’s Olivetti Now in NY TIMES Museum

posted Nov 23, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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James P. Sterba working on his Olivetti Lettera 32 in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1971. Note the lorikeet perched atop the typewriter. Credit… Courtesy of James P. Sterba

Note: I read about this in today’s NY Times.





James P. Sterba, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, with the Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter he donated to the Museum at The Times in 2024.Credit…David W. Dunlap/The New York Times





My Lettera 32 used to type this post. There’s something wrong with the ribbon advance, which is probably why some letters appear washed out.


Déjà Post – Documentary Film about the Last 10 Years of My Brother’s Life

posted Nov 14, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Six years ago today, my twin brother, Tim, died from sudden cardiac arrest. He left behind more than 1,500 videos and hundreds of blog posts about his search for Florida’s version of Bigfoot—the Skunk Ape. In the Tampa area, Tim became a kind of local folk hero, and his obituary even ran on the front page of the Tampa Bay Times.

Grief is a strange thing, and even after six years, it’s still hard for me to believe that this larger-than-life guy—someone who grabbed life with both hands no matter what he was doing—is really gone. All I can do now is keep his memory alive.

That’s why I made a documentary from his footage, our family’s old 8mm films, interviews, audio, and newspaper clippings. The film covers the last decade of his life, showing how he worked to lift himself out of poverty as a cab driver while discovering a late passion for videography and for searching the Florida swamps for Bigfoot. It’s filled with wild stories, unforgettable characters, strange dreamers, and big ideas about human existence.

 

Al Purdy: The Voice of Canada in Free Verse

posted Nov 11, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Al Purdy (1918–2000) was one of Canada’s most down-to-earth poets—tough, funny, and grounded in the landscape he wrote about. Over five decades and more than thirty books, he told the stories of ordinary people and familiar places, capturing small towns, wild country, and the passage of time with warmth and grit.
His poems, especially those in The Cariboo Horses and Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, sound natural and conversational, like talking with an old friend at the kitchen table. Beneath that easy tone, though, is a deep sense of time, loss, and endurance.
Reading Purdy is like hearing Canada talk in its own voice — honest, weathered, and full of stubborn wonder.
 
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