Authors Electric

The closest I've come to kicking the bucket was when peritonitis put me in a coma for three days at age 5. (That was in 1942, when I was saved by new antibiotic wonder drugs), and late one night a month ago, at age 89, when my inamorata, artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, found me unconscious on the floor of my home office, where I had fallen due to low blood sugar - a hazard for   type 2 diabetic octgenarians on insulin like myself. Lucky for me she called 911. (I won't count the murder of a character that my friend and prolific  mystery writer Lewis Perdue named after me in his 1985 thriller, " The Linz Testament .")   The non-fiction me woke up in St. Fra ncis Hospital, in the pricey 'burb of Evanston, Illinois, not far from my home on Chicago's North Side. Not that  I'm a believer, but St. Francis, as well as Eleanor, must have been watching over me because I remain whole, and in possession of my faculties. I was bruised from my fall, but no broken bones. ...

" The more things change, the more they stay the same," French journalist  Alphonse Karr wrote in an 1849 column.  Change is a constant of life, usually by increments in culture and politics, occasionally accelerated. This is one of those times. Like most Americans, this past week my inamorata, the noted artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris , and I watched seemingly earthshaking events unfold daily. July 2024 shifted .  It feels like 1968, a year of assassinations and upheaval that shaped our personal lives along with politics. Inspired by Don Delill o's masterful novel  Underworld  mingling characters' inner lives with the Cold War, I made the first six months of 1968 a protagonist in my memoirist novella, " Our Own Kind , " featured in my 2018 collection: " Sometimes Ridiculous ."     Eleanor and I are old enough to remember moments when we experienced political change as personal, not just as a spectator sport in Washington.  Karr's cynical quote...

Another Ground Hog Day and I'm spinning my wheels. Same rut; different project. They say that rewriting is part of the process, but I feel like Bill Murray's clueless curmudgeon midway through his trial by repetition. Eighty thousand polished and re-polished words and now I'm redoing the opening - always the opening, the grabber, the launch. I feel like I'm weaving a Persian rug with my fingernails. I'm forever climbing an M.C. Escher staircase. I'm at the stage of get-on-with-it-already. And it's Trump vs. Biden for the White House again this year -- deja vu soaked in Trump-aversion shared by a majority of my frustrated countrymen. Deja vu turns into horror when we recognize how closely Trump's MAGA fascist path parallels that of Hitler. Two years on and an increasingly demented Trump seems undeterred by consequences of his bloody, failed January 6 insurrection. Similarly, the Führer and his Nazis continued their rise to power undeterred by failure of t...

A week ago, I woke in pitch dark from of a whirl of troubled dreams, spawned no doubt by my dread of 2024, a year swaddled in doomsday prognostications . Freezing rain pelted my bedroom window. The glowing deco clock on my night-stand blinked 5:30. I'm accustomed to wee-hour awakenings. Might as well forget about going back to sleep.  An hour later, after my ablutions, when I switched on the TV over coffee, it dawned on me, quite literally, that it was evening not dawn. I had overslept from an afternoon nap. No wonder all the wrong newscasters were on and it wasn't getting light outside. T'was a scifi-moment, not a senior one, I reassured myself. I've been wrestling with time paradoxes in a story I'm writing. I had jumped to the next morning for a few hours. Ho ho ho. That, I'd wandered into the fog of winter solstice blues. Time travel speculation is an exercise in what-ifs. So is New Years Eve when we celebrate change knowing that the coming year probably will...