Eleanor's Rhyme of History
" 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...