Authors Electric

I got a hell of a surprise about two weeks ago. It was just a few days after my 81st birthday. My inamorata Eleanor was downstairs helping the neighbors with a garage sale. I had been brushing my teeth, getting ready to join my youngest daughter, Zoë, for a brunch when it happened.    My latest, soon to be released short story collection. That's me at Bread & Puppets Theater Museum in Glover, VT, opening another fabulous summer season tomorrow. She was on one of her periodic Chicago visits from Indiana University at Bloomington where she is a doctoral candidate in cognitive science. Her birthday falls just after mine and we always celebrate together. I finished brushing and tried to leave the bathroom and - surprise! The door wouldn't open! The doorknob just turned round and round helplessly without moving the latch. I rattled it, wiggled it. turned it again. Nothing. I tried prying the latch with a pair of nail scissors. Nothing. The door was clearly unlocked,...

The election debacle has me flashing on 1968 when it seemed to this old lefty - as it does today - that the stars were arrayed against our every hope for that better world we had thought briefly within our grasp. Part of it has to do with my preparing to release a new, print edition of  Our Own Kind , a semiautobiographical novella about black-and-white relationships at a newspaper during the catastrophic three months between the 1968 assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles - a story that I tried to let unfold along nexus of private lives and public calamities while skirting the edges of America's ever-present racial divide. And here we are again. Fast forward 48 years to another American presidential election year ending badly. This one started out almost as a comedy. But the potential for calamity is worse - quite conceivably an end of the republic as we know it. Nearly every measure Trump and his corporate Republican cronies...