Authors Electric

UT ponders process at AWM Six years in Chicago and I no longer feel like a tourist. Still, I like it when visitors come and give me an excuse to rubberneck the Windy City's attractions. I doubt this will wear off. I lived in San Francisco for 30 years and never tired of taking friends and family around, always discovering something new. I was ready for another round this July when my eldest daughter, Alicia and her husband Brian paid my inamorata Eleanor and I a visit, as they do from time to time. They were on their way home to Mexico City, where they run American and English literature programs at an international school, having done that sort of thing on four continents. They had just spent fortnight in Ireland visiting Brian's mother. Right off, Brian, an author and musician as well, announced in his lyrical Irish brogue: "I must see your Writers' Museum." "Writers' museum?" I hesitated. "I didn't know we had one." In fac...

I generally try to stay out of politics on this blog as much as possible. I do enough ranting and raving on my private Facebook page that, to be fair, if the current administration was actually enforcing a pogrom on political dissidents, I'd already be calling dibs on the top bunk of a FEMA camp/artist "colony." To be fair, the medical care there is top notch, I hear. We even get first dibs on experimental treatments. However, after last week's release of Trump's budget proposal , especially it's elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities , I feel like I need to speak up. It's not even that I am surprised a conservative president wants to cut resources for these two programs, as far as I can tell, every conservative president since the programs were enacted fifty years ago has wanted to restrict their funding out of some kind of belief that supporting the arts does not add much to the country...