Authors Electric

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons After several years at the game, I’m beginning to understand how bloggers find so much to say. Of course, my natural idleness continues to prevent me spending too much time putting this new-found knowledge into practice but, with another train journey home to fill, I can muse a little on a totally insignificant event which nevertheless managed to achieve some momentum – and which I think I can twist into something connected with the writing process. I was in my daughter’s car, being driven to Loch Lomond with her two young sons in the back. In front of us, a VW Beetle. Dangling in the centre of its rear window was a plastic, half peeled banana – exactly the same colour as the car. ‘Oh look, an amusing banana,’ said my daughter, with the devastating satirical tone which is obviously my legacy to her. Never one to be out-satired, especially by someone for whom I’ve striven to be a role model for years (thankfully with limited success,) I chal...

In the theatre, masks worn by skilled actors can be even more expressive than real faces. War Horse on stage was infinitely superior to the screen version because of the magic of the puppetry. Theatre has its own reality which draws on elements different from those of the everyday. And one of its masks is language. Othello’s wrong when he claims ‘It is not words that shake me thus’ because they’re exactly the things that show us his disintegration from: Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife; The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! to: Lie with her? lie on her? We say “lie on her” when they belie her! Lie with her—that’s fulsome. Handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief! To confess, and be hanged for his labor. First to be hanged, and then to confess—I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not word...

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...