When paging through an album of family snapshots, I reflect on my life as a chronological series of events, noting growth from seed to tree. My life appears as sequential notches on a measuring stick: I did this and then did that, and so forth.
Too simple, I say! Each notch is more like shrapnel from an exploding grenade. The photos are headlines, mere titles of first drafts of stories in progress that fail to capture the essence: feelings and conflicts.
Ever since 2016 and the political “take-over” by you-know-who, complaining and nastiness have dominated our lives. Between deranged individuals splattering blood indiscriminately in random gatherings before committing suicide as their grand finale, and police shooting innocent victims because, what the heck, those guys might be dangerous, even if running away, and children being ripped from [...]
Last month, feeling crushed by the political debacle of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, Lona and I went to the opening of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, the first performance of the 2018 – 2019 season at the Kennedy Center. I was looking forward to a special evening at an opera I love. Once [...]
2018 Frankfurt Book Fair Last week I was bedazzled by the masses of people and hundreds of thousands of books at the Frankfurt Book Fair, reputed as the biggest book fair in the world. Six huge buildings located at the Messe exhibition grounds were packed with booths of publishers from all over the [...]
An early draft (deleted later) of my novel, Jellyfish Have Eyes, started with the discovery of a letter in which Ricardo, a champion of basic science, bemoaned rotting in jail for the dubious felony of using government funds to perform basic research considered irrelevant. Ricardo blamed the “Relevancers” – a faceless, abstract group – for [...]
The other day, I read excerpts from an amazing novel called Erewhon by Samuel Butler, published first anonymously in 1872. I was intrigued by the title, which turns out to be the name of a fictional country meaning “nowhere” spelled backwards with the letters “h” and “w” transposed. The novel is a satire on Victorian [...]
