Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
“What sort of mental existence had been his? What, if anything, had ever threatened to destabilize the Swede’s trajectory?” So asks the narrator of the novel, Nathan Zuckerman, a stand-in for Roth who appears in the first quarter of American Pastoral and then retreats to the background as the Swede’s story unfolds, a brilliantly executed narrative strategy Roth deploys in a number of his...
That’s my dad and me riding bikes past the old casino in Delaware Park, Buffalo, New York, 1973. It was late March, the piles of snow melting in the background. I’m 14 years old, a high school freshman. My father is 46, married, the father of five, a rising marketing executive at a pharmaceutical company. Today is his birthday. He would have been 95. The photo is staged because a...
I recently visited our nation’s capital. I walked the neighborhoods, visited the monuments and memorials, looked at art, watched the people, and even witnessed the presidential motorcade passing by—and all the time I experienced a nagging sensation of dirtiness, a troubling unease. Something has gone wrong in our nation and I seemed to be searching for clues in our capital as to what happened and...
You’re just a visitor to the National Mall and you want to fly your kite on a sunny day, you want to see the sails puff in the wind, rising into the sky, soaring and fluttering, the long colorful tail bebopping in the breeze, but if your kite flies too close to the Washington Monument then secret service agents draw their handheld mini lasers and cut your line and your kite plummets and crashes...
I’ve always been interested in behavioral assessments and personality tests: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Predictive Index, Enneagram, and others. I think I might uncover patterns in my motivations and become more in tune with my strengths and weaknesses, my desires and fears. That kind of knowledge would prove helpful in navigating relationships, work, the self, and the world in general. Maybe...
I can’t say I watched the Academy Awards Sunday night, but I repeatedly replayed the video of actor Will Smith going up on stage and slapping comedian Chris Rock when Rock made a joke about looking forward to seeing Will’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, starring in GI-Jane 2. If you don’t know the reference, the actress Demi Moore—famously hot at the time (1997)—famously shaved her head as a marine...
I had an opportunity to see the Oscar-nominated live-action short films. Every year (except for the last two because of Covid), these films are shown at my local Spectrum Theater. After the last time I saw the live-action shorts in 2019, I said I never wanted to go again. Each of those short films (there are usually five or six shown together) was so utterly depressing and tragic that I left the...
Since the U.S. is sure to pass one million Covid deaths (970,000 and counting), it might be opportune timing that a new mental disorder diagnosis has just been added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): Prolonged Grief Disorder. The DSM is a comprehensive classification of officially recognized psychiatric disorders. Published by the American Psychiatric Association...
Fighting through a maze of rocks and winter’s dead leaves, this harbinger of spring, two crocus blooms, purple and gold, determined to be seen and I saw them, surprised and pleased. War and death and disease and hatred—and still, hope springs eternal.
That’s right, it’s Pi Day—March 14, or 3.14. Or 3.141592654 and on and on, with no repeating pattern. What does one do on Pi Day? Bake pies. For those who may not remember Euclidian geometry, Pi, represented by the Greek letter π, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. For any circle, the distance around the edge is a little more than three times the distance across. Two...
Tapped the tree, cooked the sap, made breakfast. We’ve got four mature maple trees on our property and I tapped two of them this year. The time to tap is when the nights are below freezing and the days warm up enough to get the sap flowing. On a good day, I get a half-gallon of sap from each tree. On a frozen day, nothing. Tapping a tree is the easy part. Drill a hole, stick in a tap, and...
Thank you Julia and Owen for helping bring our snowy friend to life. It’s funny how this guy can brighten your mood.
I’m fortunate to live just a few minutes from the Spectrum 8 Theaters, where independent and foreign films are still shown. And now that I’m going to theaters again, I had a chance to see The Worst Person in the World, a subtitled film from Norway that takes place in Oslo. Simply seeing another culture with its nuances and new faces depicted is refreshing for me. I’d classify the film as a...
I caught her reading my journal. I got home and she was already at my place, which is within our rules. When one of us is late the other knows where the key is hidden. Make yourself comfortable. That means open the refrigerator, check out my bookcases, pet my cat. It never means read my journal. I’d left it on my desk. Cover closed, but plain as day. It’s the journal where I write my private...
I’m in a phase of rereading some of my favorite novels that I’ve been pulling from my bookshelves. Last week it was Revolutionary Road. This week it was In the Lake of the Woods. Only a daring and confident writer (or a misguided one) would write a novel that carries the reader along, building an overwhelming sense of suspense and uncertainty, and then leave what seems to be the major story...
André the Giant was born André René Roussimoff, a French professional wrestler who was over seven feet tall and afflicted with acromegaly, a disorder in which the pituitary gland produces too much growth hormone. He died at age forty-six. Visiting a statue of Robert Wadlow when the kids were young. Robert Wadlow, also known as the Giant of Illinois, at eight feet eleven inches, was the tallest...
Maybe you do too, but I have days firmly in a dark place. I wake up that way. The writing goes poorly, or I say something I regret, or the news of the world has me down. Maybe Prince Happy keeps telling me how life is good, but I’m still feeling like the man in black. With all the light I have, still the shadow looms. I know the playbook. Get mindful and meditative. Savor, savor, savor...
One of the things that drew me to literary fiction as both a writer and a reader is the deep dives this form of art takes into human psychology, desires, identity, and motivation. Through novels and short stories I was able to cultivate my sense of empathy and at times “see myself” in other characters and through fictional worlds. One of those worlds is suburbia, where I have lived for more than...
People used to place personal ads in newspapers in hopes of finding potential mates. There’s a steamy Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin thriller, Sea of Love, in which Pacino plays a cop who goes on date after date trying to identify a serial killer that’s using the personal classifieds to lure his victims. Ellen Barkin is either the femme fatale or the love interest, or both. The days of personal...
Harriet’s in Florida for a few days visiting her mom so this was an ideal time for me to finish painting her closet doors. I’d been careful about moving her clothes out of the way of my brush while sliding the overlapping doors back and forth to gain access to the edges and the sides. I was on my third coat of paint, since I was covering dark wood with white paint. And then I noticed it: a...
