Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) in 2016. Courtesy Office of Liz Cheney.
You have to wonder what Nathaniel Hawthorne would’ve made of ousted House Republican Party Conference chair Liz Cheney. Would she have been standing on the scaffold with Hester Prynne and her out-of-wedlock baby, Pearl, wearing a big scarlet “O” for ousted or a scarlet “B” stabbed with an interlocking “L” for “Big lLie”?
Read MoreThe ad for my short story “The Glass Door,” updated to include the story’s selection for “Together apART: Creating During COVID,” at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, New York, May 7 through Aug. 1. Ad courtesy of WAG magazine.
The worlds of art and literature, while complementary and collaborative, are really quite different. That point was driven home to me as I took in a preview of ArtsWestchester’s exhibit “Together apART: Creating During COVID,” which opens Friday, May 7,, and runs through Aug. 1 at ArtsW’s Arts Exchange headquarters in White Plains., New York. It’s a provocative show, which I expected given the subject matter and other exhibits I’ve covered there. What I didn’t expect was how beautiful it is.
Read MoreSen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) sends Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) a look Jan. 6 that encapsulates everything we feel about those who hold — wrongly — that the recent presidential election was fraudulent.
Among the many delusions that have characterized the last four years of the Trump Administration — culminating in the shocking Capitol siege whose continuing fallout includes the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick — none has been more pernicious than our misunderstanding of the First Amendment and its guarantees of free speech.
Read MoreThe original Karen? In the Gospel According to St. Luke, Jesus tells the parable of the persistent widow, who receives a judgment against her adversary from an unjust judge simply so he can be rid of her. One person’s nagging is another’s tenacity. Image from “Christ’s Object Lessons” by Helen Gould Harmon White (Pacific Press Publishing Co., 1900).
The latest edition of what I call “the literature of rejection “— the disproportionate rage at some insult by life, as evinced by the antiheroes of such fictional works as “The Iliad,” “Paradise Lost” and “Wuthering Heights” and in real life by mass murderers, assassins and terrorists that have included John Wilkes Booth, Adolf Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden — is the case of the Nashville bomber, Anthony Quinn Warner.
He fits the profile of the literature of rejection — angry, generally white and always male. What was Warner angry at exactly? AT &T? 5G? His father, who had worked for AT&T? Life? Himself? Unlike many of these monsters, he had a girlfriend — or ex-girlfriend — and that’s where things get really interesting.
Read MoreDiana, Princess of Wales, and tenor Luciano Pavarotti at the concert “Pavarotti and Friends for the Benefit of the Children of Bosnia” in his hometown of Modena, Italy, in September 1995. Cut loose from the royal family, she had by then developed the elegantly economical look that crystallized her last years and our sense of a woman in full.
Winter, as Charles Dickens knew, is the season of ghosts. The holidays bring memories of those who are no longer with us, reminders of those who cannot grace our tables — never more so than during the pandemic when the table is often a table set for just one.
TV, too, the great American unifier and divider, plays a role in this with sad but uplifting holiday fare and series that reopen old wounds while underscoring that the past is never really over, because it is part of the continuum that informs the present and the future.
“The Crown,” Netflix’s addictive-as-potato-chips series about the British royal family, is now in its fourth season, which brings us to the Diana years and a reappraisal of her, her legacy and what went so horribly wrong. Why does Diana, Princess of Wales, haunt us still? More to the point, why do we still haunt her — for it is the living who haunt the dead, not the other way around.
Read MoreThe way the ball bounces: Novak Djokovic on his way to being the No.1-ranked men’s player in the world at Wimbledon in 2011. Still number one, Djokovic was bounced from the US Open last Sunday when he accidentally hit a lineswoman.
What kind of year has it been for you, for our global community? For many, it has been an “annus horribilis,” to borrow from what Queen Elizabeth II said of 1992. (Chuck and Di divorced. Windsor Castle burned. Your Majesty, we felt your pain.) People have lost loved ones, jobs, homes and their health to the coronavirus. Their loss and grief are incalculable, as are our feelings of inadequacy in trying to help them.
For others, it’s been “the best of times, the worst of times,” to quote another Briton, Charles Dickens. They have not lost their health, loved ones, jobs and homes. Instead they are working from and on their homes, using their extra time to acquire new skills, take up a language, a sport or an art, exercising and losing weight and generally getting their lives in order. They’ve made money in the market, as tech and pharma stocks help buoy the Dow, and have even earned honors. Or maybe they haven’t endured any losses but they’re struggling with a number of challenges, like the kids’ schooling.
In any event, it’s hard for them to take much pleasure and pride in their accomplishments and blessings with so much suffering around them — and with the occasional curve ball thrown their way. They’re having what we might call a Novak Djokovic kind of year.
Read MoreMy latest novel, “Seamless Sky,” published by JMS Books in January, will be serialized by the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journals next week and in WAG magazine, their sister publication, in September.
Challenging times call for creative measures – and so it is that newspapers, purveyors of factual truth, have joined forces with fiction writers, purveyors of psychological truth, in the hope of expanding their readership and providing that readership with an escape from the grim news of the day.
On Sunday, July 12, The New York Times devoted its entire magazine to fiction. And the Boston Globe recently serialized Ben Mezrich’s “The Mechanic,” a novella, the Globe said, “with a strong Boston accent.”
I’m delighted that Dee DelBello — publisher of the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journals and of WAG magazine, which I edit — has decided to serialize my latest novel, “Seamless Sky,” published in January by JMS Books, in the business journals next week and in WAG in September.
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