I was walking up Michigan Avenue on my way to the Art Institute the other day when I noticed what looked like a Japanese teenager in front of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra building. She was holding a girly-pink violin case and posing for selfies in front of a framed poster advertising upcoming shows. Must be a student, I thought, or a music-loving kid on a school tour.
Nope. It was Himari, the 14-year-old Japanese violin prodigy, cutely posing beside a poster of herself. She’s playing here this week. We had to satisfy ourselves with a YouTube video of her, but she’s sensational. (She was 12 at the time of this performance.) And I love our city.
Financial adviser Chris Everett recently featured us on her new podcast. Check out what we had to say about freelancing from Russia, writing my J6 novel The Insurrectionist, and defending freedom of speech here in the United States. And Nonna has wisdom to offer about growing up in the Soviet Union, and why we celebrate America.
Max Nemtsov, editor of my wife Nonna’s Russian translation of my new novel, notes that a British publisher is redacting racial slurs and politically incorrect wording from a bestselling writer’s old books.
Did somebody predict this? I think so! In my satirical novel, The Insurrectionist, a Chicago newspaper forces a troublesome reporter to spend his workdays weeding such expressions from 172 years’ worth of digital archives. Which is why Max tagged me on Facebook. He writes, “As they say, life is more shameless than literature.”
The Guardian newspaper reports that Scottish writer Val McDermid was annoyed to be assigned a “sensitivity reader” to remove offensive language from her earlier works. She has sold more than 19 million copies worldwide and is known for her authentic dialogue, the paper notes.
A Soviet poster reads, “Rats of the Ku Klux Klan: American Democracy.”
My wife’s Christmas present for me last month was inspired. For years I have talked about taking a drawing class, so she signed me up for one at an art studio in our Chicago suburb.
The class is ongoing, and the teacher began the session by laying out the previous week’s artwork (white pencil or gouache on black paper) and asking for critiques.
Disturbingly, one student artist had sketched a rat in a red MAGA cap crawling out of a tipped-over trash can. The message wasn’t as original as he perhaps imagined. Portraying one’s adversaries as vermin has a long and venomous history in Nazi, Soviet, North Korean, and other totalitarian propaganda.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. We are delighted to have younger son Lev home, but we dodged a culinary bullet. We nearly had to dine on Russell’s famous Thanksgiving fried liver.
The trouble was, I was late in getting started cooking. I’d worked on a short story, gone to the gym to work out, and strolled to the store to get the butter we’d forgotten. Plenty of time, methinks.
We’d decided to skip turkey this year, opting for a huge pork shoulder. But when we got it out of the fridge and unwrapped it, the carcass smelled like roadkill. I checked the sell-by date: Oh. This past Monday.
“We have liver,” said Nonna, my Russian wife. “I like your fried liver.”
“Not for Thanksgiving! We can’t eat liver. It’s un-American.”
She checked the freezer. “There’s pelmeni.”
“No! We’re treasonous enough not eating turkey. We can’t possibly eat pelmeni. Or liver. They’ll strip us of our citizenship.”
“I’ll never understand these Thanksgiving traditions of yours. What does it matter what we eat?”
“God is watching.”
I dumpstered the dead hog flesh, dashed to the store (by car this time), and got another ample pork shoulder. After speeding home, I hastily Grokked how long I should cook a six-pound pork shoulder, and…. What!? Seven hours!?
By now it was one o’clock. And I had to pick Lev up at the Greyhound station in 50 minutes.
Oh, well. Thanksgiving dinner at 8 PM. We doused the hog meat in olive oil and our very delicious mix of herbs and spices and stuck it in the oven.
When I picked up Lev, I broke the bad news. “Looks like we’re going to have to cook liver if you’re hungry. The pork shoulder won’t be ready until 8.”
“I’m down with that,” he said. “I like liver.”
How long, O Lord, must I dwell among the Philistines?
Luckily, as it turned out, the AI lied. Three hours was enough to cook us a crispy-crusted, tender, delicious heap of pork. And the liver can wait for another day.
I called my mother on Saturday, and as usual nowadays, she couldn’t really hear me. She misplaced her hearing aids while in rehab earlier this year, probably the third or fourth pair she has lost. Pity, because these were very advanced and expensive ones, probably costing $5,000.
But really, they provided only limited help. Her hearing, like my own, has declined to a point where hearing aids can’t do much to correct the problem.
Mom mentioned something annoying one of her caregivers had done. I said, “Was it Alejandra?”
“What?” Mom said.
“Was the caregiver Alejandra?”
She said, “I heard you say, ‘Was there a salamander?”
Since editors and companies are asking, I’ve added a tab above with examples of my writing. Many stories and photographs are lost after a 40-year career, but here is your go-to site for the works of Working.
The other day at the Art Institute of Chicago, we ran into a familiar figure: a bronze of the Roman general Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus, generally known simply as Germanicus.
The statue stands in an exhibition of ancient Roman sculptures from Italy’s Torlonia Collection in Italy.
I felt as if I knew him. I first encountered Germanicus in 1976 as a teenager, while watching the BBC Masterpiece Theatre series “I, Claudius.” He was seen as was something of a first-century JFK, charismatic and full of promise before he was tragically assassinated.
I later read the source novel by Robert Graves, a tale of intrigue, murder, and palace coups among Caesar Agustus’ family. Germanicus won victories as a general on the German frontier but was later poisoned in Syria. Many blamed Emperor Tiberias, a brooding dissolute who was jealous of Germanicus’ popularity. Most dangerously to Tiberias, the soldiers adored their general.
Or, a son’s letter recalls an amphibian’s ignoble end.
My mother has been diagnosed with dementia, so I have been sending her letters to spark old family memories. This week I wrote to her about our family’s visit to the Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee in the mid-1960s. More on that below.
Dementia takes many forms. The rehab facility wing where she’s staying features a rectangular hallway around a courtyard where shrubs and eucalyptus trees are planted. Some patients sit staring out the window wherever staffers park them. Others propel themselves in their wheelchairs with their stockinged feet, determined to keep circling, circling, hour after hour. Get out of their way or they’ll scowl at you and gibber a rebuke. During my recent visit, one poor fellow asked me whenever he circled by, “Where am I?”
The Workings in the late ’60s, several years after the Angels Camp trip.
Mom can appear mentally sound if forgetful—conversant and aware of where she is. But she often falls into confusion. At first she thought she’d been kidnapped, rather than transferred here from a hospital after a fall. She still keeps telling us that my mentally disabled brother Jeff is lost, out wandering the Mojave Desert where we lived fifty-seven years ago.
The Elephant Box 