Monthly Archives: September 2024

Nonna and I had a great time at my lecture last night in Chenoa, Illinois (pop. 1,695), despite the nuisance of fans from around world thronging the library to chant my name and throw their panties onstage.

In the first photo below, I am seated by Sean, the tech guy, who saved the day by getting my PowerPoint presentation up on the Roku TV. Library director Sheryl Siebert and her husband Reid generously served Nonna and me a dinner of shepherd’s pie and sweet rolls from a local Amish bakery beforehand. Unlike my bitter journalist character, Ian, in my novel The Insurrectionist, I love small-town America.

One of my hearing aids was in the shop, so attendees had to bellow their questions like drill instructors, but somehow we managed. Also, I am not terribly enamored of my title, but I had to slap up something so people wouldn’t think I would be lecturing on two-headed babies.

Meself and Sean, above. Reid and Sheryl, below.

Hordes of Mongols, multitudes of Visigoths, entire Tribes of Israel, and jalopy-loads of Oakies are already thronging Route 66 on their way to Chenoa, Illinois, for a lecture and reading I will deliver on Sept. 24. If you and your chain-migrating clan happen to be in the neighborhood and wish to claw and pummel your way into the crowded venue, possibly losing an eye or an ear in the melee, please join us.

Fittingly, for a handbill promoting the much-anticipated event, the Chenoa library grabbed a photograph of me in front of a circus sideshow museum in the tourist trap of Uranus, further down the celebrated highway in Missouri. Why Route 66 is so famous, beyond a forgotten TV series by that name from the early sixties, is a question for pop historians. (Fascinatingly, Jack Kerouac once contemplated suing the series for misappropriating characters and themes from his On the Road.) However, you will find many fine oddities along the way, among them a store entirely devoted to Donald Trump paraphernalia, a 19-foot fiberglass statue of a smirking lout holding a hot dog, and an octagonally shaped library in a town Abraham Lincoln used to visit as a prairie lawyer riding the judicial circuit.