Category Archives: Uncategorized

March 23, 2025 · 9:37 am

My old pal Germanicus, starkers

Reflections on a Roman sculpture.

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.

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March 12, 2025 · 12:06 pm

Of dementia, frog jumping, and angel campouts

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.

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March 5, 2025 · 11:39 am

Chemodan III: ‘Awfully happy’: George Walton finds love—and escapes the USSR with an aristocrat wife

This is the third post in a series about a mysterious suitcase that once belonged to a young Briton who followed his father into a career as a diplomat in the USSR in the 1930s. Check here for parts one and two.

Even before his posting abroad, George already had connections with the Soviet literary scene. With Reginald Merton he translated Aleksandr Neverov’s 1923 novel Tashkent: City of Bread (Victor Gollancz, London, 1930). The work prefigures the defining horror of George’s time in the Soviet Union: the famine induced by the Bolsheviks’ violent collectivization. From 1931 to 1934, millions would die in Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan under the communists’ harebrained war on successful farmers, whom it dubbed “kulaks.”

In the novel, famine stalks the Volga River region around Samara. Twelve-year-old Mishka Dodonov has lost his father, grandparents, and other relatives to the hunger. To find grain for his mother and brothers, he rides the rails 1,300 miles to Soviet Uzbekistan.

From America to the starving of Russia: a 1922 poster hails food aid from the U.S.

In the Walton-Merton translation, the novel reads:

“The two younger ones were useless little people in these hard times; one spent his time begging for gruel, while the other was carving a toy windmill for the roof. The mother was weak with hunger. She used to go down to the stream for water but had barely strength enough to get back. But for all her cries and laments the famine showed her no mercy.

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February 19, 2025 · 1:53 pm

Chemodan I: A mysterious suitcase’s tale of war, revolution, and love in the time of Stalin

This is the first in a three-part series. Check here for parts two and three.

I knelt packing my bag on the floor of the London townhouse of Andrew Fox, a British businessman and friend from when we both lived in the Russian Pacific seaport of Vladivostok. I had come here to interview him for a memoir piece on the 1990s and early 2000s in Russia’s “Wild East.” This was a turbulent era when mob-linked political bosses kidnapped journalists, a shipping industry whistleblower was blown to bits by TNT planted under her bed, and the governor threatened to jail Andrew, who also happens to be the honorary British consul general to the city.

I was double-checking my passport, wallet, and other essentials (My hearing aids! Oh, in my ears) when Andrew came thumping downstairs with a leather suitcase. As scuffed as old shoes, it was peeling open and dusted with dried mold that rubbed off like chalk on one’s clothes.

Unidentified photograph found in the suitcase, likely of George Walton, his wife Natalia (Tata), and his Russian mother.

“Before you go, did you want to take a look at this?” he said.

That’s right; he had mentioned something about a suitcase full of old British documents concerning Russia. I was heading to St Pancras to catch a train back to Belgium. Yet who could resist this strange object? “Suitcase” translates as chemodan in Russian, a word as ordinary as its English equivalent. But when applied to this curiosity, it seemed to describe a magical object that might pop up in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story.

“Sure,” I said. “We have time.”

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January 6, 2025 · 5:16 pm

Pardon the J6ers

For four years we have heard of the horrors—unique in American history, we’re told—of the January 6, 2021, “insurrection” and “attack on the Capitol.”

On the first anniversary, Veep Kamala Harris shuddered to recall “dates [that] echo throughout history … that occupy not only a place on our calendars, but a place in our collective memory: December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021.”

During an address to a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden cast his troubled gaze 160 years back in history, calling J6 “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

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October 29, 2024 · 9:05 am

A step in the right direction, but…

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos fired off an op-ed on Monday explaining his decision to stop endorsing presidential candidates. The move is the right one, even if many of the newspaper’s staff are in open rebellion.

“Most people believe the media is biased,” he writes. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”

Reports say the Amazon founder also intends to employ more conservatives, a welcome move, given that the legacy media’s idea of a conservative tends to be never-Trumpers like the Post’s Jennifer Rubin. She has flipped on some of her most heartfelt issues rather than share a position with the ex-president.

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October 8, 2024 · 6:00 am

Doubles in life and literature

I just had to post this photograph of that time I shared a good laugh with Judi Dench.

Heh-heh.

No, actually, it’s Brendan O’Hea, co-author with Dench of the fascinating book I just finished, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. But oddly, he looks rather like me, doesn’t he? Or like a long-lost cousin?

The photograph, from the back cover flap of the book, has me reflecting on the architype of the double in life and literature. Perhaps it is strangest when it occurs in the real world.

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September 25, 2024 · 7:40 am

Fans storm library for Working lecture

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.

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September 5, 2024 · 8:30 am

Throngs stampede for reading

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.

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August 18, 2024 · 10:29 am

Go. Do. See. Be present. Craft writing that grabs readers

A couple years ago, writing coach Chip Scanlan asked me to answer several questions on craft. Today, a search for a story of mine pulled up this interview, and I thought it might interest writers in search of advice from almost famous authors.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

Go. See. Do. Be present. Participate. Observe. Make your writing more than a desk job. Make it a journey of exploration: Teddy Roosevelt up the Amazon, Ernest Shackleton on the frozen Weddell Sea, Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream, Tanzania. Don’t just imagine, don’t rely on the internet; go find the scenes you are writing about and talk to the people who can illuminate your characters. Investigate the worlds you want to bring to light, whether it’s a corner barbershop or the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

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