School’s Out

The 72-year old “shock rocker” Alice Cooper is now of an age group that classifies him as highly susceptible to Covid-19. That means no more rocking campuses with live concerts for the foreseeable future. The guy who made a household name for himself with the anthemic “School’s Out” (1972) has, ironically, finally foretold his own fate – and ours, at least for the while. Across the United States schools are opening up. Or trying to. Or in the case of University of North Carolina, immediately closing down and reverting to online teaching only. It’s a mess out there, with elementary school administrators, high school principals and college presidents all struggling to balance the needs of effective education with the safety of the student body, faculty and administrators. As usual, the burden for home-based instruction via social media like Zoom falls on the parents of school-age kids. Many families are being forced to juggle what amounts to overseeing home schooling with their own work lives. The financial burdens are acute. The psychological costs are in some ways even greater. This is what happens when the state – the agencies of the federal government, that is – fails in its most basic...Read more
Ball Game

Ball Game

I’ve been playing golf now for over half a century – or trying to, anyway. It certainly feels like it’s been a long time, yet I still look forward to my next round. These days it’s easier to look back with clarity than to look ahead with confidence. But among the many things that keep me going until we finally pull out of this malaise of public health and political backsliding is a sense or hope of doing better. Golf is a very misunderstood sport. It’s a lifetime game, played by people of amazingly different sizes, shapes, physical skill sets and emotional makeup. In that sense it is far more inclusive and inviting than basketball or football, less physically demanding than hockey, less capital intensive than boating or auto racing, and more mentally demanding than just about any other ball game. It’s also played on the most beautiful, most natural landscape settings of any sport – on a field with the least specified regulations about the court. The only rule determining the size and shape of the field is that the hole cut in the ground to which one ultimately plays has to be four and one-quarter inches in diameter....Read more
Novel Approaches

Novel Approaches

We’re being tested daily like never before. Not for the right thing, however. We’re being tested emotionally, physically, in our tolerance levels of extreme social conditions. We should be undergoing tests for the virus more frequently. Because we are not, we are being put through the wringer and confronting a quality of daily life that is the stuff of a novelist’s imagination. Like lots of people I have been trying to make the best use of my time. I’m also spending a lot less time watching TV and especially avoiding the day-to-day news barrage. Not that I am unaware of it. On the contrary, it plays like a recurring earache in the back ground no matter where I go or what I do. But I try to feed my brain on healthier, more substantive fare. Lately that’s included a number of novels that might best be described as negative utopias. In fact, they cross genres and literary boundaries, from “magical realism” to “existential” to “post-apocalyptic.” For a lot of people, works portraying “the worst of all possible worlds” are a depressing turnoff that’s best avoided. No argument there. It’s a matter of disposition. I’ve always been more comfortable confronting what...Read more