(adapted from Chapter 3 of The Door-Man) I often take my grandkids to the American Museum of Natural History*. On Sundays. They have a blast; I suffer the collateral damage.        Looking into the eyes of another living person is surely a perilous affair, but too much time spent

One of the great skills I learned as a professor was knowing how to speak while thinking of what to say. It’s the dirty little secret that most, if not all, academics share. And it remains a secret because if we let that cat out of the bag (…or if a real cat got my tongue)

A number of folks have asked about the new novel that I’m working on…er, laboring over. It has a working title of Adam’s Navel and, as usual, it is ambitious and complicated (sorry, pace Martin Luther: here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God

I am often asked about the descriptions of the natural world in my novels. Folks seem to like how I… “bring such places to life.” I avoid stating the obvious – that landscapes are already quite alive without any help from me; I’m just glad my writing doesn’t ki

Wherein I answer the question always asked… Back in my days at Parsons School of Design, the faculty would play a little game when reviewing applications for admission to the architecture school. The first faculty reviewer who came across an applicant’s Personal Statement

By now, some of you have begun wading through the stream of dramatis personae in The Door-Man. I appreciate it…and hope that you manage to keep your footing in the current. It is not easy when the characters drift across three generations; when they come to the surface in c

Ok, I’m having my usual bit of fun here with disconnected facts. The “Bad Homophones” bit was a teaser, a bait and switch kind of thing…although I’ll bet any non-English-language-speaker misses the bait and still gets hooked by the swerving meanings of ou

Saul Bellow once said: “People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.“ I say: Well, yes and no… Few would deny that we spend a great deal of time inside our heads (see Lyle Lovett in&

Bones play a significant role in The Door-Man. No spoiler there; they show up in the first paragraph of the novel: It was shortly after the peculiar discovery at the Central Park Reservoir that I began dreaming about the men in my family again. About bones. That said, the story g

Reflecting on the titles of Charles Darwin’s most famous books, Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, the narrator in The Door-Man is drawn into a reverie about their inferences for the Tree of Life. He imagines the first book as celebrating the