On Friday, more baby steps were taken in the effort to turn The Coup into a musical, when composer David Berger, lyricist Paul Mendenhall and I joined three singers, about ten musicians, and a cadre of sound technicians in recording several of the songs that David and Paul have written for the show. The recording …
Reading in The Washington Post the excerpt from Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward‘s new book, I was reminded of nothing so much as –me! In The Coup, I described the people Vice President Godwin Pope saw gathered on the floor of the House of Representatives as he sat on the dais awaiting the president’s State of …
“Provided that a character is smart enough and manipulative enough,” reads a post on tvtropes.org, “they can get the people around them to do just about anything. Sometimes this can be accomplished by the power of charisma, but other times it needs to be perpetrated through an elaborate scheme. This scheme takes into account everything …
“One gift, one time — that’s bribery. Lots of gifts over a long time — that’s politics.” I have just learned that the above line–spoken by the eminent Roland Vanatua on page 210 of The Coup, was cited in June by Mr. E. Frank Stephenson, an economics professor at Berry College in Georgia. Writing on …
Writing on TrueSlant.com last week, I observed that the Number 2 book on amazon.com was Eduardo Galeano‘s Open Veins of Latin America, a book about America’s involvement in Latin America first published in 1997. To what did Galeano owe his sudden surge into best-sellerdom? Why, simply, to a genius act of product placement on the …
About a month ago I received an email from a gent named Rusty Wornom, wondering if we had ever met. More specifically, wondering if we had ever met at a sci fi convention in Baltimore. Having no memory of ever meeting Rusty or attending a sci fi convention, I could not in good conscience conjure …
Under threatening skies in a cozy and picturesque former Hudson River train station, twenty or so lovers of literature (or something) came to see the novelist DeLaune Michel and myself perform in a reading sponsored by the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. The Center’s director, Jerri Lynn Fields, opened the evening with a discussion of the …
I received a nice note from an artist in California named Lisa Jonte (see http://www.Girlamatic.com, or http://www.never-done.com, or http://www.Arcanumvisual.com), who was trying to track down an article I wrote called When Disney Ran America, which appeared in the June 1991 issue of Spy. After I sent her a copy, I received a lovely note that …
Last night, “under the cover of drakness” as NBC’s David Gregory hyperdramatically set the scene, Barack Obama met with his defeated rival Hillary Clinton–much like Jack Mahone met with his defeated rival Godwin Pope in the opening pages of The Coup! Okay, okay, so they met a Diane Feinstein‘s house, and not in a parking …
As most of you who read this blog know, in my novel The Coup, President Mahone is forced to resign when the world learns that he has had an affair with a young woman who is also linked to the head of China’s espionage agency (although, as readers know, much about this relationship has been …