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The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire book cover

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God is the Bigger Elvis, but Dolores is Bigger than God

Dolores Hart used to be a movie star.  Now she’s a nun.  “God is the Bigger Elvis” is her redacted life story in HBO documentary form and the whole, sordid, film is one sorry sad sack of an unimaginative, wasted, life:

IT is a story straight out of Hollywood. A beautiful young starlet walks away from a blossoming movie career to become a nun, and 50 years later she returns to the Academy Awards ceremony — as the subject of an Oscar-nominated film.

The real-life drama of Dolores Hart, known as Mother Prioress to the nuns here at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, unfolds in the HBO film “God Is the Bigger Elvis,” one of five nominees for best documentary (short subject). The 35-minute film examines Mother Dolores’s transformation from a Hollywood ingénue and the recipient of Elvis Presley’s first on-screen kiss to a cloistered Benedictine nun at the abbey, where for the past nine years she has been the prioress, the second in authority below the abbess, Mother David Serna.

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God and His Public Relations Problem: Ten Sentence Story #163

God realized he had a PR problem.

Satan was more popular and more powerful — and He didn’t know why.

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The Hand of a Crystal God: Ten Sentence Story #132

Robert awoke to find the crystal hand of God had shattered between his fingers overnight.

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Believing in a Cruel God

My email Inbox and my Facebook page have been overflowing with hate ever since the publication of my article — If Republicans Won Their Wants — and the comments stream for that article have to be cleansed daily because people can’t abide our comments policy and disagree without cursing or calling names.

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