Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights

With gently self-deprecating humor, Pinkwater depicts himself as a fledgling Chicago sculptor and a self-proclaimed expert on Zen Buddhism in the '60s, then a ``demon painter'' in Hoboken, N.J., living in a loft painted entirely pink and making periodic assaults on the New York City art world. This fragmentary memoir is pieced together from short commentaries, most of which originally aired on National Public Radio's All Things Considered . Pinkwater relates comic, heartwarming stories about his Polish Jewish immigrant father's experiences and his own peripatetic boyhood in Tennessee, Los Angeles and Chicago. He reminisces on raccoons on the front porch, a trip to Africa, Maine coonper web cats, egg creams, teaching art in New York City settlement houses and a fellow junior high school pupil whose assertion that he was a martianper web split the class into fist-fighting believers and doubters. (Nov.)