Intervista Me Mucho

What questions do you wish you had asked long-ago loved ones? I don't know how perceptive my questions or illuminating their responses would have been, I would have liked to find out. Having been a journalist for many years, I learned that interviewing is a demanding but unreliable art that requires repetition as well as unabashed perception. Tougher yet if it's of someone close. 

I interviewed my paternal grandfather over a week's time when he visited my home in Los Angeles at age 92. I wrote a family memoir based upon that. I wish I had asked him so many more follow-up questions before he flew off to Italy where he passed away several years later. 

Nowadays I query my fictional characters to add to their dossier, and still there are unanswered questions. No matter the homework, characters remain as much a mystery as real people. If we're lucky, one way or another, we develop a sense of what's true for a character and what's not.

I've always been fond of fake memoir novels - from Don Quixote to Orlando to Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, and many more. For the fun of it - although it wasn't easy - I used the approach in my 2009 epic, Ophelia Rising. Films too: Fellini's Intervista is one I never tire of watching.

Last year, I posted a Father's Day blog consisting of of questions from my four daughters. It turned out to be a memorable family experience on all sides, more conversations than interviews - as it should be. We generated way more material than could be  summarized here in a post.

 Zoë Tosi

I did promise a follow up, however. Here are a few more Q&As from my daughter.

One comes from my youngest, Zoë, an artificial intelligence researcher who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Zoë: 1) Was there a sense of community when you were growing up? A sense of a neighbourhood or knowing the people around you? It seems today, that no one knows anyone else or rather if they do it has nothing to do with where they live and there generally isn't any sense of solidarity.

UT - Objectively, my memory is yes. I remember a childhood with my extended family in Boston - Sunday gatherings, neighborhood stores, weddings, feast days and so forth. But I remember feeling like a stranger when my parents moved to 1940s Los Angeles, a patchwork city of people from somewhere else who kept to themselves in their tract houses and automobiles.

 Alicia Sammons

Next is from my eldest, Alicia Sammons, an English teacher in San Francisco. "Life according to Keats and other mad artists: the ole, ' Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" ... With these in mind... 

To what extent does this quote from Oscar Wilde excerpt from The Decay of Lying resonant with you? 

"People tell us that Art makes us love Nature ... that it reveals her secrets to us ... My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects.")

UT - I see Wilde's point, and far be it from me to counter the master, but I disagree. Not that nature of "perfect" - whatever that human conceit means... I find neither perfection or imperfection in nature, just what is. Virtually all of the ugliness I see is man-made, as is the manufactured evils of postmodern society.

Being in a forest grove or on a beach, or viewing the stars unfiltered from a mountainside taking in the vastness feeds me and makes me acknowledge something I can't label other than with some reference to an eternal consciousness beyond and yet within me. I can't clarify this further, but like "nature," it just "is" to me.

Our family Q&A continues, but I'll pause here at the limits of this blog post and of what I can comprehend. Like they say: It's all in the process.

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Umberto Tosi's novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead. plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus book the historial epic Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His essays and articles have been published widely since the 1970s in print and onlin

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Enjoy Umberto Tosi's Hollywood noir detective thrillers: The Phantom Eye  and Oddly Dead, out in August, 2022.

 

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen and managing editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.