Authors Electric

Probably due to my advanced age, assembling a memoir, among my  various writing projects, throws me back to a childhood that I remember in a time that now seems more like history than recollection.   Original "Hollywoodland" sign, 1938 I was a pup before television, computers, the internet, social media, the polio vaccine, jet airliners, the cold war, and nuclear weapons.  My boyhood memories blend with what my parents heard intently on our radio - a sleek, deco, maple-panelled, 1930s Philco cabinet in the living room that broadcast soap operas, the evening news, mysteries, variety shows and Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats."  My memories span from America's post-WW2 rise to free world leadership to its present, self-immolation, from the Great Depression's end and Allied leadership to being led by a self-destructive, traitorous, sociopathic president who commands the American miliary to forget the Constituion, and turn on fellow citizens. UT & fa...

Just got back from Boston, from Sanskriti 2018. On June 23rd, the Calcutta Club Book Fair and Litfest held their fourth annual event . This year, the Guest of Honor was Shobhaa De.  She has been a familiar figure for decades to those in India and the diaspora, from glitzy magazines like Stardust and Celebrity or TV serials like Swabhimaan.  Labelled the "Jackie Collins" of India, she is best known for her bold depiction of sexy socialites and bollywood starlets in works of fiction, but she easily shrugs off the "Jackie Collins" label by saying that younger readers may not know Collins, but they do know De. And indeed, with her millions of twitter followers she vacillates between rather banal tweets fat-shaming policemen to fearless statements challenging the beef-ban in India and causing Hindutva fanatics to rampage at her door. The Sanskriti 2018 organizers, Chitro and Ruma Neogy, are exceptionally gracious hosts; I got to know them l...

1914 Illustration for James Joyce's The Dead by William Bock Every year around Easter my great uncle Augusto on my mother's side would break out a barrel of his homemade wine from the previous year, or maybe two. He would pass a decanter of his deep maroon brew around the table for everyone to taste at one of the multi-course, extended family feasts that my mother and her sister would prepare on most Sunday afternoons during my early childhood years in 1940s Boston, Massachusetts. Even the kids got a spoonful or two of it diluted in a jelly glass of water-turned-pale-fuschia. The vaguely strange, metallic taste of diluted wine recalls all of this for me with Proustian sensuality even today. " Buona per il sangue " (Good for the blood), Zio Augusto would say. " Buono, Zio Augusto! Buono, buono! Delizioso! " My mother, Alba, her sister Nina, and two brothers, Aldo and Vincent, along with aunts and various cousins would all tell him, trying to look ple...