Authors Electric

A surreal memoir in Catamaran I get melancholy on Halloween. I love its makebelieve and mockery of darkness and death. In my parental days I loved taking the kids trick-or-treating, earnest in their costumes, carried on by my grandchildren and great grandchildren today, carried on when my eldest daughter Alicia Sammons builds her family altar and does herself up for La Dia de Los Muertos, November 2.  At the same time, I relive sad memories of the real thing - my mother dying in a San Francisco hospital the morning before Halloween some thirty years ago.  I remember taking a granddaughter and my youngest daughter, both age 7, trick-or-treating, giggling in their costumes the following evening as if nothing had happened, as my mother - a perpetual prankster - would have insisted.  The experience culminated months of watching my mother slip away. It cut deep. She had raised me in fiercely loving, but inconsistent ways. She hadn't been perfect, but done her damn best. ...

"I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it," wrote Paul Theroux welcoming us succinctly aboard The Great Railway Bazaa r.    "Trains sing bewitchment," Theroux added at the start of a four-month rail journey from London through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, returning via the Trans-Siberian Railway. His 1975 armchair classic depicts people, history, and cultures, more than trains and never complains about difficult accommodations. "If a train is large and comfortable you don't even need a destination." ...I concur.  I've set a few of my stories on trains, including Onion Station (published in Chicago Quarterly Review and in my anthology, Sometimes Ridiculous ). The tale is told from the perspective of a boy on a 1940s transcontinental train trip stopover with his warring mother and father in Chicago. It's taken from life --  an episode in a forthcoming novella largely set on rocking ra...

I should have anticipated the 21st century's demented clown show in 1999 on the rainy November night that I saw Being John Malkovich at a multiplex theatre in San Francisco. The harbinger wasn't so much Spike Jonze's brilliant, surreal comedy itself, but what happened in the theatre that night. I had dropped off my youngest kid after a daddy weekend that Sunday night and felt too awake to go straight back to my apartment. I diverted to catch the late showing of this well-reviewed, bizarre film, which more than lived up to expectations.   About halfway through, when I had finished off my popcorn, the screen went dark, followed by a canned slideshow advertising snack bar treats. There was little reaction from the two dozen-or-so in the theatre. So I waited. And waited. And waited. I checked my watch (This was before our cell phones became smart.) Twenty minutes! Then thirty! The sparse late night audience settled into soft murmuring. Nothing from management. No apparent activ...

... the more we know we don't know. You can be just lying in your bed, watching a mindless video and an epiphany finds you. You don't have to go climb mountains or anything. You don't even have to want one, or anything. For example, whilst recuperating from a nasty bug over Christmas - no way to spend the holidays - I was was half watching a You Tube video of what was supposed to be a romantic mountain train journey around Switzerland. I had the sound turned off. Watching trains lulls me to sleep somehow. It takes me back to being a little kid curled up in the swaying, top bunk of my parents' compartment on our annual winter cross-country rail journey from Los Angeles to Boston, Massachusetts back in the 1940s. The top bunks on the old Pullman cars used to have these little oval windows up where the carriage wall curved into the ceiling. I could slide a little plastic shade open and peek out onto a moonlit winter landscape with myriad stars above. It was like the t...

Sometimes Ridiculous , a new collection of my short fiction in softcover, has hit the stands (as we used to say in the newspaper biz). I won't feign humility. I'm pretty proud of it, and hope that I will be in years to come. The title reflects the squirrelyness of the stories, which flit among the branches of the improbable. It also describes how I feel when I read my own writing, and even when at the task of writing itself. My wry friend and colleague John Blades, the fiction editor of Chicago Quarterly Review and editor emeritus of the Sunday Chicago Tribune 's Book World, and author of the surreal, darkly comic, Small Game , did me the honor of writing a foreword. "Reading Tosi, ' El Mago '," he wrote, "is like a vertiginous trip on a combination magic carpet and time machine, the passengers generously fuelled with complimentary loco weed." I blushed under my beard at reading his amusing and generous observations. I've never gone f...

Lili Kraus Right now (taking advantage of the alternative time lines allowed by cyberspace), I'm enraptured by a  1965 recording of the great Lili Kraus performing Mozart's sublime "Jenamy" Piano Concerto No. 9, in E-flat major, K. 271. I should be writing this post, which I have let languish as I dithered over ideas until barely ten hours before post time. Now, I don't mean letting Wolfie's magic soothe me as I go about my work. I have a specific, compelling reason for playing Mozart concertos at the moment, about which I will explain shortly. In any event, however, I can never do Mozart as background. Too much undertow for me; besides, coming from a musical family, lack of attentiveness feels vaguely disrespectful. If the elevator plays so much as  Rondo Alla Turca ,  I may not be able to get off until it's finished. That's why I despise all piped-in music, but that too is another story. Let's distract from my distractions for a while an...