Authors Electric

Sacheen Littlefeather, 1973 My greatest Walter Mitty moment, in a lifetime of them, came when I held Francis Ford Coppola 's Oscar for Best Picture in my hand and pictured waving it over my head to a cheering audience - probably longer than I should have. "It's heavier than I imagined," I told Coppola.  He grinned indulgently at me as I put the famed statuette back in its place among others on a fireplace mantle. "Solid gold," he said. At the time, I worked for Coppola as senior editor on City of San Francisco , a weekly arts-and-politics tabloid. Coppola often hosted staff parties at the splendid Victorian mansion he owned atop Presidio Heights in the city overlooking the Bay and Alcatraz Island. This was well before he relocated to his Coppola Family Winger estate in Geyserville, Napa Valley north of the city. It was 1975, and the redoubtable Francis was at the apex of his wealth and fame having pulled off a Godfather films Trifecta of artistic and commer...

Gilgamesh, the Babylonian king, back from the underworld,  on the wall of an eponymous Indian-chic eatery in London. "For the record," used to mean on paper. Now, not so much. I mused on this while going over one of my favorite books on writing, Negotiating With the Dead , by the grand dame of dark irony and literary feminism, Margaret Atwood . I'm wary of the hidden traps awaiting all writers - the beguiling allure of presumed permanence, the fantasy of fame, the chimeras of book covers, notices, prizes, and reviews, of writing for posterity, of measuring oneself against what's gone before, of wondering if I have anything to say. Comes with the territory, says Ms. Atwood. Towards the end of her memoirist exploration, she makes her hypothesis plain: " all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring s...

Eleanor Spiess-Ferris and friend The other day, my inamorata, the artist Eleanor , called me her oddball lover. That seemed a stretch, considering the surreal narrative figures for which she is justly celebrated. Thanks, I told her , but I've never thought of myself as peculiar . I came from a family of larger-than-life characters who attracted more of the same. I was always the bookish kid taking mental notes, growing up with vague intentions to write,  I felt inadequate to the swashbuckling biographies of famous authors whom I admired. I wasn't one to go off and fight wars or book passage on tramp steamers like Hemingway or Harlan Ellison. When I landed a newspaper job, I ended up editing and writing features while admiring my more gritty colleagues who had come up as police reporters in the Walter Burns tradition– a rare breed now in the age of j-school grads. Au contraire, mon cher . You are quite strange, Eleanor insisted , and made her case, listin...