Authors Electric

Death came calling not long after my last Authors Electric blog post on February 3 in which I remembered a recently departed friend and colleague. Prophetically, I had entitled the post " Death and the Writer , Within a month I was hospitalized with congestive heart failure and other critical problems from which it was touch and go. Doctors brought me back thanks to the wizardry of modern medical technology. But no silver bullet, magical pill or micro-surgical technique could reverse the change this episode brought to my state of mind. Overnight, A sickly kid who became a 10K daily runner and adult adventurer who hardly ever caught colds, I went from seeing myself as a robust, healthy chap to a wheezing heap of ailments and conditions, whose every step required maximum effort. Overnight, my body seemed to give way to the multiple insults of age, each of which requires medical tending. It makes one realize one's luck to be alive with each breath, easy or hard. Avoidance doesn...

“There is a tide in the affairs of men   Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…”                         - Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3 This may be very true, but it is not quite the kind of tide I have in mind. That said, it may be that all the High Tides source from the same Well-Spring. I can also apportion these Tidal Phases to certain discrete periods in my own reading life. Period One: Aged 11 years and under – it was during this phase, the primary school years, that a great deal of varied material was imbibed, much of it forgotten now, though still present in the subconscious as shadowed form, the great edge of some dark beast’s ear, the looming shoulder of some half-formed presence. This period, for me, was in the 1970s. First, all the Peter and Jane books at school were devoured, from adventures with golden labradors, to sunned...

The Russian, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, has been oft-described as one of the first “psychological novelists”; followed up, some would say, by the 1890 publication of HUNGER by the starving, post-tubercular Norwegian, Knut Hamsun. Tough books, coming from the toughest of experiences/life stories…nothing precious about Dostoyevsky or Hamsun. They both seemed to set down the facts/details of a decade of suffering and survival in a first book: Dostoyevsky in HOUSE OF THE DEAD, Hamsun in HUNGER. But, this done, they would tend to let the imagination and spirit soar in the following books…the facts and details of their histories still embedded there though, felt, sensed, like psychological rock strata, unyielding. D. H. Lawrence, the English miner’s son, took on the “psychological” penetration of that rock strata next, delving deep, fusing the exploration with elements of impassioned drama and story which brought such a potent mix of public acclaim/disapprobation. While, in Cze...