Authors Electric

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...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on –  The Beginning of Infinity  [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by  Oxford theoretical physicist  David Deutsch , also best-selling author of  The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch  speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the  multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.       Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, a draft can seem copacetic one day, and melt off the page w...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on – The Beginning of Infinity [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by Oxford theoretical physicist David Deutsch , also best-selling author of The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.      Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, as I wrote them, everything seemed to be going along just fine until, one day I open the file and, nightmare...