Authors Electric

   L.A. Times Newroom 1963, the day JFK was shot Once again, I dwell in the alternate history of a work to which I keep returning. Maybe it's a novel, maybe a novella, maybe a string of stories I'm trying to unravel. Meanwhile, what we call reality looks more and more like science fiction or a Borges reality. Indulging fatalism and its first cousin cynicism might be easier at my advanced age but for family. My concerns are both abstract — for humankind and our furry friends and real for the younger hopeful members of the mixed heritage and gender choice clan to which I belong. As I write this we await the momentary arrival of little Nora, who will be my fourth great grandchild, expected baby of my granddaughter Fiona Reynolds in San Francisco.  Granddaughter Fiona & mom Alicia    More than ever, I see us handing a shabby future to little Nora when we could have done — nay, we have to do — so much better. I always took the works of Margaret Atwood, William...

Yogi Berra's 1998 book. "When you come to a fork in the road, take it," my favourite among the many koan-like paradoxical malapropisms for which the legendary New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra is famous. Here we are today, November 3, 2020 at such a paradoxical fork, which we have no choice but to take. It just happens to be my turn in the rotation of esteemed, Authors Electric members to post my blog on the third of each month, this time, falling on U.S. Presidential election day. We won't know its fateful results as of this posting, not until very late in this day, perhaps not for days, weeks, even months to follow. But a mighty fork it is! This is one of those days in which the cliche that "nothing will be the same after this" is for real. Today marks one of those divides whose gravity you just can't exaggerate: The end of the American republic? Possibly. Like the day Julius Caesar declared himself dictator of the 500-year-old Roman Republic? The the...

Happy New Year to you all (here are some lizards having a party with some rather nice-looking cake to help you celebrate) although by the time this blog comes out, the new year will already be almost a month old. It began badly, with the probably illegal assassination of a very bad man. I have no tears for him, but it happened via very Twenty-First Century technology - the attack directed from very far away from the target - reminding me disturbingly of the ethical issues raised in the film "DRONE", and of how we sat in the cinema rigid with fear for the little girl who kept returning to the target zone in spite of heroic efforts on the ground to keep her out of it. This guy was no innocent child, but he was in another country, and this was an invasion of its air space. Once, a long time ago, an equally unlovely guy called Hitler decided to invade Poland, thus starting the second world war. None of the protagonists in the current drama wants an outcome like that, but som...

I hate when daily events confirm my worst predictions. It happens all the time while I track the news, which I can't help doing as a former journalist - and just someone, like most of us who can't look away from a train wreck. I keep trying to distract myself by watching ball games and old movies, and browsing the Internet for factoids. Neither does my being a history addict help. It's deja vu, over and over again, like knowing you've seen a movie before, or the original of a remake, with a few differences but much the same outcomes. Donald Trump's moves, of course, have become easy to predict by now. He telegraphs his nefarious actions by projecting them on his political enemies. Whatever Trump accuses them of doing, you can be sure he's doing himself. The exasperating surprise is that he - and his kind - keep getting away with more and more blatant violations of conscience, decency and law. Two years ago, for example, I predicted in this space that Tru...

My daughter Alicia with her 'Nonna' Alba at Easter 1963 at the L.A. house I used to rent. Funny how, over the years, you remember some minor happenings in a crisis so much more vividly than momentous ones. It's as if time slowed down and magnified the minutia. For example, I'll never forget stopping at a hardware outlet on my way to work one crisp, deceptively sunny October morning in 1962. I needed some extra strong, fast-drying glue to repair a fractured slat on my then little daughter Alicia's white wooden crib, and I knew I'd work too late that night to buy any on way home. My daughter had turned an energetic 2 years old just six weeks earlier, and liked to run gleefully about our rented suburban house testing, rattling and sometimes breaking things – and of course, saying no a lot. That particular day I doubted she would make it to 3, or, indeed, whether any of us would be around much longer. We had all seen a somber President John F. Kenne...

Huge jollities over poor old Rudy. The weekend when Endeavour Books put Death Order up for free, the Independent did a huge story headlined Adolf Hitler's Nazi deputy Rudolf Hess ‘murdered by British agents’ to stop him spilling wartime secrets - which is the nub of the novel. Within hours the Daily Mail had lifted the Indy’s story, and fully credited their source, which in modern journalism terms might be something of a first! They also added a further twist: Nazi Rudolf Hess was 'murdered by British agents in prison to stop him revealing war secrets but Scotland Yard was told NOT to investigate' Both papers named the Scotland Yard detective who undertook the enquiries – Detective Chief Superintendent Howard Jones – and also revealed that his investigation had been abruptly terminated on the orders of the DPP! They also named the British Army surgeon, Dr Hugh Thomas, who said the medical evidence proved that the prisoner who died in Spandau could not hav...