Authors Electric

Sylvia Beach & James Joyce at Shakespeare & Co., c. 1922 With Bloomsday less than two weeks off, I would love to hop an Aer Lingus jet to the Emerald Isle (where I've never been, actually) and go on the annual June 11- 16, Dublin street carnival and crawl tracing Leopold Bloom's footsteps through the city that James Joyce had to leave to write about so brilliantly. Not to compare myself to Joyce, but I can relate. My move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Chicago ten years ago somehow opened gates to my writing more stories set in California where I spent my childhood and much of my adult life. No bucket-list Bloomsday crawl for me this June, however. I will be at home, sequestered from the coronavirus like any sane octogenarian and to hell with risking my life to "open the economy" for Mr. Trump and his cronies. In any case, most if not all Bloomsday fests around the world have been called off or postponed this pandemic year. I'll spend anoth...

"Jonesie" decked out for the holidays 'Tis the season to be jolly whether your preference is secular or sacred, for one religion or another, one culture or a blend. 'Tis also the season to reflect on Christmases past, not all nog and figgy pudding. 'Tis the season of myths and symbols as well as good cheer, of endings and beginnings. Like the Christmas stories I love best, their layered meanings emerge silently from cold winter's darkness like the Bethlehem star. Consider that the Nativity story - apocryphal or not - with its manger and Magi, ends darkly. Fade to The Flight into Egypt and The Massacre of the Innocents . From the Gospel of Matthew's perspective, Baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees from unimaginable violence, the same as those families fleeing atrocities in Syria and Honduras. What distinguishes the modern era's genocides from the paranoid tyrant King Herrod's mass murder of Bethelem's infants? "The past ...

Jimmy Durante finding the lost chord The other day, my inamorata, the surrealist painter Eleanor Spiess-Ferris , said she had dreamt of having the greatest blog idea ever, and that she had conveyed it to me in vivid detail. Unfortunately, she couldn't remember what it was. So, it will just have to wait, folks. This sounded so familiar, the great idea, story, melody, image that slips away. Eleanor says that as a visual artist, she has dreamt of discovering a new color, one dazzling enough to shift human consciousness and foster a masterpiece by its very recognition and existence. The ancient Greeks, they say, did not have a word for "blue" in the way we mean it today, which is why the Odyssey refers to the sea as "wine dark," not azure.  The discovery of a "new," seemingly transencent color is quite plausible, given that the spectrum of visible light can be parsed into an infinite array of hues - but only a limited number of them named. I thoug...

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...

It’s time to don my flak jacket and helmet and try to look brave, because I’m going to talk about the potentially controversial topic of controversy. This is something of a pertinent issue for me. My novella Loving Imogen has a somewhat controversial theme, and though nobody’s complained yet, someone might. Indeed, given enough time, someone almost certainly will. Authors are of course no strangers to controversy. James Joyce got into trouble for his extensive descriptions of bodily functions in Ulysses . The Catcher in the Rye (ironically, for a book lamenting the loss of childhood innocence) came under fire for its adult themes. Lolita got people’s backs up for obvious reasons. American Psycho ? Genuinely disturbing, and I don’t shock easily. Admittedly, just about anything could be construed as being controversial. Controversy is in the eye of the beholder; it’s all a matter of perspective. Don’t believe me? Why, even the dictionary has been banned from certain librar...