Authors Electric

A week ago, I woke in pitch dark from of a whirl of troubled dreams, spawned no doubt by my dread of 2024, a year swaddled in doomsday prognostications . Freezing rain pelted my bedroom window. The glowing deco clock on my night-stand blinked 5:30. I'm accustomed to wee-hour awakenings. Might as well forget about going back to sleep.  An hour later, after my ablutions, when I switched on the TV over coffee, it dawned on me, quite literally, that it was evening not dawn. I had overslept from an afternoon nap. No wonder all the wrong newscasters were on and it wasn't getting light outside. T'was a scifi-moment, not a senior one, I reassured myself. I've been wrestling with time paradoxes in a story I'm writing. I had jumped to the next morning for a few hours. Ho ho ho. That, I'd wandered into the fog of winter solstice blues. Time travel speculation is an exercise in what-ifs. So is New Years Eve when we celebrate change knowing that the coming year probably will...

"I know. Just what we need; another Christmas story," I joked to my cousin, Broadway satirist, lyricist and playwright Gerard Alessandrini on the phone the other day about my latest holiday offerings. "You can never have too many Christmas stories," he reassured me. Good ones that is, but you can't have the best without putting up with some of the worst. Christmas and the holidays take a beating every year as we endeavour to survive being inundated with canned mercantile sentimentality.  Cousin Gerard, like my four grown daughters, however, keeps his eyes on the brightest ornaments on the tree--   albeit with tongue planted in cheek. Gerard and I grew in an extended family that celebrated the holidays as joyfully as circumstances would allow. Our festivities included transcontinental reunions and week-long Italian feasts-- that included Christmas Eve crab cioppino in San Francisco and Maine lobster in Boston in days gone by. The feasting is more fictional thes...

  Zooming with daughters & a granddaughter My internet connection was down the better part of this past week for causes I'll not bother explaining. The outage nearly caused me to miss posting this missive for the first time in my seven years with Authors Electric. So please excuse this scribble to be rougher than most. It also involves my four dear daughters, who inspire me, but whose privacy I am careful to respect. I therefore proceed with double caution while doing my best to keep it lively. My grid bump brought home how critically I've come to depend on the 'net. Like most of us these days, I do nearly everything via a wifi -  tablets, computers, smart phones, smart TVs and sundry e-apps and appliances. I write to the Cloud, in that I've taken to using Google.docs in my work, which saves itself automatically on my Google Drive out there in Google's-Cloud-o-sphere -- scattered among giga-bytes of e-digits. These are tools of my trade. I am, after all, an indi...

I'm halfway through one of the few novels I can unequivocally call beautiful - musical writing, unsparing and heart-rending at the level of Toni Morrison, A.S. Byatt, or Vikram Seth. It happens when lyric poetry is fashioned into narrative prose without losing lucidity. No surprise given that the author, Ocean Vuong ( Vương Quốc Vinh ), is a prize winning poet. From Penquin, 2019; this is his debut novel. The title conveys its poetry: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous . It's a Vietnamese American's paean to his war damaged, semi-literate immigrant mother, written as letter to her that she'll never read - a familiar therapeutic device raised to high art. It's easy to read and difficult to take in some of its graphically descriptive passages of war and reflections on war, racism and homophobia. I know writers who'd kill for a title like that. I think about Amadeus . I muse over his memoirist novel's seamless, rhythmic sentences with a mixture of admiration ...

Jobim, 1981 Águas de Março, Tom Jobim's poetic, meditative, 1971 Bossa Nova gem celebrating southern Brazil's rainy month of March, has been playing in my head as we free-fall into 2021. Back in the 1980s, I memorized the lyrics so I could strum to it with my Goya, Spanish guitar. The song - about endings, beginnings and timeless flow, Zen and the beauty of common things - helped me through a rough patch. I can neither recite nor strum it from memory now, as this new year begins in which we all hope to emerge from a rough patch. But it's there, still flowing. "A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush... ... It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope"  - The Waters of March , Antonio Carlos ...

Being an autodidact, I was not aware until a few weeks ago that Charles Dickens had written five Christmas novellas in the 1840s, not just " A Christmas Carol " - all, he averred, with "a strong moral message."  Most UK schoolchildren probably know the other four as " The Chimes ," " The Cricket on the Hearth, " " The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain " and " The Battle of Life ." Each of them delivers, as Dickens put it, "a strong moral message" and all but the last come with supernatural twist. I came across this jolly factoid cluster while researching an idea for a sequel to my own Christmas novella: " Milagro on 34th Avenue ." That 2015 novella, about which I've written here previously , gives homage to my favourite Christmas movie - Miracle on 34th Street (particularly the 1947 original with Edmund Gwenn, Maureen O'Hara and little Natalie Wood, directed by playwright George Seaton). I ...

I've always loved the story that Groucho Marx quit the New York Friar's Club - famous for its celebrity membership, but packed with "barbers and dentists" according to Groucho - with a telegram that read: "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member." I experienced de ja Groucho about that the other day when read an article about meditation during one of my habitual sorties of self-distraction - sometimes framed as research - while trying to write. I had just viewed a droll, You Tube clip from a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry David "gives" his old mantra to comic Richard Lewis then asks "maybe I can get it back" just when Lewis had it working. Then the two bicker absurdly about the propriety of "splitting a mantra." The article on a more serious note, was about a Buddhist spinning mantra ring . I visualized such a ring on the hand of a short story charact...