Authors Electric

Eleanor Spiess-Ferris and friend The other day, my inamorata, the artist Eleanor , called me her oddball lover. That seemed a stretch, considering the surreal narrative figures for which she is justly celebrated. Thanks, I told her , but I've never thought of myself as peculiar . I came from a family of larger-than-life characters who attracted more of the same. I was always the bookish kid taking mental notes, growing up with vague intentions to write,  I felt inadequate to the swashbuckling biographies of famous authors whom I admired. I wasn't one to go off and fight wars or book passage on tramp steamers like Hemingway or Harlan Ellison. When I landed a newspaper job, I ended up editing and writing features while admiring my more gritty colleagues who had come up as police reporters in the Walter Burns tradition– a rare breed now in the age of j-school grads. Au contraire, mon cher . You are quite strange, Eleanor insisted , and made her case, listin...