Authors Electric

" The more things change, the more they stay the same," French journalist  Alphonse Karr wrote in an 1849 column.  Change is a constant of life, usually by increments in culture and politics, occasionally accelerated. This is one of those times. Like most Americans, this past week my inamorata, the noted artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris , and I watched seemingly earthshaking events unfold daily. July 2024 shifted .  It feels like 1968, a year of assassinations and upheaval that shaped our personal lives along with politics. Inspired by Don Delill o's masterful novel  Underworld  mingling characters' inner lives with the Cold War, I made the first six months of 1968 a protagonist in my memoirist novella, " Our Own Kind , " featured in my 2018 collection: " Sometimes Ridiculous ."     Eleanor and I are old enough to remember moments when we experienced political change as personal, not just as a spectator sport in Washington.  Karr's cynical quote...

I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if my parents had stayed in Boston instead of taking me west to California in 1942 when I was five years old. I suspect I would have been more like most of my New England cousins, whose stable, prosperous lives I've often admired, but rarely wished for. I wouldn't have been as itinerant, definitely not married so many times. If I had children they would not be the four I have now, and that I wouldn't want. It's unlikely that I would have become a journalist by trade and a writer by aspiration. I might have applied myself to the piano better, given the musicians in the family. There's no going back, of course. I could not imagine growing up anywhere but California, with its beaches, Pacific palisades, deserts, and mountains, its dreamers and con artists.       Back  then,  I still wore short pants . There was a world war on , and the Great Depression had far from given way to war-inflated prosperit...