Authors Electric

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...

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...