Authors Electric

A couple of months ago I promised you a particularly intriguing example of a false cultural memory , before being derailed by discovering that this phenomenon has been labelled the Mandela Effect.  Well, it can just get relabelled, because I refuse to trivialise that great man by association with a group of dopey people with a shaky grasp of real life events.  Instead, I give you the Casablanca Effect ( see here if you don’t immediately get why), followed by my contribution to this rich field of research.  Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, beautifully restored. My husband and I visited Paris recently, and, after having admired the astonishing restoration of Notre Dame, retired to a café. The great cathedral bells began to ring, prompting me to squawk, ‘The bells, THE BELLS!’, in a mock-heroic tone, a tired old joke that still appeals. (My children will tell you how much tired old jokes still appeal to me, and by the way, that wasn’t an intentional pun. A good one though.) No...

Giuseppe Verdi by Giovanni Boldini When I was five years old, my aunt Nina dressed me in a little blue suit and took me to a New England Conservatory of Music production of Giuseppe Verdi 's Rigoletto at Jordan Hall in Boston with my mother in the role of Gilda. Being as this was my first live opera, my aunt sat us unobtrusively in the last row of a side balcony, with an exit handy in case I didn't last. Before each act, she explained the story of the opera, based on a Victor Hugo play, as best she could in terms I could understand, censoring the racy parts about Duke of Mantua's womanizing. Just before the third act, she sketched out the tragic conclusion in which Gilda is murdered by an assassin – Sparafucile – who had been hired by her doting father, the hunchback jester Rigoletto himself, to kill the Duke. Gilda is stabbed by Sparafucile as she enters an inn by night trying to save the Duke, whom she loves despite his perfidiousness. As we settled into ou...

Recently, my excellent (indie) publisher, Diane Nelson, with great reluctance, had to wind up the company and so I decided to bite the bullet and republish all my books myself. With help from Diane and Sessha Batto, who designed the covers, I spent a few days formatting the manuscripts for republication on Kindle and as paperbacks through CreateSpace. While I’d still rather be with a publisher who knows what she’s doing and was a great supporter of her authors, I couldn’t help thinking how great it was that, unlike in the old days, not having a publisher was no bar to getting the books out there on the shelves, virtual and real. Ebooks are liberating. On the other hand, while I get a lot of pleasure both writing and reading them, my residual romanticism would still like there to be some aspect of them that had actual substance. I’m a sucker, for example, for signed copies. Whenever I visit Paris , I always try to make sure I walk past and dawdle in front of a wonderful sh...