E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

There's an old children's taunt--the kind most of my generation got to hear at least once growing up in the streets and schoolyards of America. It goes like this: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Followed by the usual body language: pointing, thumb on nose, wrinkled face, and whatever. It's possible girls heard this kind of nonsense more often than boys, because girls pretty much had to rely on words for both attack and defense, whereas boys had all sorts of weapons at their disposal: fists, elbows, knees, shoulders, and yes, sticks and stones, or baseball bats, knives, and guns, in more recent times. Maybe that's why women read more than men. They are more comfortable with the power of words, because for much of history it was the only power they had. The absurdity of that childish claim should be obvious to anyone who's ever lived in a civilized society governed by laws, or religious doctrine, or as in Christian and ...

With apologies to my readers, it has been a long time: one year, to be exact, since my last posting. I have been busy, mind you. My Italian publisher Newton Compton Roma contracted another book, as second in a new series featuring investigative reporter Jake Fleming, who, in my prior book, Il Libro Segreto di Shakespeare , discovered evidence pointing to another author of the Shakespeare Canon (and no, it was not Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford). I am still seeking an English language publisher, which is a unique situation to be in indeed, given that this book has been published (under my pseudonym John Underwood) in seven languages, to date. The last time this has happened was For Whom the Bell Tolls , by Ernest Hemmingway. Not that I am claiming peerhood with Hemmingway, but that is a fact. Meanwhile, a true hero of mine (granted, I am a professional iconoclast) has resurfaced, literally, and I consider this very good news indeed. Richard of York, the last of the Plantagen...

Last Friday evening I attended a concert at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, where I live, and as I occasionally am wont to do. It was an old favorite, a Romantic paen, the ultimate Classical performance piece: Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. The guest conductor was a young Spaniard, Pablo Heras-Casado, and the performer was an Englishman, multi-award winner, named Stephen Hough. It was a perfect performance, and as always, powerful experience. But I am not a music critic, per se, other than at my own personal level. But I come from a musical family, have grown up with and lived with music all of my life, been a musician of sorts myself, and music remains my first love. As an author, I am best gifted, for better or worse, at composing with words. Words are a wonderful tool and thing, however often disparaged by the linguistically challenged (George W. Bush and Sarah Palin come to mind),and the English language is the compendium of all languages. But the spoken language still cannot st...

Back in my carefree New York days from the late Sixties to mid-disco, I got to know Nick Dunne in an environment with which he had far more comfort and self-confidence than I. Or so I thought. He was from a more privileged background than I, certainly: an upper class upbringing in a home in which his elder brother (like my own) was already an accomplished author, and his grandfather was what I would later call "Old Money" (the original title of my first book). He had this in common with the Kennedys as well, ironically, given they would become his prime targets later on. The setting where we first met and got to know one another was in the Hamptons, at the home of then Park Avenue ingenue Gillian Fuller (actually Gillian's mother's 'dog house,' as she called it at the time). But what we had in common was a well-hidden sense of not belonging--not just there in Southhampton, but anywhere. I was there shooting a short "art" film that winter weekend in 1...

I was raised in a Quaker family, and grew up protesting nuclear weapons in Times Square back in the Fifties (remember 'Ban the Bomb'? That was me, a naive six year old, holding one of those signs). When I graduated from Syracuse University in 1968, the war in Vietnam was raging, and so was my generation. We truly believed we could change the world, bring peace and prosperity and justice to all, and—well, you know how all that turned out. Two decades later, after working so hard to change the world with so little success, I finally concluded that presenting the “truth” as I saw it didn't always work, if ever. Sometimes, I was beginning to realize, good storytelling may be a better way to reach people than on-the-nose reality. Or even gently presented reality laced with humor, the way the late great Art Buchwald mastered this skill with his political satires. Having taken my best shot at doing good without much success, I decided to try my hand at doing well, or at least mak...

I never knew Ted Kennedy other than by reputation, but my first awareness of him other than as Jack's and RFK's younger brother came at the time he and I were both new in our jobs and working towards the same goal: justice for American minorities in terms of those most basic of needs: health, education, and welfare. I was working for Kenneth B. Clark at the Metropolitan Applied Research Center in New York City. It was 1969, and I was a young idealist and Conscientious Objector to the war in Vietnam, and as a birthright Quaker, had taken a position with an NGO for my so-called Alternative Service in lieu of military action. This required (and I received) permission from the office of the President, who at the time was Nixon, whose mother had been a Quaker herself. At that time Dr. Clark had hired another white person besides myself for his Harlem-based research and educational development programs: the indominable Jeanette Hopkins, one of two venerable, powerful women pioneers I...

Lowell and Perry are out sunning, as usual. As usual it's late afternoon, to avoid the mid-day Florida heat. Perry is circumspect, as usual. Lowell is working on the brightwork of his perpetual rehab project, the schooner Andromeda . Keeping up the wood finish on a wooden boat in Florida is about like painting the Golden Gate bridge. By the time your done, it's time to start over again. "Hey, Lowell," says Perry, through a cloud of cannabis. He's been smoking more lately, and enjoying it less. "Don't you ever get tired of working on your damn boat?" "Sure. Every year," responds Lowell, slapping on a new coat of varnish on the stern rail, having finally finished re-sanding it. "Seems to me you spend about ten hours of varnishing for every hour sailing, wouldn't you say?" Lowell grins. "So few? I'd put it at more than a hundred to one. In fact, when was the last time we went sailing, like out on the Gulf?" Perry re...

My current favorite TV show is Boston Public. It’s an often humorous, usually outrageous, and over-the-top, but still thoughtful look at our so-called justice system. One of the key elements about the legal system is how often it has nothing to do with justice. Not so the mystery genre, in which I write. In the real world, justice depends on who’s in charge, who calls the shots, who can afford the best lawyers (Denny Crane) or the best lobbyists. Only in a theoretical world, a world of right and wrong, of clear distinctions, where ‘might makes right’ is a falsehood, where the good guy always wins, is there true justice. Which, unfortunately, is mostly a world of imagination and fiction. Maybe this is why this kind of fiction is so popular, anad why justice is what I like best to write about. It's what too few people get, in their lives. They hope things will be better in Heaven, of course. It's why they believe in Heaven. Because too often there is none here in our world. Those...