The big blow it -- the Colts' lost season

Three minutes left in the Super Bowl and what I predicted is coming true: after chosing to throw away a (strong) chance at an undefeated season with six quarters of football left in the regular season and now they will lose the Big One. The agony will be so much worse for not having the undefeated season or the ring. At least the undefeated season would have given them something redemptive if they'd continued to where they are now and lost.

Meanwhile, congratulations to New Orleans and the Saints! No city deserves the pride and lift more.

The Writer's Landscape

This article in the LA Times succinctly summarizes the attitudes of both publishers and writers today.

Dani Shapiro writes of how the "writer's apprenticeship -- or perhaps, the writer's lot -- is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment" has changed today, so that "Today's young writers don't peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller -- and did." Writers today, she says, "do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score."

JD

From the L.A. Times article, "JD Salinger: a gift of words and silence":

"Don't ever tell anybody anything," J.D. Salinger wrote in the closing lines of "The Catcher in the Rye." "If you do, you start missing everybody."

"Wasn't this, after all, what Salinger was rejecting, a culture of celebrity in which the most important thing was appearance and no one cared about the level of the soul?"

Goodbye.

But hold on...

In all fairness to the quote in my last post, I thought it might be useful to examine the current bestsellers and see if I could spot the trends suggested: I couldn't. There is a wonderful mix, with plenty of "my ilk," though granted many of them are quite established. I suspect the quote referred to breaking a new author in, but I am still salved to see that people want to read about the characters and genre I write in.

I did find this, however, at #8 on the Paperback Trade Fiction list:

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. (Quirk, $12.95.) The classic story, retold with “ultraviolent zombie mayhem.”

So that got me thinking....maybe I'll do Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except it will be two young lovers who go up the Mississippi in a canoe....(ok, he's super hot, has lost his shirt, and anyway, she's the protagonist here, he's just an accessory)...and they find an unknown tributary that leads to a world of vampires, zombies, ghouls, goblins...ooh, yeah, yeah...then I'll use Rossetti's Goblin Market as the guiding allegory...and if these two lovers can't navigate the backwaters they will never return and the Mississippi will drain like an unstopped toilet, taking towns and cities and people, oh the people, oh the madness, the madness...and there they will remain, doomed to wandering the swamps of UnkNOwnLaNd, hearing the lonesome voice of another girl who met a similar fate, her sad Rossetti song drifting on the haze:

MORNING and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--

Say it ain't so...

From November, over at Agent in the Middle:

However, it's become increasingly difficult to sell any genre fiction from a male protagonist's perspective, unless he's really hot. But even if he's a really hot teen vampire, it's better to tell the story from a female point of view. If you have a male character, I'd almost suggest that you change the gender of your main character to sell a novel in this climate.

So let's see...I'm white, straight, middle-aged and male, and I write mystery/suspense novels rather than YA, vampire, zombie, and my male protagonist's are not really hot in the classical sense. That's like nine strikes...if this was baseball I'd have struck out the side all by myself! Too bad for me that I will continue to write what I am  passionate about, published or not. Still...not exactly a cheery post....(read the whole thing here).

The Big Lebowski ala Shakespeare (and the Coen Brothers do True Grit)

During the first Dubya term I wrote a Shakespearean play called King George II : A Drownéd Man, A Fool, and a Madman and billed it A Shakespearean Tramedy. It was written for a creative writing class, for an assignment called the Subversive Project, and I had a blast. While mostly fiction, all the lines of the King are actual Dubya quotes (I mean, really, he provided the stuff jokers are made of). It remains obscurely online at http://www.juniorleeklegseth.com/king_george_ii/.

I was watching The Big Lebowski tonight (again) and went to IMDB to read about it (again). While following links I found that the Coen Brothers are remaking True Grit with Jeff Bridges as Cogburn and Matt Damon as La Boeuf (more at IMDB). I'm trying to imagine True Grit run through the CB mindset...

Anyway, I also found a link to an article that told of screenwriter Adam Bertocci's rewriting of The Big Lebowski as a Shakespearean play called Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. Read it here.

The opening goes like this:

CHORUS
In wayfarer’s worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geoffrey Lebowski called, yet
Not called, excepting by his kin.
That which we call a knave by any other name
Might bowl just as sweet. Lebowski, then,
Did call himself ‘the Knave’, a name that I,
Your humble chorus, would not self-apply
In homelands mine; but, then, this Knave was one
From whom sense was a burden to extract,
And of the arid vale in which he dwelt,
Also dislike in sensibility;
Mayhap the very search for sense reveals
The reason that it striketh me as most
Int’resting, yea, inspiring me to odes.

Quote

Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.
-Thomas Henry Huxley