A personal diary keeping people abreast of what I am working on writing-wise.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I AM THE ZEITGEIST

Things have a habit of converging all at once. Is it because we are looking for them, or just because that's the way the wind really is blowing? In other words, was the dust on the tabletop all the while, but it's only when we decided we needed to clean that the table became dusty?

From reading and reviewing The Dying Animal in order to better review the film version, Elegy, to thoughts of further adaptation...

Salman Rushdie writes of the art of adaptation for the UK paper The Guardian. His credibility falters when he suggests Rod Stewart outdid Tom Waits on one of old Tom's songs, but that just means never borrow Salman Rushdie's iPod. In other things, his thoughts are sound. He compares the art of adapting literature to film to the greater art of adapting any story from one media to another and the process of adapting to life and social change...

...and then I read this piece by Haruki Murakami, "The Novelist in Wartime" (link courtesy of Sierra "Ha-Cha-Cha" Hahn), addressing Israelis as they award him a prize for writing, talking of the writer's responsibility to the people who read his or her work, of the Egg vs. the Wall, and the people's responsibility to themselves...

...to Travis Fox posting this Lee Judge editorial cartoon:



...which put me in mind of this blog post from my friend, the writer Neal Shaffer, about the very attitude that the cartoon mocks, which I had wanted to link to before and forgot. Neal says it so perfectly, I can't see much point in even trying to summarize.

Everything that rises, as they say, must converge.

Current Soundtrack: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It's Blitz

2 comments:

Travis said...

Aw, I'm glad to be (somewhat) included in your lil' rambling quest.

How about that new Yeah Yeah Yeahs, eh? I love the way they keep evolving without losing their core sound.

Jamie S. Rich said...

After a couple of listens, I'm still kind of ambivalent to It's Blitz!. Though, yes, I agree that I appreciate how they continue to refuse to stand still despite the hipsters wanting them to remake Fever to Tell every time.