Satan Is a Huge Asshole…Literally!, Analyze That, and Jews Ruin Parties, aka Dante’s The Inferno, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Sun Also Rises, brought to you by Better Book Titles.
Aaaaand because the week is almost over, hipster dinosaurs: Read more »
Every time his Photoshop crashes, filmmaker/developer Garrett Murray emails an original (and bitter) piece of flash fiction to the company instead of a crash report, spawning a genre which Mediabistro has dubbed “crash report fiction.”
The Great Gatsby: classic novel and video game. I’m embarrassed to say I’m geeking out about this:
Join Nick Carraway as you explore the mansions and bungalows of Long Island, the parlors of New York City, and the heart and soul of the Roaring Twenties. Attend extravagant parties and lush gatherings as you dance the Charleston with a happy couple harboring scintillating secrets. Sip bootleg gin with a mysterious millionaire desperate to bring the passions of the past into the present in Great Gatsby, a fun Hidden Object game.
Aaaand to get you through the rest of the week, here is the Old Spice Guy (or someone who looks a lot like him, anyway) promoting libraries: Read more »
For the last few months, we’ve been working hard with the good folks over at Anthology Media to put together a spiffy new web video series for you. The concept is pretty simple: we get writers, musicians, actors, and other creative types to summarize their favorite novels. In 60 seconds or less. With no time to prepare.
One of most the interesting aspects we found about this project was how it reflected the sorts of things people take away from fiction. We had each participant summarize a couple of stories, and everyone seemed to have a theme. Carolina, who you’ll see in a few weeks, managed to end each of her 60-second summaries with the concept of love. Morgan somehow related everything back to prostitutes and redemption. Other themes? Dinosaurs and aliens. This was all the more interesting when the stories in question contained neither dinosaurs nor aliens.
We’re kicking off the project with Matt Mazur, a NYC-based folk and comedy musician. He composed this little diddly about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby off the top of his head. Enjoy and, if you like it, please share:
I don’t understand this anxiety about TV supplanting literature as the main cultural vessel for our stories. Why does it matter? To me, TV and literature are on the same team. It’s the stories themselves that matter: good stories are good stories, regardless of what medium they reach us through, and there are television shows on the air today that way down the line will be treated with the same level of legitimacy that the “classics” receive now. What’s really interesting is that I would bet that the few television shows that do endure will share the same basic themes as many of our most beloved and respected books. In fact, there have even been a couple of times that the most popular shows of our time have expressly borrowed or paid homage to “great” works of literature, adapting them for a modern audience. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
Who and what do you want to be in 2010 (but more importantly, why)?
Today is New Year’s Eve and like many people at this very moment, I’ve been thinking about my resolutions. I’ve shunned this tradition the past couple years because for some reason – if I clearly stated I was going to do something – the likelihood of it not happening was even higher than if I had not said anything at all.
I enjoyed a pretty successful first year out of college but like many, the recession soon found me and my hopes for steady work and monetary stability were knifed in the face. This year, I learned that “Freelancer” was just a glorified term for “Intermittently Unemployed.” Naturally, this leant me quite a bit of time to sit on my couch and stew in my own thoughts. It took awhile to boil down the carcass of my early twenty-something idealism, but at the end of 2009 I found myself with a rather flavorful confit of hope and aspirations. Since I wasn’t sure where to start, I asked a handful of friends what their personal resolutions would be. Most were pretty run-of-the-mill (you know, like “getting in shape” or “getting out of debt”) and I’m not really the biggest fan of run-of-the-mill. I was also set on making my resolutions concrete and more specific (you know, like “double the income I had in 2009” instead of “earn more money” or “master the Arabic language” instead of “learn new stuff”). My desire to prevent my resolution from being ill-defined was shot to death (wow, my writing is violent tonight) upon asking my friend Bryan what his resolution was going to be.
