SOMETHING BIG WILL HAPPEN

In 2000 I was living in Southern California in an idiotic paradise of flowers, palm trees, skunks, echinacea, closeted Navy types and hummingbirds. The mean temperature in San Diego was neither too hot  nor too cold, the rainfall a pittance, as blondes in convertibles cruised all year long with tops down, under enamel-blue skies, to and from a cocktail-blue Pacific beside which I  lazed many a long day away,  the ocean and I tossing and turning so languidly in our sleep. Blonde bunnies battled dark-haired hunks with beach balls while lithe-but-leathery Gay men rollerbladed ornately along a boardwalk covered in … Continue reading SOMETHING BIG WILL HAPPEN

MUSTER of TRIVIUMS: a reflection on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine in Two Parts

It’s hard to believe that this piece on Nick Baker’s The Mezzanine is almost ten years old. I was asked to do it by Daniel Green (of The Reading Experience) , because Daniel admired my critique of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, and I remember that neither Daniel nor I could properly format the Word doc,  in which I wrote it, to match his site’s template. The resulting debut was a graphical catastrophe of psychotic font sizes but it got fixed, in the end, and the piece even managed to get itself cited in an academic work. Which is mildly ironic … Continue reading MUSTER of TRIVIUMS: a reflection on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine in Two Parts

THE SECOND GUEST: A FREUDIAN GHOST STORY (unfinished shooting script)

  In 2002 I sold an option on a screenplay, to a Berlin film production company, for a record amount (for that company) and began writing more scripts. Unfortunately, Kirch Gruppe, the company that was providing quite a bit of the money for film production in Germany, at the time, folded as an indirect result of “9/11”, putting an end to my screenplay-writing adventures (here’s another Script from 2002, this one completed)… which included a few months of being a script doctor for various private parties (all of them professional men older than forty and not naturally creative) with an uncannily … Continue reading THE SECOND GUEST: A FREUDIAN GHOST STORY (unfinished shooting script)