“Who’s that? Who’s talking to me?” Moscowitz said, still dazed by the mystical slam-bang postmortem that had transmogrified him into a crustacean.“It’s me, Moe Silverman,” the other lobster said.
“O.M.G.!” Moscowitz piped, recognizing the voice of an old gin-rummy colleague. “What’s going on?”
“We’re reborn,” Moe explained. “As a couple of two-pounders.”
“Lobsters? This is how I wind up after leading a just life? In a tank on Third Avenue?”
“The Lord works in strange ways,” Moe Silverman explained.
A segment from a new story by Woody Allen in The New Yorker, in which two of Bernie Madoff’s victims die, find themselves reincarnated as the swindler’s potential dinner, and plot to get revenge. It’s short and cute and I totally blogged it for the sly drop of Gossip Girl vernacular alone. O.M.G., indeed.
Every week Kevin Kelly will look at different writers whose books should be turned into films, films that were much better as books, or books that should never be turned into films upon pain of death. We’ll also talk about book to movie trends and deals if anything interesting happens.
My first introduction to Stephenson came back in the mid 90s when I was working at a bookstore in Austin, Texas. I’d read everything William Gibson had written, and was hungry for more when a coworker suggested Snow Crash. It’s a very Gibson-esque book that is probably one of Stephenson’s most cinematic works, meaning that it would probably require the smallest amount of effort to take it from the page to the screen in terms of putting a screenplay together.
Snow Crash is about a sword-wielding, pizza-delivering hacker who is trying to stop the spread of a computer virus that only affects computer programmers, along with the help of a young female courier who travels around on a high-tech skateboard using a magnetic harpoon to slalom through traffic. Sounds like a movie, right? Hollywood thought so too, since it was optioned by Touchstone Pictures and several drafts were written before it was abandoned due to budget concerns.
Neal Stephenson has been writing books since 1984, on subjects spanning the ecology, cyberpunk, steampunk, cryptography, artificial intelligence, information trafficking, historical fiction, and speculative fiction. However, none of his works has yet been turned into a movie. If you take a glance at Cryptonomicon or any of the three books in The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, or The System of the World, you’ll see why: these are massive tomes that average about about 800 pages in length, and those four titles could take up an entire shelf on their own. Snow Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U are all “normal” sized books, so why haven’t they been smacked onto celluloid?
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Emma Forrest’s defense of Ben Affleck/glowing review of Gone Baby Gone in Friday’s Guardian is more than just your standard, short celebrity puff/think piece; it’s the short celebrity puff/think piece Forrest has been sitting on for years. There are four mentions of Affleck in the first fifty pages of Namedropper, Forrest’s first novel, which was probably the best thing to happen to teenage girls and the adults who are enamored with them since My So-Called Life. The mention that I remember most vividly comes from a passage in which the 16 year-old heroine, Viva, is explaining why she rebuffed an opportunity to meet with her estranged mother:
Last time my mother came out of the Buddhist retreat, she tried to set up a reunion with me. But I didn’t want to meet her. She’d been in a Buddhist retreat for five years. I know she wouldn’t have heard of Ben Affleck and that it would just annoy me.
The idea of knowing Ben Affleck comes up again and again in Namedropper, which was published a couple of years after Affleck won an Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting. Viva’s friends and nemeses either don’t know who Affleck is or can’t remember his name, which is just one element of the pop-culture obsessed heroine’s sense of isolation. Forrest’s new appreciation of Affleck would seem to stand as Viva’s vindication. It contends that the former J. Lo consort “had this film in him” but was forced to keep it hidden “all the time that MTV had on heavy rotation a yacht-shot video of him caressing his bling fiancee’s ass.” In other words: what Forrest/Viva knew all along has now been revealed to rest of us. Read more here.
