Stuff and nonsense

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The above link is a ranking of how literate various cities (pop. 250,000+) are, based on newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.

It’s also further proof of why I don’t want to live here for the rest of my life. Phoenix is all the way down at number 54. (Tucson was better, at no. 34.)

But the two places I would most like to move to, if (when?) I do leave Phoenix? San Francisco rated fifth and Denver was sixth.

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I’m pretty sure this is the greatest story ever. Do you think Grimace drove the getaway car? And then there’s the obvious question: How does the Hamburgler fit in all this?

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How do you know your credibility as President has reached disastrously low proportions? How about when the top headline in a conservative paper like the Republic in a conservative place like Phoenix starts giving you the quotation mark treatment: Bush to unveil ‘victory’ plan. Ouch.

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It’s the last day of November which means I should have 50,000 words of a novel written … right? Well, not so much. As of this moment I have about 37,000, which is way short of the goal but really isn’t too bad. Especially considering where I was last week, I’m pretty proud of the output. And, as I wrote before I’m mostly excited about having found a story.

I thought about taking the afternoon off from work and seeing if I could squeeze out 13,000 words in 11 hours or so, but then I had a 3.5 hour meeting from hell in the morning so didn’t get anything done then and, well, now I’m blogging so the hell with it, I guess.

Don’t know how often I’ll keep working on this story once December officially hits. I’ll probably bounce from story to story based on whatever mood strikes. The problem I ran into with this story is that I hit a kind of boring section I didn’t want to write, which usually just means I’m muddy on the plot. I started writing other scenes that will go later in the book to get around it, so hopefully with time I can fill in that gap. In the meanwhile, there’s another story idea hatching (related to this character world that has spawned the “What I Am…” short story and this novel – which incidentally now has a working title, “Smoke”), plus the good old LA story, and Christmas stuff, etc etc.

So, ultimately, I guess it’s a failure, but we’ll definitely invoke the term “moral victory” for this one.

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I read on Slate today about a woman writer who feels that Jonathan Larson stole characters from a novel she had published and used them in Rent. I wasn’t going to blog about it, but Lisa’s comment on my Rent post got me thinking about it again, as well as a discussion I had with my aunt over Thanksgiving.

As for whether Rent was partly plagiarized from this lady’s novel, I don’t know – I have ordered both the novel in question and her book where she talks about the “theft” from the library. But I doubt it. After all, rent is – without question – a modern retelling of La Boheme. New city, new disease, Americanized name spellings. But it’s pretty much the same story otherwise. So, if Larson stole from this novel then didn’t the novel also steal from La Boheme? It seems a tough argument to prove.

But the author’s real outrage wasn’t about having been (possibly) plagiarized. It was that she (and by the way she’s openly gay) disliked the portrayal of homosexuals and the AIDS crisis as presented in Rent. She also seems to have a problem with the movie Philadelphia. Interesting note: Rent and Philadelphia were produced primarily by heterosexuals. I’d be curious to know what she thinks of, say, Angels In America, which was written by a gay man. But I digress.

To an extent, I think, she may have a point. I haven’t read her argument in any great depth, but the gist seems to be that it overly sanitizes just how hard it was to be gay in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe so – what made the Team America gag funny was that it nailed that, “It’s fun to be gay!” thing that seems to be going on in Rent. It’s a tragedy ultimately, but it’s also a lot of fun – and I wouldn’t be the first to argue that the final message is ultimately uplifting, no matter the dead bodies.

But Lisa raised a different point in mentioning her Mom, an apparently open-minded woman who nonetheless had no idea Rent was basically about gays and AIDS. And this is probably true of a lot of people, many of whom might even stumble into the theatre expecting Chicago or Phantom of the Opera. Surely, this has also happened to music theatre goers already.

For me, even that seems like it’s enough. It’s easy to criticize stories that are for whatever reason very close to you because they don’t match your experience. But if you want someone to understand your own personal experience then you have to bring it to them, you can’t expect others to tell your story. Rent tells the story Larson wanted it to. As I said before, it’s silly sometimes, sometimes it’s downright bad, but hopefully it’s close enough to what he believed that it’s an appropriate tribute and memorial to his short life. Of course, most people who see Rent will never get that far. They’ll see gay people with AIDS and hetero people with AIDS and some gay people and straight people who don’t have AIDS. They’ll see them sing and dance and live together and be distinctly human. Maybe it has and will continue to help a few people realize that ultimately all those distinctions don’t make them any less human. That’s a point and a success that no one should want to deny.