The Wild Blog in the West

I don't have a whole lot to report.  I've been busy for both good and bad reasons... recently bad, but I won't go into it. First, What's New With the Blog?  Well this month and next month will likely be quiet, or at least not unusual.  However, I'm toying with the thought of expanding it to three times a week -- two posts short, less than 500 words, and one post my standard long one. You may have noticed that I changed my tag at the top.  While mainly keeping the content unchanged, I want to skew the focus on this blog a bit more in the introvert and introverted section. That said, an old and welcome piece of business will soon be back: Downton Abbey recaps!  I'm sure no one will know what happened and everyone will be super surprised, right?! Second, What's New With the Novel?   I know you want to hear, right?  Well the selling part remains stalled mainly because it's the holidays.  I still have that query letter and synopsis hovering ...

There is a mocking term for people who have an unearned sense of their own importance: "snowflake." "You're such a special snowflake!" the taunt goes.  "You got trophies just for showing up in kindergarten.  Your mommy and daddy told you every day how wonderful you are and no one else is like you.  You think you shit gold.  Only now do you understand that no one else gives a shit about you ." This taunt is usually aimed at today's youth, up to about the age of 30, though technically it could be aimed at anyone.  The taunter aims to knock a sense of humility into the recipient, reduce the recipient's confidence, remind him or her that the world is hard and unforgiving.  People get used and chewed up and spit out, and only a few truly get to wear the "special" mantle. But what if this is the wrong message? What if the problem is that this person is special?  That there are not too few special people in this world, but too man...

With novels like The Chocolate Wars , A Separate Peace , and  Lord of the Flies under its banner, Young Adult literature was never a bastion of sweetness and optimism.  Rather, Young Adult literature (or "YA," as it is fashionably called) is used frequently to explore dark themes about ourselves and our society.  In fact, one could even argue that YA novels are often darker  than adult novels, not only because the events are happening to kids, but also because authors can take advantage of the "kids' novels are safe" misconception to push the envelope. Certainly The Hunger Games  trilogy does not shy from darkness.  It's a post-Apocalyptic world where North America has been separated into 13 districts, each with its own specialty, while an oppressive Capitol rules over all of them.  If you have not read The Hunger Games , or you have only seen the first movie, stop reading now because I will be discussing the first and second novel along with the t...

I don't normally do this, but I figured it was appropriate for the musical that many regard as Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece.  Prior to my review , I had listened to some of the songs and watched part of the stage musical, but I wanted to post the review while the movie was still fresh in my mind. Since then, I have watched the entire stage production on YouTube with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury, purchased the 2005 Broadway version with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris, and watched the 2001 Sweeney Todd  concert in front of the San Francisco Symphony, starring LuPone, Hearn, and Neil Patrick Harris as Toby.  While I feel as certain as before that Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd  was a very good musical adaptation, I am able to approach the transition with a more nuanced perspective. And durn it, if I can go on and on about the changes to Les Miserables  over the years, I can at least give some attention to the American Mozart's masterwork, can't I? After...

I had another post planned, but I doubt I could finish it before the night is out, so I thought I would just through together a handy-dandy list instead.  People love lists! So, without further ado, my list of scary things related (sometimes marginally) to Halloween... 1.  Scariest Movie.   Oh boy, that's hard to narrow down.  I'm a highly susceptible person who gets spooked very easily.  I was one of the kids who was freaked out by Return to Oz .  Large Marge in Pee Wee's Big Adventure scared the fuck out of me.  Even Ghostbusters  left me afraid to close my eyes.  So to this day, I have watched very few horror movies... yet somehow I really like reading synopses of horror movies.  Don't ask me why.   The Exorcist scared the crap out of me when I saw it, not because of pea soup head-spinning girl, but because of those random flashes of the devil (or whatever that was).  I could not stop thinking about them.  But I ...

Now I've done it.  It's bad enough that I put Mamma Mia! on the Right list, but a Burtonized Sweeney Todd ? Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street  (2007), directed by Tim Burton, was well-received upon its release , but has apparently received mixed reviews from fans of the stage musical.  The stage musical was written by the legendary Stephen Sondheim and premiered on Broadway in 1979, then in the West End in 1980. Based on 19th Century legends, Sweeney Todd is the tale of a London barber who just finished serving a long sentence for a crime he did not commit.  He was sentenced by the corrupt Judge Turpin, who lusted after his pretty young wife.  After Todd -- then known as Benjamin Barker -- was shipped off, Turpin invited his wife, Lucy, to his home under false pretenses and then raped her.  Lucy took arsenic afterward, and the judge took her and Barker's young daughter, Johanna, as his ward.  Flash forward 15 years, and Todd returns ...

While I sit here in the United States waiting for Downton Abbey 's Series Four -- not at all  reading episode spoilers or looking for places to download the episodes -- I have been thinking about the show's appeal to Americans.  Part of it is no doubt due to the fascination with British history, its aristocracy, and the pretty-pretty that comes with it.  But another reason could be the nostalgia for our country's past. Not that everything was so great in the U.S. from 1912 to 1922.  After World War I, there were greater tendencies toward xenophobia and isolationism.  "Lost Generation" writers like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald rejected post-war American culture.  Life was still significantly worse for anyone who was not a white male of Anglo-Saxon descent. Yet at the same time, the U.S. was taking center stage for the first time.  Woodrow Wilson introduced the idea of the League of Nations, which was unsuccessful, but ...