The window for talking about a cultural occurrence is too small.

When the song “Bad Romance” exploded into everyone’s brain space in 2009, I had a joke in my stand up comedy act about it almost immediately. I did that joke for a very successful few months. Then, the song was no longer relevant and I stopped doing the bit. A year later, I suspected enough time had passed to bring the joke back. It worked again. “Bad Romance” had come full circle.

But what if you miss something and then, no one wants to talk about it with fresh enthusiasm?

Jim Gaffigan, another (better) comedian, has the perfect joke about this, where he says he watched the 1995 film Heat and then, wanting to discuss it, asked a friend if they’d seen Heat. The friend scoffed, “Yeah, like ten years ago.”

Gaffigan pouted, “But I wanna talk about it noooow.”

Whereas Steph lamented loving hot items long after they’ve cooled, I didn’t even get to like these gems when they were hip. Steph never left the boat at the end of the cruise. I missed the trip entirely.

(SPOILER ALERT) Does anyone wanna talk to me about these things?

Twin Peaks, 1990

My friend Charlie spent YEARS trying to convince me this surreal show was the tits and I resisted like a darn fool. I’m in the middle of season two right now. Holy Log Lady! It’s pretty great. The distinctive fashion, the cool David Lynch-ness, the gorgeous ladies, the quirky characters, the intrigue and mind-melding, Agent Dale Cooper and his fine self. Mmm.

I have so many questions! What’s the deal with Black Lodge? Is Windom Earle gonna get Dale? Why haven’t they killed off Lara Flynn Boyle? Is BOB a real person or an evil spirit? Did you know Kyle MacLachlan was in Showgirls? Will Dale and Audrey ever make out?! I wish I could have watched Twin Peaks while it was still on the air, with the rest of the equally-as-clueless populace.

It’s no fun telling the Dunkin Donuts employee she makes a “damn fine cup of coffee” when all she does is give me a blank stare back.

Firefly, 2002

Speaking of TV shows that were cancelled too soon: Finally watching Firefly explained SO much about the Internet. I had no idea Jayne Cobb coined the meme, “I’ll be in my bunk” and I’m kind of embarrassed about having used it without knowing.

Plus, I am waaaay late to the Joss Whedon party. I know, I know, I basically don’t deserve to be on this planet. Drop me off on Triumph, orbiting the brown dwarf Heinlein. I belong with those hill people.

Talking points: How about the loose ends that’ll never be tied up? The Mal and Inara storyline or what the blue hand people did to River or the UNTIMELY KILLING OFF of one of the more awesome characters (NO SPOILERS) in the followup movie, Serenity.

Seriously, Whedon. How could you kill him off like that?? Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.

The Shining, 1980

One winter break from college, I spent the whole time on my living room couch with the flu. To pass the time, my mom went to the public library and got me Stephen King’s entire canon. I stayed up until 4 a.m. reading Carrie under the covers. I never thought words could inspire such spine-chilling fear.

That same week I watched The Shining for the first time, and then I went back to college. To film school. And tried to talk to the students there about The Shining as if it were a new thing.

I referenced it so much (excited to finally be getting the jokes everyone was making) (REDRUM!) that people were all like, “Did you JUST see The Shining or something? Why do you keep bringing it up?”

No. Jeez. Can’t a girl jabber on about Scatman Crothers all the time without everyone getting on her case?

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, 2005

I was writing a piece about great music documentaries recently and I realized I’d never seen one of the most critically acclaimed films in the genre, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.

Man, did watching this make me nostalgic for when Chappelle’s Show was on the air. It feels like a different time, doesn’t it? A time before Mind of Mencia tried to fill that gap. We were innocent and fresh-faced then. We repeated catchphrases that, if we were white, were probably racist. We pretended to slap people, yelling “I’m Rick James, bitch!” We were so young.

Mostly, I’d love to chat about the adorable couple in the weird staircase house. They were delightful.

The Lincoln Assassination, 1865

If I had a penny for every time I’ve cried in public while reading about the Lincoln assassination, I’d have too many reminders that John Wilkes Booth was an asshole.

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DISCLAIMER: The worst way to ruin a perfectly good argument is to mix up its subject, so before we get into it, let’s get a few things straight:

While I’ve read Battle Royale and watched the movie, I haven’t read The Hunger Games (I may go see the film). You can complain that this makes me uninformed and biased, but being familiar with both books isn’t necessary to this argument and if I am biased, my case is obviously still vulnerable to facts and logic, so come at me, bro.

I don’t need to read The Hunger Games to have this argument because this isn’t about whether or not it’s similar to Battle Royale. The two have enough in common to get otaku nerds angry and tweens defensive, so there must be something to it. Also, enough effort has already been put into cataloging the similarities between the two books, while similarity doesn’t even necessarily imply plagiarism; tons of things have been independently created or discovered by more than one person. No one is arguing that Battle Royale is the seminal text of the genre. William Golding threw down childhood bloodlust with Lord of the Flies in junior high school, and themes of adolescent sacrifice are at least as old as the Minotaur. Everything is derivative, nothing is original and yeah, “Simpsons did it” — no one is saying otherwise.

What we are arguing about is the claim by Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, that before handing in her manuscript, she had never heard of Battle Royale.

Suzanne Collins’s Background

Collins spent the better part of the last two decades working in television, specifically on children’s shows. Her incomplete IMDB filmography, spanning 1993 to 2009 (2012 if you include The Hunger Games movie), includes writing credits for five different television series. Prior to working in television, she attended New York University, beginning in 1988 to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing. Collins started writing children’s books with The Underland Chronicles, an admitted re-imagining of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In September of 2008, Scholastic published The Hunger Games, which Collins acknowledges was inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

So the entertainment industry and the literature world are the spheres Suzanne Collins is familiar with, having worked or studied in one or the other from 1988 to 2012. She is also accustomed to re-imagining others’ work — though there’s no harm in that when it’s admitted.

Battle Royale as a “Cult Hit”

People like to describe Battle Royale as a “cult hit,” ostensibly meaning that it has a small, though fanatic following and little mainstream exposure. The problem with classifying things as cult hits is that it’s often meaningless or even false. Think of Fight Club, the perennial cult film: If its fan base is so small, how have all your friends seen it? If it’s so esoteric, why is there a Fight Club poster hanging in every college freshman’s dorm? Calling something a cult hit is typically a reflexive action, saying more about the speaker than the subject, the equivalent of describing your favorite band with the words, “You probably haven’t heard of them.” It’s a means for people to claim they have a premium on knowledge, a way for kids to win Cool Points.

Battle Royale’s supposed cult hit status is also the favored argument of Hunger Games fans in denying the mere possibility that Collins could have been inspired by the Japanese book or film. “Ugh, no one outside of Japan-obsessed nerds has even heard of Battle Royale,” the reasoning usually goes, with the speaker casually unaware that they themselves seem familiar with it despite apparently not being Japan-obsessed nerds.

Essentially, the problem is: If no one’s heard of Battle Royale, who keeps bringing it up in the first place? The answer is that people have heard of Battle Royale. Both the book and the film have received coverage in the American press, and both have a number of Americans fans that seems larger than the U.S. population of anime nerds.

Let’s start with the book: The English translation of Battle Royale was released in 2003, and besides the obligatory write-up by Publishers Weekly, it was also reviewed in Entertainment Weekly by famed novelist Stephen King, who included it on his summer reading list after being introduced to it by Kelly Braffet, another American author. To date, Battle Royale the book has 171 customer reviews on Amazon, where it’s the 23rd best seller in science fiction short stories (odd considering it’s a 624-page novel), and 98 customer reviews on Barnes & Nobel, most of which predate the publication of The Hunger Games. Nothing compared to the success of Collins’ books, but certainly not unknown.

Onto the movie: The Japanese film-adaptation of Battle Royale was released in 2000, and despite not having an official U.S. release nor distribution until 2011, it received a relatively considerable amount of coverage in America. In fact, its international premiere took place in Los Angeles, as reported by Variety in the entertainment industry magazine’s first piece about the film in 2001. Variety also reviewed Battle Royale II in 2003 and covered the purchase of the original film’s American rights in 2006 — which was subsequently reported by The New York Times in 2006, five years after the “newspaper of record” published its own review of Battle Royale. TIME magazine also reported on Battle Royale and its sequel in 2003. According to Rotten Tomatoes, 36 critics have reviewed the film, along with the 73,883 users who rated it (again, most prior to the publication of The Hunger Games). To date, the DVD has 199 customer reviews on Amazon, and the film has 513 user reviews and 68,036 ratings on IMDB, which also lists references to Battle Royale in a number of popular American movies, including Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Juno and Thank You for Smoking. Almost all of these numbers are bound to be surpassed by The Hunger Games, but the figures go a long way in dispelling the notion that Battle Royale is some incredibly obscure movie that only hardcore Japanophiles have ever heard of.

_____

Your judgment of whether or not Collins borrowed or outright stole material from Battle Royale for The Hunger Games obviously rests with you. Despite denying any knowledge of Battle Royale’s existence, she did work in the entertainment and literary worlds while Battle Royale was being covered by major publications relevant to those industries and she has a history of reaching out for inspiration, so the possibility is there. It comes down to whether or not you take her word for it — which is fine either way because, ultimately, it has no bearing on anything but a meaningless microscopic sliver of your own particular take on the world.

The only thing I ask is that we stop pretending that there’s literally no way Collins could have even heard of Battle Royale because it’s sooo underground. Apparently you and I have both heard of it, and neither of us is all that cool.

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A year ago, I wrote some advice about becoming a writer which, like, a million people read for some reason. …Because what the people really want is writing advice from the obscurely-and-minorly-well-known-on-the-internet-kind-of-writer Oliver Miller. And not, say, from Jonathan Franzen or Stephen King. …Anyway, this is all to the good. And as before, I find myself in need of money, so here’s another column about how to be a writer. This time, we’re moving on to ADVANCED WRITING STUFF. So hold on to your hats.

– – — – –

ADVANCED WRITING 101

– – — – –

A lot of people want to be writers for some reason. I can only assume that this is because writing is a sexy job.

And writing is a sexy job.  I originally started writing because I thought it would make girls like me. Yes, that was the actual reason that I started writing. I was correct; it did make girls like me, except that it took ten years for that to work, and at the end of it, I was broke, because I was a writer. Maybe you should learn how to play the guitar instead. That will also make members of the opposite sex like you, and it only takes like eight months to learn. Try that instead. In fact, do not become a writer. Please. Give up and stop now.

You’re still here. You’re not listening; I knew you wouldn’t listen. Great. So you really do want to become a writer, you moron. Wonder-f-cking-full. Is there any way that I can talk you out of this? …No? You’re INSPIRED and DETERMINED to become a writer, you say? Great; nifty…. Here are some advanced tips to keep you from screwing up.

1) Don’t write about vampires. Seriously. Number one, I hate reading about vampires, and number two, learn to write about normal stuff first, okay? We’re going to teach you how to write about normal stuff. You can add vampires later, if you want, but learn how to observe the world around you before you start writing sci-fi and/or fantasy. This will make your stories about vampires that I never ever want to read much, much better.

2) Go for walks, take a drive, do manual labor, whatever. You have ideas when you’re not trying to. That’s when ideas happen. “All the good ideas that I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow,” said a very famous person, once upon a time. A famous composer was once asked how he thought of his Ninth Symphony. He replied:

I was on a tramp through the hills, and climbed a crag to enjoy the view and eat my lunch. As I unfolded the greasy paper around a piece of rather strong cheese, the damned thing popped into my mind.

Right? Right. Get out of your room. You can’t have brilliant ideas by trying to have them. It’s like trying to get a cat to come to you. You can’t actually try to get it to come, or it’ll never happen. Or it’s like viewing an eclipse by looking at its shadow, or whatever it is that you do with eclipses. You have to use inverted vision. So get out of your house. Get out of your study with all of those books. Ideas will happen.

Every good idea that I’ve ever had happened to me while I was walking or driving. While I was distracted, that is — is what I mean to say. I once had a job working as a dishwasher. I had a lot of good ideas then too. Get out of your damn house, and then come back to it.

3) Stop reading only the books that you’re reading. This especially applies to people who only read Bukowski and Kerouac. Please stop doing that. It’s making your writing awful. Bukowski is bearable in small doses and Keroauc wrote one good book. Read lots of stuff. Get some different viewpoints, Christ.

4) Don’t write about yourself. I realize that I break this rule all the time. But I spent years writing fiction that wasn’t about myself. I wrote mostly from the point of view of girls, or jocks, or rock stars, or ad-men, or anyone I could think of who wasn’t me.

Here’s some actual wisdom for a moment – you can understand everything else in this world better than yourself, because you can view everything else in the world from the outside. But you can only view yourself from the inside. Therefore, you understand yourself least of all. If you start out by writing a short story about, say, your current messed-up relationship with your boyfriend, it’s going to be terrible. Of course it will be. Because you don’t understand your current messed-up relationship with your boyfriend, and why would you? You’re in it right now. You need to be outside something to view it and to write about it. So when you’re starting out, when you’re an apprentice writer, don’t write about yourself. Trust me. When my friends ask me for advice, I force them to not write about themselves and it makes their writing better. Writing about other people forces you to pay attention — to pay attention to the way other people talk, for instance — which is important, though I’m not going to explain why.

5) Here’s a simple rule of thumb. “Here’s a simple rule of thumb/ Too clever is dumb.” So said a famous poet. Stop trying to be so f-cking clever with your writing. I actively try not to think when I’m writing. I clear my mind. I don’t think of clever metaphors or  anything like that. It’s a little Zen, I know. Here’s a little more Zen, from a story about a guy trying to shoot some marbles. He gets some advice about shooting marbles from his brother:

From the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from – well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. ‘Could you try not aiming so much?’ he asked me, still standing there. ‘If you hit him when you aim, it’ll just be luck.’ He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. ‘How can it be luck if I aim?’ I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn’t say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. ‘Because it will be,’ he said. ‘You’ll be glad if you hit his marble – Ira’s marble – won’t you? Won’t you be glad? And if you’re glad when you hit somebody’s marble, then you sort of secretly didn’t expect too much to do it. So there’d have to be some luck in it, there’d have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.’

Stop aiming so much. Stop thinking up your precious clever, clever little bot mots beforehand. Just look at the world around you and try to describe it honestly — very, very honestly. Just do that. If can do that, then things will work out, assuming that you’re not incredibly boring and uninteresting. If you are those two things, then I can’t help you and no one else can either.

But for the rest of you, look out the window. What do you see? A tree, a cat, a car? Describe it plainly, with utter honesty. Because after all, the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion — all in one. And if you can see clearly and write that down, then someone will discover you.

Don’t think. You shouldn’t even have time to think. You should be too busy just observing the world and being honest. An interviewer once asked William Faulkner about his writing process. “You haven’t got time,” Faulkner said, “to be thinking about images and symbols. You’ve got all you can manage without that. …Writing a novel,” he said, “is like trying to nail together a henhouse in a hurricane.”

6) And by the way, good writers don’t die alone and undiscovered. …For some reason, this is something believed by people who read lots of Bukowski and Kerouac and Kafka and stuff. They believe that great writers starve to death in a garret and no one reads their stuff until fifty years later. Look. It’s romantic to think that you’re an undiscovered genius whose deep thoughts will be discovered after your death to the universal acclaim of millions. This never happens. This has happened once in the recorded history of the world, with the book A Confederacy of Dunces (which I never read). It’s never happening again. Kafka was published and popular in his lifetime, and so was every other “unknown” genius that you can think of. If you’re good, you’ll get published.

7) But who gives a sh-t about getting published? I write for myself, dude. And that whole publishing scene is so bogus, man. First of all: nice attitude! Second of all, if you don’t care about getting published, then why are you reading an article that gives advice about how to write? If you just want to scribble in your private journal, then you don’t need my advice, or anyone’s advice. I’ve met a million people who say that they write “for themselves.” Bullsh-t. I don’t write for myself. Doing this is a lot of work. I could be getting stoned and playing Super Mario 3 on an emulator. Or be endlessly browsing through Etsy.com. Or be reading or having sex or masturbating or whatever. I enjoy doing all those things more than I enjoy writing. I mean, I like writing, but it’s a job. Nothing is fun to do for eight hours a day, every day, and that includes writing.

My feeling is that “I only write for myself” is just used as a defense mechanism. It’s a way to deflect all criticism. And you’re going to have to learn to accept criticism. Which leads me to my next step.

8) You’re going to have to learn to accept criticism.  I went to the largest MFA writing program in the country. We had something like 150 students. The bad writers were universally the ones who couldn’t take criticism, who would retreat into “well, I just wrote this story for myself” territory. Some people would get mad. Some people would cry when their story was critiqued.

Look. It’s writing. It’s not you. Your writing is not you; it’s a craft — that’s all writing is. Being the world’s greatest writer is no different — is qualitatively no better and no worse — than being the world’s greatest bridge-builder, or the world’s greatest dental hygienist, or the world’s greatest tier of knots in cherry stems with your tongue. All these things are crafts; and to be truly skillful at a craft, you need both training and some artistry. And so anyway, to sort of return to my original point, if you were trying to fix the engine of your car and someone said, “You’re doing that wrong,” and you weren’t actually a licensed mechanic, well, you wouldn’t get angry at them, would you? You wouldn’t cry. Right? No. You wouldn’t. So don’t cry when someone criticizes your writing.

Here’s something I learned in grad school. If a majority of people in a room say that your story is bad, or needs to be changed/ fixed, then it’s bad. They’re not trying to hurt your feelings. People are intrinsically shy. They don’t want to say awkward things. They don’t want to offend you. They’re saying it because they have to.

And you don’t like getting criticism? Guess what — neither do I. No one does. Suck it up and deal. Life is pain, princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

9) So hey, what about that whole MFA scene, anyway? Should I go to grad school for writing? Well, that’s the $100,000 question, isn’t it? And in my case, it literally cost $100,000, because I went to the most expensive MFA program in the country. I regret this. I stupidly turned down a full scholarship and stipend to a sh-tty MFA program in order to go to a better one. In my defense, the school I went to was made up of 80% girls, was located right outside New York City, and featured naked all-night bisexual girl parties. Still, I shouldn’t have gone.

Get an MFA if they pay you to do it, with a scholarship and a teaching stipend. Because an MFA gives you lots of time to write, and you need lots of practice to get better. Christ, do you need lots of practice to get better. But if they don’t pay for it, don’t waste your money. Don’t do it unless it’s free. Sadly, it does help to go to an MFA program, or a journalism program, because you make connections there, which is lame. And it does help to live in New York City, which is really lame. Of course broke writers are supposed to live in the most expensive city in the history of the world. F-cking great. And I hate New York City, mostly. I like yards and trees and things. The main thing I like about New York City is the Natural History Museum. And then there’s this one bar on 12th and 2nd Avenue that I like. Otherwise, it kind of sucks. …Anyway, where was I?

10) And finally, stop worrying about external sh-t. Just write all the time, because Christ do you need a lot of practice. As I mentioned the last time I dished out advice, I wrote for six hours a day, every day, for 15 years before I could quit my dumb job and become a full-time writer. …It’s like jogging, which I never do. Or it’s like quitting drinking, which I’m trying to do. It needs to become routine. Jog once, and it sucks, and you never want to jog again. Jog every day for a month, and it starts to become ingrained. Do it for a year, and it’s automatic.

Affectations that become habits. I started out writing stupidly, in order to get girls to like me. Now it’s automatic, like breathing. Girls, no girls, whatever. I probably think about writing once every three minutes or so, no matter what I’m doing — the way that normal people are supposed to think about sex. I don’t have to think about writing every day anymore: it’s just my thing that I do, the way that I smoke cigarettes or waste time flirting on IM. It’s ingrained. Get a routine. Find an “office.” I try to never write at home. When I first started writing, I would hump my ancient gray Macintosh laptop (which weighed about 10 pounds) all the way across Washington, D.C. I would walk for an hour to this one gay coffeehouse where you could smoke cigarettes. And once I got there, I had to write. I had just walked for an hour! I had to do something. I couldn’t just walk back without writing; that would be retarded.

Write all the time, and you’ll get better. Here’s the thing: writing is the best job there is; the best job that I can think of (okay, maybe being in a band is better). But it’s hard to be writer, because it’s fun, so everyone wants to be one. It’s like trying to make it in the NBA. How many famous writers are there? Let’s say that there are maybe 300 of them. That’s about the same number of players as are in the National Basketball Association. Do you think that you could star on an NBA team? You wouldn’t dream of trying to do that — unless you played basketball every day for six hours for ten years. Then, maybe you could start thinking about being in the NBA. So you’re in it for the long haul, baby.

And please, stop worrying about Twitter and stuff like that. Twitter is vile; I never use it. It’s like a video game that never plays back. It’s like Facebook if you were the only person on Facebook and had to read your own stupid thoughts all day long. Stop worrying about Twitter and social media and getting followers and all that crap, okay? Just write all the time. I have an agent now; I didn’t really try to get one; agents come to me now. Stop paging through How to Get an Agent guides and all that crap. Just write all the time, and it’ll happen. …I’m the worst self-promoter in the history of the world, but I got noticed. And if you get good, people will notice. And then you’ll be a writer, and you won’t die alone, starving in a garret. People will notice. And then you’ll be the writer. And instead of reading stupid articles like this, you can write them. …And that’s all. That’s the end. Finis.

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Video may have killed the radio star, but the internet killed, well, pretty much everything else.

I am not a technological Luddite by any means. I am supremely grateful for DC Cupcakes and Say Yes to the Dress, for the guilty-pleasure Katy Perry tunes on my iPod, and for the sociocultural phenomenon that is YouTube.  I will defend to the death the situation comedy as social commentary, consider it a global crisis when Facebook is down for ten minutes, and I sent and received at least 160 text messages last night alone.

That being said, sometimes I wonder what life was like for those of previous generations, before modern technology transformed doing nothing from a weekend pastime into a way of life. Having entered the scene smack-dab in the middle of Generation Y (born in 1985), I do vaguely remember a time before the internet (we first got AOL, dial-up of course, when I was 11).It was a simpler time. I played outside with real, live friends — hide-and-seek, T-ball, Capture the Flag. I remember playing a lot of Operation, Battleship, Twister, Taboo, Balderdash, and Trivial Pursuit. I seem to remember reading books (and I mean real books printed on real paper, damn-you-to-hell-Kindle). Lest I wax too nostalgic, let me hasten to add that it’s not exactly as if I was walking uphill to school in the snow both ways in in the early ‘90s — there was still Oregon Trail, of course, and a little something called Super Mario Bros. on NES, and I definitely planted my little hiney in front of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Inspector Gadget every single damn afternoon. I even seem to recall my dad, engineering nerd that he is, trying to teach me to program in BASIC on our old Commodore 64 when I was about eight.

But I do remember, before my introduction to the Web in 1996, spending more time throughout the day interacting with real people and participating in real creative endeavors. Don’t get me wrong, I have always been a dynamic personality who could interact with and befriend the dead — but in 2011, having 1200 Facebook friends enables me to give just a perfunctory nod to each of them on a semi-regular basis without having to sustain any meaningful adult relationships. Similarly, I have always been a writer — but what does it say about me that my output from 1992-1996 was vastly more prolific than any body of work I’ve produced since – including when I was in graduate school studying English literature?

Perhaps I’m just looking for a smoking gun, but I blame the internet.

Sure, if you wanted to be an expert in useless trivia as a kid you could always go to the library and check out armfuls of books on the Titanic or the Battle of Gettysburg or the Salem Witch Trials or whatever it was that happened to catch your fancy. But it took a sustained, concerted effort to plumb the depths of the Dewey Decimal System, usually an encounter with a mean librarian or two, and the likelihood was high that you would stick with your given obsession for at least a week or so.

Not so today. I’ve been on medical leave since early March, so I am painfully, acutely aware of how much time playing on the internet saps out of my day and how little profit I actually derive from this wasted time. This isn’t primarily because there is nothing of interest on the internet, but rather because there is too much of interest on the Internet. “The internet,” Eric Schmidt opined, “is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

Personally, I can’t even trace the linear connection between one topic of interest and the next in my Web ramblings, but I do know that in the last week, I have read about depictions of McCarthyism in the American theatre, the lives of Shel Silverstein and John Nash, the criminal trials of Andrea Yates and Marie Noe, the filmography of the guy who played Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the dating history of Matthew Perry (Chandler on Friends), and common tropes used in 1990s sitcoms. A search through my browsing history reveals that I have Googled the following in just the last 24 hours: Higgs Boson, Stephen King’s The Body, Romper Room, Alec Guinness gay?, Nurse Ratched, An Officer and a Gentleman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories, Girl Interrupted, “Bill Mumy kid from Twilight Zone,” Mary Jo Kopechne, “Demi Lovato and Wilmer Valderrama breakup.”  There is simply no rhyme or reason to this erratic lineup – it reads like it was compiled by either a serial killer or an ADD schizophrenic on meth. All my spastic browsing serves to provide me with is a deceptively superficial amount of information about a wide smattering of subjects, which may serve me well in getting phone numbers, but “Mary Jo Kopechne Enthusiast and World-Renowned Expert on Sir Alec Guinness’s Sexual Orientation” is not necessarily what I want engraved on my gravestone.

“Dost Thou Love life? Then Do Not Squander Time, for That is the Stuff Life is Made Of,” Ben Franklin once observed (and a quick IMDB search will reveal that it’s also written on the gate of the plantation Twelve Oaks in 1939′s Gone With the Wind).  At what cost have I obtained all this cocktail-party pseudo-wisdom? (And even that designator is generous, since much of what I do online — *cough* watching deleted scenes from no longer syndicated TV shows and horror-movie remixes of romantic comedies on YouTube *cough*- does not even qualify as pseudo-wisdom.) When I was 10 years old, I used to have long discussions about moral theology and Charlotte Bronte with my friends. Fifteen years later, I have long discussions about… Cracked.com? Retrograde motion, indeed. It seems to belie the truth of evolution of the species.

Many have recently lamented the death of literature, the fact that there has not been a “great” American novelist since Hemingway (or since Steinbeck and Kerouac, if you’re feeling generous). The fact that Stephanie Meyer is the best we have to offer an entire generation is as deplorable as it is sickening. But while literary critics have scratched their heads about this phenomenon to no avail, I should think the answer was pretty mind-blowingly obvious:

The people gifted with the passion, talent, imagination, drive, and attention-span to create world-shaping art are now spending their days watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes on YouTube.

People like me and you. Sad, isn’t it?

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My interest in writing started around the fourth grade. A teacher assigned a project where we wrote a “book” which we illustrated and bound ourselves. My book was about snakes and consisted of page after page of partially or entirely plagiarized excerpts from the encyclopedia entry for snakes. The book was called Snakes!. Colored pencil drawings of snakes formed each letter of the title. When I held the final product in my hands, beheld what I had wrought — presumably — via my nascent creative drive, I thought, ‘I’m so impossibly talented, I’ve already written a book. Snakes! will be a worldwide bestseller. I am a literary God.’ It would be many years before I stopped having this thought every time I wrote something.

My post-Snakes! output moved into the horror genre or more specifically, the torture porn/ slasher genre. In fifth grade, I bloomed (wilted) into a misanthrope who despised his classmates and yet craved their attention. If I met myself at age ten, I would feel an intense compulsion to strangle myself for being a self-involved little worm (says the adult writing an essay about his childhood). Maybe I’m exaggerating; maybe everyone felt like an outcast, but in any case, I started composing a list of all my classmates — a flashing neon red flag to any teacher paying attention. I would ask for kids’ last names if I didn’t know them, and if they asked why I wanted their names, I said, “I’m working on a special project.” Also a massive red flag. I might as well have said, “I’m making a list of people to murder, and I’d like it to be as accurate as possible.” Fortunately, I didn’t murder anyone, and instead used the names to write a horror story about the class pet, an iguana named Iggy, growing to enormous size and devouring all my classmates.

To be clear, young adult horror paperbacks were all the rage in the 90s, and so most of my budding literary lexicon originated in books by R.L. Stein, Paul Zindel, and Stephen King. I did not possess words like “literary lexicon”; I had “bloody chunks,” “splattered brain matter,” and “oozing fluids.” So while most of the writing is, shall we say, unsophisticated and, you know, childish, once the giant iguana ate someone, the story transitioned into shockingly graphic descriptions of “intestines spilling out like wet coiled snakes” and “a shower of bloody chunks like crimson confetti.” I murdered, via my imagination, a huge portion of my class — with particularly gruesome death scenes reserved for the kids I didn’t like — and the oddest part? They loved it (the boys, at least). Such is a ten year old’s ego, seeing their names in a story was a thrill, and dying horribly in the story, somehow that appealed to the darkly morbid part of them.

When the faculty became aware of my “masterpiece,” my math teacher Mr. Solomon took me aside. He said, “Do you think Dr. Seuss ever wrote the kinds of things you’re writing?” which seemed like a strange question. I said, “Who said I wanted to write like Dr. Seuss?” It was the only intervention I can recall. This was a year before the Columbine shooting, so no one worried too much yet.

Meanwhile, my English class would assign journal entries at the start of class: “What did you do over the weekend?” or “What would you do if you could fly?” As an adorable ploy for attention, I challenged myself each day to write the most grisly and disturbing journal entries possible, no matter how mundane the prompt. If I had a scab, I’d pick it open and smear my own blood across the page. At the time, I thought it was funny. One time, the prompt was, “What did you dream about last night?” My response: I dreamed a man broke into my house, dragged me out of bed, sliced me open from throat to belly button, reached into my chest cavity, ripped out my stomach, tore my stomach in two, held one half over his head, and, like a fleshy shot glass, dribbled my partially digested dinner into his gaping maw. The teacher said, “Okay, that’s it. Go to the counselor’s office, Brad.” I didn’t mind. The counselor had a sweet sandbox in her office.

I wasn’t a Goth child though. I didn’t dress in black, and I wasn’t preoccupied with death. I was just mimicking whatever genre I happened to be reading at the time. By sixth grade, my interest shifted to science fiction — Star Wars, Bruce Coville, and Isaac Asimov — so all my stories became science fiction stories. I was pretty cool as you can imagine. It was then, in perhaps my most angsty melodramatic year, that I wrote a 114-page manuscript — which seemed like War and Peace length at the time — about a drug dealer who goes to space to escape being killed by the mafia, gets sucked through a black hole, crashes on an alien planet, and then leads an insurrection of beetle people against their reptilian overlords. I had a lot of time on my hands, yes indeed, a lot of time. The book is basically unreadable as, it turns out, I was not an undiscovered literary prodigy, but it’s interesting to note what I thought made a good story at the time: fighting, lasers, monsters, horrifying deaths, etc. At the time, I thought it was the best thing I’d ever read. I thought I’d be published by the time I turned twelve. Studies have shown that intelligent people perceive that they have low IQs relative to the population, and dumb people perceive that they have high IQs. Writing a book didn’t mean anything about how smart or talented I was. I was still a dumb eleven year old, just one with a lot of time on his hands and an irrational amount of drive. If I’d known how much I would have to write before I stopped sucking quite so dramatically, I would have redirected my interest to pottery or automobile repair.

I wrote two sequels to that first book, each longer than the last, steadily improving, but only marginally. Then I wrote two more books after that — also terrible, but with a slight improvement. After the first book, all subsequent ones were written in secrecy, and even when I finished them, I rarely told anyone because I’d awoken to the dissonance between what I was reading and the garbage I was producing. In the middle of writing, I’d think, ‘This is amazing!’ and by the end, I’d think, ‘This is so inconceivably awful, no amount of editing can ever save it.’ I couldn’t understand how the more books I read and the more stories I wrote, the worse my own stuff seemed to me. I’m an incredibly slow learner. I was the last kid in my elementary school to learn how to read and write; they sent me to remedial reading classes to catch me up with the rest of my class. I’m always conscious of this, and I remember all those bad books — which shall be seen by anyone! — and all those crappy stories. I can only try to be slightly better than I was the day before and hope that I am, but then again, I might just ramble about cats for ten pages instead.

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My cousin and I were watching the recently released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 DVD, and there’s a scene in which Harry, disguised as a Ministry employee, approaches the office door for the evil Professor Umbridge. Embedded in the center of the door, an eyeball peers around frenetically. Although it’s never stated, this is the eye of Mad Eye Moody, Harry’s dead professor and protector. My cousin said, “This pissed me off. They never mention that the eye is Mad Eye’s, and they didn’t include the part where he buries his eye, so all the emotional resonance of Moody’s death is omitted.” I said, “They buried Dobby the house elf. They can’t have these movies be 3-hour funerals.” She shrugged and said, “They should’ve included it.”

I thought that was the end of the conversation, but a little while later, there came a scene in which Harry’s following an old lady who’s actually a giant fucking snake wearing her skin. He follows her to her house, and then the lady talks to him in snake language, but he doesn’t realize anything’s up because, to him, we know it sounds like English. My cousin says, “This scene was so much better in the book. In the book, the old lady’s talking to Harry every time Hermione leaves the room, and so discovering that she was a snake was a bigger surprise.” I said, “Okay. But in the book, I wasn’t sexually attracted to Hermione in the least.”

Here is how I feel about it: books are books and movies are movies. Movies will never have the same effect as books, and likewise books will never have quite the same effect as movies. They are two different mediums with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, their narratives have to be constructed in two different ways. Books can portray complicated multiple branching plots with slow deliberate character development. Movies can portray the visceral thrill of images and music combined in a two hour narrative punch.

So when adapting a book to the screen, the notion of including everything is not just time prohibitive, but creatively impractical. If books were adapted word for word, not only would they be twenty hours long, they would be boring on an unimaginable scale. Much of the enjoyment of reading comes from descriptions of characters not doing much—just thinking, looking at their surroundings, contemplating recent events and what action to undertake. All the linguistic fireworks would be lost in a film. Suddenly, you just have a guy sitting on a bench or looking at a girl or walking down the street. You have something like the movie Somewhere except for twenty hours instead of two, a cinematically induced cerebral hemorrhage.

Often times, movies are actually better than books, but the guy who read the book will never admit it. After all, he spent a couple weeks plowing through it, so he has a certain cognitive work-to-enjoyment ratio to justify. Look at some of the movies based on Stephen King’s work. You really think the film The Shining is worse than the book? Honestly? The book has the family being chased by hedges. Fucking hedges. How about Shawshank Redemption? What about Shutter Island. The book by Dennis Lehane, as I recall, was continuously irritating and, by the end, I wanted to set it on fire. Only Scorsese could make that dreck watchable.

How about fucking Jurassic Park? Gone with the Wind? Silence of the Lambs? Forrest Gump? The Godfather?

I can’t stand watching a movie and hearing, ‘The book was better,’ from some asshole. It’s that snide pretension, that bullshit notion that movies are somehow artistically inferior. It’s a statement that fails to address the film as an individual piece of work and means nothing to me. You might as well have said, “The text on the ticket stub wasn’t as good as the movie.” You might as well have said, “This chicken alfredo tastes better than the page from the cookbook.”

Similarly, comic book readers freak out when adaptations deviate slightly from the original. I remember when it was a big deal Spider-Man had “organic web shooters” instead of ones he invented in his bedroom. To which, I answer that it sure doesn’t make a lot of sense to movie-goers for an eighteen year old to inexplicably have the skills to engineer a device that shoots webbing as strong as steel cable while also coincidentally gaining the proportionate strength and reflexes of a spider. The concept makes sense in one medium, but not the other.

There’s no winning with some people. They split that last Harry Potter movie into two films, crammed it full of the, I’m sorry, countless unnecessary McGuffins from the book (three deathly hallows, something like six horcruxes, the sword of Gryffindor, and all the other random shit they had to find), and stuck in everything else of any interest, and still, you have people saying, “They left out the history of house elves, and their magical powers, and Dumbledore’s family history, and also—,”

Oh my God, just shut up.

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I have a mild case of coulrophobia. It’s not a crippling fear—it doesn’t keep me up at night, like some of my other fears do—but if I’m walking down the street and see a clown coming towards me, I’ll cross that street in a heartbeat.

I’m not alone. Clowns have climbed their giant shoes into the short list of the most common phobias, and now rank right up there with snakes, spiders, public speaking, and dentists.

So what’s the cause of this irrational fear? Here’s one easy answer: THE MEDIA. Unlike my fear of clowns, the media does keep me up at night, because it’s so entertaining. But evil clowns have permeated all forms of popular media, and are therefore hard to avoid.

Pennywise, the sadistic child-killing monster from Stephen King’s It, is the fictional clown most commonly fingered for causing people’s coulrophobia. Pennywise doesn’t have a monopoly on the killer clown industry, though. On TV, an early episode of The Simpsons inspired the internet meme “Can’t sleep, clown will eat me.” In the world of comics, Batman’s archnemesis is the Joker, a green haired agent of chaos with a penchant for committing gruesome murders while laughing hysterically. Similarly, perhaps as a blatant knockoff of Batman, Spawn’s archnemesis is the Violator, a giant, gruesome demon who disguises himself as a short, stocky clown. And then of course there’s corny examples of evil clowns, like the ‘80s movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space, or the musical group Insane Clown Posse, which are both more stoopid than scary, but they’re still kinda scary in their own way, especially ICP.

The media may have reinforced coulrophobia, but that’s not to say clowns aren’t inherently terrifying. Psychologists claim that clowns’ exaggerated features violate our basic idea of what people should look like. Since reading facial expressions is a social survival skill, our inability to read a clown’s emotions puts us on guard. The painted white face, fake red nose, and uncanny permasmile mask a clown’s true feelings and identity, which triggers our distrust and suspicion.

Phobias are irrational fears. But is fearing clowns really irrational? Consider America’s evil clown history. Consider David Friedman, popular children’s party clown, alleged child molester, and subject of the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. Or better yet, consider John Wayne Gacy, the scariest clown ever. Gacy raped and murdered 33 teenage boys in the ‘70s. Most of them he buried in his crawlspace. When he wasn’t raping and murdering innocents, Gacy dressed up as “Pogo the Clown” to attend parades and children’s parties. Gacy once said “A clown can get away with murder.” While on death row, he took up oil painting. He painted punk rockers, and dwarves playing baseball, but mostly, he painted clowns. PSYCHO.

Of course, it’s wrong to prejudge all clowns based on the depraved actions of a couple sick, rednosed individuals. I met some clowns once at a party (it was an adult party, the clowns were off duty and dressed like normals) and they were perfectly nice people. I even told them about my fear of clowns, and they were very understanding. Clowns aren’t for everyone. Then they took me out back, brutalized me with banana cream pies, electrocuted me with joy buzzers, and devoured my soul.

Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.

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Teen Vogue

What It’s About: Profiles of teen celebrities. Every issue, they also go inside the closet of a trust fund pre-teen who loves her Miu Miu bag but cant live without her Balenciaga, Prada, and Escada. My personal favorites are the hard-hitting exposes on teen drinking, teen pill-popping, and teen shopping addictions.
What It Says About You: You’re a mini-Anna Wintour which means you are a pubescent nightmare. When you’re old enough, you’ll probably even apply for an internship at Teen Vogue, following in the illustrious footsteps of Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port. As you get older, you’ll transition to reading grownup Vogue, bag yourself a hedge-funder named Barry and watch the days just languidly pass by. Sometimes, you’ll stir your finger into your cocktail without noticing because you’ll be completely in a daze. You’ll whisper to yourself, “I guess it’s….time….to get ready for the Multiple Sclerosis Disco Dance-Off Charity Ball.” Make no mistake: this will all be because you read Teen Vogue as a child.

Spin

What It’s About: Alternative music that was popular from 1999-2005. Spin is contractually obligated to put Arcade Fire, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes on the cover ever year, regardless of whether they have a new album out or not. They also have a fondness for ’90s grunge, Flaming Lips, and New York City. They are the only remaining fans of The Vines and The Hives.

What It Says About You: You’re afraid of change. You like to play Fever To Tell every time you get drunk, and your friends are always like, “There’s actually this new band out called-” and you’ll scream, “Silence!” before they can finish. The mood will be very tense and you’ll just play “Maps” to make it all better. You’ve been told you need to get professional help but you don’t listen. All the answers you need can be found in Oh, Inverted World by The Shins anyway.

Jane

What It’s About: Founded by the same editor of the revolutionary teen magazine, Sassy, Jane was a magazine marketed towards smart hip 20-something women-also known as me- that featured candid interviews with cool celebrities, a devil-may-care attitude and sharp wit. It was sort of like Jesus Christ in magazine form- that is if Jesus Christ was a cute 24 year-old feminist who liked to get drunk and make out with boys. Like everything else good in the world though, it ended up folding. Rude.

What It Says About You: You thank Anais Nin everyday for the existence of Jezebel, which is basically Jane in virtual form. You loathe the traditional girlie mag. You’re a woman who likes to talk about their vagina, orgasms, and the evils of American Apparel. You want to get laid tonight and that is not a crime, okay? Or you’re just a gay dude who’s in tune with the plights of women.

Us Weekly

What It’s About: The wacky things celebrities (often don’t) do. In most tabloids, every story almost always comes back to Jennifer Aniston being single. Poor single Jennifer Aniston. There’s another picture of her grocery shopping. What’s that in her cart? A single lamb chop, a bottle of Smart Water and a depressing cup of yogurt. Someone’s eating alone! Where’s Brad and Angelina? Oh, there they are! They’re in the South of France doting on that lesbian child of theirs, Shiloh! Blasphemy!

What It Says About You: You’re an awful boring person with antiquated ideas about gender and sexuality! You’re also into body-shaming. Aggghh!

BlackBook

What It’s About: BlackBook essentially serves as a guide to the latest hippest restaurants, hotels, and stores for most major metropolitan areas. They interview interesting celebrities like Patricia Clarkson and always put some hot indie princess on the cover. BlackBook is sort of in an awkward place. It doesn’t feel like a proper magazine, but it also doesn’t have a powerful Internet presence like The Fader. The writing’s always solid though so we’ll see!

What It Says About You: You’re an older wealthy hipster, which can be kind of the worst. As the CEO for a T-shirt company, you’re traveling for business constantly, always staying at hotels like The Standard or The Roosevelt. You be up in the blogs like crazy, and you better believe believe you have the new Grizzly Bear! You act way younger than your actual age but it’s sort of NBD when you’re super rich.

Cosmopolitan

What It’s About: Making women feel bad about themselves. J/K, but kind of not J/K. Cosmo doles out bad sex advice every month, preying on the insecurities of women with their backhanded compliments and condescending tips. This magazine is so gross. Who reads it? I guess I’ll tell you.

What It Says About You: You form your opinions about dating through watching old episodes of The Hills. The book, He’s Just Not That Into You, changed your life and you probably even have The Ugly Truth and Killers listed as your favorite movies on Facebook. You just can’t get enough of Katherine Heigl.

Entertainment Weekly

What It’s About: Entertainment news told in a non-gossipy informative way. Interesting tidbits about the production of certain blockbusters. Agonizingly useless columns from Stephen King. Questionable taste in music.

What It Says About You: You’re a NERD NERD NERD! (Full disclosure: I’m a subscriber.} You’re a critic of some sort who’s in their 30s or 40s with an interest in superheroes. You don’t have sex very much but at least you own all of the Harry Potter movies! Sigh…

The New Yorker

What It’s About: Important smart things with a few “Ha. Ha. Ha.”‘s thrown in for good measure. The state of Joan Didion’s avocado tree is of great interest.

What It Says About You: You love what reading this magazine says about you.  You read it on planes, subways and the occasional train to Connecticut with great pride and superiority. You derive great pleasure from being a New Yorker fan. Feels good being all intellectual and shit, doesn’t it? It’s okay. You can admit it. I understand. I’m here for you, remember?

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When the zombie first appeared on film in the 1930s, audiences became hooked on what they saw. Often depicted with crazed, transfixed, and bloodshot eyes, an insatiable hunger for human flesh and above all, a reckless disregard for human life, these terrifying creatures were slow-moving pack travelers. Audiences loved witnessing the random chaos visited on everyone and everything by these soulless corpses. As popularly conceived, a zombie is an infected human who has died from a virus, only to rise up as the ‘walking dead’ with a severe attitude problem.

These eerie creatures first identify, then surround, their victims, spreading infection at high speed, rampaging as they go. No wonder they became an enticing subject for film makers who, over the last century, have created thought-provoking and horrifying films built around them.

When George A. Romero released The Night of the Living Dead in 1968 he began a new era in zombie film making. Romero raised the creature’s profile to definitive cult status and inspired both fans and film makers around the world with his unique take on the zombie genre: a mix of classic horror/gore overkill with humor that established a new standard. Sequels like Dawn of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and Diary of the Dead followed suit. His work has continued to spur exciting contemporary directors to make modern zom-com classics like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland which pay homage to Romero’s work. Other directors like Danny Boyle have taken a more serious and thoughtful stance, examining our drive to avoid irradiation as well as the impact of “total infection.”

Whatever the take, zombie films live on, and there’s no doubt that zombies will continue to dominate our screens for many years to come. With the firm belief that every zombie freak should have his day and draw up a list of the ten best, here’s mine.