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SIX REASONS
1. Marilyn Suzanne Miller
2. Joel Church-Cooper
3. Amy Sherman/Dan Palladino
4. James Burrows
5. Armando Ianucci
6. Alan Ball
BUT
Someone would
quickly tell me
"All those people you named
are great writers"
I would agree with you
100%
And that is why
the Great American Novel
is dead
The reason
tops the list
is because she wrote
the greatest
man/woman
conversation
in the history of
Saturday Night Live
It featured Richard Dreyfuss
and the vastly under-rated
Laraine Newman
What
Joel Church-Cooper
wrote for
is funny enough
to make Mark Twain
jealous but Brockmire
is not a book
It is a cable TV show
The other names listed
are the creators
—respectively—
of Gilmore Girls,
Cheers, VEEP,
and Six Feet Under
Suffice it to say
that if Scott Fitzgerald
had written
The Great Gatsby
in 2021
—instead of 1927—
publishers would not
have been
the first people
knocking
on his door:
It would be HBO
and they would have
made an earth-shattering
mini-series
They would have given
Fitzgerald
so much money,
his name would
never need to be
on the bookshelves
Instead of people saying
"Have you read Gatsby?"
the question would be
"Have you binge-watched Gatsby?"
***
© PAUL OLIVERIO ©
The next GoFather/Fitzgerald
page is here
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What new novelists have you read in the past 5 years?
ReplyDeleteI've attempted to read
Deletequite a few
The best ones are not serious literature
as much as literary amusements,
especially George Saunders
and Thomas Pynchon
The smarter young novelists
have mastered the art
of sexually appeasing
the literary critics
as much as necessary
for the latter to write in
The New York Review of Books
that he/she has seen God
I don't think there is an American writer
capable of shining the shoes of
the magnificent Jenny Erpenbeck
She is alive and well
but she is also from
the former "East Germany"
However, I would never have read her
if it weren't for NYRB
If he had never touched a guitar,
DeleteBob Dylan could have written
the Great American Novel.
Exactly
DeleteDitto for Loudon Wainwright,
Phil Ochs, Warren Zevon, John Sebastian...
Or if you think piano: Billy Joel, Tom Lehrer,
Mark Russell...
Or voice: Oscar Brown, Jon Stewart,
George Carlin...