I suppose I could write in Microsoft Office (let's be real here, OpenOffice, I'm not a millionaire) and then copy and paste the text but somehow that feels dishonest. Even if there was a way to import the text without the aid of copying and pasting, it would be dishonest. Also I'm sure there is that option. They can print guns that shoot food now apparently, they can certainly import documents within the same platform. Or thing?
Thinking about Thomas Disch's "The Genocides". (Put in quotation marks even though I'm sure that's incorrect for the title of a novel.) Or is that just MLA Format? This doesn't have to be in MLA format does it? I hope not because I got good and lazy my last semester in college and just used the citation machine which I'm almost positive wasn't really all that correct or accurate most of the time. Thankfully I think my professors weren't that strict because they felt bad that I was still in college and almost as old as they are.
I was thinking about Thomas Disch's The Genocides. (Just got lazy and did it this time).
It might seem silly to think "My this book is very dark." when reading a book called The Genocides. Yet that is exactly what I kept thinking the farther into the book I got. Because, my that book is very dark.
If you haven't read it, it's about these plants that destroy the world. They could be aliens, they could be something else, they grow incredibly quickly and suck up all the water, devastate ecosystems, and decimate the human race. (That's decimate used in the broad, common sense of "kill a bunch of", not the literal sense of "divide by ten").
As I read it (reread actually. I'm at that age where books that I've been saying are my favorites, are books that I read ten years ago or more so it's time to give 'em a reread to refresh and also just to make sure that I do actually love these books) (and films to a lesser extent, but more on that in another post) I kept seeing the story in my mind's eye as an HBO show. This could have to do with the fact that I've been watching (and loving) The Leftovers which is a nice bit of apocalyptic what-have-you. Or with the fact that I'm just trying to use my mind more than I have been in the past and actively engaging with the text is a part of that.
I've also been thinking about attempting to adapt a favorite book of mine to script form, not for any production in particular, not to answer a real world demand, but just to see if I can do it. As a bit of creative homework. This is creative homework, in a way. Just the act of writing.
As I reread The Genocides I marveled at Disch nailing today's apocalyptic genre serial format 50 years earlier (well 40 if we want to credit The Walking Dead with giving birth/rebirth to the apocalyptic genre serial format in the early part of the aughts, but I don't want to do that, even if it's true and I have to). The biblical tyrannical patriarch, the lovesick young woman, the smart outsider with the secret agenda, the nurse, the grieving mother, the violent oaf, all the character types that populate so much popular apocalyptic genre fiction are all at work in The Genocides and move the story quickly, smoothly and unexpectedly throughout a lush nightmare eden. Well Eden without the animals. "Eden Without The Animals"! That would've been a better title for The Leftovers! (That's a separate obsession, marveling at the the divide between how good that show is and how bad its title is)
The Genocides would make for an amazing television show. There would have to be some changes from the text but not many. For instance, many of the scenes in the latter half of the book take place underground, in the roots of the plants, therefore there are many scenes that take place in total darkness. I think the total darkness aspects would work wonderfully at some points, it would become rather grating on an audience to have to experience so much of the story in the dark that I think some of the roots (or "tubers") should glow a sickly, ethereal green, not bright raver green, but just green enough to make out the haunting shapes of the withering survivors.
It's really dark though. It would be a jarring visual experience but I think it would be a worthwhile one. It would at least be better than The Walking Dead which remains the Walmart of television genre storytelling, that is the biggest and dumbest that swallows up other fandoms under it's stocky, empty husk of marketing and ads. No, I'm probably kidding, everyone loves that show and everyone couldn't be wrong.
(It is a rubbish show though. I mean come on. I made it through the first two and a half seasons and with every subsequent season I was told, "Yeah but it starts to get better next season" and that never happened and it remained a poorly scripted, one dimensional, bland mess of cliches and tedium)
xoxoxo
louie
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