November, 2011 | Warren Adler

Month: November, 2011

J. Edgar, the Bad and the Good

Posted on: November 27th, 2011 by Warren Adler 2 Comments

After seeing Clint Eastwood’s excellent biopic, J.Edgar, I was reminded of Mark Anthony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

With excellent reproductions of the era and the magnificent acting of Leonardo DiCaprio and a wonderful cast, Eastwood tells the story of J. Edgar Hoover, a sexually conflicted, complex, and single-minded man who was both extravagantly reviled and praised for founding, building and operating, with dictatorial efficiency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forging it into a powerful arm of the Federal Government.

The Plight of the Mainstream Novelist

Posted on: November 22nd, 2011 by Warren Adler 1 Comment

Lost in the conversation of the impact of eBooks is the plight of the mainstream novelist, who writes books that fit no genre category but nevertheless represent the crown jewels of the authorial world, the lynchpin of the trade publishing business.

It is these long form fictional compositions that will eventually be lost in the shuffle during the giant tsunami of material in this non-genre category that is now engulfing the Internet.

The Mystery of Love

Posted on: November 16th, 2011 by Warren Adler No Comments

Through the composing and imaginings of thirty volumes of novels, numerous short stories, plays, and poems, I have been wrestling with the mystery of attraction. It has been the dominant theme of my work. You know the kind I mean, the obsessive, magnetizing emotional fixation that goes under the name of love.

Why does one person motivate the kind of heart palpitating enormity of overwhelming powerful, all consuming, possessive emotion we call love and not another person?

Martha Marcy May Marlene: a Brave Movie

Posted on: November 11th, 2011 by Warren Adler 2 Comments

I recently saw the movie Martha Marcy May Marlene, which bravely took up the question of the insidious influence of bizarre cults on unsuspecting young people.

Having lived through the era when such cults were media fodder and a number of friends and relatives had lost adult children to this phenomenon, and having written the well-received novel, Cult, I was interested in how the filmmakers approached the subject.

Why I Still Love the New York Times

Posted on: November 7th, 2011 by Warren Adler 2 Comments

Yes, I still love the New York Times. I have been reading it since I was twelve years old when I subscribed at a discount as a freshman at Brooklyn Technical High School.

I probably read parts of it earlier, since my father was an ardent reader and was an expert in knowing exactly how to fold its broadsheet for reading when he stood up in the packed subways that brought him daily from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

Contact Made, Message Delivered

Posted on: November 3rd, 2011 by Warren Adler 2 Comments

I think it’s time for the Occupy Wall Street people to declare victory and go home. They have illustrated their anger and their passionate desire for a more equitable America. I would not insult their integrity by asking any of them what they want to change, although it is hard to get a sense of specifics from their signs and snippets of interviews reported in newspapers, television and offered on the social networking sites.

Their anger undoubtedly reflects a general frustration with inequities, real and perceived, the uncertainty of our economic future, the absence of talented political leadership, and a sense of being overwhelmed by man-made and natural impediments.