Daily Entries for the week of
Sunday, April 3, 2022
through
Saturday, April 9, 2022
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It’s Saturday, April 9, 2022
Welcome to the 1,406th consecutive post to the blog
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture
Don Delillo
DeLillo in 1988
Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer - Don DeLillo, author [New York City]
Title: Don DeLillo, author [New York City] Creator(s): Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer Date Created/Published: July 1988. Medium: 1 photograph : color transparency ; 35mm (slide format) Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-gtfy-01086 (digital file from original) Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication. For information see "Bernard Gotfryd," (https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/res.592.gotf) Access Advisory: Please use digital image: original slide is kept in cold storage for preservation. Call Number: LC-GB05- 1086 [P&P] Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA Notes: Title based on information from slide mount or other caption information provided by the photographer. Photo agency: Newsweek. Date on slide mount: 1988. Gift; Bernard Gotfryd; 2004; (DLC/PP-2004:032). Subjects: United States--New York (State)--New York. authors Format: Slides--Color--1980-1990. Part of: Bernard Gotfryd photograph collection (Library of Congress) Bookmark This Record: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2020730627/
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Commentary
I’ve talked a lot about my search for healthy eating.
I thought I’d mention several of my more effective finds.
Eating small amounts of Hulu ice cream, sold at W Foods: half the calories of fully-packed ice cream.
The introduction of plant-oriented breakfasts, like a plate of vegetables, or berries, or oatmeal,
and very few eggs.
The introduction of cauliflower as a substitute for potatoes, mashed or in clam chowder. Much better for us.
The introduction of oat milk as a substitute for heavy cream in clam chowder and in ice cream sodas.
The omnipresence in my refrigerator of cooked beans and greens which supplements my main meal of the day, reducing the size of my protein.
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Reading and Writing
I am reading The Outsiders, a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967 by Viking Press. Hinton was 15 when she started writing the novel; however, she did most of the work when she was 16 and a junior in high school.
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Screen time
Have just started Enigma, the movie.
Deals with Bletchley Circle, famous for cracking the German top-secret encrypted messages and helping to win World War II.
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Understanding aging
Legs. From a sitting position, it takes a moment longer to stand up and then to move away from the table.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
I was at this casino minding my own business,
and this guy came up to me and said,
'You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit.'
As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run.
If you're flammible and have legs,
you are never blocking a fire exit.
~Mitch Hedberg
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
I made asparagus soup yesterday.
Today’s dinner will be small bowls of soup, Fish Soup (from a Bouillabaisse I made several days ago.) and the Asparagus. I’m adding Oatmilk to the asparagus Soup to make it the equivalent of Cream of Asparagus, the richness without the calories.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Dom and family, three generations, taken about 2000.
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Short Essay*
Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism.
DeLillo was initially a well-regarded cult writer, but the publication of White Noise in 1985 brought him widespread recognition, and he won the National Book Award for fiction. It was followed in 1988 by Libra, a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for Mao II in 1992 and for Underworld in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving another PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), won the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.
DeLillo had described his fiction as concerned with "living in dangerous times", and in a 2005 interview said, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
DeLillo was born in New York City and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo said he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English."
As a teenager, DeLillo was not interested in writing until a summer job as a parking attendant, where hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a reading habit. Reflecting on this period, in a 2010 interview, he stated, "I had a personal golden age of reading in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time". Among the writers DeLillo read and was inspired by in this period were James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens.
As well as the influence of modernist fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music—"guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis"—and postwar cinema: "Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the '70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese and so on. I don't know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense." Of the influence of film, particularly European cinema, on his work, DeLillo has said, "European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel about things. At that time I was living in New York, I didn't have much money, didn't have much work, I was living in one room...I was a man in a small room. And I went to the movies a lot, watching Bergman, Antonioni, Godard. When I was little, in the Bronx, I didn't go to the cinema, and I didn't think of the American films I saw as works of art. Perhaps, in an indirect way, cinema allowed me to become a writer." He also credits his parents' leniency and acceptance of his desire to write for encouraging him to pursue a literary career: "They ultimately trusted me to follow the course I’d chosen. This is something that happens if you’re the eldest son in an Italian family: You get a certain leeway, and it worked in my case."
After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and from Fordham University in the Bronx with a bachelor's degree in communication arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he could not get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue, writing image ads for Sears Roebuck among others, working on "Print ads, very undistinguished accounts....I hadn’t made the leap to television. I was just getting good at it when I left, in 1964."
DeLillo published his first short story in 1960—"The River Jordan", in Epoch, Cornell University's literary magazine—and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Of the beginning of his writing career, DeLillo has said, "I did some short stories at that time but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore." Reflecting in 1993 on his relatively late start in writing fiction, DeLillo said, "I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn’t have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this."
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Friday, April 8, 2022
Welcome to the 1,405th consecutive post to the blog
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
True Crime
Murder pamphlet, 1812
Robert Peck, circa 1812 - https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/murderpamphlets/images/bellingham.jpg Pamphlet describing the trial of John Bellingham for the wilful murder of the Right Hon. Spencer Perceval
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Commentary
Assume the worst: Robert Williams will not play in the first play-off series.
Even without him, the Celtics will win this series no matter who their opposition is.
And, if still without him, they may squeak out a victory in the next series.
But they will absolutely need him back for the Eastern Conference Championship series.
Assume the worst: the war in the Ukraine continues.
At it will continue as long as the diplomats cannot recognize two realities.
One, is that Russia must return to the status quo ante bellum. No Ukrainian land must be allowed to be absorbed into Russia.
Two is that it must appear that Putin has decided he made his point. Let him say, “That’ll teach’em.”
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Chuckles and Thoughts
I like refried beans.
That's why I wanna try fried beans,
because maybe they're just as good and we're just wasting time.
You don't have to fry them again after all.
~Mitch Hedberg
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
This from Tucker:
I'm happy to see you posting quotes from Mitch Hedburg.
Truly one of the funniest comedians to ever do it!
Blog meister responds: He was awesome.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Tuesday night I had dinner with my friend, Anthony.
We’ve been friends for 70 years.
Seventy.
Years.
We meet twice a year regularly.
We had dinner at the Summer Shack on Cambridge.
While I definitely will return, our experience was spotty.
The waitress gave us a lot of attention at the start and then service fell to fair or below.
Most of the food was good, the fried clams in particular were as good as anywhere in the city and fairly priced.
So was the fried chicken good and Tony’s tacos.
The brussel sprouts with ginger were good as was the Indian Pudding.
And Tuesday is $1.00 oyster day, and that was appealing.
The poor dish was the bland, very bland, unappetizing Mac and cheese.
Tasted more like cream and mac.
Too bad.
And the restaurant ought to be ashamed of its short and poorly selected wine list.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Fashion History Exhibir in NYC
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Short Essay*
True crime is a nonfiction literary, podcast, and film genre in which the author examines an actual crime and details the actions of real people.
The crimes most commonly include murder; about 40 percent focus on tales of serial killers. True crime comes in many forms, such as books, films, podcasts, and television shows. Many works in this genre recount high-profile, sensational crimes such as the JonBenét Ramsey killing, the O. J. Simpson murder case, and the Pamela Smart murder, while others are devoted to more obscure slayings.
True crime works can impact the crimes they cover and the audience who consumes it. The genre is often criticized for being insensitive to the victims and their families and is described by some as trash culture.
Zhang Yingyu's The Book of Swindles (c. 1617) is a late Ming dynasty collection of stories about allegedly true cases of fraud. Works in the related Chinese genre of court case fiction (gong'an xiaoshuo), such as the 16th-century Cases of Magistrate Bao, were either inspired by historical events or else purely fictional.
Hundreds of pamphlets, broadsides, chapbooks and other street literature about murders and other crimes were published from 1550 to 1700 in Britain as literacy increased and cheap new printing methods became widespread. They varied in style: some were sensational, while others conveyed a moral message. Most were purchased by the "artisan class and above", as the lower classes did not have the money or time to read them. Ballads were also created, the verses of which were posted on walls around towns, that were told from the perpetrator's point of view in an attempt to understand the psychological motivations of the crime. Such pamphlets remained in circulation in the 19th century in Britain and the United States, even after widespread crime journalism was introduced via the penny press.
Thomas De Quincey published the essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827, which focused not on the murder or the murderer but on how society views crime.
Starting in 1889, Scottish lawyer William Roughead wrote and published essays for six decades about notable British murder trials he attended, with many of these essays collected in the 2000 book Classic Crimes. Many regard Roughead "as the dean of the modern true crime genre."
An American pioneer of the genre was Edmund Pearson, who was influenced in his style of writing about crime by De Quincey. Pearson published a series of books of this type starting with Studies in Murder in 1924 and concluding with More Studies in Murder in 1936. Before being collected in his books, Pearson's true crime stories typically appeared in magazines like Liberty, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. Inclusion in these high-class magazines distinguished Pearson's crime narratives from those found in the penny press. The foreword of a 1964 anthology of Pearson's stories contains an early mention of the term "true crime" as a genre.
Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood (1965) is usually credited with establishing the modern novelistic style of the genre and the one that rocketed it to great profitability.
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Thursday, April 7, 2022
Welcome to the 1,404th consecutive post to the blog
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Supernatural Saint Peter Attempting to Walk on Water
Saint Peter Attempting to Walk on Water (1766), painting by François Boucher
François Boucher - Unknown source
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Commentary
On Tuesday I ate my second consecutive fiber-driven daily snack:
frozen lima beans sauteed in butter, s/freshly ground black pepper, and a touch of water.
I cooked the pound package last night and just had to scoop and microwave.
They were delicious.
Add that to my list of foods I’ve adopted to keep myself regular.
Being more vigilant is part of aging.
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Reading and Writing
The Confederacy of dunces is named after the Jonathan Swift line that warns geniuses to expect that those dunces who don’t understand them will form themselves into a confederacy to obliterate the geniuses.
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Screen time
At the suggestion of my son Dom, and he and I share similar tastes in food and art, I’ve started watching Nine Innocent Strangers with Nicole Kidman. One episode in and I like it.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
I don't have a girlfriend.
But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.
~Mitch Hedberg
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
My friends, Tucker and Howard, have sent me several emails which contain responses to questions I asked each.
It’s been two days and I haven’t responded to them because I know each email will cause me a few minutes of improvements to the manuscript.
I think they know that I will respond very soon. My last distractions will be over after Tuesday.
Blog meister responds: I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
After making Bouillabaisse on Monday night, the next few meals are very easy on my time.
Tuesday night: dinner with my friend Anthony Cintolo at the Summer Shack in Cambridge.
Wednesday dinner: A Prime bone-in rib eye.
Thursday Takeout: Likely sushi from Fuji.
Friday: Bouillabaisse repeat
Sunday: North End Gravy repeat
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Twisted Trunk
Love this tree
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Short Essay*
The supernatural is phenomena or entities that are not subject to the laws of nature. Though the corollary term "nature", has had multiple meanings since the ancient world, the term "supernatural" emerged in the medieval period and did not exist in the ancient world.
The supernatural is featured in folklore and religious contexts, but can also feature as an explanation in more secular contexts, as in the cases of superstitions or belief in the paranormal. The term is attributed to non-physical entities, such as angels, demons, gods, and spirits. It also includes claimed abilities embodied in or provided by such beings, including magic, telekinesis, levitation, precognition, and extrasensory perception.
The philosophy of naturalism contends that nothing exists beyond the natural world, and as such approaches supernatural claims with skepticism.
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Welcome to the 1,404th consecutive post to the blog
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Casey McQuiston
McQuiston at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
Larry D. Moore
Author Casey McQuiston at the 2019 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, United States.
Permission details
© 2019 Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Attribution Specification: Reuse without attribution is a violation of the license. The photographer's name and the link to the license are required. A link back to this source is requested. Example: Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
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Commentary
To provide a buttress to my efforts to keep regular, I am adding a snack rich in dietary fiber at 5pm each night.
On Monday, I ate a very small plate of broccoli rabe.
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Reading and Writing
My Granddaughter’s book class finished Lincoln Highway today and chose to read Confederacy of Dunces next. I’ll be rereading it.
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Screen time
Monday night I am looking forward to Ken Burn’s Ben Franklin, to be followed by another episode of My Brilliant Friend.
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Wellness
Today I got a charley horse in my leg.
If this is repeated, I will review the recent increase to my lifting.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
I'm sick of following my dreams.
I'm just going to ask them where they're goin',
and hook up with them later.
~Mitch Hedberg
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
I had a Bouillabaisse dinner on Monday,
Delicious.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
lagoon in Boston Public Garden being cleaned before filling up
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Short Essay*
New adult (NA) fiction is a developing genre of fiction with protagonists in the 18–30 age bracket. St. Martin's Press first coined the term in 2009, when they held a special call for "fiction similar to young adult fiction (YA) that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of an 'older YA' or 'new adult'". New adult fiction tends to focus on issues such as leaving home, developing sexuality, and negotiating education and career choices. The genre has gained popularity rapidly over the last few years, particularly through books by self-published bestselling authors like Jennifer L. Armentrout, Cora Carmack, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, and Jamie McGuire.
The genre originally faced criticism, as some viewed it as a marketing scheme, while others claimed the readership was not there to publish the material. In contrast, others claimed the term was necessary; a publicist for HarperCollins described it as "a convenient label because it allows parents and bookstores and interested readers to know what is inside".
Examples of books in the new adult genre include Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and Throne of Glass, Jennifer L. Armentrout's Wait For You and Blood and Ash series, Jamie McGuire's Beautiful Disaster, Colleen Hoover's Slammed, Cora Carmack's Losing It, Kendall Ryan's The Impact of You and Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue.
This category is intended to be marketed to post-adolescents and young adults ages 18 to 30. This age group is considered to be the lucrative "cross-over" category of young-adult titles that appeal to both the young-adult market and to an adult audience. Publishers of young-adult fiction now favor this category as it encompasses a far broader audience. The chief features that distinguish the new adult fiction category from young adult fiction are the perspective of the young protagonist and the scope of the protagonist's life experience. Perspective is gained as childhood innocence fades and life experience is gained, which brings insight. It is this insight which is lacking in traditional young-adult fiction. The other main differences are characters' ages and the settings. YA does not usually include main characters over age 18 or in college, but these characters are featured in new adult books. New adult can best be described as the age category after young adult.
New adult literature touches upon many themes and issues to reach the readership that falls in between the categories of young adult and adult fiction.
Many themes covered in young adult fiction such as identity, sexuality, depression, suicide, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, familial struggles, bullying are also covered in new adult fiction, but the various issues that are dealt with in the category hold it separate.[vague] Some common examples of issues include first jobs, starting college, wedding engagements and marriage, starting new families, friendships post-high school, military enlistment, financial independence, living away from home for the first time, empowerment, loss of innocence, and fear of failure.[vague]
This category focuses heavily on life after an individual has become of legal age, and how one deals with the new beginnings of adulthood. Commonly, these themes and issues have been seen taking place post-high school in popular new adult fiction titles, but there are exceptions.
Like the fiction categories of young adult and adult, new adult fiction can combine with all genres and subgenres. Science fiction, urban fiction, horror, paranormal, dystopia, etc. are some examples.
Many agents and large publishing houses have yet to recognize the category due to various issues. Some view the category as a marketing scheme, while others claim the readership is not there to publish the material. Therefore, authors have turned to self-publishing as a means to get their books out into the market. The success of these authors has led to many independent publishing houses and agents opening up to the category. Publishers are now publishing these books with many of the bestsellers having deals with large publishers.
Sex
In 2012, new adult fiction saw a rise in the romance subgenre of contemporary when self-published titles such as Slammed by Colleen Hoover, Easy by Tamarra Webber, and Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire were acquired by major publishing houses. Some believe this jump in response to the category came from the release of the popular erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which featured a heroine in college. Since new adult fiction tackles issues such as sex and sexuality and many of the categories' successful titles deal with those same issues the category itself and the single issue of sex have been stated as synonymous, and even been called over-sexualized versions of young adult fiction. Both readers and authors of the category combat the claim by stating that the category deals with the exploration of a character's life, and that sex is not ubiquitous in new adult title
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Welcome to the 1,403rd consecutive post to the blog
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
The Hunger Games
This is the front cover art for the book The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset. The book cover art copyright is believed to belong to the publisher, Scholastic, or the cover artist.
"Amazon.com: The Hunger Games Trilogy eBook: Suzanne Collins: Kindle Store". amazon.com. Retrieved 2016-03-10. (Direct image link)
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Commentary
Inches and degrees.
Life changers.
Eternal vigilance is the cost of good health.
One positive example and two negatives.
Positive: I’ve added a bit more weight to my lifting regimen. That bodes well for my health.
Negative #1: In the interest of making a slightly stronger cup of morning coffee, I added a minuscule amount of caffeine beans to my blend. Coffee was delicious. An hour later, I got a slight attack of vertigo. In my experience, definitely the first indication of a full blown caffeine attack last experienced 15 years ago, and that was not fun. Next day I returned to the lesser amount. It was fine.
Negative #2: Having gotten my voiding issues under control, I proceeded to stray from my diet with dire effects, having to deal with a difficult bowel moment. Having endured that,you can be sure when I woke the next day my breakfast included oatmeal, prunes, raisins, and chia seeds.
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Reading and Writing
The submission process is underway.
Unfortunately for that, Monday and Tuesday are busy days for me and I’ll have to wait until Wednesday to do some serious work on submission.
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Screen time and Music
And speaking of powerfully emotional, I have three songs to recommend:
Girl from North Country, by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash
Tennessee Whiskey, by Chris Stapleton
No Time to Cry, by Iris Dement
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Wellness
Reaffirming our need to pay attention to ourselves, meaning our health.
Payback is a birtch.
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Understanding aging
It’s slow.
That’s a good thing.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs.
You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just
Escalator Temporarily Stairs.
Sorry for the convenience.
~Mitch Hedberg
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
This from Sally C:
Dear Dom,
Regarding potatoes and cream vs. cauliflower and oat milk, my mother used to make a most filling and rich-tasting soup by pressure-cooking a cauliflower, then blending it in the blender with a quart of her chicken stock.
I make my soup stock the same way she did – when I’m roasting a piece of meat or poultry, I put water into the roast pan. It makes a robust, seasoned broth, which solidifies when chilled. It also takes no effort or time, versus boiling meat or poultry just to make stock.
Speaking of creamed-style soups, I substitute coconut milk for cow’s milk in my cream of mushroom soup. The availability of lactose-free half-and-half makes for a downright decadent soup!
The nutritional value of potatoes aside – great or not so great, I won’t argue here, but I go as mushy as mashed potatoes, mushy with bliss, when I get to eat potatoes in any form.
Happy eating!
Sally
Blog meister responds:
I’m getting very hungry, Sally.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
I am making Bouillabaisse tomorrow.
Will buy the fish, shellfish, and vegetables on Sunday.
Make it Sunday night.
Eat it Monday and another day.
The exciting thing about it this time, is that I plan to substitute
Cauliflower Rouille for the white potatoes.
Revolutionary.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Are You Ready
A sign I read as I began my solo three-week trip across the country.
And back.
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Short Essay*
Young adult fiction (YA) is a category of fiction written for readers from 12 to 18 years of age. While the genre is targeted at adolescents, approximately half of YA readers are adults.
The subject matter and genres of YA correlate with the age and experience of the protagonist. The genres available in YA are expansive and include most of those found in adult fiction. Common themes related to YA include friendship, first love, relationships, and identity. Stories that focus on the specific challenges of youth are sometimes referred to as problem novels or coming-of-age novels.
Young adult fiction was developed to soften the transition between children's novels and adult literature.
20th century
Though young adult literature had existed since at least Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which was published in the 1930s, teachers and librarians were slow to accept books for teenagers as a genre.
The Heinlein juveniles were science fiction novels written by Robert A. Heinlein for Scribner's young-adult line, beginning with Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947. Scribner's published eleven more between 1947 and 1958, but rejected the thirteenth, Starship Troopers. That one was instead published by Putnam. The intended market was teenage boys, but a fourteenth novel, Podkayne of Mars (1963), featuring a young girl as the protagonist, is sometimes listed as a "Heinlein juvenile", although Heinlein himself did not consider it to be one.
In the 1950s, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), attracted the attention of the adolescent demographic although it was written for adults. The themes of adolescent angst and alienation in the novel have become synonymous with young adult literature.
A Wrinkle in Time, written by Madeleine L'Engle in 1960, received over twenty-six rejections before publication in 1962, due in part to it being neither a children's nor adult's book, and featuring a teenage girl as the protagonist at a time when most science fiction targeted teenage boys.
The modern classification of young-adult fiction originated during the 1960s, after the publication of S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967). The novel features a truer, darker side of adolescent life that was not often represented in works of fiction of the time, and was the first novel published specifically marketed for young adults as Hinton was one when she wrote it. Written during high school and published when Hinton was only 16, The Outsiders also lacked the nostalgic tone common in books about adolescents written by adults. The Outsiders remains one of the best-selling young adult novels of all time.
Author and academic Michael Cart argues that the 1960s was the decade when literature for adolescents "could be said to have come into its own". This increased the discussions about adolescent experiences and the new idea of adolescent authors.[citation needed] In the late 1960s and early 1970s, five very popular books were published: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), an autobiography of the early years of American poet Maya Angelou; The Friends (1973) by Rosa Guy; the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar (US 1963, under a pseudonym; UK 1967) by poet Sylvia Plath; Bless the Beasts and Children (1970) by Glendon Swarthout; and Deathwatch (1972) by Robb White, which was awarded 1973 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery by the Mystery Writers of America. The works of Angelou and Plath were not written for young readers.[citation needed]
As publishers began to focus on the emerging adolescent market, booksellers and libraries began creating young adult sections distinct from children's literature and novels written for adults. The 1970s to the mid-1980s have been described as the golden age of young-adult fiction, when challenging novels began speaking directly to the interests of the identified adolescent market.
In the 1980s, young adult literature began pushing the envelope in terms of the subject matter that was considered appropriate for their audience: Books dealing with topics such as rape, suicide, parental death, and murder which had previously been deemed taboo, saw significant critical and commercial success.[18] A flip-side of this trend was a strong revived interest in the romance novel, including young adult romance.[19] With an increase in number of teenagers the genre "matured, blossomed, and came into its own, with the better written, more serious, and more varied young adult books (than those) published during the last two decades".[20]
The first novel in J.K. Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997. The series was praised for its complexity and maturity, and attracted a wide adult audience. While not technically YA, its success led many to see Harry Potter and its author, J.K. Rowling, as responsible for a resurgence of young adult literature, and re-established the pre-eminent role of speculative fiction in the field,[21] a trend further solidified by The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The end of the decade saw a number of awards appear such as the Michael L. Printz Award and Alex Awards, designed to recognize excellence in writing for young adult audiences.
The category of young adult fiction continues to expand into other media and genres: graphic novels/manga, light novels, fantasy, mystery fiction, romance novels, and even subcategories such as cyberpunk, techno-thrillers, and contemporary Christian fiction.
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Monday, April 4, 2022
Welcome to the 1,402nd consecutive post to the blog
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Historical Drama 19th Century
2004 filming of a 19th-century film scene set in London
Photograph © Andrew Dunn http://www.andrewdunnphoto.com - English Wikipedia, original upload 4 October 2004 by Solipsist
A film crew recreates the atmosphere of a Victorian London smog or pea-souper. This street scene is actually being filmed in the central courtyard of Somerset House, and the smog is artificially generated using a smoke machine. The film director (probably Simon Cellan Jones), on the right, is explaining his ideas for the scene which is being filmed. Whilst the cameraman next to the lamp post is operating a steadicam and wearing the harness required to support it. The actor walking towards the group is wearing a bowler hat. The production was for the TV movie Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (IMDB) at Somerset House in London.
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Commentary
Ron DeSantis would be a great choice for the Republican nomination for President.
He might be able to defeat Donald Trump.
Anybody is preferable to such an immoral, dangerous man.
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Reading and Writing
It’s done. I finished my manuscript on April 2, one day later than my guess six months ago.
I am happy.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
My fake plants died because
I did not pretend to water them.
~Mitch Hedberg
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
This day, I sent the completed manuscript to the two readers most invested in the process.
It felt so good.
And the first ideas were returned within the hour.
Blog meister responds: God bless.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Of all the food ideas I’ve ever presented in this blog, this is it the most important.
How we love mashed potatoes.
White potatoes.
Heavy cream.
Delicious and satisfying.
But contributing very little to our health.
And very high in calories,
Think:
Cauliflower and Oat milk.
Delicious and satisfying.
And contributing major league to our health.
And very low in calories.
Think:
Cauliflower and Oat milk.
An amazing approximation of the original.
Only even more delicious.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
kat at her senior prom
she’s center right: black dress
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Short Essay*
A historical drama (also period drama, costume drama, and period piece) is a work set in a past time period, usually used in the context of film and television. Historical drama includes historical fiction and romances, adventure films, and swashbucklers. A period piece may be set in a vague or general era such as the Middle Ages or a specific period such as the Roaring Twenties.
Films set in historical times have always been some of the most popular works. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Buster Keaton's The General are examples of popular early American works set during the U.S. Civil War.
In different eras different subgenres have risen to popularity such as the westerns and sword and sandal films that dominated North American cinema in the 1950s. The costume drama is often separated as a genre of historical dramas. Early critics defined them as films focusing on romance and relationships in sumptuous surroundings, contrasting them with other historical dramas believed to have more serious themes.
Other critics have defended costume dramas, and argued that they are disparaged because they are a genre directed towards women. Historical dramas have also been described as a conservative genre, glorifying an imagined past that never existed.
While historical drama is fiction, works may include references to real-life people or events from the relevant time period or contain factually accurate representations of the time period. Works may also include mostly-fictionalized narratives based on actual people or events, such as Braveheart, Les Misérables, and Titanic.
Works that focus on accurately portraying specific historical events or persons are instead known as docudrama (such as The Report). Where a person's life is central to the story, such a work is known as biographical drama (examples being Frida, Cinderella Man and Lincoln).
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Sunday, April 3, 2022
Welcome to the 1,401st consecutive post to the blog
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Epic Movies
Italian film Cabiria (1914), one of the earliest known epic films
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Commentary
The unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percent to 3.6%, and is now only a tenth of a percent above the low achieved during the last expansion.
That is uplifting. Despite the arrival of inflation, the economy is doing very well.
I am just a few pages away from finish. I may finish today, the first of April. That would be a stunner: I estimated April 1 as a finish date, six months ago. That guess intended to be a very rough marker. Instead, prescient.
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Reading and Writing
I will select a new reading book tonight.
Exciting.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.
~Mitch Hedberg
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Wellness
Thursday night- Friday morning I went sleepless.
I ascribe to the Elite Sleeper theory and used my early morning time well.
I had my breakfast at 1.00pm, five hours earlier than usual.
I will stay on my diet by not snacking. At noon I will eat again.
In the very early morning I worked on my manuscript, getting a full day’s editing done.
I shaved and dressed.
I took two 20 minute naps.
And then it was 7.00am, two hours before I leave for the café.
And it’s now 8.00pm and I have had a very productive day.
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Understanding Ageing
I met two childhood friends of mine. The same age.
One was fine and alert.
The other, not so much.
Three times in five minutes she asked me the same question about my sisters.
Why didn’t it shock me?
She reminded me of one of the few serious poems by Oden Nash.
I don’t mean to be morose but this is what came to mind:
People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when…
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
r text to 617.852.7192
Got several happy texts from my daughter Katherine related to a new ipad that she needed for her job. She loves it. Especially that it comes with a built-in hotspot so the internet will follow her wherever she goes.
And she loves her office. She starts a week from Monday.
Blog meister responds: From their birth we worry about our children. We applaud each success. Clap. Clap, Katherine.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
I had dinner from a takeout place called Hen.
There was nothing wrong with it.
It just didn’t sparkle.
I’ll keep looking.
I want to do takeout twice a week.
One will always be sushi.
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Community Photos**
barnes and noble and comic fan
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Short Essay*
Epic films are a style of filmmaking with large-scale, sweeping scope, and spectacle. The usage of the term has shifted over time, sometimes designating a film genre and at other times simply synonymous with big-budget filmmaking. Like epics in the classical literary sense it is often focused on a heroic character. An epic's ambitious nature helps to set it apart from other types of film such as the period piece or adventure film.
Epic historical films would usually take a historical or a mythical event and add an extravagant setting and lavish costumes, accompanied by an expansive musical score with an ensemble cast, which would make them among the most expensive of films to produce. The most common subjects of epic films are royalty, and important figures from various periods in world history.
The term "epic" originally came from the poetic genre exemplified by such works as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the works of the Trojan War Cycle. In classical literature, epics are considered works focused on deeds or journeys of heroes upon which the fate of many people depends. Similarly, films described as "epic" typically take a historical character, or a mythic heroic figure. Common subjects of epics are royalty, gladiators, great military leaders, or leading personalities from various periods in world history. However, there are some films described as "epic" almost solely on the basis of their enormous scope and the sweeping panorama of their settings such as How the West Was Won or East of Eden that do not have the typical substance of classical epics but are directed in an epic style.
When described as "epic" because of content, an epic movie is often set during a time of war or other societal crisis, while usually covering a longer span of time sometimes throughout entire generations coming and passing away, in terms of both the events depicted and the running time of the film. Such films usually have a historical setting, although speculative fiction (i.e. fantasy or science fiction) settings have become common in recent decades. The central conflict of the film is usually seen as having far-reaching effects, often changing the course of history. The main characters' actions are often central to the resolution of the societal conflict.
In its classification of films by genre, the American Film Institute limits the genre to historical films such as Ben-Hur. However, film scholars such as Constantine Santas are willing to extend the label to science-fiction films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. Lynn Ramey suggests that "Surely one of the hardest film genres to define is that of the "epic" film, encompassing such examples as Ben-Hur, Gone with the Wind and more recently, 300 and the Star Wars films none of these comes from literary epics per se, and there is little that links them with one another. Among those who espouse film genre studies, epic is one of the most despised and ignored genres". Finally, although the American Movie Channel formally defines epic films as historical films, they nonetheless state the epic film may be combined with the genre of science-fiction and cite Star Wars as an example.
Stylistically, films classed as epic usually employ spectacular settings and specially designed costumes, often accompanied by a sweeping musical score, and an ensemble cast of bankable stars. Epics are usually among the most expensive of films to produce. They often use on-location filming, authentic period costumes, and action scenes on a massive scale. Biographical films may be less lavish versions of this genre.
Many writers may refer to any film that is "long" (over two hours) as an epic, making the definition epic a matter of dispute, and raise questions as to whether it is a "genre" at all. As Roger Ebert put it, in his "Great Movies" article on Lawrence of Arabia:
The word epic in recent years has become synonymous with big-budget B picture. What you realize watching Lawrence of Arabia is that the word epic refers not to the cost or the elaborate production, but to the size of the ideas and vision. Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God didn't cost as much as the catering in Pearl Harbor, but it is an epic, and Pearl Harbor is not.
The comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail had the joking tagline "Makes Ben-Hur look like an epic."
*The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Community Pictures with Captions are sent in by our followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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