Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 81

Daniel Moskowitz's Bronx Stagger at Books in Bloom Local Author Showcase!

Roy Freirich, in conversation with Jeff Dorchen, discusses and signs Deprivation

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Book Soup 8818 Sunset Blvd West Hollywood, CA 90069 

Women's History Month: When Hollywood’s Power Players Were Women

Female writers, directors, and producers were pioneers of the silent-film era—but were pushed out of the industry as its influence grew.
Lois Weber, a prolific screenwriter and director, was the first woman to establish her own film studio.HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY

Given the dearth of women among this year’s Oscar nominees for writing and directing, not to mention behind the camera in Hollywood at all, you may be surprised to learn that before 1925, during the silent film era, women wrote the outlines for roughly half of all films. In fact, a great many women were behind the camera in those days—producing and directing films, and running studios. Women also pioneered much of the film technology that still exists today—only to be pushed out of the burgeoning industry once its influence and moneymaking potential had become more widely recognized.

When the writer and satirist Dorothy Parker and her writer husband, Alan Campbell, moved to Hollywood and signed contracts with Paramount, she was paid four times as much as he was. Frances Marion, who would go on to become the founding vice president of the Screen Writers Guild, was the country’s highest-paid screenwriter in the 1920s and ’30s; more than 100 of her scripts were made into films, and in 1930, she became the first woman to win an Oscar for writing. Lois Weber, a prolific screenwriter and director, in 1917 became the first woman to establish and run her own film studio. The year before, her wage as a director was the highest in Hollywood.

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Women's History Month: Virginia Woolf - Time Woman of the Year 1929

Illustration by Oliver Sin for TIME; George C. Beresford—Hulton Archive/Getty
MARCH 5, 2020


In 1928, addressing distinguished female students at the University of Cambridge, novelist and critic Virginia Woolf declared, “A woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.” Replace “write fiction” with any creative, intellectual or political pursuit, and in a sentence, Woolf had summed up millennia of inequality. In her 1929 extended essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf played with both fiction and nonfiction, building on the themes of her lectures. She invented the indelible figure of Judith Shakespeare, sister of William, who had equal talent but would never become a world-famous playwright because she was barred from education and relegated to the home.

Suddenly, readers imagined a world history filled with the ghosts of gifted women and the works they never had the opportunity to create. Before 1929, Woolf had established herself with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse as one of the boldest novelists of the 20th century, and then when “A Room of One’s Own” was published to both celebration and outrage, she became a political visionary too. Her essays were—and still are—a rallying call to women around the world. —Lucas Wittmann

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Coming Soon From Story Merchant Books!

The Last Full Measure - Audience Reactions

THE LAST FULL MEASURE tells the true story of Vietnam War hero William H. Pitsenbarger (Jeremy Irvine), a U.S. Air Force Pararescuemen (also known as a PJ) medic who personally saved over sixty men.  
During a rescue mission on April 11, 1966, he was offered the chance to escape on the last helicopter out of a combat zone heavily under fire, but he stayed behind to save and defend the lives of his fellow soldiers of the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division, before making the ultimate sacrifice in the bloodiest battle of the war.  
Thirty-two years later, respected Pentagon staffer Scott Huffman (Sebastien Stan) on a career fast-track is tasked with investigating a Congressional Medal of Honor request for Pitsenbarger made by his best friend and PJ mission partner (William Hurt) and his parents (Christopher Plummer & Diane Ladd).   Huffman seeks out the testimony of Army veterans who witnessed Pitsenbarger’s extraordinary valor, including Takoda (Samuel L. Jackson), Burr (Peter Fonda) and Mott (Ed Harris). But as Huffman learns more about Pitsenbarger’s courageous acts, he uncovers a high-level conspiracy behind the decades-long denial of the medal, prompting him to put his own career on the line to seek justice for the fallen airman. 
With a superb all-star cast and an emotionally gripping story, The Last Full Measure is a film everyone should see. Get tickets: www.thelastfullmeasurefilm.com

Celebrating Disappointment by Kenneth John Atchity

Are you disappointed? We all get disappointed by life from time to time and, in these “interesting” times, no doubt more often than usual.

Maybe because I savored my Roman Catholic upbringing, I was drawn to a profession in which rejection became not a daily occurrence, but an hourly one—until the email era, in which rejections come in once every few minutes! As an intellectual property manager, I try to tell my rejected clients that every no is a step further to the one yes we’re looking for. I remind them of a story I was once told:

There’s a big blackboard in the sky. On it are all the NOS you or your dream project will ever get. And there too is the final YES.

The only problem is that you can’t see the blackboard.

Since this is the case, what does the dreamer do? Only three things:

Never give up. You never know, but the YES may be lurking behind the NO that makes you want to throw in the towel. There’s only one way to find out: Persist. As long as you live and breathe. My definition of a happy death is dying in the middle of your dream.

Get through the NOS as fast as you can.

Don’t think negatively about them. Do you really wish your dream was accepted by the WRONG person? That’s what a NO is, a wrong person for your dream. Nothing would be worse, believe me, than having your dream partnered with someone you talked into it when they didn’t see it in the first place.

Celebrate each NO as a step forward toward making your dream come true. No successful dreamer has succeeded without dealing with rejection over and over. Edison….

Disappointment and celebration. To live a happy life, you can’t have one without the other. Think of them as life’s teeter-totter, disappointment on one seat, celebration on the other.

Imagine that you’re on that teeter-totter (because you are) but don’t understand how it works. Every time disappointment has the upper position, you sit there like a lump on a log and bemoan your fate.

That will literally get you nowhere, allowing disappointment to maintain the upper hand. I went to an ashram outside of Delhi some years ago, to check out for myself whether a certain guru was all my current girlfriend believed he was cracked up to be.

I have to admit I was nodding during most of the program, but during the question and answer period I came awake as I heard a distraught westerner lament that she tried so hard to lead the path of perfection and serenity but, because she was only mortal, kept falling. “What shall I do?”

He looked at her with that infinite ennui that teachers who have heard it all a thousand times experience, and said:

“Pick yourself up and keep going.”

“Master, I try to do that,” she lamented. “But I am weak, and I only fall again. How many times can I pick myself up?”

“Sister,” the wise man replied, “how many times can you fall?”

That’s when I decided he was indeed a wise man.

You’re sitting there on the ground, disappointment in the air, wondering your glass of life is half-empty. Finally you get tired of the half-empty glass. Or you figure it out—or you remember--and you use your legs as pistons and celebrate your ability to return to the top of the teeter-totter where your glass of life appears to be more than half full!

That’s celebration in action, countering disappointment. That’s optimism, the only logical program to adopt for life. It’s logical because it either proves to be justified—by success; or you’ll actually never know because you remain optimistic to the end. That’s why, in The Godfather, we all loved the Don Corleone’s last words as he fell to his knees with a massive stroke in the tomato garden: “La vita é cosí bella…Life is so beautiful”—optimistic to the un-bitter end.

Don’t think I’m not as bad as the woman at the ashram in terms of sitting at the bottom of the teeter-totter wondering what happened to put disappointment in the cat bird seat. I am as good at lamenting as the next guy, maybe even better! One day I was complaining to my best friend (you need to be careful who you complain to, by the way) about a clump of setbacks that happened one after another, yet another reflection of the turmoil of our times. I recited them to my friend and explained why I questioned whether life was still worth living.

He said, “So some deals fell through, and so it’s hard to earn a living.

“But you don’t have mongoloid children, but two kids who are earning a living and leading an okay life. You go back and forth to New York whenever you want to. You have a beautiful Japanese wife who cooks, takes care of the house, works hard, has her own non-profit, loves you. Loves you. Your brother is not in jail, but is a millionaire who leaves you alone. Your sisters aren’t drug addicts, but doing okay. You aren’t pushing a walker, you ARE playing tennis 3 times a week. You’ve been involved in a whole bunch of books that have your name in them. You’ve been involved in a bunch of movies. You have a bunch of projects that are still viable. You have friends who haven’t killed you yet. You’re not driving a junk heap but a luxury sedan with air conditioning. You have a view out three sides of your apartment in L.A. You have a cat who loves you. You meet Hollywood people and literary people all the time. You’ve developed your companies in a whole new direction and had the best year in six years last year. You have several major feature films nearing production. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR ATTITUDE?”

One thing about attitude: you’re entirely in charge of it. Celebrate that. Celebrate that the problems you have are the ones you asked for. The cost of admission to the stage of your life.

Reposted from Tome Tender

How To Read More Books

Maybe you'll relate to this scene: you're sitting around, cracking open a good book and thinking of all the incredible knowledge you will drink up. Then suddenly, it's two hours later and you're three months back in an Instagram account about cats with their mouths open (side note: it exists, and I love it) and the book is just sitting there, judging you quietly from where you put it down.

If this is you, you're (clearly) not alone! Making time to read is increasingly hard, what with your phone and the latest binge-worthy TV show just waiting to suck up all of your attention. But never fear, future book nerd — Life Kit has your back. We talked to the experts and got some really good best practices that will hopefully transform you into a regular Hermione Granger.

Lynn Neary has been covering books for NPR for over a decade and even though she could probably pave a road to the moon with the books she's read for her job, she says she's not a speed reader by any means, and doesn't judge herself for that. Here's her advice:

1. Read in the morning

"What I've found is a really good time for me is to read in the morning — particularly on weekend mornings," Neary says. "I love to lie in bed on weekend mornings and read. It's just one of my favorite things to do now, and I get a lot of reading done at that time." Doesn't that sound just lovely? Sure, it might not be right for everyone (I see you, chronic snoozers!) but waking up first thing in the morning and getting a few pages in is a good way to start your day. Plus, Neary says, it means you won't fall asleep the way you can if you try and read before bed.

Our second piece of advice comes from a man who reads 100 books a year. ONE HUNDRED! I can barely do one hundred sit ups in a year, so truly I feel like he's achieving greatness. Kevin Nguyen has been writing about books for the majority of his career and even has a piece in GQ that can give you even more advice. His advice for folks who want to read more is our second takeaway:


2. Read wherever, whenever (especially when commuting!)

As the great prophet Shakira quoth: wherever, whenever. When Nguyen walked into the studio to record our Life Kit episode, he had two paper books in his bag and three more that he was reading on his phone! He says that having books with you at all times is a great way to get in a few pages here and there. Commute times in the U.S. are also at a record high, which means that if you wanna be a bigger bookworm like Nguyen means you can spend those precious minutes reading. "The hardest part about reading a book in 2019 is just opening the book," Nguyen says. "We have in our imagination, like oh reading time is like this luxurious thing and I'm in my armchair sipping scotch. You have to make it a more regular habit than that because if you just wait for all those moments you're never gonna finish a book."

3. Tailor the book to the situation

This is another genius Kevin Nguyen tip! "We should think about it like you sit down and watch Netflix," Nguyen says. "Maybe one day you'll get to that queue of documentaries but you're probably just going to watch The Office." Nguyen says that you should apply the same thing to the books you're reading. So, just like you would choose a really peppy song for a workout, you could choose a breezy book for when you're waiting to pick up your coffee. And, conversely, when you have a little bit more time to focus, you can read something that's a little more involved. Cool, right?

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"Writing must have an element of magic to it. When that m...

"Writing must have an element of magic to it. When that magic takes over, the writer himself loses track of time during the writing—and the reader will lose track of time during the reading. If you’re happy at work and think of it as your own private briar patch—a place of escape from the world in which time is your time—the clock of life becomes your clock, and even the thorns in that briar patch are of your own choosing.”


― Kenneth Atchity, Write Time: Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision-and Beyond

Available on Amazon

Library Life...

Not a NYT best seller yet but the local library has this on their New Arrivals shelf! 

A Potter's Tale by Dave Davis... murder, betrayal and a collapsing universe. Oh, and a little romance!