“And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that this is not just “Something That Happened.” This cannot be “One of Those Things… ” This, please, cannot be that. And for what I would like to say, I can’t. This Was Not Just A Matter Of Chance. Ohhhh. These strange things happen all the time.”
The Narrator – Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
I want to curse! I want to punch the pillows on my bed hard. I am almost mad enough to drop kick a yapping dog.
Why?
Well, after writing about A.V. Club, I woke up this morning to read the article about Nathan Rabin’s new book The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture. I wanted to see what the book would be about and was greeted with this description:
“The following is an excerpt from The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture by longtime A.V. Club Head Writer Nathan Rabin. In each chapter of The Big Rewind, Rabin uses a book, song, movie, album, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life.”
I’m glad that my roommate already left for work, because what I said when I read that wasn’t pretty and was rather loud. You see, THAT WAS MY IDEA! I have been working on something very, very similar since 2007 and have saved it as a book project tentatively titled The Soundtrack of Me. And this is not one of those things where the published work and the work on which I was working are kinda similar but not really.
No. This is not one of those things.
After reading the excerpt, I can definitively say that his book and the one which I have been writing for the last two years are the EXACT. SAME. THING.
Over the last 12 years, my friends Robert, Joe, and I have joked about how people have to have our apartments bugged because so many of the funny stuff that we’ve discussed together winds up making it into various movies. I guess that this is just another one of those instances.
“And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. And so it goes, and so it goes.”
July 7, 2009 at 8:14 am
Well our pop culture reality TV culture’s definition of “original” just means that you have different shoes on, so you’re still good…although it sounds like a memoir in the tradition of High Fidelity, without Jack Black of course.
August 12, 2009 at 12:46 am
[...] be just as guilty as everyone else. It’s been hard for me to come back and start writing again since this incident. I don’t know if I’m paranoid or not, but a lot of my ideas and the ideas of my friends find [...]