Steven M. Finkelstein

Hello all. I’m very pleased and excited to announce the posting of my new short story collection “The Great Divide,” here on the website. Included in this collection are two years of work, including a novella and several stories, many of which have never been seen before by anyone, anywhere. And you, lucky readers, can enjoy them absolutely free. Just go to the “Collected Editions,” icon on the left hand side of the screen for the main site, click it, and you’ll find all the stories in the collection, along with an introduction and special notes on each piece by yours truly. I’m proud of these stories, which, I feel,  encompass some of my best work to date. Perhaps you will feel the same. In any case, I’d be happy to hear any and all comments regarding individual pieces or the collection as a whole. Thank you all very much for your continued support of me and the site. Cheers.

Hello all. I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays and isn’t too stressed out. I’m pleased to announce that I’m having three new stories published. The first two are erotica stories that are going to appear on the pay website Grace and Beauty. G and B is an atypical site, one that focuses on promoting tasteful, elegant exploration of sexuality. The stories are titled “Yard Work” and “Fun with Jane,” and they will  be posted on the site in the next few days; it should be noted that although there is pay-per-view content on the site, such as pictures and videos, my two stories will be available for viewing without a membership, in the public area. For all those interested, the site address is www.graceandbeauty.com. Obviously, viewing of this site is intended for adults of legal age.

I also have another story, “One of the Family,” appearing now in the publication Babel Lit. Babel Lit is based in New Orleans, and my story will be in their second issue. It can be viewed both online, at www.babellit.com, and also in print. If you want to order a print version of the second issue featuring my story, full details on how to do so are available on the website.  

That’s it for now. Keep an eye out for the new collection, “The Great Divide,” which will be posted here shortly. Cheers.

In a holiday season where the movie going public will be inundated with flashy, special effects laden fare, it’s nice to see a bleak, tear jerking slice of despair brought to us straight from the pages of a Pulitzer prize winning author’s latest opus, The Road. The author in question is, of course, Cormac McCarthy, the best writer of his generation or the past several. I won’t go on about my admiration for McCarthy, who I’ve mentioned here on the site before, but will instead focus on the film, a noteworthy effort and a triumph for all involved, from director John Hillcoat, to the principles, Viggo Mortenson, in the role of unnamed father, and newcomer Cody Smit-Mcphee, in that of the son. Together, the two are traveling across a ravaged American landscape, moving south, heading for the coast, in the wake of some catastrophic event that has ended life as we know it. Nuclear war, perhaps? We never find out, and the knowledge is unimportant anyway. There are no resources left, and roving bands of cannibals prey upon any weaker survivors. We don’t know how long its been since everything went to hell, but things must have deteriorated quickly. The source material is stuck to pretty closely; the father and son don’t meet a lot of other survivors, meaning that there’s a lot of screen time with just Viggo and Mcphee, but the two of them play very well off each other. We get some flashbacks with the mother that add some needed background, but to see Viggo’s raw despair at having to take care of his son under such circumstances, watching his innocence quickly fade, is a powerful experience, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him get an Oscar nod.

At the end of two hours’ time, what makes this movie so successful is how truthfully and brutally McCarthy (and Hillcoat) examine human nature and find it both lacking, and measuring up to its lofty ideals. If an event such as the one that took place here were to actually befall us, one would like to hope that the dregs would draw together and try to rebuild society. If resources were so limited, though, it would in no way be an exaggeration to think that within a few months we’d all be decked out in war paint and eating each other. Humans are animals too, after all, and when our desire to be otherwise is challenged, believe me, hunger and survival instinct are going to be what wins out. Still, the other side of it, the nobility displayed by Viggo’s character, are present to, and always will be. That is why The Road matters: it is a harsh judgment but a fair one, and this is a cinematic effort worthy of attention, just as the novel was. There are elements at play here we might not necessarily want to think about, and because of that, it is all the more important that we do so. My rating: 7/10.

Heads up, true believers. I just wanted to mention that my story “The Red Convertible,” can now be seen in the online ‘zine Glass Cases. This story is part of the series “Several Sorrows,” which originally appeared in my collection The Lean Years. This is the third of those six stories to be published. To view this story, you can go to www.bigglasscases.blogspot.com, and while there, you can check out other author contributions and blogs by Sarah, the administrator.

In other news, I’m continuing work on my new short story collection, The Great Divide, which should hopefully be available here on the website around the end of the month. I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays, whichever ones you celebrate. More soon.

It seems there’s been a recurring theme in my conversations with various people the past few weeks. Everyone keeps coming back to the “end of days,” or what exactly is going to happen at the end of 2012, and the Mayan calender, Nostradamus’s predictions, etc. What’s the cause of all the concern? Global warming and climate change? The fact that the actual date is only a couple of years away? The Roland Emmerick movie that’s inexplicably doing so well in theaters? Although maybe the success of 2012 the movie shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Since that’s what so many people are focusing on and talking about, it makes sense to make yet another movie capturing that idea and packaging it with lots of buildings collapsing and things blowing up. It’s the Hollywood formula, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But back to the impending Armageddon. Even a sceptic like me can’t completely discount the possibility of something happening, especially since so many disparate minds seem to have agreed on the exact date that a monumental event will occur. It certainly bears some thinking about. There’s a few things to keep in mind, though. Firstly, neither the Mayans nor Nostradamus actually said that the world is going to end in 2012. In December of 2012 is only when the Mayan calender ends. That could mean something, and it could mean nothing. After all, there’s no way to ask the Mayans. If they were so smart, then how come their civilization eventually collapsed? Then there’s the issue of Nostradamus. Like all philosopher/prognosticators, he made a good many predictions, some of which seem to have come true, or have a good chance of coming true. But a big factor there is that Nostradamus and people like him deal in generalities. If you’re very general about what’s going to happen…it will happen between such and such a date, involving a person coming into your life whose name starts with a ”b”….or maybe a “w”….who might have facial hair…or not….it’s kind of hard to be proven wrong. What Nostradamus and the Mayans agreed on is the date that whatever is going to happen is going to happen…and there’s a reason they chose that date. Now we’re not dealing with prediction, we’re dealing in fact, and the fact is, there’s going to be a planetary alignment that takes place near the end of the year 2012 that hasn’t happened in a few thousand years. What’s actually the most impressive to me about the whole business is that the Mayans were sophisticated enough to be able to tell that based on their own studies of the planetary bodies, but with that aside…the planetary alignment could mean that something huge is going to happen, yes. Or it could mean nothing. How vividly I remember the Y2K hoopla, when everyone was convinced that their computers were going to short circuit, and planes were going to fall out of the sky. Absolutely nothing happened. And I’m going to make a bold prediction of my own that’s what’s going to happen this time too…nothing.

Of course, I could be wrong. There is climate change happening, that much is true. Iran is openly defying the U.N and enriching plutonium with the obvious eventual goal of constructing nuclear warheads. Sarah Jessica Parker is consistently getting work. All of these could be signs of an impending doom being brought on the world and our very way of life. But we don’t know that. It’s all speculation, and just because a bunch of idiots believe that something is going to happen on a certain date, that doesn’t make it so. A lot of people can be convinced of something, and a lot of people can be wrong about it just as easily as one person can. Just look at organized religion if you don’t believe me. The bottom line is, I’m a man who needs empirical evidence before acting on something. That’s the only method that makes any sense; anything else is just superstition. So changing my behavior in the next couple of years leading up to what, if anything, is going to happen at the end of 2012 is just pointless. I’m going to live my life as I always have. I have fears about the future, sure. But I’ll only start to make those fears priorities in my life when and if these disaster scenarios play out, and till they do, I’m going to keep scoffing at people who do otherwise. Because what’s going to happen is this: when the date comes and goes, and nothing has happened, they’re just going to find “an extension to the Mayan calender and new predictions by Nostradamus that were hidden under a rock! The real end of the world will happen in 2045!” Or 2112, 0r 3000…or whenever. But if I turn out to be wrong, and the world does actually end in 2012, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll be sure to write a retraction here on the website…if I’m still around, and if there’s anyone  else around to read it.

I’ve said in the past that the Cohen brothers don’t make bad movies. The movies that don’t rank as high in their own particular canon are still better than about ninety percent of what everyone else is doing, and their best are as fine as cinema has to offer- see Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and No Country For Old Men, among others. Where does this rank, in terms of their complete body of work? Somewhere in the middle. Some have said this is the Cohen’s most autobiographical work to date. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but in any case, it does deal with the most Jewish subject matter of any of their previous efforts. It’s set in a kind of suburban Jewish purgatory in the 1960’s where the protagonist, Larry Gopnik, a middle-aged professor at a small university, is on the verge of getting tenure. He learns that his wife wants a ceremonial divorce so that she can shack up with an overbearing rival, who, it is later revealed, has been sending unflattering letters to the committee that is deciding whether to grant Gopnik tenure. His brother, a reclusive loon who has been working unceasingly on a mathematical formula that can successfully predict future events, is living in his spare room, while his son, who is about to be bar mitzvah, is having trouble with a local tough who he owes money for buying pot. Various troubles begin to close in, and the result is a typical Cohen-flavored hodgepodge of hysterical encounters, highlighted by visits with the three rabbis at the local synagogue as Larry tries vainly to make sense of his world collapsing around him.

It’s all in good fun…except it’s not. The Cohens are absolute masters of making you laugh uproariously even as you cringe, and that’s what’s happening here. Yes, these events are funny, in some cases, but this is very much a black comedy, emphasis on black, and there’s much more at work here than simply sticking larger than life characters into humorous situations. On a larger scale, this is about what happens when a life, particularly that of a passive person, begins to implode, without their having any knowledge why or what they can do about it. It’s as sad as it is funny, especially with the pervading sense of doom through which the Cohen’s infuse this entire undertaking, through expertly applied camera work, use of music, sound, and volume, and intentional blurring of certain portions of the screen, to name a few of their traditional bag of tricks. It works to perfection, for the most part. It’s what the Cohen’s have been doing for two decades. They got it right the first time, and the formula hasn’t changed.

It seems like the Cohens vary how much of themselves they put into their work. On certain occasions it seems like they’re just being a little playful as they gear themselves up for their next “important” project. In this case, the effort is fairly evident, and so this movie is largely successful. There may be some who will be turned off by this piece because of the heavily Jewish content, but I don’t think this endeavor won’t pay dividends just because you aren’t a member of the tribe. After all, the Jewish aspect is just a backdrop; if some of the individual details are lost due to religious or cultural ignorance, at the end of the day this is still about asking God the big questions, foremost among them “why the hell is this happening to me?” and each and every one of us, of any culture, should be able to relate to that. Overall, a wicked, darkly funny, and, at times, painful comedy with serious issues peaking out from behind the facade. My rating: 7/10.