Steven Hoadley is Gone

One of the most promising writers of my time died, this year, March sometime. I don't know how he died or where or why but last night I was up late, depressed, and wanted a story to pick me up so punched in the name of my favorite recent writers, Steven Hoadley, and noticed an epitath in SoMa mag. He had really only barely begun to scratch the surface of the short story and poem and I could sense he was breaking into his stride in the long form but now that is all gone and we have lost what would have been one of the best writers of our age. Fuck all the lit rock star boys and girls, Hoadley wasn't going to be picked up easy but it was only a matter of him surviving and he would have made it. His talent would have taken him there. It's hard to think of a writer with his sensitivity and instinct having to grind at a construction job during the day and steal what moments he could in the night to write, since there is barely enough energy left to read.

I mourned last night thinking about him and how little is known of him and how he left only a handful of exceptional poetry and stories...I had just watched a very bad movie called Bad Santa, which probably started off with a good story about a drunk who was forced to play Santa Claus every year, no doubt because of some resemblence, thinking, yes this was a good story and they took it and performed their hollywood chainsaw surgery and turned it into another hamfisted humor crime caper. The original writer must cringe whenever it is mentioned, and I hope he got enough with the option to make it worthwhile. But most likely not.

So it goes for our writers, the best, like Hoadley, die unknown, punching a clock, getting punched by a clock, or they feed into the Hollywood vein which is where all writing ends up these days and where all writers end up mediocre...at best.

Who is to blame? Certainly not the average person who barely has enough time to do the neccessary things to survive and who, in a state of physical and mental exhaustion chooses a movie over a book. And why choose a book anyway since all recent fiction is pretty much written with a movie option in mind? I don't know. It bothered me that Ethan and Joel Coen's name's were attached to the Bad Santa movie, since it implies that they no longer give a fuck about making good movies. But they aren't to blame. They've no doubt become accustomed to the lifestyle of the very rich and when they saw such a brilliant classic like Lebowski flop at the box they probably tossed in the towel.

One thing I can't understand though is why more actors and directors and actors who want to direct, don't see talents like Hoadley and scoop them from the gutter, help them out with the greatest gift a writer can have beyond experience--food, drink and a quiet place to write. Most of them, Jarmusch comes to mind, have no business behind the fucking keyboard.