Once, when I was lamenting to a friend that I didn’t have any projects in the pipeline, she tried to console me by calling me an “ideas machine.” To which I could only respond by pounding my head forcefully into the nearest hard surface.
But it occurred to me a few weeks ago, that I do in fact have a lot of ideas. A vast majority of these ideas, however, I am definitely the wrong person to see to completion. Perhaps there is something like an ideas broker, in which I could maybe sell the ideas to the best candidate? Here is just a taster of what’s to come:
1. From the Times of London obituary of Helmet Kohl, former German chancellor:
“In late 1944 [Kohl] was sent to a pre-military training camp as part of Hitler’s desperate effort to save the Third Reich by enlisting boys and old men, and ended up in Bavaria. At the war’s end he and three classmates walked 250 miles back to Ludwigshafen through a country in ruins. They scavenged for food, were attacked by liberated Polish prisoners, and saw the bodies of deserters hanging from trees.”
BAM! Movie. Right there. Three boys wander through the German rubble. Maybe there’s a bear involved, or is that a little too Stand By Me? Anyway, you’d need to have a thorough, localized understanding of World War II, be able to write adolescent dialog, and speak German. Well, preferably be German––I think this would work better as a film if it were made in Germany by German filmmakers.
2. Recently I read a long piece in The New Yorker about Augustine, and it commented on how in Confessions, you never hear from his longtime lover and baby mama, who is summarily tossed out of his house when A’s Oedipal nightmare moves in and asserts her power:
The woman with whom he had been living “was torn from my side, because she was supposed to be an obstacle to my marriage,” Augustine writes. “My heart, which had fused with hers, was mutilated by the wound, and I limped along trailing blood.” Of his mistress’s feelings, he gives us no glimpse, noting simply, “She went back to Africa, vowing to you that she would never know another man.” Then she is gone from his account, leaving him with the gnawing sexual appetite that she had served to appease.
So––what about a historical novel from a silent figure? A la Colm Toibin’s book The Testament of Mary? This would involve “world-building,” and I do not care to delve into the research on the Roman Empire in North Africa, among other things, enough to do this. But I think it could be great. Highest bidder! (Question: should this service be financially based, or require the applicant to submit a proposal of sorts?)
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