E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Whether or not the Reader accepts the premise that William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, was not what he seemed (i.e. a writer/poet and man of letters) or my own premise that he was in fact the inventor of Hollywood (i.e. the first celebrity producer) William Shakespeare was not a fool or a foil, as depicted in the film Anonymous : he was anything but. I see him not only as a forerunner to Cecil B. de Mille and Louis B. Mayer, but also a forerunner to the Vampire Capitalist and Wall Street corporate greedmeister as depicted in the movie Wall Street by Michael Douglas. Shakespeare had a lot of business savvy, was denounced for being greedy just like Gordon Gekko, was accused of piracy and plagiarism just like Dan Brown and Steven Spielberg, hoarded grain to drive up prices during a famine just like Monsanto, owned a theater company (i.e.studio) just like Goldwyn (well, a partner, anyway, with my own ancestor John Underwood among others), and fostered a bastard son who became England...

Recently I attended a rather remarkable catered event sponsored by Amazon.com's answer to the democratization of publishing--CreateSpace--whose motto seems to be 'Anyone can be an author.' Unlike, apparently, in the old un-democratic days when you had to be able to write, with a product that passes at least somebody's version of muster (usually one of those now-nearly extinct educated female editors with a no-nonsense approach and a degree or two from Barnard or Wellesley). Yet here in the now in Seattle, it all seemed fitting, because one of the key topics was having a so-called 'platform,' and as former publisher and editor Alan Rinzler (who has published and edited such dauntingly diverse clients as Toni Morrision, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Shirley MacLaine, Clive Cussler, Andy Warhol, and Robert Ludlum and thus has stood on lots of platforms prior to this one at the Asian Art Museum) put it, "who are you to write about this subject?" Indeed...

"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." Matthew 13:57 I find myself facing a fascinating, if not frustrating conundrum. How can it be that my long-languishing mystery-thriller about the Shakespeare authorship (writing as John Underwood) has been published in six different languages variously titled The Shakespeare Chronicles, A Thief for All Time , and A Tiger's Heart and yet not in my own native language or country? Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, of course, as well as Solzhenitsyn. And for that matter Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo weren't exactly rock stars in Rome either. But now, it seems, I am. Well, not quite a rock star, but pretty close. I now have a bestseller in Italy, a book that has been rejected for nearly a decade in my home country. So what's up with that? Just as the Shakespeare academics always dismiss those who doubt the Bard's credentials (or, actually, lack thereof) as cranks or merely uninformed, so h...