POINT:The Stranger Is Named After My Novel
by Albert Camus

There are only two responses you can have to my work: You are either wrong or dead wrong. You are wrong if you call my novels mediocre, and you are dead wrong if you believe that the Seattle paper The Stranger is not indebted to my novel for its name and ideas.

When I wrote the novel in 1946, there was no such thing as an absurd hero. There was the useful hero, the happy hero, and the hero who arrives in the nick of time and saves the day, but there was no absurd hero. Such a man was the total invention of my literary and philosophical genius. Monsieur, no one before me had the guts to describe and confront the Weltanschauung of the absurd hero--the bleak world of a man who is essentially cold, distant, and burdened by a sense of the futility of it all. And is this man (his way of thinking, his exhaustion) not the very definition of the Stranger weekly? Its covers, for example, are absurd. They usually don't relate to the paper's content. They are as random as existence and as meaningless as a world without God.

Speaking of God, from the very start The Stranger has hired the most godless writers on the earth. They, like my absurd hero Meursault, express an utter indifference to the idea of a moral universe organized by a higher being. The Stranger writer exists, like a Nietzschean over-man, outside of morals. (This is why it's not hard to imagine a Stranger writer killing an Arab for no particular reason at all.)

If all this does not convince you of The Stranger's profound indebtedness to me, then explain why no less than 35 features and almost 150 reviews and news stories have opened with the line, "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know"?

Indeed, The Stranger's entire reason for being is the shameless exploitation of my book and its original ideas.

COUNTERPOINT: The Stranger Is Named After My Album
by Billy Joel

Whoa there, Al. You obviously ain't thinking too clearly.

First of all, The Stranger newspaper ain't named after your book. It's named after the album I recorded in '77. Maybe you've heard it? It's also called The Stranger, and it won a Grammy as Album of the Year.

Second, where do you get off saying The Stranger has exploited your book and its "original ideas"? I've read your little book, Al, and there ain't an original idea in it. Oh, your mother died. Boo-fucking-hoo! You should write a book about it. What's that? You already did? And it's called The Stranger? Well I'll just have to rush out and pick it up!

And by the way, I'm being sarcastic.

Reading your whining about The Stranger reminds me of when I was recording Storm Front in '89. Mick Jones, one of the producers, didn't think the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" could make the cut. He felt it was too poppy, not enough Billy Joel. But I told him, I said, "Listen, Mick, there's a reason your name rhymes with 'dick,' so why don't you just leave the hit-record-making to me, Billy Joel. Or have you forgotten about a little song called 'Uptown Girl'?" That shut him up, and you should shut up too, Al. Nobody's given the sweat off their sack about you or your books in 50 years.

Tell you what, the next time one of your books hits number one, like "We Didn't Start the Fire" did in '89, then you can complain to me about The Stranger exploiting your "original ideas."

At any rate, sorry to hear about your mother.