I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

This was my "Halloween" season book.  I recommend it.  But I will say of all the books I have ever read that had movies based on them, this was by far the most "nothing like the movie" book I have ever read, and that includes "The Shining" and "Congo".  Don't get me wrong, I actually like the Will Smith movie (Yes, there were two other movies made, one in the 60's and one in the 70's, but I have not seen those).  But there was one thing about it that I never understood, the title "I Am Legend", it didn't really make sense.  Why was Will Smith a legend?  Wouldn't hero be a better word if he found a cure for the virus?  Well, when you read the book, you understand where the title comes from.  This book was first published in 1954 and it is set in the apocalyptic future of 1976 through 1979.  The main character, Robert Neville, is just a normal guy, not an army doctor.  It is set in L.A., specifically in Compton and Englewood....long before Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.   The "bad guys", are vampires, not super zombies or what ever they are in the Will Smith movie.  And by vampires, I mean old school vampires, hate crosses, mirrors, garlic, etc.  Neville does become a scientist and discovers the science behind the vampires.  He also goes out in the morning and kills about 50 or so while they sleep, every single morning as long as it isn't cloudy.  There is a woman that he meets and a dog, but that is about the only similarity.  


SPOILER ALERT




Ruth is not a nice woman that takes the cure to the last human civilization.  She is a spy for the newly mutated vampires that can come out in the light.  She she feels sorry for Neville and tries to save him, but in the end he is captured and sentenced to death by the new society of vampires.  In the end, Neville is told that he is the last of his race, and before he commits suicide he sees how the sight of him strikes fear into the new inhabitants of the vampire world.  He is the terror that was responsible for killing thousands.  They will tell frightening stories about his kind, not the other way around.  He is now legend.

Why Do We Own These?

I know Red Box and Netflix have made actually owning movies out of style, but I like to still have a pretty decent collection, just in case you get snowed in and the internet goes out.  And there are certain movies that I am very glad we own because we really do watch them. Sometimes you just really want to watch Terminator 2, Pulp Fiction, or True Grit (lets be honest, that is when I am alone...WE watch Coal Miner's Daughter, Mean Girls, and Under the Tuscan Sun).  And it sounds weird but both Beth and I find all of the Lord of the Rings trilogy incredibly relaxing to watch or just have on in the back ground.  In fact, whenever we are able to have the opportunity to take a nap, we like to turn it on just to fall asleep to.  I think it is that lullaby like theme music that plays throughout.  But anyway, I was looking at our movie collection yesterday, and we own some really odd movies that I am not sure that we have ever watched more than once.  Some of  them are really good movies, but not ones you find the desire to watch over and over.  These are the worst offenders:


1) The Village - 

We have other Shyamalan movies, like Signs and Sixth Sense.  But The Village is by far the most pointless to own.  Of course, Shyamalan has stuck in his head that every movie has to have "twist" at the end....this has apparently been much to his detriment.  But Signs and Sixth Sense are still scary, even after you know the twist at the end.  The Village isn't.  It has those moments at the very end, but after you are clued in on the twist after the first time you see it, the movie is never the same.

2)  American Beauty - 

I have no idea how we wound up with this.  Don't get me wrong, it is a great movie with a great theme that is executed perfectly.  Probably one of Spacey's best.  But it is pretty horrifically depressing.  Once you have seen the ending, you really don't care to ever see it again. 

3) The Others - 

Same thing as the Village, with the big twist at the end.  I will say that the movie does still hold a high creepy factor even after you know that (SPOILER ALERT) they are all ghosts.

4) Riding in Cars with Boys - 

Now I know this one is connected to Beth somehow.  It is probably one of Drew Berrymore's best.  But again, horribly depressing, even if it does end up "ok".  

5) Someone Like You - 

I just found this one in our entertainment center and I am giving Beth credit for it.  It is some kind of romantic comedy with Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman made in 2001.  I have never seen it and could not tell you anything about it.  I didn't even know we had it until five minutes ago, and we have probably had it for ten years.

Well, that is enough DVD collection bashing for now.  I just found The Fellowship of the Ring playing on Encore.  Frodo and company just arrived at the Prancing Pony. For some reason, I am getting really sleepy.

Raging Bull and how I finally understand the "Joe Pesci Show".

I was a prolific SNL watcher in the early Nineties and I clearly remember the first time I saw the "Joe Pesci Show".  Of course, I knew Joe Pesci as that goofy character in Lethal Weapons and McCauley Caulkin's punching bag in the Home Alone movies.  When I got older, I watched Casino and Goodfellas, and then I started to understand the crazy violent reputation.  Recently I sat down and watched Raging Bull, which I always knew was supposed to be an American classic, but I had never seen it.  It was made in 1980 and stars Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and pretty much every other actor in every other Scorsese movie.  It is the tale of the tragic life of middle weight boxer Jake LaMotta who proceeds to act like a complete wacko to everyone around him.  Basically, now I understand that Martin Scorsese takes the same cast of characters played by pretty much the same actors and puts them in a blender and makes a plot.  It is a really cool plot with really cool characters, but all his movies have some really strong similarities, same gangsters, same dialogue.  I will say that Raging Bull is probably the most "artsy" of any Scorsese movie I have ever seen.  It is filmed in black and white, it has long scenes of rambling dialogue, and random poetic solilquies.  I will admit though, there wasn't much explanation about how De Niro transformed from a psycho hotheaded boxer to a traveling method actor.  Ultimately though, it is a classic and definitely worth watching, although it could have used a few more f bombs from Pesci and good beat down or car bombing at the end.

The Sun Also Rises

"One  generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever....The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose....The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits....All the rivers run into the the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come; thither they return again."

Ecclesiastes 1: 3-7

So tonight I finished The Sun Also Rises.  I finished it with wine, which is the right way to finish a Hemingway  novel set in Spain, Italy, or France.  You can finish Steinbeck and Faulkner novels with whiskey, but Hemingway deserves something a little special. 

This is one of the great "lost generation" novels of the 1920's.  Right up there with Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise.  It is written from the perspective of a wounded American WWI vet that is a journalist in Paris.  He goes on a trip with a bunch of friends to Spain where he goes fishing in the Pyrenees and winds up at a fiesta/bullfight in Pamplona.  They also drink and party, a lot.  It reads like a longer, more interesting Panama City spring break tale from the old college days.   I read a little about the history behind it.  He wrote it when he was 26 years old, after actually going to the real festival of St. Fermin, that is the plot is based on.  The actual people he went there with have similar names or backgrounds to the characters.  Like anyway Hemingway novel, the plot is relatively simple, but it is done right and real, to the point you know what it would be like to stand there and watch.

I am definitely not the first one to do it, but whenever I read one of the "Lost Generation" novels, I can't help but draw parallels between the young adults of the 1920's and my generation.  At the turn of the twentieth century, the world was supposed to get better, and better, forever. We were supposed to have gotten rid of all the barberry of the past.  Technology and innovation would lead us to an ever prospering  future.  This illusion was thrust upon the youth, just to have the butchery of WWI, the decadence of the 1920's, and finally the crush of the Great Depression, destroy the fairy tale they had been told to believe.  As with my generation in the late 1990's, we came of age in a world that was going to be made forever better by technology and the Internet.  I was taught in college that we had developed such a sophisticated system of economic controls, that we would never have another severe recession.  Fannie Mae was going to give us 100% home ownership.  Our nation could never be challenged militarily and the future would be peaceful because of it.  The EU was a brilliant model of the future.  I believed every bit of it, and now I realize that it all had been a huge lie.  It came crashing down on 9/11 and has pretty much not stopped since.  Just to take a look at where we are now,  assuming that a child becomes aware of their world around the age of five or so, you have to find a seventeen year old American or older to tell you what it is like to live in a nation that is not at war.  You have to find a ten year old to tell you what it is like to turn on the TV and not hear the word recession or high unemployment.  Anyway, it sucks and it would be nice if you could make it not effect you, but you can't.  It seems all the more worse because we knew it at a time when it was supposed to be right.  In the end though, I guess you have to approach it like Romero, the bullfighter in the novel.  Take something that is violent and awful and horrible to look at, and find a way to do it in a way that is right and beautiful, despite it all.  And in the real end, you have to look to the verses from Ecclesiastes that are in the novel's introduction.  I guess Ecclesiastes can probably answer a lot of angst.           

So, this was really my last major Hemingway novel left.  I try to read only one a year, it isn't like they are making more of them.  There are still several of the less popular works out there and I'll dig them up somewhere.  I really should be okay for a while anyway.

Breaking Bad and Oh Me! Oh Life! Oh the questions of these recurring,

The is the most fame Walt Whitman has gotten since Dead Poets Society.  Well, I have spent the customary 24 hour "thinking" period for the last episode of the first half of the last season of Breaking Bad.  Most of this contemplating was done while I was working in our flower beds for three hours this afternoon, because when else is the perfect time to think about the intricacies of international crime than when you are planting yews?  In any event I have come  up with a few thoughts on the future of Walt and company....

SPOILER ALERT

If you will remember that in an earlier blog I did predict that Walt would kill Mike.  I missed the events leading to it and the method, but I did get that right, so maybe I will be on track with a few more ideas/predictions:

So Hank has his first hint on Walt.  We knew this was coming for the past five years.  I find the copy of Leaves of Grass from Gail lying on the back of the toilet a little sloppy, but I can see it being overlooked.  We know from how quick Hank zeroed in on Gus that he is a really smart cop and it won't take him long to piece it all together.  The random "gambling winnings", the car purchases, the way Skylar is acting (hiding the kids), the random connection between Jesse and Walt, even going back to the incident with Jesse's car and the Tuco killing/Walt being found wandering in the road.  Of course the whole notion of Walt being a drug kingpin is ludicrous, that is the point of the whole show, so it will take him some time to come around.  Then he will check the surveillance tape of his office and he will know.  But there are several problems between him realizing this and throwing Walt in the back of a squad car.  First, he needs real evidence, not just scribbles in a book.  If Walt is really "out" (and who knows if he is), there wouldn't be much anymore.  Unless he tailed him to the storage locker where the money is.  There are no more local people to even trail, they are all out like Jesse or they are dead.  He won't get any help with it either.  Second, there is still the same reason why Skylar doesn't tell, it would ruin the family.  Third, and this might very well be the biggest factor, it would ruin his career.  Even if he brought Hank in himself, it would be impossible for the DEA to believe that this meth mastermind was running a 100 million dollar drug cartel for a year without his brother in law in charge of the DEA running protection for him.  They fired Hank's boss because he ate a few dinners at Gus's house.  Imagine what would happen to Hank?  I think Hank would be forever labeled a "dirty cop", and he knows that is a reputation that stays forever.   

So here are some predictions:

When Hank comes around, he has a "get out of town by sundown" talk with Walt.  Basically telling him that everyone will be better off if he leaves.  That is why Walt is driving a vehicle with Vermont plates in the "preview scene".  

Walt is really "out", but he comes back in it because something happens.  Maybe when he moves away, he really has nothing left, so he starts back in the business.

Lydia's role is not over.  If real trouble starts again for Walt, she will somehow be behind it.   

Something is going to happen to that gigantic pile of money in the storage unit.

Somebody is going to get that ricin poison....I was close about it still being a factor.  Walt is keeping it handy.

Something is going on with the cancer tests.  This show doesn't show random scenes for no reason.  We NEVER saw the a confirmation of the fourth season test results, it cut from the waiting room to Walt having dinner and saying everything was ok.  Now in this episode we got another test, with no disclosure of the outcome.    

Maybe, Walt will redeem himself in the end, by saving Jesse and Skylar, and taking the whole thing down someway were everybody else thinks he was a great man.  Or maybe he kills half the cast!  Guess we will just have to wait until next year.  Anyway, I am ready for The Walking Dead to start again, this kind of thinking is wearing me out!

Breaking Bad...over half through with the first half of the first half of the probably last season!

Spoiler alert....attend to your DVR first...


Holy crap!  I have no idea where this is going!  I think for the first time in the whole show, I am getting the suspicion that Walt is completely manipulating everyone around him.  I think he is making everyone do exactly what he wants, from making Jesse break up with his woman to pushing Marie away from Skylar.  What in the world did he mean with that last comment about Gus killing Victor because he flew to close to the sun????  Is he going to kill Mike????  If he does try it... I am calling this....that vile of ricin poison that he hid behind the electrical face plate is going to have something to do with.  Mike never knew about it.  Or maybe that machine gun that he buys (in the future) in the first few minutes of the first episode is going to play into it??? So far this season is the quickest paced one yet.  Unfortunately, I just read that this is going to be drug out until the summer of 2013!!!     

Woody Guthrie and 100 years of ramblin'

Today is the 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie.  If you don't know who that is, you really should.  You already know a little about him.  In elementary school you probably sung the lyrics to his best known hit, "This Land is Your Land" (which he wrote in response to listening to "God Bless America" being over played on the radio).  And you know his son Arlo's songs, "City of New Orleans" and "Alice's Restaurant".  But you have to listen to more of his work to understand his influence on modern music.  He directly influenced singers from Bob Dylan (who at the age of 19 visited Woody when he was dying, trying to learn as much as he could) to Bruce Springsteen, and his sound has indirectly influenced every folk, country, and rock song with a social message for the past eighty years.  Pretty good for a guy who traveled around the dust bowl in the 1930's playing for farmers and migrant labor.  There are dozens of his songs on iTunes.  I think the Library of Congress recordings are the best because he is being interviewed in between his songs so you can hear his story behind each one, and the sound quality is better.  My favorites are "Dirty Overhalls", "Dust Bowl Talking Blues", "Talking Fishing Blues", "Hard Traveling", "Pastures of Plenty", "Jolly Banker", "Boll Weevil Song", "Do-Ri-Me", and "Tom Joad" (that he wrote the night he saw "Grapes of Wrath").  Check it out and you won't be disappointed.
 

Death of a Salesman

I think this is my second Miller play.  I have read "The Crucible" several times, but I think one this has a whole lot more artistic stage directions and changes in chronology.  Of course, the horribly depressing nature of this story is pretty much summed up in the title, but Miller really does hit on the futile aspects of what we consider as the "American Dream".  Willy has lived his whole life on hope, despite all that has gone on around him.  All he wants is the whole world for his family and he is determined to get it through the modern world of business, despite how horrible this world treats him.   When the reality of his life; the home choked by the city (ruining his garden that he can never plant), the shrinking pay, the lost job, the lost friends, the failures of his sports hero sons, conflicts against that hope to the greatest degree ever in his life, he simply cracks and loses all hold on reality.  He lives in the past, which is the only world he handle, until eventually his delusions convince him to commit suicide.  His brother Charley, says at his funeral:

"Nobody dast blame this man.  You don't understand: Willy was a salesman.  And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life.  He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine.  He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.  And when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake.  And when you get yourself a couple of spots in your hat, and you're finished.  Nobody dast blame this man.  A salesman is got to dream, boy.  It comes with the territory."

That shoeshine and smile ultimately fail him.  This story tells us what is horribly wrong with the modern American Dream, but I have been trying to figure out what Miller is saying should be the "right" path, or the good American Dream.  I wonder if Biff (who is a ranch hand out west) and Willy's brother Ben (who tried to go to Alaska and went to Africa and became rich with a diamond mine, or at least he did in Willy's imagination) serve as the alternate to the world of appointments and groveling for nothingness that Willy's world revolves around.  At Willy's funeral, Biff repeats "He had the wrong dreams.  He never knew who he was."  Maybe  Miller is saying that our dream should be one of recklessness, of chances, of bronco riding and diamond mining, of starting for Alaska and ending up in Africa.    

Tale of Two Cities

Well it took me a while, but I finished it for the second time in my life.  The first being in high school AP English.  Of course this is one of the many great books that is wasted on stupid teenagers.  In total, my Dickens resume includes Great Expectations, Hard Times, Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol.  They are all brilliant of course, but I think that Tale of Two Cities is by far the most action packed, so much so that it could almost be considered a war book.  The chapter about the storming of the Bastille sounds like a longer version of Charge of the Light Brigade.  This was my favorite part out of that chapter, I still remember the imagery striking me when I first read it at seventeen:

"As a whirlpool of boiling water has a centre point, so all this raging circled around Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed on to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar."

Of course it has the powerful imagery, deep character development, and highly developed plot that all the rest of his work has.  It started from an obscure point and over the span of a couple of decades, bring the story fully round and ties in the the beginning, such as the end of Dr. Monette's imprisonment and later the cause behind it that dooms Darnay. It pulls obscure observations and characters from any point in the story and makes them relevant (Carton's resemblance to Darnay at the trial that saves Darnay, then later saves him again, the wood sawyer that is a spy, etc.).  It describes the violence of the revolution so well that you believe that Dickens saw it himself, which of course he didn't.  These are the things that make Dickens, in my opinion, the best plot man in all of literature.  Then of course there is the portrayal of the civilized British afloat in the sea of French barberry (never mind that the British were going to draw and quarter Darnay for treason).  And the end fight between Madam Defage and Ms. Pross is the perfect good Brit versus evil Frenchie ending.   It makes you feel proud to be British, even when you are not British.

One of the extra things that made reading this book interesting was the actual book itself, which was my mother's copy when she took senior English in 1966.  It has her name written on the spine and the back cover has definitions of certain terms in the book, such as "Old Bailey".  Also written in her handwriting on the side of the last page is  my dad's name, "Johnny".  I have no idea why.  I do know that you will never see that with an E-book, no matter how great they are for the state of reading.

Frankenstein

Well, I abandoned the Nook for a "real" book for a month or so, picking up one of my old AP English books from high school.  Now, this is a real horror story.  And it is surprisingly easy to read for being written almost 200 years ago.  Even more amazing when you consider that it was written by a 19 year old that got scared from a night of story telling (from her weirdo husband).  I can still remember reading this when I was 17 and being impacted by the description of the desolated world of the lab in the Orkneys.  And of course, the best part is that in the end, it really isn't about good vs evil, in the traditional sense like a horror movie or story would be about today.  The good vs evil fight is in the heart of humanity, seen in both Victor and the monster.  Of course, the part that definitely does not translate into modern story telling is how articulate the monster is about his emotions.   Can you imagine imagine Michael Meyers delivering a five minute monologue about his emotional needs after he kills someone?  Also, the whole Victor marrying his step sister thing wouldn't go over too well either.  

Also, I thought about how the Robert Deniro movie does a pretty good job, except that it focuses way too much on the process of actually making the monster, which the book pretty much skims over.

Not sure what to read next.  I downloaded 4,200 pages of classic poetry to my Nook (for the low price of $4.99), so I will have plenty to read for a while.  I need to focus on finishing some of my own stories.   Seriously!!!    

PS...a reference to Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in this book got me to go back and read that poem again too.

Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.