A Christmas Carol: The Creepy Directors Cut

My Favorite

There are just a handful of stories that have truly stood the test of time and held a place in our common culture of Christmas.  You could place Rudolph, Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch, and maybe even A Christmas Vacation in the lexicon.  We all know them backwards and forwards. We watch them each year and enjoy them like we did as children. 

But the top of the Christmas story list has to be occupied by A Christmas Carol.  Essentially a short story that Charles Dickens cranked out over the course of a few weeks in the fall of 1843, it has been re-made and re-made and re-made so many times in plays, film, and TV, that it is has become difficult to even remember what parts were in what adaptation.  Was that scene with Bill Murray, Michael Cain, George C. Scott, or Scrooge McDuck?    

Because obviously I am a huge book nerd, as evidenced by this blog site, every few years or so I sit down and read the original.  It doesn't take very long.  My copy is 68 pages.  The $1 price tag is still on it.  And every time I read it, I am reminded that there are just some parts that intentionally get left out of all the movies and cartoons. They all involve the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.  Here are the creepiest parts:

1) The part where Scrooge watches the thieves sell his possessions, the last of the thieves stole the shirt off his dead body, and switched it with a cheaper shirt.

2) When Scrooge asks "Is any person in town, that feels emotion caused by this man's death?", he is shown a family who he was about to foreclose on.  When the word of Scrooge's death comes, they all get really happy.

3) Scrooge has to also stand over the vision of his own corpse, laying on his bed, bedroom ripped apart by thieves, as animals  that want to eat him scratch at the door.

4) That part where the Cratchit's are so sad?  Tiny Tim's dead body is still upstairs in his bed.  Bob goes up to sit by it.

Merry Christmas!!!!  God Bless Us, Every One!

Dracula...my Halloween season book that I finished after Thanksgiving

This is probably my second time reading Dracula, but I picked to be my official scary book of the fall.  I was possibly influenced by my recent consumption of LORE podcasts.  In one episode on ghost hunters, the host discusses how in popular culture, the main characters of Dracula, Jonathan, Mina, and Lucy, are far overshadowed by our fascination with Van Helsing.  Because deep down, we all want to be monster slayers, or in this case, vampire hunters.

One of the things I love with this book is that it really good late nineteenth century British literature that doesn't try to be incredibly deep, or a "classic".  It is just a really good adventure story.  It is a scary tale, that is further improved by the shifting first person narrative.  All good ghost stories are told from the first person.  It makes them so much more believable. 

Of course this book essentially gave birth to every thing we associate with the modern vampire story, however the 1897 vampires were significantly stronger.  People forget that Dracula can come out in the daylight, he is just weak.  He can also shift his human appearance, shape shift into animals, turn into a mist to go through cracks in walls, command wolves, and influence the weather.  When he attacks people, it can go on for weeks or months before he finally turns them. And the corner stone of fighting vampires, is the Holy Host, wafer. Yes that method is of course too religious for modern tales, but in nineteenth century Britain, that was serious ammunition.    

Random thoughts: The Keanu Reeves 90's movie wasn't that great of adaptation, (for instance, the real Count is much more frightening than Gary Oldman), but in every Van Helsing part in the book, I pictured Sir Anthony Hopkins. Also, now I really want a Kukri knife; because you never know when the Count might rise again.

Crime and Punishment...why did I do this again?

I guess by late spring I had read several non fiction books and I was looking for a change in pace.  For some reason or other I picked up Crime and Punishment again.  Also for some reason, I wrote in the book when I finished it for the first time.  I finished it on November 22, 2002, at 12:30 am.    I must have been proud.  I was living in Peach Tree apartments in Martin and spending my lunches at the park in Union City where I probably read most of this.   I was proud again on August 3, 2017 at 11:00 pm.  It took me most of the summer. When you say, hey this is a Dostoevsky book that was translated from Russian to English, it makes in sound hard.  But in reality, if you can read hard books written in English, you can read any translated book.  English is the hardest.  

Anyway, a few take aways....Raskolnikov is a total self absorbed asshole for 503 pages of this book, then falls in love with Sonia while he is a prisoner in Siberia, then becomes possibly normal just at the end of the story, page 504.  But even in his transformation with love, we really don't know if he actually feels bad for murdering two people.  

The interrogation by Porfiry Petrovitch heavily reminded me of Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Bastards.  He starts off as your friend in a far direction and works his way in.

Apparently people in Russia have two separate names, a formal type and an casual type, like a nickname.  That, and the names that seem very similar, can make following the plot a little tricky.

What makes this book so long is not the page count, but the lack of short, declarative, narrative.  There are many series of pages with no paragraph breaks, much less narrative quotes.  

I am not going to write an essay on the genius of Dostoevsky, he definitely took care of business.  His novels read like a psychology and philosophy text book with a plot.  My favorite lines are the zombie apocalypse dream he describes to Sonia in the last few pages.  

Anyway, I am ready to move on to a little easier pace of books.  Maybe I will get back with old Raskolnikov, Sonia, Dounia, and company in another 15 years or so. 

The War of the Worlds

I think in the process of getting older I have endeavored to appreciate the pioneers in creativity.  Like when you listen to a Chuck Berry song, it is easy to go, "Sounds like normal rock n roll", but the thing is, in the mid to late 1950's, nobody was playing the guitar like that.  When you watch the original Star Wars, it is easy to say, "The special effects are ok", but the thing is, in the late 1970's, that was a huge leap in movie making.

So, in that same line I try to appreciate the real pioneers of Science Fiction.  SciFi (and it's close cousin, Horror)  is one of those genres that is done so poorly, so often, that is is easy to dismiss it as pop culture junk.  But if you seek out the original creators and their original work, such as Shelley, Stoker, Wells, Verne, Matheson, etc., you will find some great work that stood equal with their peers in the 19th and 20th centuries.  And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, these guys are the most flattered writers in the Western Hemisphere.  Their ideas have been copied and re-hashed so many times it is mind boggling to consider it. 

So I picked up The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells a few weeks ago.  This was my first Wells novel.  I have to say that I didn't know much about the story other than the old tale about the radio broadcast in 1938 that made a real state of emergency and I have seen the Tom Cruise re-make.  Which has some narration by Morgan Freeman so of course it is good.  Anyway, I was really impressed with the far reaching ideas that all started with Wells.  This book was published in 1898.  The high tech accomplishments at the time were the Maxim machine gun, the bicycle, and the glider.  There was no powered flight.  There was no space travel.  Yet somehow he almost essentially invented the idea of the alien invasion, the flying disk, the tentacles that grab people, the idea that aliens would have over developed brains and communicate through telepathy, the ray gun, and a host of other alien invasion/apocalypse ideas that have permeated every piece of SciFi over the past century.  I was particularly  struck by the tentacle scene in the house when the curate is killed.  It seemed straight out of The Abyss.  His visions of London could be in an episode of The Walking Dead.  The conflicts between the humans and the aliens could be straight from Independence Day or 10 Cloverfield Lane.  And although I didn't expect to have this opinion, the Tom Cruise adaptation is actually not that bad of job. 

Anyway, I plan to continue my exploration of the roots of SciFi.  I think some Verne is next on my list!