Horror and Sci-Fi Classics - The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Both of these books were part of my most recent haul of Dover Thrift Editions, and neither one is very long.

The Island of Dr. Moreau has been adapted into a movie three times. The only one I had seen was the 1996, Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer version. Needless to say, the book was much better. As far as H.G. Wells works, I had only read War of the Worlds previously and this one did not disappoint. Wells uses a well woven together adventure tale to explore the ethics of bio-engineering. You have to constantly remind yourself that this book was first published in 1896. In War of the Worlds, Wells essentially invents all of our notions of invading aliens. However; in Island of Dr. Moreau, he anticipates scientific issues that will not truly become reality for decades. And one of the ending themes, ultimately the return of the beast instincts of the animal folk, is a statement of man's ultimate inability to "cheat" nature. This is an idea that we are only now starting to accept, over 120 years later. 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde piqued my interest because in some biographical article I read about Stephen King, it mentioned that he taught a class at one time focusing on the three novels that made up the "canon of horror", which were Stoker's Dracula, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am a big fan of the first two books, so I knew that I needed to check out Dr. Jekyll. I knew very little of the story previously. I will have to admit, as far as horror books go, there is not much to fear from Mr Hyde. There is not much of a body count, mostly he just darts around and looks "odd". The suspense rests mainly in the slow discovery of his identity by Dr. Jekyll's friend, Mr. Utterson. But I  do appreciate the theme behind it all. Dr. Jekyll believed that there was essentially two separate sides to our souls, a good and an evil. He was ultimately trying to bring out the good only, but ended up becoming Mr. Hyde, which slowly took him over completely. This book doesn't have the blockbuster action of Dracula or the dark introspection of Frankenstein, but at 54 pages, it is definitely worth reading. At least I can say that I have now completed Stephen King's "canon of horror". 

The Grapes of Wrath

I think I was first motivated to read this book about 10 years ago because I read about how it had been so widely banned, most recently as 2002 in George County, Mississippi. Anything that gets folks that upset has to be worth reading. I have always believed that The Grapes of Wrath and 1984 should be required reading for every high school civics class. I really don’t know of a better source for describing the effects of out of control, tyrannical capitalism (The Grapes of Wrath) or out of control, tyrannical government (1984).

There has been a lot written about this, but being a general fan of Steinbeck, this book is written in a very different style than his other work. The actual main plot only occupies roughly half the book. The remaining portions are almost independent sermons about a myriad of topics that relate to the most recent part in the story of the Joads. Many people attribute this to the influence of his first wife Carol, who was much more politically radical than John was. If you wanted to throw a couple of criticisms out there, you could say that it gets a little preachy at times. And you could say that it unfairly portrays entire groups of people/objects unfairly. For example, all religious people are nuts, tractors are bad, banks are bad, all cops are bad, the American Legion is bad, all big farmers are evil, etc. I would defend this by saying that those points are valid only when you think of this novel as a history book, which it is not. It may be set in a real place and real time, but it is a story. And criticizing those things is about as valid as criticizing the Wizard of Oz for making all flying monkeys bad. But needless to say, it did make a lot of people in California mad when the book was released in 1939 and the John Ford movie was released in 1940.

Also, the allegories and symbolism in this novel are way more “thick” than any of his other works. Almost every small description seems to have some relation to the over arching themes of the novel. From the description of the tortoise spreading seeds, to the action of a seed drill, to the way the other children treat Ruthie when she is being selfish, to construction of the dike to hold back the flood water from the box cars, every chapter contains these devices that drive home the plight of the migrants. But one element that is very present here and continues throughout Steinbeck’s work is the idea of nature as a refuge. Nature is shown to be the only escape from man’s tyranny, albeit a temporary one. That is why Muley lives in his cave, Tom lives in the brush, and Noah walks down the Colorado river.  

There is also a wonderful economics lesson under a few of the sermons. The farmers complain about how low the prices are and that they can't afford to even have the crops picked. That is what is driving down wages. The more they lower the wages, the more price falls. Of course this is the heart of the effect of currency deflation in a recession. The prices are so bad because no one can afford to buy food. If you paid the workers more, they would buy the food, and the prices would go up. 

I have always thought of how powerful the description is of how the big land owners walk through the Hooverville camps looking for workers. They don't look for the strongest men, they look for the parents with the sickest children, because "they will work all day for a cup of flour".  Also, I love the description of how the workers organized in factory in Akron, Ohio. They were getting beaten up when they tried to unionize. Then one day they formed a Turkey Shooting Club. On a Sunday afternoon, 5,000 men marched down main street carrying rifles, went out into the country and had turkey shoot the rest of the day. Suddenly no more union busters gave them trouble.

But for some reason, one of my favorite lines has always been from Ma Joad.

"Woman can change better'n a man," Ma said soothingly. "Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head".

And then responding to Pa saying "Seems like our life's over and done."

"No, it ain't, " Ma smiled. "It ain't, Pa. An' that's one more thing a woman knows. I noticed that. Man, he lives in jerks - baby born an' a man dies, an' that's a jerk - gets a farm an' loses a farm, an' that's a jerk. Woman, it's all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain't gonna die out. People is goin' on - changin' a little maybe, but goin' right on".

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!   

Slaughter House Five - Vonnegut is a Genius and I am so over it.

So this is not the first time I have read this book.  I read it in my early 20's sometime.  I loved it.  Vonnegut pulled off the perfect anti war novel.  He really is a genius.  And what other 20th century literary great had a scene in freaking Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield?

But a couple of weeks ago, for some reason I decided to pick it up again, and this time I read it with my older mind and thoughts.  I was disappointed.  Most books that I re-read as I get older, I find that I appreciate more.  But there is something about this one that worked the opposite way.  Over 10 years ago, I got Billy Pilgrim.  I got that he was an outsider and saw horrible things that nobody else got. It made him sad and be alone all the time and slowly drove him into believing that he was living on another planet, living in an alien zoo with a 20 year old Hollywood actress.  So, Billy Pilgrim's innocence and his descent into an alternate reality showed how horrible the rest of society was.

But this time when I read his story, I just didn't see it. Even though Vonnegut alludes to Billy Pilgrim being an allegory for Christ, he just isn't.  Billy Pilgrim is just a self absorbed goof-ball.  He does not show one bit of compassion or even general human interest toward basically anyone other than his insane author friend, Kilgore Trout.  Such lines like these really struck me as summing it up:

When his mother is visiting him in the hospital and talking to his only friend in the bed beside him: "And on and on it went - that duet between the dumb praying lady and big hollow man who was so full of loving echoes."

Of his mother "She was a perfectly nice, standard issue, brown haired, white woman with a high-school education."

Of his son Robert: "Billy liked him, but didn't know him very well.  Billy help couldn't help suspecting that there wasn't much to know about Robert."

He is traumatized by visiting the Grand Canyon as a child.  Although his wife is loving and devoted, he hates her.  He hates his fellow soldiers.  He hates America. He pretty much has contempt for everyone he meets.

Who thinks this shit? And the more I thought about it, I realized there were some really good parallels in other literature in this era (50's and 60's).  Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22, and Fahrenheit 451, all display similar themes, although not quite as obnoxiously.  It pretty much goes like this, "I am different and smart and completely miserable.  If you are happy in this world you must be stupid and worthless.  So, I am going to just wander around and complain and mope.  And this is going to so justify my existence."  

In fact, at the end of all of these books, the protagonist ends up living in some type of isolation (mental hospital, alien zoo, Sweden, out lands with other hobos), away from all of the stupid, common folks.

What is the motivation behind all of this?  Sure, bad stuff happens to Billy (his father and wife dying, stuff he sees in war).  And encounters bad people.  So freaking what?  That is life!  But he does absolutely nothing, no action what so ever.  There is nothing new about the "individual versus society" theme, but in earlier periods the struggle was treated different.  The individual actually did something.  Tom Joad (Grapes of Wrath) saw a lot of bad shit too.  Know what he did?  He freaking killed a bad guy!!!  Imagine that! I guess I just have a different mindset about the world when it come to literature.  I want to see things how they are, the beauty and ugliness in all of it.  Spare me the pseudo intellectual judgment.  You aren't necessarily and better or worse than the others so give it up.  Do something!

So to summarize this rant....It is the freaking Grand Canyon.  Enjoy it!

  

Six months and 1,000 pages with David Copperfield: Trot and Agnes got together. Yeah, that's the plot.

Some books just linger and linger and linger.  After I finished all of my CPA stuff, I decided to get back into serious reading.  One night around Christmas I was flipping channels and saw the end of Cider House Rules movie (the one with Spiderman and Alfred from Batman) and in the end of course it shows Spiderman reading David Copperfield to the orphans.  Something about it caught my attention.  Maybe I needed to expand my Dickens horizon?  I had read Hard Times, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol, but it had been a while since I had tackled a new classic so I figured that this one would be a good one to try as any.  Especially since I have always found Dickens easy to read.  I also decided to go with the Kindle version, so it only cost a couple of dollars.  So in January I started out on my adventure learning about Davy Copperfield's life.

The novel is Dickens only major work written in first person and is supposed to be the most autobiographical.  It covers his life from birth to somewhere around early adulthood.  If there is an overarching theme, it is the story of the orphan striving.  By orphan, I mean not only those whom have lost both parents, but those who have been cast off by society.  Essentially, all the main characters are orphans of some sort or have taken in orphans of some sort.  David, Emily, Ham, Steerforth, Dora, Agnes, and Miss Dartel are all orphans proper. Ms. Gumbridge is a "lone lorn creature".  David's great aunt is a scorned woman, with no close family, trying to find redemption.  Before she takes in David, she has taken in Mr. Dick, who is kind hearted mentally ill man that has no family.  Mr. Micawber and crew are cast offs from the economy, despite his wits he is unable to keep a job or stave off creditors.  Mr. Peggoty has created a legacy in his town by taking in orphans of lost fishermen.

And in true Dickens fashion, the plot is full of surprises and twists among the dozens of characters.  There are bad guys with bad guy sounding names; Mr. Murdstone, Mr. Creakle, Uriah Heep, and Littimer.  And also in Dickens fashion, in the end most of the bad guys get justice and the good guys persevere.  It just takes a long time to get there.  Dickens is also great with imagery and this book is no exception. I always have my favorite descriptive screens.  In Tale of Two Cities, it the storming of the Bastille.  In Christmas Carol, it is the descriptions of the December street scenes in London.  In Great Expectations, it is the description of Miss Havisham's house.  And in David Copperfield, it is the description of the ship carrying immigrants to a new life in Australia.     

Well, it was fun but I am glad to have this one behind me.  I am a little done with the rambling lonely lover(s) striving for happiness and a place in the cruel world. I think my summer reading will involve a little Hemingway action. 

The Road, The Walking Dead, and a Defense of the Good Apocalypse Story

 

                            A Deleted Scene From "Love Actually"

 

 

 

 

 

In honor of The Walking Dead starting again this weekend, I have just finished re-reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  It is the story of a father and son traveling and searching for hope in a post-apocalyptic world (actually if you know a little of McCarthy's University of Tennessee history, it is very apparent that a section of the book occurs on Hwy 441, through Gatlinburg and over Newfound Gap)   Long story short, The Road is a great book written by whom I believe is the greatest living American writer, but if you don't want to take the time to read it, the movie is a pretty good adaptation.  Besides being the most powerful story about parenting I have ever read (next to Hemingway's Islands in the Stream), it is absolutely the most dark apocalypse story I have read or watched.  The movie does not quite capture how bad it is in the book, but I would say it makes the world of The Walking Dead look like the Magic Kingdom.  The details are really too unsettling to repeat.  Anyway, the whole thing got me pondering just what makes the apocalypse story so compelling for us?  They are typically pretty horribly depressing and even when they end well...they don't end well.  Why do we keep coming back for more? 

I read an article on Cracked.com a while ago that shared several popular beliefs that are holding humanity back, (http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-popular-beliefs-that-are-holding-humanity-back/).  One of the beliefs was that we are constantly living at the "end times", just a few years away from the end of the world.  This idea is not just something for the evangelical viewer's of the 700 Club or conspiracy theorists on Nat Geo's Preppers.  This belief has transcended all religions and cultures for centuries.  Today our popular culture is awash with apocalypse stories that are not religious in any way.  As a society we are fixated on the idea.  And I understand the point about how this belief is harmful.  It makes our priorities very skewed  toward the short term.  Why worry about the environment or education or fixing social security?  It's not like any one is going to be around to appreciate our efforts anyway.  I would suppose that even if you wanted to condemn the idea a little more, you could say that our end times beliefs/obsessions are really a meeting of our super ego and our sense of mortality; as in "I am going to die, so why should I think that the world continues beyond me?"  But despite these arguments against it, I think there is some real value in a good apocalypse story.

 

1) It helps us shed just a little bit of our obsessive materiality, even if only for a minute or two.  We live our entire lives accumulating all of this "stuff".  To paraphrase George Carlin (I think), we buy all of this stuff, then we buy a house to put it in, then we buy more stuff, then we have to buy a bigger house, just to fit our stuff.  Furthermore, as Americans, many of us have no real idea what it is really like to need anything (other than more stuff or a bigger house to put it in).  Food for us never ends.  It just keeps coming from the pizza place or the grocery store.  Water just comes out of the kitchen sink.  Warm air just comes out of the vents....well as long as you have money anyway.  Apocalypse stories get to turn all of that on its head.  Suddenly food, warmth, and shelter have actual meanings, and money can't buy much at all.  I like the scene in the movie version of "The Road", where the man and the boy are walking through a department store and stepping on what used to be tens of thousands of dollars of gold and diamonds.  Because despite what all those gold bug commercials on Fox News tell you, if when the real crap hits the fan, you can't eat your horde of gold.

 

2) It reminds us of our mortality and our frailty, in a good way.  It is kind of bi-polar I guess, but when we aren't thinking that the world is ending, we think that we are the center of the world.  Of course, we aren't, and getting reminded of it occasionally, via viruses, zombies, or aliens, does us some good.  Being surrounded in an environment that threatens our very existence brings us down a few notches.  I could try to explain more, but I think Jack London does a good job in his intro to "The White Silence".  He is writing about the quiet of the Arctic night...

 

All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass, the slightest whisper seem sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrightened at the sound of his own voice.  Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more.  Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance.  And the fear of death, of God, of the universe, comes over him - the hope of the Resurrection and the Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.

 

3) It reminds us about the things in our lives that have real worth.  Sometimes I think this is a real horrible sounding cliché, but it is my horrible sounding cliché.  When you look at a candle flame in the normal light, it doesn't seem like much at all.  But when you have a blackout and it has been pitch black inside for a while, a candle flame can be so bright that it hurts your eyes.  I think by making the surrounding world dark, we can see how bright and great some things are that we normally don't notice as much.  The relationships that we skim over every day between commutes and work and channel surfing, can suddenly become so much brighter when we "dim the lights".  I think this is the strongest draw of the good apocalypse story.  Blowing things up or killing whatever gets old pretty quick.  The best stories are centered on relationships or on the basic fight to hold on to our humanity.  A good reference for this is back to The Walking Dead, does the title refer to the zombies or the survivors?  What does being alive really mean?  What does being a human mean?  If all you do is wander around and search for food constantly while killing anything that moves, what is the difference?  A good apocalypse story makes us face these questions.

 

Anyway, like I do with most things, I am probably over analyzing this.  But if you wanted to get real philosophical about it, a little end of the world now and again is probably a good thing.  But it's probably best to do it with a little more appreciation, humility, and love, and maybe a little less gunfire, samurai sword work, and exploding zombie heads (although those things are still pretty freaking cool).

 

Reservoir Dogs.....yeah, I finally watched it.

Hey, take it easy or I'll never get to hang out on an asteroid with Ben Affleck!

 

 

I was very embarrassed to say that I have never seen this one.  It is one of the most influential 90's movies ever made.  This was the start of it all. Before Django, Kill Bills, Inglorious Bastards, Death Wish, Pulp Fiction, Dusk till and Dawn, and even Jackie Brown.  It was 1992, I was twelve years old when this came out and  a few years later I remember the coolest people in high school talking about it.  Of course, like everyone else, they didn't discover it until after Pulp Fiction.  So anyway, I finally watched it and even as a Quentin Tarantino fan in general, I was impressed.  There were so many elements he pioneered here that resonated through the remainder of his work.  Such as:

The cool camera angles that drag you along the action.  You are either standing way back as an observer or you are standing on the shoulder of one of the actors.

Overall lack of soundtrack behind dialogue.  Tarantino has always known that music distracts from powerful dialogue.

The long, character developing dialogue regarding TV, music, movies, etc.

 

Starting the movie at a restaurant.

The name "Vega".

The random descriptive graphics "Mr. White", "Mr. Orange" to set offside stories.

The way they plan robberies with the different roles, just without the "honeybunney".

The messed up chronology....the beginning is kind of the ending.

A super weird soundtrack of obscure 50's, 60's, and 70's music.

The only thing I didn't catch was a reference to Tennessee, which is most of his movies (Tarantino is from Knoxville). Yup, it is all there, so now in 2014 I can officially declare myself a 90's kid, and a cool kid in high school of course.

Islands in the Stream by Hemingway

So keeping with my Hemingway rotation (one book a year, alternating between one I have read and one I haven't, knowing that eventually, they will all have to be repeats), I pulled this one off my shelf a few months ago.  This one is the the first of the posthumously published Hemingway books, released in 1970, nine years after his death.   There has been so much stuff going on this fall it seems to have taken me a ridiculously long time to finish it.  This is my second time reading it.  The first time was maybe in 2009, and even though I wasn't a parent then, I knew it was a powerful story about being a father.  But I wanted to go back and read it now, knowing what I know and see if I saw the same things on my first read.  Of course, I saw even more.  

SYNOPSIS/POSSIBLE SPOILERS:

The book is divided into three parts.  The first part is shows a relatively famous painter, Thomas Hudson (which is of course Hemingway, just like he is the primary male character, protagonist, in every one of his novels) spending a summer on an island in the Bahamas with his three sons (one from his first wife, two from his second).  The second part follows a day where he goes to a bar in Havana and meets his first ex-wife.  All of his sons have been killed by this point.  The last part is him commanding a boat on a covert U-boat hunting operation in the Caribbean in WWII. 

The plot is not fast moving, but like in all Hemingway books, the slower the pace the more real and true the content.  I have a lot of favorite scenes, but probably the best when his sons are spear fishing in the clear water of the gulf stream (that is the stream in title) and Thomas is standing on the bridge of his boat with a rifle, a .256 Mannlicher, looking for sharks because he knows they love the conditions that they are in.  Hemingway always writes well about guns.  Thomas sees a long hammerhead coming slowly in towards his boys.  He shoots at it and misses, three times, and just as he is taking the last shot he has, his alcoholic, aged deckhand/cook opens up with a Thompson sub machine gun, raking the shark from head to tail, riddling it with so many .45 holes that it rolls on its belly and sinks.  Thomas couldn't stop the danger from reaching his children, instead relying on a random happenstance(an old drunk with a gun that he wasn't even suppose to have) to save them. A month after his boys leave he gets a telegram saying that the two youngest were killed in a car wreck in Paris, with their mother.

One of my favorite lines come when Thomas and his crew are very close to the Germans.  They have captured their boat and and are trying to find them in this string of mangrove keys.  After one of his crew goes off to sweep an island alone, another crew member is talking to Thomas about him:

"I'm sorry we haven't been friends."

"Everybody is friends when things are bad enough."

"I'm going to be friends from now on."

"We're all going to do a lot of things from now on," Thomas Hudson said. "I wish from now on would start." 

So what is this book about?  The islands in the stream are the characters.  Like the keys in the gulf stream they stand together, but somehow alone too.  As fear and pain and tragedy rush around them they always stand.  They meet others and love and are loved, but still they stand by themselves.  I think in a lot of ways this is the truth about our own lives.  The last line is a good one.  Thomas is shot and dying on his boat.  Willie, a  older crew member who fights well but is a little unstable and gets picked on, is kneeling beside him.  

"Tommy," Willie said. "I love you, you son of a bitch, and don't die."

Thomas Hudson looked at him without moving his head.

"Try and understand if it isn't too hard."

Thomas Hudson looked at him.  He felt far away now and there were no problems at all.  He felt the ship gathering her speed and lovely throb of her engines against his shoulders blades which rested hard against the boards.  He looked up and there was the sky that he had always loved and he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his position a little to lessen the pain.  The engines were around three thousand now, he thought, and they came through the deck and into him.

"I think I understand, Willie," he said.

"Oh shit," Willie said.  "You never understand anybody that loves you."

Next to Last Ever Breaking Bad blog!

So unless something unusual derails me from the 11:00pm encore showing tomorrow night (I will be on the road during the first show), tonight is the last night of Breaking Bad questions.  By Monday, everything will be answered.  It is a great story, but I think what has made it so exceptional is that it has always kept me guessing.  I am not sure that ever quite knew where it was going and it always kept me coming back to see.  I remember back in 2009 when I was flipping through the channel on our 13 inch "dorm room" TV upstairs and I caught a piece a re-run from the first season.  It was the part where Jesse tries to melt the drug dealer body in the tub instead of the plastic container that Walt told him to use and the half acid melted body falls through the ceiling.  I was hooked from there on.  I remember the episodes that kept me up for hours just trying to absorb what happened.  My favorite of these were Hank's shootout with Tucco, the bomb on the turtle, and Hank's shootout with the brothers.  I remember watching the end of the fourth season and seeing the "lilly of the valley" plant by Walt's pool at the end and the hair actually standing up on the back of my neck.  All this past week I have been occasionally watching the past episodes as they have aired them in order (I was finally able to see the one pivotal episode I somehow missed, which was Walt watching Jane die) and I could not be struck by how everyone's life has been completed ruined.  It started with the nice janitor that got fired in the second or third episode and it has progressed through the entire cast.  No one has escaped it.

 

But now it is over.  And by the way this last part of the fifth season has gone, I am ready.  The story needs to conclude.  It has gotten just too dark and hopeless now for any kind real plot turns to be left.  After Andrea was killed like that last week, there is just not much hope left.  They don't even show stuff like that in movies.  What happens tomorrow night is just going to be the epilogue.  No one is "getting away" with anything now.  Everyone (including me) hopes for Jesse to be saved somehow, but I am not sure it will happen.  If Walt does save him, it will be by accident, I don't think there is anything left to be redeemed. We'll find out soon enough.  I guess the show really has followed through, I am still guessing, all the way to the end.  But I do stand by my ricin prediction (let the record show it was made like two years ago).....somebody's gonna get it!   

Breaking Bad: You Should Tread Lightly

                      I'll take "Who is getting the ricin." for $100

 

 

If you haven't joined the other 6 million of us that watched Sunday, your DVR is calling you name.  Get on it! SPOILERS PRESENT!

 

Well, it happened.  And I am so glad it did.  The conversation/confrontation between Walt and Hank happened.  We knew it was going to eventually happen for the past four years (since the start of the second season) , and I have envisioned it countless times.  The main reason that I am glad that it happened in this episode was that I didn’t want to watch Walt and Hank play a cat and mouse game for the next three or four weeks.  I didn’t want to see a constant back and forth of “Is he going to find this?” or “Does Walt know?”, complete with crafty cliff hangers.  Now, it is all out in the open.  And where does the show go for the last seven weeks?  I have no freaking idea, and that is why Breaking Bad is the best thing ever on TV.

A few more observations:

1)      We already pretty much knew this from the first part of season five and most of season four, but Walt is a complete monster and you cannot believe anything he says to anybody.  Do we really know that he is “out” of the meth game?  Other than what he says, what proof do we have? (the same way he was clear of cancer for the first part of season five)  And he lies to everybody.  There is no character that he confides in or has an earnest conversation with.  Every single thing he says to anybody has some kind of manipulative pretext to it. 

2)      Nobody is safe.  In the first couple of seasons, the “bad drug dealers” were the ones in danger of Walt’s calculative murder methods.  Now, as Jesse has already figured out (he is the only one I think that truly knows it), nobody is safe from Walt, with the exception of Skylar and his kids.  Walt would kill Hank, Marie, Saul or anybody else in his way and not think twice about it.  I would like to think he would still not kill Jesse, but I don’t know. 

3)      The only way Walt is going down, ever, is either by cancer, or from somebody who does not underestimate him.  The entire series shows how a middle aged high school chemistry teacher builds a drug empire using one constant method;  no matter how ruthless he becomes, he still appears to others like a middle aged high  chemistry school teacher (even though the Aztec has been replaced by the Charger).   This has been happening since Walt killed the two “bad drug dealers” in the RV and he has been steadily working his way up the food chain. Walt took out Gus and Mike; a crazy successful drug lord and a crazy successful mercenary/hitman that always stayed one step ahead of their competitors, because they never understood how dangerous Walt really was.  I think by this point in the series, the only logical course of action for every remaining character is to catch the next Russian rocket to the International Space Station and wait for the show to end.  Of course, that would leave us just seven hours of watching Walt wander around a car wash, shot using cool camera angles.  But that would still be better than watching the 22nd season of the Kardashians.          

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (no spoliers)

 

 

I finally got through this one, for the second time.  Apparently I went through a period where I wrote the date that I finished the book on the back cover.  For Catch 22, it was March 12, 2003, just eight days before the Iraq war started.  Looking back, I think it definitely shaped the way I viewed the ensuing foolishness.  Catch- 22 is follows the tale of Yosarrian, a bombardier stationed in Italy in WWII.  He observes the inane nature of the world, not just life in the military, but everywhere else touched by the stupidity of man, except for Sweden (that is like the paradise of sanity Yosarrian aspires to reach)  It was as good as I remembered it, but I had forgotten how slow the plot goes.  In essence, out of 450 pages, the first 350 pages are sketches of the lives of a couple of dozen characters, with minimal focus on chronology.  It is hard to know what was past and what is present in reference with the other tracts of the other characters.  The last 100 pages really advance the story to its conclusion.  Despite it's humorous slant (kind of M*A*S*H like), there are some incredibly powerfully descriptive images of war; the fear before the raid on Bologna (everyone smelled of formaldehyde), Kid Sampson getting cut in two by a plane, Snowden spilling his secret on Yossarian (one reason why I thought that the NSA Snowden was made up) and Yosarrian's last trip through Rome.  The other cool thing about this book are the quotes.  There are a ton of really cool ones.  Here are some of my favorites:

"She was a crazy mathematics major from the Wharton School of Business who could not count to twenty-eight each month without getting into trouble."

 

"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."

 

"Nately's mother, a descendant of the New England Thorntons, was a Daughter of the American Revolution.  His father was a Son of a Bitch."

 

"The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves.  What a welcome sight a leper must have been!"

What is Catch-22?  It is the "catch" that explains how we deal with our problems through airtight anti logic.  Such as: Orr would be crazy to fly anymore missions and sane if he didn't; but if he was sane then he had to fly them.  If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. 

Sound crazy right?  But this is exactly how our society argues every problem we encounter:

Why is everyone so poor?  Because unemployment is high.  Why is unemployment high?  Because everyone is so poor!

Why is health insurance so expensive?  Because enough people don't pay in.  Why don't enough people pay in?  Because it is so expensive!

Why is public education not good?  Because everyone that can afford it has put their kid in private school.  Why did they put their kids in private school?  Because public education is not good!

Why is crime so high?  Because there are no jobs and people are poor.  Why are there no jobs here?  Because the crime rate is so high!

 

We live in a world of Catch-22, where the solution to and cause of all problems are just another problem with the exact same attributes.  It results in a crappy society, but great cable news network ratings.  Kind of reminds me of what Yossarian and Doc Daneeka said about it.

"That is some catch, that Catch -22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

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!!!