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.