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.