It’s a late afternoon in August and the shadows are growing deeper under the trees.
The Valley – A Short Story
It was a dark November afternoon. Ice-cold rain fell in sheets. A stark wind whipped at the man’s coat. He stood on a dirt road overlooking a wooded valley, its canopy billowing like an ocean in the wind. Beyond the valley rose vast hills, glowing gold and amber through the gloom.
The Hobbit: Adaptation and Image
Adaptation
Filmmaker Peter Jackson wowed me as a teenager with his Lord of The Rings Trilogy in the early aughts. He took massive books that I knew well and loved deeply, majorly condensed them, added a bunch of crazy action scenes and confounding character changes, and still somehow won my heart and made what I felt were good adaptations that captured both the basic plot and the spirit of Tolkien’s three books. Now Jackson is back at it with The Hobbit, the prequel to his trilogy and what I thought would be an easy adaptation for him to get right. But I was very wrong.
Dearest Ray
Ray Bradbury died today at the age of 91. I left this rocket with some yellow carnations that looked like dandelions in downtown Waukegan tonight, near a mural depicting his smiling face. I grew up in Waukegan IL, playing in the same ravines that Ray did as a child. I always dreamed of meeting him and talking about life with him and having him read my poetry and give me his honest opinion about it. He revolutionized my whole outlook on life and art. His prose powerfully displayed the intense poetry of God’s creation. I read him so much that it seemed he was in my head. Sometimes he felt like the closest friend I ever had. I’m going to miss him a lot.
“Dearest Ray
You will be greatly missed
I wish I could have met you
I pray you are in everlasting Rocket Summer Country”
Candid Classics: The Jungle and Unjust Justice
I’ve been reading a lot of classics lately, and I thought I’d do some rather candid reviews of them. Here’s my first.
The Jungle
1906. By Upton Sinclair
I just finished reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It’s a very well written piece of social commentary and a powerful work of propaganda. Ninety percent of the novel I can get behind. In it, Sinclair brilliantly tells the tale of the immigrant man Jurgis and his downward spiral through the dante-esque levels of corruption and greed that plagued American industry and society at the time. In dramatically charged, tragic yet entertaining prose, Sinclair realistically portrays life in the slums of Chicago, using the character of Jurgis as a vehicle for the reader to explore the foul strata of turn-of-the century working-class American society. Jurgis works in a slaughterhouse, a fertilizer plant, and a harvester factory; he becomes a jailbird, a bum, a charity case, a criminal, a small-time politician, a strike-buster, and finally a socialist. Throughout his adventures, the reader is shown an intricate web of injustice and corruption, and the human suffering and destruction it brings. The last ten percent is a rosy advertisement for the socialist party and the heaven-on-earth state it promises its followers. This is the part I can’t get behind.
"And Another Thing" Book Review
I immensely enjoyed and was immensely annoyed by Eoin Colfer’s new book, “And Another Thing,” his reverent yet irreverent love offering to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series. I’ve always respected Colfer as a writer. His ideas are fresh and his stories are lean and fast paced, never wasting time with heavy exposition or overly detailed descriptions. That’s why I was so surprised by the slow, almost dragging pace of this, his first book for adults. There were moments when I wanted to skip ahead a few pages–especially when he dragged out the long and often pointless Guide entries.
In Adam’s last Hitchhiker book, our heroes were left on an exploding Earth, clearly all very dead. “And Another Thing” finds them all mysteriously at the end of long and full lives, looking back with some confusion on the past. This mystery is soon, and brilliantly solved and the action catapults into . . . three very long and dull subplots that don’t seem to go anywhere. Adams often had random and very anti-climatic things happen in his stories, but at least the action didn’t let up. I think Colfer has confused Adam’s “anything can and will happen” approach to storytelling with an “anything can and will be explained in long and pointless exposition while the characters sit around and do nothing” one. Arthur Dent, for instance, spends the majority of the book sitting on a bed talking to a computer.
The characters are also a bit skewed. Though their voices are largely intact, they don’t always act the right way. Zaphod is dumb, but this time he’s too dumb, Arthur and Ford sit around and are not funny, Eddie the shipboard computer has been replaced by a very obnoxious and confusing “Left Brain,” Marvin is no where to be found and Colfer has dredged up a minor character and done so much modification to him, that he’s unrecognizable, and not half as fun. The best characters in this book are of Colfer’s own creations. Thor the Thunder-god is strangely coherent and meek, with a hammer that plays rock music while he fights, and the small group of refugee human retirees and their personal trainers is on par with the sanitary specialist from “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.”
I’ll admit, it felt good to be back in Adams’s universe, and I had forgotten how much I missed theses characters. There’s also some true comic genius at work here. There were four or five moments where I found myself laughing out loud. There are also sections so dull, so overwritten and expositional, that it feels as if this was still the writer’s first draft. If Colfer writes book 7, which I hope he will, he should definitely focus more on plotting and less on aping Douglas’s Guide narration, as good as he can be at it about half the time.
SLIGHT SPOILER: Those who were depressed by the nihilistic ending of “Mostly Harmless” are in for another bad surprise. Colfer really hasn’t fixed anything.
And Another Thing . . .
The sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book came out today. And I was there. And I had my towel.
Acclaimed children’s novelist Eoin Colfer is picking up where Adam’s left off in his series, with all the main characters dead. Adams, who admitted that he was depressed when he wrote the last book, reportedly intended to write a sixth book, bringing all of his beloved characters back. This is that book. Regrettably, Adams, who died in 2001 of a heart attack, is not the author.
I really like Colfer and I really want to like this book. But I already know it just won’t be the same. Adams had such amazingly witty and intelligent style. Colfer, who is a solid writer, just can’t compare. He’s even said that he thinks of this book as just a big work of fan fiction. Fingers crossed. I’ll post a review when I’m done reading.
Death Eaters Are Alive And Well And Living in Greenville
(But apparently some people think they share more in common with Dumbledore.)
The Epic Quest of The Book Hunter and the Tragic Demise of Suprema
In the tradition of a generation of bloggers, I will now depart on a long-winded discussion of some of my hobbies.
I love book hunting! There are two thrift stores right off campus and both of them sell softcovers for fifty cents a piece! It’s really the thrill of the hunt that I love the most, digging through dusty piles of outdated computer manuals, crummy romance fiction, and hundreds of worn copies of Clancy, Crichton, Grisham, Ludlum, Koontz, and King. On a shelf of hundreds of books there may only be one I want, but finding it is half the fun!
I went book hunting today and brought back five treasures for two dollars and fifty cents! Brave New World, Howard’s End, Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and The Inheritors by William Golding, who also wrote Lord of the Flies. I started reading The Inheritors, which is about cavemen facing new, more human rivals. Definitely against my worldview, but Golding’s portrayal of darkened humanity seeking light is beautiful.
I was to the third chapter at Starbucks, drinking a free drink, when a furious thunder shower hit. I stayed longer than I wanted to, till the storm blew over, then walked to CVS to pick up a battery for my recently acquired $10 camera.
My Suprema has been kind of a pain lately. I like the image it produces, but its tiny and useless LCD screen sucks up all the battery life. The battery died after only a few uses and I discovered at CVS that buying a new one would cost me more than half of what the camera is worth! While I was trying to think of a solution to my dilemma my eyes fell on a little Vivitar mini digital camera the store was selling, the exact model I had years ago that I loved so much. $9, no dumb battery-sucking features, a sturdier design, and it runs ten times longer on a cheap triple A!
I’m sad to say that I purchased it, and that my little blue Suprema is being retired. I miss you already little guy . . . NOT! Here are some test pics I’ve shot already. A little blurrier and more pixelated, but I can live with it.
Rice Boy
I recently stumbled upon a web graphic novel called Rice Boy, and was pleasantly surprised by a beautiful and exciting read. Evan Dahm, the comic’s creator, is a solid artist with a strong sense of narrative and a crazy imagination.
The comic is about the troubled land of Overside, a land filled with a multitude of strange races and wonderful locations, and a little bulbous-headed, armless being named Rice Boy who may just be the prophesied one. This little guy goes on a long and arduous journey in an attempt to save his world and bring peace to warring factions.
All the characters are unique and wonderfully drawn. I particular like T.O.E. (The One Electronic), an ancient robot-man who has been seeking the prophesied one for thousands of years. He’s a lot like a Gandalf. only weaker and with a more contemporary voice.
On his website, Dahm has this to say about his creation:
The kind of narrative feeling I’m trying to stick to for this comic is most of what I’m trying to get down properly in the thumbnails: storytelling that seems leisurely even though it reads very quickly; brief animatic sequences and big, self-indulgent scenic panels that don’t do much but let me develop settings and moods. All in all, a ridiculously inefficient way to tell a story.
And yet a very good story! The leisurely pacing reads well and gives the novel its epic and exhaustive world-building quality. I highly recommend this comic to anyone who enjoys comics or is wondering why others do.
You can read the entirety of Rice Boy on www.rice-boy.com, as well as the beginning of it’s prequel, The Order of Tales.
A Whole New Meaning to the Word "Trilogy"
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the much beloved sci-fi comedy series by the late Douglas Adams, is apparently getting a sixth book this Fall. It’s entitled “And Another Thing”, and is being penned by Irish Children’s novelist Eoin Colfer. Many fans, including myself, are understandably upset, considering the fact that Adam’s very specific voice was key to what made the series so enjoyable to begin with. Colfer, famous for his Artemis Fowl series, certainly has a comic sensibility, even at times a sharp wit, but he just isn’t as philosophical or as intelligent as Adams. I predict lots of action and color and little meat.
Simon Jones, the voice of Aurthur Dent on the HHGTG radio series, has this to say.
Guess What Day it Is …
It’s September 22, which means …
Happy Bilbo and Frodo’s Birthday!!!!!!!!!
