I was gripped with a sudden urge, while wandering drunkenly through the library (truth?), to reread HG Well's awesome book--it's a little less awesome now than it was four or five years ago (what, is that even real), but it's still good. Better than the Autocracy of Mr Parham. Always better than that. Anything would be better than that.
Anyways, this is the first time machine story ever written. (Well, the first well-known one in any case. Shush.) That has never hit me before reading it this one time--I was reading the section where the Victorian men were trying to puzzle out how the time machine could move back in time if they had never seen it in their friend's room before. Finally it occurs to one of them that it moves at super speed or whatever as it goes back, and whatever else. It has never occurred to me before that someone could take the idea of time travel for granted, but I clearly had. All the late Victorian and turn-of-the-century people probably basically peed themselves when they read this. Also, I think that it's hilarious that the psychologist is the one who eventually figures out the super speed thing.
Oh, but the story itself--the pioneering scientist travels into the feature which has resulted from people attaining utopia, and then devolving in light of the easy life. The working class went underground and became gross ape-like monsters who feed on the upper class people, who have devolved into child-like creatures that aren't very bright. My next note has to do with this--you see, I've read a lot of studies that accredit human brain development to the fact that we started eating more and more meat because we figured out how to cook it and not die. All of these people ate fruit exclusively. Maybe HG Wells didn't do this intentionally, or did this just to contrast their purity with the Morlocks' cannibalistic evils, but still, that would definitely have an affect on their brain power and bodies. So... so yeah. It's also a bad idea to raise a kid (until age five or six, but even then it's questionable) on a strictly vegetarian diet because of the damage that can do. (HG Wells also mentions that they're all incredibly weak and light, so that's probably a super protein deficiency.)
Also, when he explains their diet he talks about how all cows and sheep and everything seemed to go extinct. Okay, HG Wells. Sure. That makes oodles of sense. Why bring it up other than to complain? Well, what he actually says is is that they "followed the Icthyosaurus into extinction" (Wells 32). Hehe. Awesome.
Eventually the time travelling narrator befriends one of the future non-Morlock humanoids. He saves her from drowning--while swimming or playing in a stream she gets a cramp and the moderate current picks her up and takes her away. Her fellows basically ignore her and leave her for dead, so the narrator dives in after her and rescues her. She falls in love with him immediately (which, of course, he doesn't understand--he believes for almost the entirety of their friendship that it was just a childish affection) and follows him everywhere. At first she annoys him, because "'I had not, I told myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation'" (Wells 54). It's funny because flirtations are considered minor or miniature (as compared to, say, romance or dating or getting married, because it was the Victorian era and getting married was your only option then), and because Weena (the girl) is no more than four feet fall... Ahhh, oh you, HG Wells!
Oh yeah, I always forget that the non-Morlocks are the Eloi, probably because HG Wells only mentions it once. It means "chosen" in Latin (although one of the baby naming sites it was one says it has Latin and French origins which doesn't really make sense since they developed at different speeds and times...?), which would make sense if these people were supposed to be the privileged upper class. The French saint of metalworking (no lie) is Saint Eloi. There doesn't seem to be a clear meaning behind the name Morlock, but apparently HG Wells wrote a quasi-prequel to this book (by quasi-prequel I mean one of his books is set a few centuries into the future and makes intimations that certain groups will develop into the Morlocks eventually. I wonder if HG Wells really believed that the way HP Lovecraft believed Asian people really would take over the world), which might have some clues in it...?
HG Wells also eventually figures out the true nature and relationship of the Eloi and Morlocks. He realizes that the Eloi are the main food source of the Morlocks and that explains all of their weird nighttime behaviour. I think he gives the Morlocks too much credit, though. He says the Eloi are akin to fatted cattle, which the Morlocks "'preserved and preyed upon--probably saw to the breeding of''" (Wells 80). The Morlocks are clearly more advanced physically than the Eloi, and more advanced mentally because being a predator obviously requires a more complex system of thought, but I don't think they're smart enough to control breeding and preservation and all of that. I think they're very much like cavemen--knowing where the prey is, and how much there ought to be, but beyond that, not really having a good idea of what's going on. (But just wait until Equality discovers electricity!) Though saying the Eloi are akin to fatted cattle is appropriate in what a fatted cattle is, that also automatically brings up the image of farming, which is definitely inappropriate for this situation.
...Also, now that I think of it, what happened to all the people every part of the world that's not London?
My next bit comes when... when that guy who I almost called the Doctor but most definitely is NOT the Doctor realizes he can scare the Morlocks with fire--he gets so excited he tells Weena (the Eloi female) to dance and he dances with her: "'It part it was a modest can-can, in part a step dance, in part a skirt dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original. For I am naturally inventive, as you know'" (Wells 87). At first I was like woaaah, ego! But then I remembered that he made a whole damn time machine, so maybe he should be allowed to brag a bit.
Anyways. He finds his time machine again, and Weena is killed due to his foolishness with the Morlocks--something I apparently misunderstood when I read it all 5,000 times in middle school. You see, I always thought she was simply stolen away, and that's why the time traveler goes back--to try and save her. The book ends--well, this edition has an epilogue, which for whatever reason my edition was bereft of--with the time traveler becoming determined to prove that the traveling occurred to our narrator who parrots back everything the traveler said in verbatim. The time traveler goes back in time, and the narrator tells us that he vanished three years ago and never returned. I kind of like it better when he's going back to save Weena and gets killed instead, instead of just trying to prove himself, but whatever. I'm not the one writing classic sci-fi novels at the turn of the century... Yet.
The epilogue is also a little too optimistic--basically the narrator is saying that the traveler could still be alive wandering the future or past, and that the future saw can be changed, and at least love and tenderness still lived on in the Eloi. It was probably to calm down all the Victorian people, who were probably smoking their smelling salts at that point in an effort to not vomit on everything, but... But ugh! It's so lame! It ruins the creepy implications of it! Stupid Victorians and their fear of absolutely everything. Anyways. Other than the lame-butt epilogue, this is Twilight Zone-worthy. No, I don't care that it predates the Twilight Zone by like seventy (woah, really!??) years.
MLA Citation information: Wells, HG. The Time Machine. Robert Bentley, Inc: United States of America, 1895. (Sorry, this one of those books that are definitely from the mid forties to mid fifties that don't feel like putting legitimate information in their books, which I guess doesn't really matter since this is all public domain and everything.)
I also started reading the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. I read a spin-off series (Death: At Death's Door by Jill somebody, which I'm thinking is her specific take on all the events that occurred during the Sandman comics--though I'm not sure because it's only one volume... And I'm only one volume into Sandman.) and a spin-off of that spin-off (The Dead Boy Detectives) which sucks HARDCORE. I read Preludes & Nocturnes... I'm not sure if it was a prequel series made after the original series or what, but I jumped into it okay. There wasn't a huge learning curve, even if Martian Manhunter and the Scarecrow make appearances (yep). The only other related book was Dream Country, which is a collection of random quasi-related stories... That was good, though. Plus you get to see Morpheus wearing a ruff, sooo...
But yeah. I like the series so far, but unfortunately my access to it is limited until the summer (or maybe spring break, if I'm really lucky--shut up I don't have a life at all). The local library has only these two volumes (I believe), the school library only has The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (I tried reading it again but it's just so baaaaad), and my library at home only has the aforementioned spin-offs. Soo I'll keep you updated. But it's cool. Very cool.
I read JD Salinger's Nine Stories, too. I can't do a whole post for that--I don't really like focusing on short story collections. His stories are always all right, and always seem to be constructed okay, if not really well--but the ends are just... just failed. Talk about going out with a bang instead of a whimper. I can never quite follow them, for example, "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" starts out with the girl talking to her mother on the phone about her boyfriend, then it goes to the boyfriend who's being kind of creepy on the beach in a robe talking to young girls (yeah, I thought pedophile--even before it mentioned the girls, it was the robe that made me suspicious), who then shoots himself. It ends with him going into the room where she is sleeping and him loading up a gun a then shooting himself. I... What? What, because the little girl ran away before they were done talking or whatever? What? The next story does a lot of Holden Caulfield "I mean it--I mean I mean it" stuff that makes me want to pull my hair out.
The Esme story is in here too, and it's probably my favourite. Well, half of it is. Half of it is a little slice of life sort of deal, he meets a girl named Esme while in England during the war. Esme asks him to write her a story, and the second half of that story is presumably it? I'm not sure. But he's very good at presenting slice of lifes, just bad at making them do things. On the plus side, he writes about Connecticut all the time, and that's always exciting for me.
Anyways, these stories are more himself than anything else. All stories and art and music is the creator in some way, but these are a psychological study more than anything else. They are way more telling about Salinger's mental mechanisms than they are about anything else, I feel like. And I'm not just saying it because of all the analyzing in his daughter's book. I don't even really remember what she said, other than that she mentioned "Bananafish" a lot. But if you're interested in Salinger's mind, I'd suggest it. If you're kind of lukewarm on him, like me, you might not really be interested in this as much. Salinger's style in these stories isn't nearly as grating as Catcher in the Rye, but I still got bored quickly.
Wow, long post. I'm rereading Crabwalk, but I'm not going to write anything for it because I hate it even more this time around. Oops...
(Also, spellchecker has decided to peace out for this post, so sorry if I missed anything.)
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Monday, June 13, 2011
The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells
Helloooo! This is going to be a really short post, I promise you that.
So, first of all, there's a little background on Wells by a fellow named Robert AW Lowndes. (Also, I'm going to mention that this is a really cool edition from the sixties. Actually, it was printed in sixty five--I find it funny, because of course you know what happened four years later... (And consider--a paltry sixty-eight years after the book was originally published!)
So yeah--a background on Wells. First of all, Wells was a son of the working class, and of course England was a very classed society in the eighteen-hundreds. It says that he struggled to escape those boundaries placed upon him, which of course he did, and even at the start of the book itself this is reflected. The main character, Bedford, was a banker--bankrupt at the start of the story. He sees that he will probably have to spend the rest of his life as a clerk (low-class work, of course--) unless if he doesn't think of something else. He decides to go to the country to write a play. At first when I read that, I was like, how stupid! But then I remembered that that's sort of close to when Oscar Wilde wrote his plays (like a decade off. Decade and a half at most), and since Wilde's plays were so awesome, it seemed like a perfectly acceptable idea. As in, "Oh, Wilde did it? Well then duh everyone would want to do it." So yeah...
Another interesting note in the introduction is that of course Jules Verne's works were widely read and very popular, they were only read as fantasies and romances. Apparently HG Wells made people see crazy scientific explorations and going ons as possible realities. It also goes on to say that while Verne would have liked the characters in his book, From the Earth to the Moon, to land on the moon, he made that impossible for himself. I don't know if HG Wells was aware of that and that's why he decided to go one step further, or if he just did for the hell of it, but I guess this is really the first book that dealt with aliens. Originally I was going to complain at how lame the aliens are, but... Ugh, fine. HG Wells, you did something novel, amazing and groundbreaking, and you improved on it later, too. But they're still sort of lame. (Listen, I read Animorphs, okay!? Compared to that, this is like... Well. The opposite of great.)
Not only that, this appears to be the book that CS Lewis refers to in the opening note of Out of the Silent Planet. He has a little note that says that he's aware of similarities between his and other works, and that some of his ideas are based on other works and so on. Of course, this means that almost all of my notes are based on differences between the two, though most of them are pretty superfluous and needn't actually really be discussed. (Things like the fact that the men with the ship in Lewis's first book knew what they were doing, had already completed the ship, whereas Bedford had to urge on Cavor and help him, Cavor still had to make the ship, similarities between the ships, and so on...) CS Lewis is very briefly discussed in the closing paragraph, and he is praised highly because he is pretty awesome, just saying: "It is interesting to compare the career of H. G. Wells and C. S. Lewis, a contemporary author on religious subjects, who examined and wrote about the same human problems as Wells, in his 'Perelandra' trilogy of science-fiction novels. Lewis lived to see far greater evils than Wells, who died in 1946; but Lewis knew there was no utopia, no simple solution to human ills, and showed far deeper understanding of the human condition. Wells died in despair; Lewis never despaired" (10). So I put this down mostly for that last sentence. The rest is all context. For whatever reason, that last sentence enthralls me.
Oh, I also want to mention that whenever Wells skews a scientific fact that we of today take for granted (remember, this was written in 1901--judging from the text, helium was only just recently discovered at the time of the original writing) I have a little moment of aw, Wells, you are just too cute. Even though he was undoubtedly nine thousand times smarter than me and more of a visionary than I'll ever be--I mean, his idea of a ship is amazing and all, but I can't wrap my head around it, either because I'm too dumb to understand it (very possible) or because I'm just automatically like funny story, Wells, that is not how we do it at all (possibly). Anyyyywayyyys. Yeah. His idea is a sphere powered by strips of cavorite which is an element like helium that can go against gravity. Or something like that... And I also want to mention that this is something else CS Lewis borrowed from HG Wells in Out of the Silent Planet. I don't remember if Lewis gets into all specifics, but their ship is a sphere with blinds, though I can't figure out how the control room fits into his ship. And the blinds in Lewis's book (I haven't read the other two in the series) seem to be more for aesthetic purposes than controlling the ship purposes.
HG Wells also decides it's no worse to go into space than to go on an arctic expedition. Again, Mr Wells, you are so adorable.
Also, that word/slang/whatever you'd call it tidbits--originally, the phrase was apparently tit-bits. (Insert everyone from the twenty-first century clawing their eyes out in disgust.) That was also apparently a very popular magazine at the time.
One thing that really makes me mad is the fact that Bedford pushes Cavor to make his machine and go to the moon (even though Cavor doesn't really see the point of it all, not really) and then when they've taken off he flips out and begs to be let off.
"It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream" (36).
So they land on the moon and explore the landscape. HG Wells has a ball making up the strange environment--it seems like a barren tundra, but then the snow melts and strange plants sprout and bloom at amazing speeds and so on--it's actually pretty enthralling. Anyways, they start searching for food and find some edible fungoid. The fungoid are actually intoxicants, and Bedford declares that the 'discovery' (the landing, that is) is second only to the potato. It's hilarious and it's definitely one of the best scenes from the book. (It's page sixty-five in this edition.)
"Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use" (104).
So the men part ways--the moon people take the two men into bondage, and they break free and kill a few moon people in the process. Cavor is eventually recaptured, but Bedford finds their sphere and takes flight. He then begins to bemoan his trip, and seems to view himself as an objective outsider--he "looks down" upon himself. "I saw Bedford in many relations--as an ass or as a poor beast where I hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited and rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses" (117). Hehehehe.
He goes on to say how after his little existential crisis, he set himself to "puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to earth" (118). Just move along...
On earth he decides he must make a new identity for himself to escape his failings and so he'd never be obliged to explain the occurrences on the moon and Cavor's disappearance and all. He signs his name as Wells. He says the name seemed to be "thoroughly respectable" (126). I see what you did there.
The book sort of ends after that. I say it sort of ends because Bedford/Well's bit pretty much ends. He mentions that he received a few transmissions from Cavor, who came into contact with theMooninites. The book then switches to the transmissions, sort of as an after note--not dissimilar to the after note in Out of the Silent Planet. The only thing I have marked is the very last page of it--the people of the moon are apparently completely peaceful (might I mention that, when not working, everyone indulges in what is essentially opium?)--Cavor must explain war to them. They don't get it, of course it is seen as beastly, and Cavor says rather hopelessly that it can thin the population (the 'Grand Lunar' can't understand its existence, because there is no benefit to be measured from it). This is unsurprisingly kind of a buzzkill for the moon people. They demand to know how Cavor got there, and I'm not sure whether he explains to the Grand Lunar how to make cavorite (his last message very nearly ends with the fragment "'I was mad to let the Grand Lunar to know--'" [159]) or if they just decide to kill him because he would bring war and pain and death and all to the moon. I am completely convinced that he was killed either way, though.
MLA Citation Information: Wells, HG. The First Men in the Moon. Airmont Books: United States of America, 1965.
This was a pretty good book. Not phenomenal, but I don't have any regrets about reading it.
Also, for all you film buffs--that famous 1902 film where--well, where the men go to the moon... It's based on this book. It's called A Trip to the Moon--its famous image is the moon with a face and a rocket sticking out of one of its eyes. It's mentioned in 99% of all film books, so yeah... It's pretty interesting. I haven't actually watched it in a few years.
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen
This post's cryptic lyrics: Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!
So, first of all, there's a little background on Wells by a fellow named Robert AW Lowndes. (Also, I'm going to mention that this is a really cool edition from the sixties. Actually, it was printed in sixty five--I find it funny, because of course you know what happened four years later... (And consider--a paltry sixty-eight years after the book was originally published!)
So yeah--a background on Wells. First of all, Wells was a son of the working class, and of course England was a very classed society in the eighteen-hundreds. It says that he struggled to escape those boundaries placed upon him, which of course he did, and even at the start of the book itself this is reflected. The main character, Bedford, was a banker--bankrupt at the start of the story. He sees that he will probably have to spend the rest of his life as a clerk (low-class work, of course--) unless if he doesn't think of something else. He decides to go to the country to write a play. At first when I read that, I was like, how stupid! But then I remembered that that's sort of close to when Oscar Wilde wrote his plays (like a decade off. Decade and a half at most), and since Wilde's plays were so awesome, it seemed like a perfectly acceptable idea. As in, "Oh, Wilde did it? Well then duh everyone would want to do it." So yeah...
Another interesting note in the introduction is that of course Jules Verne's works were widely read and very popular, they were only read as fantasies and romances. Apparently HG Wells made people see crazy scientific explorations and going ons as possible realities. It also goes on to say that while Verne would have liked the characters in his book, From the Earth to the Moon, to land on the moon, he made that impossible for himself. I don't know if HG Wells was aware of that and that's why he decided to go one step further, or if he just did for the hell of it, but I guess this is really the first book that dealt with aliens. Originally I was going to complain at how lame the aliens are, but... Ugh, fine. HG Wells, you did something novel, amazing and groundbreaking, and you improved on it later, too. But they're still sort of lame. (Listen, I read Animorphs, okay!? Compared to that, this is like... Well. The opposite of great.)
Not only that, this appears to be the book that CS Lewis refers to in the opening note of Out of the Silent Planet. He has a little note that says that he's aware of similarities between his and other works, and that some of his ideas are based on other works and so on. Of course, this means that almost all of my notes are based on differences between the two, though most of them are pretty superfluous and needn't actually really be discussed. (Things like the fact that the men with the ship in Lewis's first book knew what they were doing, had already completed the ship, whereas Bedford had to urge on Cavor and help him, Cavor still had to make the ship, similarities between the ships, and so on...) CS Lewis is very briefly discussed in the closing paragraph, and he is praised highly because he is pretty awesome, just saying: "It is interesting to compare the career of H. G. Wells and C. S. Lewis, a contemporary author on religious subjects, who examined and wrote about the same human problems as Wells, in his 'Perelandra' trilogy of science-fiction novels. Lewis lived to see far greater evils than Wells, who died in 1946; but Lewis knew there was no utopia, no simple solution to human ills, and showed far deeper understanding of the human condition. Wells died in despair; Lewis never despaired" (10). So I put this down mostly for that last sentence. The rest is all context. For whatever reason, that last sentence enthralls me.
Oh, I also want to mention that whenever Wells skews a scientific fact that we of today take for granted (remember, this was written in 1901--judging from the text, helium was only just recently discovered at the time of the original writing) I have a little moment of aw, Wells, you are just too cute. Even though he was undoubtedly nine thousand times smarter than me and more of a visionary than I'll ever be--I mean, his idea of a ship is amazing and all, but I can't wrap my head around it, either because I'm too dumb to understand it (very possible) or because I'm just automatically like funny story, Wells, that is not how we do it at all (possibly). Anyyyywayyyys. Yeah. His idea is a sphere powered by strips of cavorite which is an element like helium that can go against gravity. Or something like that... And I also want to mention that this is something else CS Lewis borrowed from HG Wells in Out of the Silent Planet. I don't remember if Lewis gets into all specifics, but their ship is a sphere with blinds, though I can't figure out how the control room fits into his ship. And the blinds in Lewis's book (I haven't read the other two in the series) seem to be more for aesthetic purposes than controlling the ship purposes.
HG Wells also decides it's no worse to go into space than to go on an arctic expedition. Again, Mr Wells, you are so adorable.
Also, that word/slang/whatever you'd call it tidbits--originally, the phrase was apparently tit-bits. (Insert everyone from the twenty-first century clawing their eyes out in disgust.) That was also apparently a very popular magazine at the time.
One thing that really makes me mad is the fact that Bedford pushes Cavor to make his machine and go to the moon (even though Cavor doesn't really see the point of it all, not really) and then when they've taken off he flips out and begs to be let off.
"It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream" (36).
So they land on the moon and explore the landscape. HG Wells has a ball making up the strange environment--it seems like a barren tundra, but then the snow melts and strange plants sprout and bloom at amazing speeds and so on--it's actually pretty enthralling. Anyways, they start searching for food and find some edible fungoid. The fungoid are actually intoxicants, and Bedford declares that the 'discovery' (the landing, that is) is second only to the potato. It's hilarious and it's definitely one of the best scenes from the book. (It's page sixty-five in this edition.)
"Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use" (104).
So the men part ways--the moon people take the two men into bondage, and they break free and kill a few moon people in the process. Cavor is eventually recaptured, but Bedford finds their sphere and takes flight. He then begins to bemoan his trip, and seems to view himself as an objective outsider--he "looks down" upon himself. "I saw Bedford in many relations--as an ass or as a poor beast where I hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited and rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses" (117). Hehehehe.
He goes on to say how after his little existential crisis, he set himself to "puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to earth" (118). Just move along...
On earth he decides he must make a new identity for himself to escape his failings and so he'd never be obliged to explain the occurrences on the moon and Cavor's disappearance and all. He signs his name as Wells. He says the name seemed to be "thoroughly respectable" (126). I see what you did there.
The book sort of ends after that. I say it sort of ends because Bedford/Well's bit pretty much ends. He mentions that he received a few transmissions from Cavor, who came into contact with the
MLA Citation Information: Wells, HG. The First Men in the Moon. Airmont Books: United States of America, 1965.
This was a pretty good book. Not phenomenal, but I don't have any regrets about reading it.
Also, for all you film buffs--that famous 1902 film where--well, where the men go to the moon... It's based on this book. It's called A Trip to the Moon--its famous image is the moon with a face and a rocket sticking out of one of its eyes. It's mentioned in 99% of all film books, so yeah... It's pretty interesting. I haven't actually watched it in a few years.
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen
This post's cryptic lyrics: Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!
Saturday, January 15, 2011
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Well, with this I've completed both of my Christmas books. I'm a little unused to doing these awkward beginner paragraphs, so just bear with me as you always have.
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Don't come closer or I'll have to go
Hey guys! I recently read another book of John Green's (of youtuber fame) entitled Looking For Alaska. Good, good, goooooooooooood book. Fantastic. (I've decided that people don't use that word enough today. Let's bring it back.) To illustrate exactly how good it is, I fell asleep reading it. Usually I can pull away from a book before I pass out. But oh! John Green held me with his vice grip and would not let me g.... uh. That looks weird written out. S--sorry, John... But I would recommend the book. A good read, indeed.
Anyway, let's meet our protagonist, Miles, soon to be renamed 'Pudge'. He is transferring high schools to a boarding school, leaving behind a nonexistent social life and taking with him a love for last words. (Oh, hi John! My favorite may be, "Tell them I said something!" This is also the one of the only two John Green videos I've ever watched, for the record.) So, he meets a bunch of cool cats, like the Colonel, ALASKA, Takumi (aka, the "motherf---ing Fox", and my favorite character) and a bunch of other people who you'll meet if you read the book. Anyway, please note that Alaska is a human girl, and Emile Hirsch is not involved. This is not a rewrite of Into the Wild. (No one is laughing!? You guys! Comedic gold!)
Let me say this now: Alaska embodied basically 95% of the traits in people that I hate. I know what happens to her and all, but before thus I was like hey, Alaska, shut up. And SPOILER: just saying, if a friend of mine died I'd probably just be upset. I wouldn't make a mystery out of it...
"'God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will" (71). Go, Colonel, go!
"'The Colonel takes all this honor and loyalty sh-t pretty seriously, if you haven't noticed'" (73). I wish more people took that sort of stuff more seriously. What an impeccable world we'd live in! A world full of bolly days, ostentatious British accents and funny chuckling--oh, and top hats. Is that really what would happen? I don't know. But get me my top hat just in case. (I'm having a very top hattish week).
Alaska has terrible taste in Vonnegut books. Cat's Cradle!? Well, at least it wasn't Hocus Pocus. And I guess the pictures in Breakfast of Champions would be hard to see in the moonlight. And Galapagos... Actually, I don't think Vonnegut is a very 'read by moonlight' sort of author, but I guess that's why John Green and I aren't married. (Aside from several hundred other reasons.)
"'Can't wear it to the opera,' said the Colonel, almost smiling. 'Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go'" (150).
SPOILER! "Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow" (196). / "And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time"--Jack Kerouac
"We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so cannot fail" (221). Dear John Green, I love you.
LAST WORDS:
"You seem to be feeling better this morning." Henrik Ibsen: "On the contrary." (Dies)
"Now comes the Mystery"--Henry Ward Beecher
"I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record"--Dylan Thomas
"Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room"--Eugene O'Neil
"I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die"--Meriwether Lewis
"It's very beautiful over there"--Thomas Edison
I need a book of last words. Anyway, Green's little bio thing says his favorite quote is Wilde's: "Either this wallpaper goes--or I do." I always thought what he actually said was "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death." Or something like that. According to Wikiquote (which I remembered I could easily look up because, duh, I have Internet!) he said: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go." So we're both kind of right. I'm willing to share this. Wiki Answers says it's not his very last words. Several sites agree with Green. Well, there's only way to find out! Get the TARDIS.
PS. In case if you're still wondering: I found Alaska.
You don't have to look anymore.
You don't have to look anymore.PPS. Into the Wilde?
Friday, December 4, 2009
I routinely check closets for Narnia
On to Narnia! Personally, my favorite fantasy series of all time. Harry Potter pales in comparison. We know how I feel about Lord of the Rings. So awesome that I based my farm in Harvest Moon off of Cair Paravel. That translates to: oh my God, Angela, could you go get a life? You're embarrassing the human race again. Anyway--I'll be doing the books in order they're meant to be read, not by how they were published or written. So! First! The Magician's Nephew!
Even though, so far as I know, this has never been made into a movie, it is the first--or intended to be the first--in the series, not The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It chronicles Narnia's birth through the eyes of accidental world travelers, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, along with Digory's nefarious Uncle Andrew and the White Witch. Uncle Andrew sends Polly and Digory into magic lands because he is too cowardly to try his gained magic out himself (this is a little too bothersome to explain) and then they fall into a dark world, where they wake up the White Witch, then just Empress Jadis. Jadis follows them into London, and they try to take her back to Charn (her world) but ends up in the newly-forming world of Narnia.
The world is being formed by a singing lion--Aslan, of course. The one who's supposed to be representational of Jesus? Oh, he totally is. Zero questions about that.
My first actual note comes in almost at the home stretch of the book.... "'All get what they want; they do not always like it.'" / "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it"--Oscar Wilde Oscar and Aslan are on the same page!
Woah, did you like that extreme dearth of notes and comments? It really is good, though. Read it and stop trying to tell me this isn't the first in the storyline, it's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
That book is the second book! I'm going to assume you've seen the movie, but if not, four children are sent to live away from their homes in London during the Blitzkrieg. (I had to write a paper on the blitz in Contemporary lit and mentioned children being sent to the countryside--my teacher wrote next to that line 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'. Duh, Marky Mark! [rolls eyes]) They are sent to live with a certain Professor... a Professor Kirke... and while playing one day, Lucy hides in a large wardrobe and finds herself in a winter's forest where she meets a faun. After a while, she returns to the house, and of course, no one believes her but Digory. Edmund discovers the country and meets the White Witch, who appeals to him and his heart becomes twisted. Eventually, all four children make their way into Narnia--and must set about restoring Narnia to what it should be by breaking the White Witch's curse upon the land--she's made it always winter, and never Christmas.
First, CS Lewis wrote a rather touching dedication, which I feel I must include: it's so sweet. "To Lucy Barfield. My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, CS Lewis." In the final book, Susan doesn't not appear as a friend of Narnia because she no longer believed--and I think it had something to do with the real Lucy's age and how she may have reacted to Narnia as she got older. Well, it's possible, right?
The Professor is unmarried and old in this book, and ever since I first read the books, I always thought it was sad he didn't marry Polly. Of course, Polly didn't exist then, but still.
Um... the notes for this book are sparse as well. Well, I do love the series greatly (save A Horse and His Boy) so it's safe to assume my affection towards this addition to the series as well. Actually, we were cleaning out my garage a week ago, and found a wardrobe. My mom went upstairs to answer the phone--I looked around very cautiously, tip-toed up to the wardrobe, opened it... No. No Narnia. But I'm going to try again on a rainy day. (Hello, my name is Angela, I came through War Drobe from Base Ment. How do you do, Rob Merci--I mean, Mr Tumnus?)
A Horse and His Boy is a pointless addition to the series. I hate it. It's terrible. Even after Marky Mark explained it to me I got to the second-to-last chapter and was like, "This is--What the hell is this?" I can't even properly summarize it for you. It's just blehhhhhhegh. (Like that sound effect?) I was giving it the benefit of the doubt (I usually skip this book--I think of the eight times or more I've read the series I've read this maybe twice--thrice counting this time) but no. No more. I will be skipping it every time after. I HATE IT.
Oh, an interesting note is that CS Lewis always seems to equate apes with villainy, or at least they conveniently show up on the wrong side whenever villainy is afoot. In the second book, apes aid the White Witch in fighting Aslan's side, in this book, a cruel fellow is described as having a face that resembles "an ape" and in the final book, an old ugly ape named Shift basically brings about the end of Narnia.
Prince Caspian is next, which tells of Edmund, Lucy, Susan and Peter's return to Narnia. Narnian time passes at a different rate than Earth time, so several hundred years have passed. In the Narnian future, 'Old Narnia' has been suppressed (that is, dwarfs and unicorns and dryads and Talking Beasts and fauns and such) and men have taken over. Caspian is rightful heir to the throne--but when his aunt has a baby, his uncle plans to have him murdered so his new son can inherit the throne.
The scene where the four siblings come up to Cair Paravel (a castle) after a few hundred years is one of my favorites. Anyone who hasn't read the book will probably be curious when they read it for the first time, but of course I knew. So, it seemed silly while all the children were looking around saying "Oh, this item in the castle is just like Cair Paravel!" or "Oh, we had this is Cair Paravel too!" You dunderheads, it is Cair Paravel! Excuse me whilst I chuckle.
I love Trufflehunter the badger! Not--not just for his name! He's a cool badger too!
Two Talking Beasts' names that would do Dickens proud: Clodsey Shovel (Mole), and Hogglestock the Hedgehog.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is next in the series--in this book, Peter and Susan don't return to Narnia--but Edmund and Lucy do. Along with Edmund and Lucy come a particularly horrid cousin, Eustace Scrubb. CS Lewis, when first introducing Eustace, says he "almost deserved it". He "liked books if they were books of information and had grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools." No comment. But he's greedy and selfish and rude and often teases Lucy and Edmund about Narnia, which he believes is just a silly babyish made-up game. Until, of course, a painting of a boat on the ocean in his room suddenly floods the room and becomes quite clear. (Even then, it takes a while for him to understand he's not in England.) The boat is the Dawn Treader, and Caspian is sailing to see what has become of several lords who were friends of his father who were exiled and to see the end of the world, for their world is flat.
I LOVE REEPICHEEP. I tend to think of the non-human characters as 'background characters', or sort of sidekicks, but still, Reepicheep is my second favorite of this breed. My first is Puddleglum, who will be showing up next book. Reepicheep is a valiant warrior--and a Talking Mouse. I suppose you may know that from Prince Caspian, but too late I just re-told you.
At one point, Lucy finds a magic book and reads a story that is three pages long--Lucy thought it was the most beautiful story she had ever read but as soon as she finished it, she realized she was slowly forgetting it. She tried to turn back, but the book was enchanted and the passed pages stuck together and could not be read. "'Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn't remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do, do, do.' 'Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years.'" It is her life--I believe. Her life story and beyond, to when she goes into Aslan's land.
The Silver Chair is, like I've said, the first appearance of Puddleglum. Besides that, it is based off Eustace's next adventure into Narnia along with his friend Jill Pole. The two call for Aslan and appear in Narnia, to discover that--among other things--some eighty years have passed in Narnia times. Caspian is a doddering old man (Eustace is heartbroken to see his dear friend in such a state) and he has no heir. Many years ago his queen was killed by a great serpent--Caspian's son, Prince Rilian, set out secretly to kill the beast and disappeared in the process. Eustace and Jill are asked to search for (and hopefully save) Prince Rilian, accompanied by a Marsh-Wiggle named Puddleglum.
The two children are from the same school, Experiment House--one of the first co-ed schools of its time. This book is FULL of comments on reforming and new-age sort of ideas as this, none of them positive. (He does this a little when speaking about Eustace's parents in The Dawn Treader, when he says the Scrubbs are 'new-age' so Eustace calls them by their first names and they're vegetarians and whatnot. You don't get very positive vibes off any of this.) They're little sideways things, but they make me giggle a little. For example, he doesn't like the fact that the real schools like Experiment House are secular--at one point Eustace and Jill are completely confused by being called a son of Adam and daughter of Eve and he adds, in parenthesis, of course, because religion wasn't taught, or something similar to that. He comments on the fact that the headmaster is female, the school is co-ed, children aren't caned or properly punished (this one I can get behind) and... well, there's more and more. I just love how CS Lewis just slips those grumblegrumblegrumbles in. Aw, you just hate everyone today, don't you, Lewis? Love you, bro! (Big hugs for CS Lewis!)
Puddleglum is like Mr Downer, but there's still something oddly charming about him. For example, if one were to say, oh, today looks like it'll be nice, he'd be likely to answer "I shouldn't be surprised if clouds roll in or it rains later on, though". Or, if he's complimented on the food he makes he says "it would probably disagree with them [Eustace and Jill] horribly." He really is a downer... but I love him! Fun fact: he was supposed to have been based off CS Lewis's gardener, who supposedly had quite this personality. (The example of his attitude was quite similar to the first example I gave of Puddleglum's attitude, for the record.)
The villain in this book is also a witch (who can turn into a giant snake) and brainwashed Caspian's son and treats all of the underlanders as slaves. Though it's often agreed on that the White Witch is the worst villain of the whole series, the witch in this book seems much more threatening to me. Using an enchanted flame (that gives off an enchanted smoke) and by playing a magical instrument and using simple persuasion she can erase memories and create new ones plus she can turn into a snake. The white witch was all "Always winter and never Christmas!" I'm less scared of that. I'll just celebrate Hanukkah or something.
I think this book is my second favorite in the series mainly because of Puddleglum. The bottom of the world weirds me out a little too much to say it's number one, though. It's creepy in the final book as well, which is...
The Last Battle. I hope it's obvious that this is the final book of Narnia; Narnia's end. Shift, a villainous ape has tricked Narnians into thinking Aslan has returned to his land. Pretending he is Aslan's right-hand man, he starts ordering the creatures to kill trees and be sold as slaves and so on, saying it's what Aslan has ordered. Even worse, he strikes up deals with the Calormenes, men generally considered to be wicked and villainous. They, privy to Shift's scam, don't believe a word of Aslan and so summon their own false god by accident, Tash. At this point, basically everything goes to hell (even after the real Aslan has shown up) and the Last Judgment pretty much happens, only with the Talking Beasts. So... that's cool, I guess.
One thing I love about this book that instead of just a few children coming to Narnia, all the children but Susan come back--and Digory and Polly are young again. Not children, but I wouldn't say any older than 30. (Susan doesn't come back because she no longer believes--all she cares for are boys, and being an adult, and so on. When her siblings try to speak to her about Narnia, she waves it off as silly children's games.) But I get all excited. AND THEN DIGORY AND POLLY GOT MARRIED BECAUSE THERE WAS NO REASON WHY THEY WEREN'T BEFORE AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
"'If she was a boy she'd have to be knighted, wouldn't she, Sire?' 'If she was a boy,' said Tirian, 'she'd be whipped for disobeying orders.'" Wow, you're kind of a jerk. The day was just kind of saved, Tirian.
"'I thought it was the beginning of a railway accident. So I was jolly glad to find ourselves here instead.'" Foreshadowing... Can you say foreshadowing... (SPOILER!!! It was a train accident. It turns out it is an accident and somehow all the children are dead and they go into Aslan's Country, uh duh heaven. More on this later, look for the asterisk!)
"'It seems then,' said Tirian, smiling to himself, 'that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from the outside are two different places.' 'Yes,' said the Lord Digory. 'Its inside is bigger than its outside.'" Aslan=the Doctor? Stable=the TARDIS? It's starting to look that way...
Here's a big paragraph of spoilers so get ready: 1. The Last Judgment happens in Narnia with Aslan opening a gateway to his world--Talking Beasts look upon him and if they look at him with hate, they become regular beasts and die with Narnia. If they look upon him with still love in their eyes and hearts, they go into what is basically heaven. Dragons and such destroy what's left of Narnia and then die themselves--and Narnia is but a 'shadow-land' to Aslan's Country, just like London and anywhere else that's not Aslan's Country is. As for the children being dead, * it turns out they were really dead and are also drawn into Aslan's country: "All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is greater than the one before." Wow, someone's a little colon happy, CS Lewis! But yeah, they end up going to heaven, which is a rather satisfying ending, I'd say. It made me sad when I was a kid that Narnia was over, but now I'm quite happy with the ending. I can dig it.
Like I said, I LOVE this series. I can't even attempt to be objective. READ THIS SERIES TO YOUR CHILDREN. Just do it! (Will I get sued for saying that?) And if you haven't read it yet... Well. You know what you must do!
I found a wardrobe in my garage recently. No signs of Narnia yet, but heck if that will stop me from trying. You have no idea how excited I got when I found it... Well... I bet you can nary a guess...
Oh, and fun fact! CS Lewis apparently got quite uncomfortable around children. And, this entry took me six days to write--but I noticed during the course of those days there happened to be two Narnia comics on differing webcomics. Do I dare declare... destiny? Randall Munroe had a more modern take on Lucy's reaction to finding Narnia, and Duke AKA Ben Kahan who just had his eternally high take on Larxene think she was in Narnia. Good enough for me!
Even though, so far as I know, this has never been made into a movie, it is the first--or intended to be the first--in the series, not The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It chronicles Narnia's birth through the eyes of accidental world travelers, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, along with Digory's nefarious Uncle Andrew and the White Witch. Uncle Andrew sends Polly and Digory into magic lands because he is too cowardly to try his gained magic out himself (this is a little too bothersome to explain) and then they fall into a dark world, where they wake up the White Witch, then just Empress Jadis. Jadis follows them into London, and they try to take her back to Charn (her world) but ends up in the newly-forming world of Narnia.
The world is being formed by a singing lion--Aslan, of course. The one who's supposed to be representational of Jesus? Oh, he totally is. Zero questions about that.
My first actual note comes in almost at the home stretch of the book.... "'All get what they want; they do not always like it.'" / "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it"--Oscar Wilde Oscar and Aslan are on the same page!
Woah, did you like that extreme dearth of notes and comments? It really is good, though. Read it and stop trying to tell me this isn't the first in the storyline, it's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
That book is the second book! I'm going to assume you've seen the movie, but if not, four children are sent to live away from their homes in London during the Blitzkrieg. (I had to write a paper on the blitz in Contemporary lit and mentioned children being sent to the countryside--my teacher wrote next to that line 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'. Duh, Marky Mark! [rolls eyes]) They are sent to live with a certain Professor... a Professor Kirke... and while playing one day, Lucy hides in a large wardrobe and finds herself in a winter's forest where she meets a faun. After a while, she returns to the house, and of course, no one believes her but Digory. Edmund discovers the country and meets the White Witch, who appeals to him and his heart becomes twisted. Eventually, all four children make their way into Narnia--and must set about restoring Narnia to what it should be by breaking the White Witch's curse upon the land--she's made it always winter, and never Christmas.
First, CS Lewis wrote a rather touching dedication, which I feel I must include: it's so sweet. "To Lucy Barfield. My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, CS Lewis." In the final book, Susan doesn't not appear as a friend of Narnia because she no longer believed--and I think it had something to do with the real Lucy's age and how she may have reacted to Narnia as she got older. Well, it's possible, right?
The Professor is unmarried and old in this book, and ever since I first read the books, I always thought it was sad he didn't marry Polly. Of course, Polly didn't exist then, but still.
Um... the notes for this book are sparse as well. Well, I do love the series greatly (save A Horse and His Boy) so it's safe to assume my affection towards this addition to the series as well. Actually, we were cleaning out my garage a week ago, and found a wardrobe. My mom went upstairs to answer the phone--I looked around very cautiously, tip-toed up to the wardrobe, opened it... No. No Narnia. But I'm going to try again on a rainy day. (Hello, my name is Angela, I came through War Drobe from Base Ment. How do you do, Rob Merci--I mean, Mr Tumnus?)
A Horse and His Boy is a pointless addition to the series. I hate it. It's terrible. Even after Marky Mark explained it to me I got to the second-to-last chapter and was like, "This is--What the hell is this?" I can't even properly summarize it for you. It's just blehhhhhhegh. (Like that sound effect?) I was giving it the benefit of the doubt (I usually skip this book--I think of the eight times or more I've read the series I've read this maybe twice--thrice counting this time) but no. No more. I will be skipping it every time after. I HATE IT.
Oh, an interesting note is that CS Lewis always seems to equate apes with villainy, or at least they conveniently show up on the wrong side whenever villainy is afoot. In the second book, apes aid the White Witch in fighting Aslan's side, in this book, a cruel fellow is described as having a face that resembles "an ape" and in the final book, an old ugly ape named Shift basically brings about the end of Narnia.
Prince Caspian is next, which tells of Edmund, Lucy, Susan and Peter's return to Narnia. Narnian time passes at a different rate than Earth time, so several hundred years have passed. In the Narnian future, 'Old Narnia' has been suppressed (that is, dwarfs and unicorns and dryads and Talking Beasts and fauns and such) and men have taken over. Caspian is rightful heir to the throne--but when his aunt has a baby, his uncle plans to have him murdered so his new son can inherit the throne.
The scene where the four siblings come up to Cair Paravel (a castle) after a few hundred years is one of my favorites. Anyone who hasn't read the book will probably be curious when they read it for the first time, but of course I knew. So, it seemed silly while all the children were looking around saying "Oh, this item in the castle is just like Cair Paravel!" or "Oh, we had this is Cair Paravel too!" You dunderheads, it is Cair Paravel! Excuse me whilst I chuckle.
I love Trufflehunter the badger! Not--not just for his name! He's a cool badger too!
Two Talking Beasts' names that would do Dickens proud: Clodsey Shovel (Mole), and Hogglestock the Hedgehog.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is next in the series--in this book, Peter and Susan don't return to Narnia--but Edmund and Lucy do. Along with Edmund and Lucy come a particularly horrid cousin, Eustace Scrubb. CS Lewis, when first introducing Eustace, says he "almost deserved it". He "liked books if they were books of information and had grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools." No comment. But he's greedy and selfish and rude and often teases Lucy and Edmund about Narnia, which he believes is just a silly babyish made-up game. Until, of course, a painting of a boat on the ocean in his room suddenly floods the room and becomes quite clear. (Even then, it takes a while for him to understand he's not in England.) The boat is the Dawn Treader, and Caspian is sailing to see what has become of several lords who were friends of his father who were exiled and to see the end of the world, for their world is flat.
I LOVE REEPICHEEP. I tend to think of the non-human characters as 'background characters', or sort of sidekicks, but still, Reepicheep is my second favorite of this breed. My first is Puddleglum, who will be showing up next book. Reepicheep is a valiant warrior--and a Talking Mouse. I suppose you may know that from Prince Caspian, but too late I just re-told you.
At one point, Lucy finds a magic book and reads a story that is three pages long--Lucy thought it was the most beautiful story she had ever read but as soon as she finished it, she realized she was slowly forgetting it. She tried to turn back, but the book was enchanted and the passed pages stuck together and could not be read. "'Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn't remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do, do, do.' 'Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years.'" It is her life--I believe. Her life story and beyond, to when she goes into Aslan's land.
The Silver Chair is, like I've said, the first appearance of Puddleglum. Besides that, it is based off Eustace's next adventure into Narnia along with his friend Jill Pole. The two call for Aslan and appear in Narnia, to discover that--among other things--some eighty years have passed in Narnia times. Caspian is a doddering old man (Eustace is heartbroken to see his dear friend in such a state) and he has no heir. Many years ago his queen was killed by a great serpent--Caspian's son, Prince Rilian, set out secretly to kill the beast and disappeared in the process. Eustace and Jill are asked to search for (and hopefully save) Prince Rilian, accompanied by a Marsh-Wiggle named Puddleglum.
The two children are from the same school, Experiment House--one of the first co-ed schools of its time. This book is FULL of comments on reforming and new-age sort of ideas as this, none of them positive. (He does this a little when speaking about Eustace's parents in The Dawn Treader, when he says the Scrubbs are 'new-age' so Eustace calls them by their first names and they're vegetarians and whatnot. You don't get very positive vibes off any of this.) They're little sideways things, but they make me giggle a little. For example, he doesn't like the fact that the real schools like Experiment House are secular--at one point Eustace and Jill are completely confused by being called a son of Adam and daughter of Eve and he adds, in parenthesis, of course, because religion wasn't taught, or something similar to that. He comments on the fact that the headmaster is female, the school is co-ed, children aren't caned or properly punished (this one I can get behind) and... well, there's more and more. I just love how CS Lewis just slips those grumblegrumblegrumbles in. Aw, you just hate everyone today, don't you, Lewis? Love you, bro! (Big hugs for CS Lewis!)
Puddleglum is like Mr Downer, but there's still something oddly charming about him. For example, if one were to say, oh, today looks like it'll be nice, he'd be likely to answer "I shouldn't be surprised if clouds roll in or it rains later on, though". Or, if he's complimented on the food he makes he says "it would probably disagree with them [Eustace and Jill] horribly." He really is a downer... but I love him! Fun fact: he was supposed to have been based off CS Lewis's gardener, who supposedly had quite this personality. (The example of his attitude was quite similar to the first example I gave of Puddleglum's attitude, for the record.)
The villain in this book is also a witch (who can turn into a giant snake) and brainwashed Caspian's son and treats all of the underlanders as slaves. Though it's often agreed on that the White Witch is the worst villain of the whole series, the witch in this book seems much more threatening to me. Using an enchanted flame (that gives off an enchanted smoke) and by playing a magical instrument and using simple persuasion she can erase memories and create new ones plus she can turn into a snake. The white witch was all "Always winter and never Christmas!" I'm less scared of that. I'll just celebrate Hanukkah or something.
I think this book is my second favorite in the series mainly because of Puddleglum. The bottom of the world weirds me out a little too much to say it's number one, though. It's creepy in the final book as well, which is...
The Last Battle. I hope it's obvious that this is the final book of Narnia; Narnia's end. Shift, a villainous ape has tricked Narnians into thinking Aslan has returned to his land. Pretending he is Aslan's right-hand man, he starts ordering the creatures to kill trees and be sold as slaves and so on, saying it's what Aslan has ordered. Even worse, he strikes up deals with the Calormenes, men generally considered to be wicked and villainous. They, privy to Shift's scam, don't believe a word of Aslan and so summon their own false god by accident, Tash. At this point, basically everything goes to hell (even after the real Aslan has shown up) and the Last Judgment pretty much happens, only with the Talking Beasts. So... that's cool, I guess.
One thing I love about this book that instead of just a few children coming to Narnia, all the children but Susan come back--and Digory and Polly are young again. Not children, but I wouldn't say any older than 30. (Susan doesn't come back because she no longer believes--all she cares for are boys, and being an adult, and so on. When her siblings try to speak to her about Narnia, she waves it off as silly children's games.) But I get all excited. AND THEN DIGORY AND POLLY GOT MARRIED BECAUSE THERE WAS NO REASON WHY THEY WEREN'T BEFORE AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
"'If she was a boy she'd have to be knighted, wouldn't she, Sire?' 'If she was a boy,' said Tirian, 'she'd be whipped for disobeying orders.'" Wow, you're kind of a jerk. The day was just kind of saved, Tirian.
"'I thought it was the beginning of a railway accident. So I was jolly glad to find ourselves here instead.'" Foreshadowing... Can you say foreshadowing... (SPOILER!!! It was a train accident. It turns out it is an accident and somehow all the children are dead and they go into Aslan's Country, uh duh heaven. More on this later, look for the asterisk!)
"'It seems then,' said Tirian, smiling to himself, 'that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from the outside are two different places.' 'Yes,' said the Lord Digory. 'Its inside is bigger than its outside.'" Aslan=the Doctor? Stable=the TARDIS? It's starting to look that way...
Here's a big paragraph of spoilers so get ready: 1. The Last Judgment happens in Narnia with Aslan opening a gateway to his world--Talking Beasts look upon him and if they look at him with hate, they become regular beasts and die with Narnia. If they look upon him with still love in their eyes and hearts, they go into what is basically heaven. Dragons and such destroy what's left of Narnia and then die themselves--and Narnia is but a 'shadow-land' to Aslan's Country, just like London and anywhere else that's not Aslan's Country is. As for the children being dead, * it turns out they were really dead and are also drawn into Aslan's country: "All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is greater than the one before." Wow, someone's a little colon happy, CS Lewis! But yeah, they end up going to heaven, which is a rather satisfying ending, I'd say. It made me sad when I was a kid that Narnia was over, but now I'm quite happy with the ending. I can dig it.
Like I said, I LOVE this series. I can't even attempt to be objective. READ THIS SERIES TO YOUR CHILDREN. Just do it! (Will I get sued for saying that?) And if you haven't read it yet... Well. You know what you must do!
I found a wardrobe in my garage recently. No signs of Narnia yet, but heck if that will stop me from trying. You have no idea how excited I got when I found it... Well... I bet you can nary a guess...
Oh, and fun fact! CS Lewis apparently got quite uncomfortable around children. And, this entry took me six days to write--but I noticed during the course of those days there happened to be two Narnia comics on differing webcomics. Do I dare declare... destiny? Randall Munroe had a more modern take on Lucy's reaction to finding Narnia, and Duke AKA Ben Kahan who just had his eternally high take on Larxene think she was in Narnia. Good enough for me!
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Have you heard? There's a rumor in St. Petersburg...
OH HAI I'M BACK
So. Earlier today, I finished rereading The Odyssey for the umpteenth time. (Seriously, where the hell is the underline button?) I still love it EMMA but the one thing that bothers me (and always has) is the way Homer constantly describes Clytemnestra--basically, a dirty back-stabbing bitch. For those of you who didn't spend your childhood reading Greek mythology/history I'll give you the short of it: Clytemnestra's husband goes off to fight in the Trojan war--he makes it back alive to discover his honey bun has taken a lover and oops, the two of them have been plotting, and the two new lovebirds murder him.
Now wait, before you start agreeing with Homer, here's her side: The navy tries to sail out to Troy for weeks and into months (I don't remember the exact length of time) because the winds keep blowing their boats back to port. The only way to stop this? Sacrifice a maiden. Agamemnon (the hubby) decides his daughter Iphigenia will be the perfect maiden. Naturally, Clytemnestra rejects the idea, but lovely hubby goes and takes her anyways without telling his wife. So, understandably, she's an eensy bit pissed. Now, to top that off, when he comes back, he's got a second wife. Although I think it's a little strange that wife #2 (Cassandra) could supposedly see the future... so what the hell was she thinking, hooking up with him? (She was murdered too)
But yeah. I'd say that murder was justified--maybe not the murder of Cassandra, but Agamemnon deserved it. But Homer just goes on and on about how terrible she was... failing to mention any of this with sacrificing the daughter and all... Okay, okay, "for the gods and all" but if someone sacrificed my kid to the gods I'd probably kill them. And it's a little troublesome that Aggy wasn't the least bit against the killing of his daughter... But, then again, my first introduction to this story was in The Groovy Greeks--which was very sympathetic for Clytemnestra, being that it was written from her point of view. So maybe it's just me that thinks this... well, Emma agrees too I think. We had this conversation already! lol. But yeah. If you think Clytemnestra was being an unjust faithless murderous wife, she and her lover were murdered shortly afterward by her twins, Orestes and Electra, who were pursued by the Furies until Athena pardoned them. (Athena! No!!!) Ah, those Greeks are a fun bunch, aren't they? And in conclusion, check out the Horrible Histories series--the earlier books in the series, like The Groovy Greeks or The Awesome Egyptians. Yes, I just plugged a series of books meant for fourth graders. These books are awesome.
And, while I was in France, I finished The Brothers Karamazov and Pride and Prejudice.
The Brothers K... That book... The beginning, I got very little, other than scenes where Alyosha was the focus. I rather liked Alyosha, and not just because his name is fun to say, at least how I think you pronounce it. The scenes with him were interesting, especially the thoughts on religion and such, unfortunately I cannot cite any at the moment, because I handed the book off to my brother who will most likely pull out all my bookmarks. So until about halfway through, or the point at which 'Stinking Lizaveta's' story was first told, I was just kind of treading water. After her story, I got and could follow probably every other event in the story. Not that I understood everything I could follow, for example, the interlude revolving around the 'murdered' dog--where did that come from!? So, I will have to reread it, but not any time soon. I started Demian by Hermann Hesse and after that I have a million other books--including but not limited to Middlemarch and War and Peace. That is to say, I'll probably have long since killed myself before I get around to rereading The Brothers K.
Pride and Prejudice was awesome and I loved it, which I'm sure you've gathered. Of course, I love Mr. Darcy now... Well, I liked him before (I saw the movie two or three years ago) but the book adds about a million. Especially at the end when Elizabeth asks him about his going about loving her--"I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun." <3 class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Mind me hopping in the TARDIS and getting you? And David Tennant? Sounds good! But yeah, I'm totally a fangirl for him now. We need to get the Twilight tweeners to read this, so they can recognize a character worth fawning over... and read an uncrappy book. Actually, forget it, they can keep being in love with Edward. More Darcy for me. But yeah, now I have no choice but to watch the movie again and take it seriously--take it seriously? Well, I actually tried rewatching the movie in... February? March? And I had a difficult time, being that Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy) is secretly my english teacher. I mean, they look similar. Only that. They're definitely not the same person. Except for the part where they are.
And now, since I'm still on France time, I believe I'll go play some Pokemon. Wow, two posts in, and it's already obvious I'm a huge dork.
So. Earlier today, I finished rereading The Odyssey for the umpteenth time. (Seriously, where the hell is the underline button?) I still love it EMMA but the one thing that bothers me (and always has) is the way Homer constantly describes Clytemnestra--basically, a dirty back-stabbing bitch. For those of you who didn't spend your childhood reading Greek mythology/history I'll give you the short of it: Clytemnestra's husband goes off to fight in the Trojan war--he makes it back alive to discover his honey bun has taken a lover and oops, the two of them have been plotting, and the two new lovebirds murder him.
Now wait, before you start agreeing with Homer, here's her side: The navy tries to sail out to Troy for weeks and into months (I don't remember the exact length of time) because the winds keep blowing their boats back to port. The only way to stop this? Sacrifice a maiden. Agamemnon (the hubby) decides his daughter Iphigenia will be the perfect maiden. Naturally, Clytemnestra rejects the idea, but lovely hubby goes and takes her anyways without telling his wife. So, understandably, she's an eensy bit pissed. Now, to top that off, when he comes back, he's got a second wife. Although I think it's a little strange that wife #2 (Cassandra) could supposedly see the future... so what the hell was she thinking, hooking up with him? (She was murdered too)
But yeah. I'd say that murder was justified--maybe not the murder of Cassandra, but Agamemnon deserved it. But Homer just goes on and on about how terrible she was... failing to mention any of this with sacrificing the daughter and all... Okay, okay, "for the gods and all" but if someone sacrificed my kid to the gods I'd probably kill them. And it's a little troublesome that Aggy wasn't the least bit against the killing of his daughter... But, then again, my first introduction to this story was in The Groovy Greeks--which was very sympathetic for Clytemnestra, being that it was written from her point of view. So maybe it's just me that thinks this... well, Emma agrees too I think. We had this conversation already! lol. But yeah. If you think Clytemnestra was being an unjust faithless murderous wife, she and her lover were murdered shortly afterward by her twins, Orestes and Electra, who were pursued by the Furies until Athena pardoned them. (Athena! No!!!) Ah, those Greeks are a fun bunch, aren't they? And in conclusion, check out the Horrible Histories series--the earlier books in the series, like The Groovy Greeks or The Awesome Egyptians. Yes, I just plugged a series of books meant for fourth graders. These books are awesome.
And, while I was in France, I finished The Brothers Karamazov and Pride and Prejudice.
The Brothers K... That book... The beginning, I got very little, other than scenes where Alyosha was the focus. I rather liked Alyosha, and not just because his name is fun to say, at least how I think you pronounce it. The scenes with him were interesting, especially the thoughts on religion and such, unfortunately I cannot cite any at the moment, because I handed the book off to my brother who will most likely pull out all my bookmarks. So until about halfway through, or the point at which 'Stinking Lizaveta's' story was first told, I was just kind of treading water. After her story, I got and could follow probably every other event in the story. Not that I understood everything I could follow, for example, the interlude revolving around the 'murdered' dog--where did that come from!? So, I will have to reread it, but not any time soon. I started Demian by Hermann Hesse and after that I have a million other books--including but not limited to Middlemarch and War and Peace. That is to say, I'll probably have long since killed myself before I get around to rereading The Brothers K.
Pride and Prejudice was awesome and I loved it, which I'm sure you've gathered. Of course, I love Mr. Darcy now... Well, I liked him before (I saw the movie two or three years ago) but the book adds about a million. Especially at the end when Elizabeth asks him about his going about loving her--"I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun." <3 class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Mind me hopping in the TARDIS and getting you? And David Tennant? Sounds good! But yeah, I'm totally a fangirl for him now. We need to get the Twilight tweeners to read this, so they can recognize a character worth fawning over... and read an uncrappy book. Actually, forget it, they can keep being in love with Edward. More Darcy for me. But yeah, now I have no choice but to watch the movie again and take it seriously--take it seriously? Well, I actually tried rewatching the movie in... February? March? And I had a difficult time, being that Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy) is secretly my english teacher. I mean, they look similar. Only that. They're definitely not the same person. Except for the part where they are.
And now, since I'm still on France time, I believe I'll go play some Pokemon. Wow, two posts in, and it's already obvious I'm a huge dork.
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