The Salmon of Doubt

With a name like The Salmon of Doubt I wasn't sure what to expect. I mean, I've read nearly every major work of Douglas Adams, but this one wasn't giving any clues as to what was going to happen by the title. That's just a part of the charm in this book.

Here's my Goodreads review: This book is an anthology; therefore it's impossible to review as a whole. The Dirk Gently draft at the end is very humorous and very unfinished. I understand why Adams struggled a bit with it. It certainly felt mixed up between The Hitchhiker world and The Gently world. Had he finished the novel it would have been on par with most of his other work, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The other bits of this book are essays, interviews and just random scraps of thoughts found on Adams' macs after he passed away. I'll tell you my favorites were some of his little blurbs as they gave me some insight into his thinking. That was fun. His essays were what you'd expect from anyone who writes essays. They fell on a spectrum. I don't adhere to all of Adams' worldview, but some of his arguments for it were weightier than others (much as some theistic arguments are weightier than others). The interviews are as good as the interviewer was. 

Some of the highlights for me are the biscuits at the train station because that is flat out one of the funniest stories I've ever read, the puddle analogy against a teleological worldview because it makes me think even when I disagree and his story about the manta rays because it highlights how good stories can be about nature. If more conservationists were like Adams there would be less need of them.

I really did enjoy much of the book. There were parts that had me rolling and laughing out loud to myself. Then there were parts that were humdrum. Here are some of my favorite parts in my first reading (I plan on rereading it at least 41 times to get to the meaning of everything). In writing some of this, I hope to glean some of the storytelling tricks Adams uses to employ in my own writing.

Fifteen Second Timespan

In describing himself and his nose Adams writes, "One of the more curious features of my nose is that it doesn't admit any air. This is hard to understand or even believe. The problem goes back a very long way to when I was a small boy living in my grandmother's house. My grandmother was the local representative of the RSPCA, which meant the house was always full of badly damaged dogs and cats, even the occasional badger, stoat, or pigeon. Some of them were damaged physically, some psychologically, but the effect they had on me was to seriously damage my attention span. Because the air was thick with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any though I could not explore, develop, and bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen second would therefore be forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus"(Adams, 13). 

P.G. Wodehouse

Douglas Adams and I both have a strong affinity for Kurt Vonnegut. Adams lists his favorite authors as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, P.G. Wodehouse and Ruth Rendell. I'll admit to have never heard of Rendell or Wodehouse. Wodehouse is now however on my periphery as someone I'd like to read. (Rendell doesn't really strike me as all that interesting and while I may get around to reading something of hers and have my mind completely blown, I've got a lot of other books I want to read until I get to hers). Dickens is fantastic. He is very wordy and very descriptive, which slows down my reading; but, there is no denying his incredible storytelling. Jane Austen is on my list for 2017. And, as previously stated, Vonnegut is one of my favorites. Adams writes about P.G. Wodehouse's last novel, Sunset at Blandings, as being unfinished, "It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and work, stops in mudflow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is unfinished. A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organized - its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing - the relentless revising, refining, and polishing - that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love" (Adams, 63). Sadly, and rather poignantly, this is somewhat how I feel about The Salmon of Doubt (at least the Dirk Gently part).

Life as a matter of opinion & The predestined puddle

I find it somewhat unsettling that I am frequently drawn to writers and thinkers that I am thoroughly at odds with on some fundamental level. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy was what got me into philosophy in the first place and I've read much of his other work as well. Vonnegut and Adams are among my favorite authors from the relatively contemporary period we live in. Voltaire is one of my favorite authors of all time. Russell, Vonnegut and Adams were all atheists and Voltaire wasn't exactly friendly to orthodox Christianity. I don't know why I seem to be drawn to those who have such vastly different views from me on things that are as crucial and foundational as a belief in God, but I am. I think that is because I'm drawn to interesting writing and ideas and while I may agree with a sermon by the average preacher, unless they present it in an interesting manner I simply nod along. With Adams, he makes strong arguments for atheism that are challenging and I like to be challenged. In his speech Is there an artificial god? he notes, "without a god, life is only a matter of opinion" (Adams, 128). I think that he's right. If there is no god, the definition of everything becomes subjective - including the fundamental question of what is living and what is not. I find his notion of where did the idea of God come from as somewhat shallow, man looks around and sees a great world and as masters of that great world it must be made for us. I don't find that very convincing or challenging. He makes other points that are challenging. This just isn't one of them. But, the notion that the meaning of life is purely subjective without the existence of God is an intriguing philosophical problem to me. His parable of the puddle is a better nuanced version of this argument. The puddle finds itself in a hole exactly the shape that is suited for it and thinks that this world was made for him. As the puddle evaporates it hangs on to the notion for dear life that the world is made for him, even as he is receding into nothingness. That's a challenging idea. That's a difficult one for the theistic minded man to contend with. It calls for better apologetics (but not new theology). 

The Cookies Story at the Train Station

This might be one of my favorite bits of the book. Adams states that in 1976 he went to a train station and bought a bag of biscuits and a paper and sat down across from a man. The man opened a package of biscuits and began to eat one. Adams, in shock at having someone eat one of his biscuits, doesn't say anything but eats a biscuit himself. This back and forth goes on until the whole package is finished. The other man leaves without having said a word to Adams. Adams is in disbelief as to what had just happened (as was, presumably, the other man). When Adams finally gets up to go he picks up the paper to discover the packet of biscuits he bought is actually under his newspaper. "The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line" (Adams, 151). This is seriously one of the funniest things I've ever read.

The Letter to David Vogel at Walt Disney

When Adams and Disney are having problems with making Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into a movie, Adams writes Vogel about the lack of communication between them and how it's making it difficult. So he ends the letter with a plead to get together to discuss the movie and a page and a half of ways of reaching Adams. He gives him his email, assistant's number, office fax, his home number, UK cell phone, US cellphone, his French home number, his wife's office number, his film agent's number, his book agent's number (office, home and other office), his producer's number, his director's number (office, home and cellphone), another woman's office, home and cellphone number, his UK producer's number (office, home and cell), his mother's number, his sister's work and home number, his nanny's number, his next door neighbor's number (work and home) and some 'restaurants I might conceivably be at', including the telephone number for Sainsbury's '(supermarket where I shop; they can always page me)' and his website. Too funny. "[Editor's Note: This letter had the desired effect. David Vogel responded, resulting in a productive meeting that pushed the movie forward]" (Adams, 171). Who says sarcasm never worked?

I also enjoyed his incomplete novel and his short story about Genghis Khan, but that is enough for now.

A stench that will come dangerously close to vaporizing your brain

I recently reread both Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors and I enjoy rereading his works over and over again because each time I do something in them catches my fancy in a way that didn't the last time I read it. There are a lot of little tangents to dutifully follow in his books and they often lead to dead-ends that somehow still must be followed to reach the final destination. I enjoy rereading g his books because I discover dead ends now and again that weren't there before. A prime example of this is when Kate meets Thor again for the second time.

"She didn't go straight home but set off instead in the opposite direction to get some milk and bin liners from the small corner shop in the next street. She agreed with the gentle-faced Pakistani who ran it that she did indeed look tired and should have an early night, but on the way back she made another small diversion to go and lean against the railings of the park, gaze into its darkness for a few minutes, and breathe some of its cold, heavy night air. At last she started to head back toward her flat. She turned into her own road, and  as she passed the first streetlamp it flickered and went out, leaving her in a small pool of darkness.

That sort of thing always gives one a nasty turn.

It is said that there is nothing surprising about the notion, for instance, of a person suddenly thinking about someone he hasn't thought about in years, and then discovering the next day that the person has in fact just died. There are always lots of people suddenly remembering people they haven't thought about for ages, and always lots of people dying. In a population the size of, say, America, the law of averages means that this particular coincidence must happen at least ten times a day, but it is none the less spooky to anyone who experiences it.

By the same token, there are light bulbs burning out in streetlamps all the time, and a fair few of them must go pop just as someone is passing beneath them. Even so, it still gives the person concerned a nasty turn, especially when the very next streetlamp they pass under does the same thing" (Adams, 116-117).

His law of averages paragraph is a total dead end; we got there, turned around and found Kate again in the very next paragraph; but, after having re-found her we understand her feeling all the more richly because of our brief jaunt to the end of a street that had nothing to do with our plot journey. We meander along with Adams and getter a fuller landscape of his world than if he simply took us from point a to b.

Another part in the book that really struck me this time is when Dirk met a god in the King's Cross station and suddenly noticed that god's awful smell. "The air which he unsettled as he stood, which flowed out from the folds of his skin and clothes, was richly pungent even to Dirk's numbed nostrils. It was a smell that never stopped coming at you - just as Dirk thought it must have peaked, so it struck on upward with renewed frenzy till Dirk thought that his very brain would vaporize" (Adams, 168-169). I just thought this part was very funny when I read it.

Notes on Breakfast of Champions

I just finished Breakfast of Champions today and what a fantastic book. Y-O-U have got to read it. Seriously though, it is truly fantastic for numerous reasons. Firstly, it skewers us as humans and us especially as Americans in a delightfully painful way. I'm not advocating masochistic pleasure-seeking when I recommend this book, but if you want to have your patriotic thought processes unnerved a bit (which you should so you don't end up goose-stepping your way through life) this is a great book to achieve that. Secondly, it's a brilliant description of life. I have been working to make myself a good storyteller recently. In fact, that's what this whole blog is essentially about - it's a repository of all my previous notes and current thoughts in the hopes that my future self will be able to easily look back at categorized notes in order to pull something worthy of putting into a story. Vonnegut hates storytellers. He blames storytelling on all the ills that America faces and his argument is pretty sound. Nonetheless, Vonnegut wrote one hell of a story. Thirdly, I love the meta-narrative he does of inserting himself into the story and explaining why he writes the way he does and so on and so forth. It's a fascinating literary device and has instructional value for me as an aspiring writer.

There could be a lot of metaphorical ink wasted if I were to point out every little jib and jab of this book that I particularly enjoyed so I will save the metaphorical carbon black by highlighting only a few of my favorites. In the introduction his discussion of Armistice Day and how the soldiers heard God was great.

"When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering each one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind" (Vonnegut, 6).

This little blurb sums up for me what Vonnegut does in this book. First, he successfully makes himself a part of the story, which I like. Second, he touches on a brutal subject (WWI) with levity and jokes (stopped butchering one another) without being mean. It's dark, but not mean. Third, his wit and dark humor is amplified through dissonant sarcasm - the Voice of God is silence.

In a little jab at men and women and their roles with each other he writes "'I don't wonder you're tired and nervous,' Francine went on. 'If I was a man, I'd be tired and nervous, too. I guess God made women so men could relax and be treated like little babies from time to time.' She was more than satisfied with this arrangement." (Vonnegut, 154). That's just funny.

His shot at how wealth is accumulated is funny too. "With the passage of time, his shares had become one hundred times as valuable, simply lying in the total darkness and silence of a safe-deposit box. There was a lot of money magic like that going on. It was almost as though some blue fairy were flitting about that part of the dying planet, waving her magic wand over certain deeds and bonds and stock certificates" (Vonnegut, 161).

In contemplating the meaning of life as he is slowly starting to lose his grip on his sanity, Dwayne tells Francine about his visit to the Pontiac factory and the impact that the destruction tests had on him. He recalls seeing (and Vonnegut so kindly drew for us a rendition of it) a door labeled "Destructive Testing" where all the torture of the cars took place. "'I saw that sign,' said Dwayne, 'and I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for - to find out how much a man could take without breaking'" (Vonnegut, 166).

Again in pondering the meaning of life, Vonnegut inserted a story about a greyhound. Forgive me, this is a lengthy quotation but it's funny and can't really be pared down well and retain its hilarity. "The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator. Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made" (Vonnegut, 198).

In discussing truth a Novelist (Beatrice) and a painter (Karabekian) a sad conclusion about truth is raised. Karabekian had just sold a minimalist painting entitled The Temptation of St. Anthony for an exorbitant price and Beatrice admitted to Karabekian that she had no idea who St. Anthony was. Karabekian responded, "'I don't know, and I would hate to find out,' said Karabekian. 'You have no use for truth?' said Beatrice. 'You know what truth is?' said Karabekian. 'It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?'" (Vonnegut, 209). Funny. But sad.

Vonnegut places the blame of what makes America a dangerous and unhappy place squarely on the shoulders of the story tellers. The government treated Americans as disposable (a war reference) because authors treated their bit-part players like that. The reason why some details in life are important and others are trivial and the reason why some people in life are important and others are trivial is because authors makes some details important and others trivial and some people important and others trivial in their stories. Vonnegut swore off storytelling. Instead he chose to write about life. "I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out" (Vonnegut, 210). That's why Vonnegut stories have so many seemingly unimportant side passages.

"Milo now used a line from a television show which had been popular a few years back. The show wasn't on air anymore, but most people still remembered the line. Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both present and past" (Vonnegut, 230). That's funny because it's true.

"I gazed at the Keedsler mansion, never dreaming that a volcanic dog was about to erupt behind me" (Vonnegut, 287). That's funny because of the wording.

As a hopeful writer, as a hopeful storyteller, I find I've often inserted myself into a story or two. But, I've not found a way to do it later in the story. Either I'm in it from the beginning or I'm not it at all. Vonnegut is present from the beginning in this book in theory, but really jumps into the story when Dwayne, Wayne and Kilgore Trout are all in or around the Holiday Inn in Midland City. His entrance is flawless and I read and reread it about fifteen times. "'Give me a Black and White and water,' he heard the waitress say, and Wayne should have pricked up his ears at that. That particular drink wasn't for any ordinary person. That drink was for the person who had created all Wayne's misery to date, who could kill him or make him a millionaire or send him back to prison or do whatever he damn pleased with Wayne. That drink was for me" (Vonnegut, 192). From this point on, Vonnegut is a character with a major role to play in the conclusion of the story - which I won't reveal in case you haven't read it.

Maybe it's the sheer weirdness of Vonnegut's stories. Maybe it's his literary style. Maybe it's the fact that he's a Hoosier. Maybe its a je ne sais quoi amalgamation of all three and other unknown factors, but I'm really starting to see Vonnegut as among my favorite writers. Currently, I find myself enjoying and thus, emulating, however poorly, four writers more than anyone else: Voltaire, Douglas Adams, Raymond Queneau and Vonnegut. Voltaire has long been among my favorites, so he holds a sentimental place in my heart. But, between the other three I can't decide who I like the most.

Twain - The Stolen White Elephant

I'm enjoying my Mark Twain short stories. I still feel that Journalism in Tennessee is my favorite thus far, but in reading Twain's The Stolen White Elephant I'm realizing that I like detective stories. Now, that said, I haven't read a Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie or any other "serious" detective fiction. But, I've loved Law & Order since at least high school; I think I liked it earlier, especially the crossover episodes with the Baltimore based Homicide: Life on the Street. I know I liked those when I was young and before I moved out of the area. But, it also made me never want to enter the city...

But, earlier on this blog and in one of my nascent stories I've mentioned the similarities between Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently and Raymond Queneau's Morcol in The Flight of Icarus and now having read Twain's short story The Stolen White Elephant, I'm finding that I really enjoy farcical detective stories. I'm also noticing a trend about such characters. They are, simultaneously, bungling and cunning. They have the great balance of bafoonery and intellect that allows them the expertise of the  charlatan. Money moves them. I guess that's a well-worn thought because even in serious journalism we question the ethics of the police. Maybe we should simply make them well paid and then they wouldn't have to worry about bribes. That however would be a socialist notion and thus, completely unacceptable in America. We can't stand an ounce of socialism. On a side note, I'm very concerned that I'm not going to get my social security in forty years or so when I'm eligible. These aren't related thoughts, but my mind is always doubled over in multiple trajectories.

As for Twain's short story, it's great. It is silly and full of sharp language. That makes it easy to read and easy to pause and reread a fantastic passage or sentence. With Twain, it's often the sentence that you reread because of it's incredible sarcasm within its brevity. "Next morning it was all in the newspapers, in the minutest detail. It even had additions, consisting of Detective this, Detective that, and Detective the other's 'theory' as to how the robbery was done" (Twain, 28). Beautiful. Concise. Caustic.

The thing that I like so much about this story is that it incorporates an odd structure using the "telegraph" as a medium. I had this idea for a short story (which is still peculating within me) that makes use of a similar medium. Interwoven in the story will be some background narrative, but the story will be moved forward by a different medium - comments posted on Internet "journalism". I thought it would be a new novel and innovative technique. Twain wrote The Stolen White Elephant 101 years before I was born. What did Solomon say???

Notes on The Flight of Icarus

Generally speaking I don't love to read plays. I like to watch plays, but reading them doesn't normally give me the same satisfaction as seeing them or as reading a novel. But, Raymond Queneau's The Flight of Icarus may have shifted that paradigm for me. I loved this book/play.

Morcol's line to Hubert "Die by all means but keep calm. My intellectual powers have caused me to change my mind" (Queneua, 33) is absolutely a double whammy. What a wonderful way of saying I was wrong without saying I was wrong.

The part about dicknapping on pages 39-40 made me laugh out loud and wake up my wife.

"Doctor: As we say in French: voila le hic.

Sir: Not the hic, the dick."

...

"Morcol: For some reasons of which I am unaware, no doubt because you considered that the work he has undertaken is injurious to his health, to prevent him from continuing it you have dicknapped the principal character of his novel.

Doctor: (stupefied by this neologism) Dicknapped?"

...

"Doctor: Since you don't want any bicarbonate of soda, lie down on that couch and tell me everything that comes into your head; it'll do you good.

Morcol: And will that help me find my Dick?"

Oh my gosh, the sophomoric humor is too much!

It has just dawned on me though that the Doctor unsuccessfully tries to get nearly every character to do the laying down on his couch thing and tell him what pops into their head unsuccessfully. The Surrealists loved psychoanalysis and since Queneau broke from them this might be a jab of repudiation at them.

"The place where the most famous adulteries are consummated and consumed" (Queneau, 53). What a wonderful pun. There are a lot of puns in here, most of which are intended I think, to make the reader groan. This one got a good groan from me.

Scene 34 where Hubert's rivals and friends kidnap the returned Icarus to interrogate him is hysterical. While they are busy pontificating Icarus sneaks out the bathroom window and into the wide world yet again.

Morcol is scouring the Bois de Boulogne in search of Icarus when he is nearly run over by Icarus on the bicycle. "Morcol: Clumsy oaf! I was in a very dangerous situation, there. I'm quite upset. I can't even remember why I'm in the Bois de Boulogne. Let me think... Ah yes. Well, even so, there's not much point in trying to run after him" (Queneau, 122). This was another line that had me laughing and disturbing my wife's slumber.

Morcol reminds me a little bit of Dirk Gently in methodology. Dirk solves the whole crime and the whole person through the interconnectedness of everything. "Morcol: The Bois de Boulogne. Everything leads back there. Reason, flair, intuition, not to mention my method of free association - everything sends me in that direction. Unfortunately the Bois de Boulogne is vast; what's more, it's dangerous. You keep nearly getting run over" (Queneau, 125). Just like Dirk, Morcol is fated to go where it won't end well for him because their methodologies, however odd, are correct.

"I'm giving up, Monsieur Surget. I'm giving up. No more shadowing. And above all, no more shadowing of shadows - meaning insubstantial images of authors' imaginations" (Queneau, 140). A little self-deprecation never hurt anyone.

"Surget: You have no pity.

Morcol: I have some for myself" (Queneau, 140). Man that was another good zinger.

"Well well! so that's where we've got with popular medicine and the pharmaceutical advertisements which are displayed not insidiously but in abundance in the daily and even weekly papers. So that's where we've got: the patient wants to heal himself! Any minute now he'll be wanting to write out his own prescription!" (Queneau, 141). Apparently Queneau and Dr. Lajoie could see the state of 21st century medicine and the advent of WebMD.

"Doctor: It's the paying that counts; you'll see how much good it'll do you" (Queneau, 160). Not much explanation needed there.

Two things that sort of sum up the best part of this story, the characters knowing they are characters, the fiction within the fiction, the surrealism, the meta...

"Icarus: Oh, I'm more read about than a reader" (Queneau, 164). Very good.
"Icarus: How do we know? It may all come to the same thing. They may be the characters of some other sort of author" (Queneau, 166-167)

The part where Icarus is offered Balbine by Monsieur Berrrier as a wife is great.

"Icarus: The thing is, I'm already engaged.
Balbine: Oh God! (she faints in her father's arms)
Icarus: Only I don't particularly want to marry my fiancée, alas.
Balbine (coming out of her coma). Heaven be praised.
Icarus: But I've got what they call a mistress.
Monsieur Berrrier: A liaison. They're made to be broken.
Icarus: And there's a society lady chasing me.
Balbine: Monsieur is very much in demand" (Queneau, 170).

Another thing I just noticed is Monsieur Berrrier's name. In reading it I had not noticed the triple R. It's weird that the mind only sees what it is accustomed to seeing.

Notes from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

More. I need more. I need more Douglas Adams. While not as good as the Hitchhiker's Guide, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was a wonderful and fantastical read. I haven't read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency yet, but I listened to the BBC radio version of it. I think I liked this one more, although I reserve the right to switch once I've actually read the book. That being said, I find that although I love reading his books, the endings always seem to leave me unsatisfied. I don't know if that is because they end so abruptly and neatly and that is somehow unsatisfying or if it is merely that I don't want the story to end. But, as with Hitchhiker's Guide, there are a number of things I want to write down to use later in my own writing.

I love the way Adams describes ordinary things and makes them monstrous. Some of the best descriptions in this book are about airports, pizza and windshield wipers. For instance, the book opens with the line "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'" (Adams, 1). And then the notion continues on about the purposefulness of the architect in creating a certain aesthetic quality about every airport, "They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not" (Adams, 1). I love it. On the first page of the book, he has made the airport a villain and exposed the whole of airport architecture as a sinister plot to shield the airlines from their unfortunate record of departing on time.

As for the pizza notion, he described some of the best nostalgia for an ex-pat and it really struck a chord with me. Its truth and humor are inextricable. "She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them to. That was the only real pizza (Adams, 3). I think this simple notion of nostalgia would play somewhere well in Future Modern Ancient Greeks. Take something that seems mundane, like flipping channels on a TV or the emergency broadcast system interrupting an exciting live sporting event at exactly the inopportune moment and describe it this way.

The final mundane and ordinary that Adams turns into the extraordinary and imaginative that I wish to highlight is the description of windshield wipers on Dirk's elderly Jaguar. "Furthermore it came on to rain a little, which should have helped... Dirk turned on the car wipers which grumbled because they didn't have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen. He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in protest" (Adams, 157).

Adams, as a "radical atheist" obviously has a slightly different take on religion than I do, but his skewering of it is still a fascinating read. Again, describing the absolute horrors of airport existence for travelers, Adams notes "This, she reflected, in a continuation of her earlier train of thought, was presumably how religions got started, and must be the reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts. They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance" (Adams, 5). Another little section reflects Adams (and a fundamental atheistic value) that religion was created by man for man, but in his style, he turns it into a farce. "If she could have been transported to where she might see her secretive patient enthroned, warrior father of the warrior Gods of Asgard, she would not have been surprised. That is not quite true, in fact. She would have been startled quite out of her wits. But she would at least have recognised that it was consistent with the qualities she perceived in him, once she had recovered from the shock of discovering that virtually everything the human race had ever chosen to believe in was true. Or that it continued to be true long after the human race particularly needed it to be true any more" (Adams, 62).

There's a lot in that last bit. First, it assumes that religion is man-made and that the gods are anthropomorphic. Second, because Adams is writing comedy it throws out there that what humans believe is true becomes true. That's an interesting philosophical notion about rationalism in and of itself. But, the consequence of this is that the gods continue to exist even after humanity has no longer deemed it necessary for them to exist. That's a funny concept. But, also the fact that Sister Bailey would have been startled out of her wits to see the existence of such beings is an interesting indictment of faith.

Moving on to other things, the description of how Dirk Gently wakes up had me laughing out loud. "The sheets and blankets were pulled up tightly around his head, but from somewhere half-way down the length of the bed a hand slowly emerged from under the bedclothes and its fingers felt their way in little tapping movements along the floor. Working from experience, they neatly circumvented a bowl of something very nasty that had been sitting there since Michaelmas, and eventually happened upon a half-empty pack of untipped Gauloises and a box of matches. The fingers shook a crumpled white tube free of the pack, seized it and the box of matches, and then started to poke a way through the sheets tangled together at the top of the bed, like a magician prodding at a handkerchief from which he intends to release a flock of doves. The cigarette was at last inserted into the hole. The cigarette was lit. For a while the bed itself appeared to be smoking the cigarette in great heaving drags. It coughed long, loud and shudderingly and then began to breathe in a more measured rhythm. In this way, Dirk Gently achieved consciousness" (Adams, 21). What an introduction of a character. Magnificent.

Lastly, upon describing how the airport accident occurred I found something that might work well as an homage to Adams in the Future Modern Ancient Greeks. A politician described the accident as the airport check-in desk was "fundamentally fed up with being where it was". I thought that the traveler and the doctor in Future Modern Ancient Greeks could fit this description as to how their bodies and souls got separated. And, since the soul is the form of the body the separation caused the body to lose its shape and become mushy mass. It also would explain why the traveler looked an awful lot like a human stencil before the reconciliation.

Hitchhiker's done.

So I finally finished The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I was sad to put it down. The book was great; I really enjoyed it. Although, I have to say the endings to each story always seemed to come a bit abruptly. It was sad to see Marvin die even if he did in a moment of rare satisfaction.

7 Days Off In the Land of Douglas Adams

Well, it's been seven days since I last posted. I've been traveling, moving my sister-in-law from Texas to Georgia. So, I do have a bit of an excuse. But, while I haven't been writing, I did do a little reading. Now that I once again have a computer right in front of me I'll jot down the little notes that I had over the week. It wasn't much, but just a few things.

While gone I immersed myself in some Douglas Adams. I had read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a long time ago, but I think the version I had read before was the transcript from the old BBC Broadcast. Anyway, the time between my readings was very very big. On this occasion I've been reading The More than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I finished The Hitchhiker's Guide on the plane and then read The Restaurant At the End of the Universe, which if I ever do open up a restaurant I think I will call it Milliways - if I don't get sued. Since I didn't have any paper I jotted a few quotes down on my phone that I liked, with references, but this was a hassle so I don't have as much as I'd like. Suffice it to say that some of my writing style is influenced by Adams and I'm probably going to be reading a bit more of him in the near future. Without further ado though here are three quotes that I found particularly entertaining.

Ford to Arthur "History is never altered you see, it just fits together like a jigsaw" (303). I like this idea of time being thoroughly deterministic, not actually like it, but find it an interesting thing to explore in A Cornish Mess. Is time unable to be altered? Does the Grandfather Paradox hold true?

Zaphod, upon leaving Milliways right before the end of the universe [It is] "nothing but a gnab gib... opposite of a big bang" (233). I laughed aloud to myself at this one.

In the introduction I found another interesting concept to explore when writing on time traveling (which is the goal of my first novella I'm attempting, called A Cornish Mess. "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is a nother which states that this has already happened" (148). It's funny, clever and a bit depressing all at once.

In addition to reading these two books I also listened to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. It was very funny. Interestingly enough though, unlike Ford's assertion that history cannot be altered the ghost in this broadcast very nearly alters history by going back and nearly stopping life from being created on earth in the first place. Luckily it's stopped by Professor Chronotis altering time, after the ghost is trying to change time but before the present where the story mostly takes place.

I find Douglas Adams' stories to be pleasantly jarring to the brain in syntax and style. It's fantastic fun and smart. While I loved the movie, I find the book more riveting, though the ending of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a bit depressing. Plus, Douglas Adams wrote for Doctor Who and that's about all you'd need for me to be hooked.