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Sunday, February 06, 2005
DOUBTFUL SALMON LEFTOVERS..
When I was younger (junior high), I wanted to be able to write like Douglas Adams. I loved the way he wrote - reading a book by Adams is kind of like taking a walk through the prairie with a dog. He bounds along, way out ahead of you, and every once in awhile, he suddenly stops and circles, sniffing the ground. Then, just as you're about to catch up, he lifts his head in a sudden jerk, glances around, sniffing the air, and bounds off in an entirely different direction. Douglas Adams was like a well-read, well-informed, more thoughtful Dave Barry. Not that Dave Barry isn't great, too, but I always get the sense, when I read Barry's stuff, that "I could DO THAT." Adams' work, by contrast, just makes me say, "Wowee."
Then I read A Farewell to Arms, and I wanted to be able to write like Hemingway. Each sentence is a tour-de-force of monosyllabic majesty, laden with latent emotion and depth.
Then I read The Grapes of Wrath, and I wanted to write like Steinbeck - that vitality, that basic, raw humanism, with transcendentalism everywhere in the subtext..
It's basically been a progression from there...back to Hemingway, back to Steinbeck, then Neihardt, back to Adams, back to Hemingway..more recently Abbey, Peacock, Turner, Cather...but...
The other night I started reading The Salmon of Doubt, by Douglas Adams. It's sort of a collection of occasional pieces he wrote, plus a stitched together novel, which was to be the final book in either the Hitchhiker's series, or the Dirk Gently series - apparently, it's not clear which..
It's good stuff. One begins to realize that there is alot going on behind the facade of facile satire (not that facile satire wouldn't be enough!). I haven't gotten to the novel part yet, so I can't comment on that, but the magazine and newspaper articles won't disappoint anyone who likes other DNA work.
-m
When I was younger (junior high), I wanted to be able to write like Douglas Adams. I loved the way he wrote - reading a book by Adams is kind of like taking a walk through the prairie with a dog. He bounds along, way out ahead of you, and every once in awhile, he suddenly stops and circles, sniffing the ground. Then, just as you're about to catch up, he lifts his head in a sudden jerk, glances around, sniffing the air, and bounds off in an entirely different direction. Douglas Adams was like a well-read, well-informed, more thoughtful Dave Barry. Not that Dave Barry isn't great, too, but I always get the sense, when I read Barry's stuff, that "I could DO THAT." Adams' work, by contrast, just makes me say, "Wowee."
Then I read A Farewell to Arms, and I wanted to be able to write like Hemingway. Each sentence is a tour-de-force of monosyllabic majesty, laden with latent emotion and depth.
Then I read The Grapes of Wrath, and I wanted to write like Steinbeck - that vitality, that basic, raw humanism, with transcendentalism everywhere in the subtext..
It's basically been a progression from there...back to Hemingway, back to Steinbeck, then Neihardt, back to Adams, back to Hemingway..more recently Abbey, Peacock, Turner, Cather...but...
The other night I started reading The Salmon of Doubt, by Douglas Adams. It's sort of a collection of occasional pieces he wrote, plus a stitched together novel, which was to be the final book in either the Hitchhiker's series, or the Dirk Gently series - apparently, it's not clear which..
It's good stuff. One begins to realize that there is alot going on behind the facade of facile satire (not that facile satire wouldn't be enough!). I haven't gotten to the novel part yet, so I can't comment on that, but the magazine and newspaper articles won't disappoint anyone who likes other DNA work.
-m
Comments:
I'm sorry to say that I haven't read any Adams, but a couple of weeks ago, I did meet a guy from the bus(?) in Hitchhiker's Guide. Maybe I'll have to sit down with it now.
Wait...so..you met "a guy from the bus (?) in Hitchhikers' Guide".......I'm having a severely hard time getting my tiny reptilian brain around that one....there was a guy...who was in the Hitchhiker's guide, on a bus? And you were on the bus? Was the bus in reality? Was the guy in reality? A real guy on a fictional bus or a fictional guy on a real bus?
Kun-fyoozed.
But yes, Hitchhiker's is probably the best satire of our time, and we should stop beating schoolchildren about the head with Swift, which they can in no way appreciate, not having the depth of knowledge regarding English history, etc., and let them instead read something they might actually laugh at, something that might actually make them not hate books.
-m
Kun-fyoozed.
But yes, Hitchhiker's is probably the best satire of our time, and we should stop beating schoolchildren about the head with Swift, which they can in no way appreciate, not having the depth of knowledge regarding English history, etc., and let them instead read something they might actually laugh at, something that might actually make them not hate books.
-m
Ok, correction. I, not only, wasn't thinking about the right book, I wasn't even thinking about the right author. The guy I met was featured in "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test".
My boyfriend lives in a cabin on a commune-type thing(mostly for drunk fiction writers), and his neighbor/roomy is Fargo Kesey (Ken Kesey's nephew). His dad, Dale, is the one who is in the aforementioned book as Ken's sidekick. So now, you know all the back story, and I feel even dumber that I managed to get all that confused.
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My boyfriend lives in a cabin on a commune-type thing(mostly for drunk fiction writers), and his neighbor/roomy is Fargo Kesey (Ken Kesey's nephew). His dad, Dale, is the one who is in the aforementioned book as Ken's sidekick. So now, you know all the back story, and I feel even dumber that I managed to get all that confused.
