Rediscovering the Lost and the Forgotten

My wife and I have moved several times in our life together (four times in the last eight years), including the most recent move which was overseas, when we returned to the United States. As anyone who’s moved house before knows, a year between moves sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. We still have boxes from our first move (all the way back in 2003) that we still haven’t unpacked. I’m a little worried now to discover what’s in them.

One of the effects of this is that you quickly learn what it is you can and can’t live without. Pots and pans and food end up being useful, and so end up getting unpacked pretty quick. Those old summer clothes you really thought you were going to slim back down into but never quite got around to it – they get unpacked second, of course. The kid’s toys are way down on the priority list (depending on who’s writing the list).

But then there are things that you actually never needed in the first place, and of course this realization doesn’t hit you until you drag a box out of the basement corner, scrape off the dust and mold, and then marvel at the things inside that you’d forgotten ever existed. For us, this tends to mostly be old papers, tax records and files; all the stuff they say is important and then is never needed again.

And then, there are the things that you can’t live without, use day to day, and still never come out of their box. These are the things that have insinuated themselves into the glass and metal of my iPhone and Mac, and left their earthly shells behind to wither with the spiders. For me, these are music, movies and books. I have genuinely not noticed the lack of my CD collection, since I still listen to every song each and every day. My DVDs are old, and looked a little mournful as I pulled them out of their box, as though they really just wanted to roll over and die. And as for my books…

Well, that felt like a different matter. For the past few years, I have been almost exclusively reading books on my iPad, and whilst it has certainly had its benefits (the carry-on luggage is ten pounds lighter!), I do find myself missing the feel of paper under my fingers, and the satisfying sense of progress that comes from holding more pages in your left hand than in your right. None of this exists in the digital world – one of the reasons I’ve immensely enjoyed reading Harry Potter with my son from the actual ‘books’ his grandfather gave him for Christmas.

And so it was with a deep nostalgia that, the other day, I pulled the top off a box and rediscovered the hundreds of books that had followed me around from home to home and country to country, and had never been looked upon once in all that time. There were a lot of Stephen King novels in there; in fact, it felt like half of them by weight were his vast tomes, though it was certainly less than half by numbers. I was forcibly reminded of my long-passed Star Trek addiction: ultra-nerd sci-fi pulp fiction brain fodder. I even unearthed the complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is fortunate because I had been considering buying it on my iPad.

But, hidden amongst the trite and the trash, I found a few, small gems: works of beauty, intricacy and genius that had completely slipped my memory until I held the torn cover in my hands and felt the memories come rushing back into my mind. Of these, there were five that I had loved so much, and and since forgotten, that I wanted to share them.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Richard Bach – 1970

What a magical book this was. There really is nothing like it I can think of; it tells the story of a young seagull (yes, seagull) who is taken by the art of flying, and becomes scorned and shunned by his fellow gulls. Eventually, he finds solace as an outcast, and the tale traces his life from his youth to old age…and beyond. The writing is pure poetry, and coupled with the stunning black and white photographs that are dotted throughout, this book is simple a marvel.

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler – 1939

For me, this is the original and ultimate detective novel. Everything, ever, that has come since – whether it’s Patricia Cornwell or Stieg Larsson or just film noir in general – came after this. I know this isn’t actually true, but I don’t care. It has guns, girls, sex, drugs, violence, hard-boiled attitudes and plot twists every three pages. I don’t think you could really ask for more.

Garfield Thinks Big

Jim Davis – 1997

Um…yep. Exactly what it sounds like.

Dinotopia

James Gurney – 1992

A more beautiful book – in both story and illustration – does not exist. If Tolkien had written a tenth of the words, added talking dinosaurs and lush, extravagant color pencil illustrations, he would have created something like this. The story is pure fantasy, in the most lyrical of ways; a tale of shipwreck and isolation, of wonder and discovery, of coming-of-age and eventually of redemption. They made a TV series that frankly wasn’t all that good at all, but this is a story I would love to see rendered in Peter Jackson CGI on a fifty-foot screen. Oh, yes please…

Goodnight, Mr. Tom

Michelle Magorian – 1981

This is possibly one of the most depressing and disturbing children’s stories I have ever, ever read, but it is beautiful nonetheless. Willie, a world war two evacuee and son of a neglectful and abusive mother, is sent to live in the countryside with old Mr. Tom, who never wanted to have him anyway. To be honest, there’s little else to say – the story grows wonderfully from there – but there is a twist of the darkest, darkest nature and if you haven’t read the book, I wouldn’t dare spoil it for you. All I will say is I still get misted up to this day simply thinking about it.

Anyway…wow. What a trip. If you haven’t heard of or read some of the books above, I would whole-heartedly suggest you do so now. If you must, read them on your Kindle or iPad – all but Dinotopia. Do yourself a favor there and go out and buy (do not borrow this book from your library, you will not return it) a real, hardcover untouched copy of this book and read like a priceless work of art.

What about you? What books are out there that you’ve loved and left? What are the tales of magic that touched you years ago and have faded from your own memory? I’d love to know!

Tales of Despair: The Road and the Unhappy Ending

There are so many creations in the realm of literature and art that draw inspiration from despair that they have, in some areas, grown a cult of their own. Entire genres are dedicated to these themes, and as far back as Shakespeare people have been fascinated by fate and the tragic ending. Macbeth is a perfect example of a tale which is very much doomed from the start – from the very beginning, we know there is no hope left for this man, and we follow him powerlessly to his doom.

In most areas of art, the artist is mostly, if not entirely, in control of their work. This allows a great freedom to take the story where it leads, regardless of the end. As a storyteller, it is with great relish – though also with great pain – that we can put our characters through a hell they sometimes don’t survive. Tolkien allowed Frodo to be scarred, physically and mentally, for the rest of his life. Orwell provided no escape for Winston Smith, and in the end he was powerless to stop himself from being reintegrated into the society he so hated. Stephen King is a master of the ability to push the darkness of a tale past the point of no return, whether it is Louis Creed graphically losing his son early in Pet Semetary and eventually driving him to insanity, or Paul Sheldon losing his entire leg to Annie’s madness in Misery. These are things that can’t be recovered from; for these characters, there will be no happy ending.

Yet there is one artistic medium in which it is much more difficult to avoid the inevitable ending upturn, and that is film. Particularly in the large-budget Hollywood industry, revenue is all-important in recouping the cost of developing the film, and the story ultimately falls to the demands of the crowd. In the end, most people just don’t go to the movies to feel bad.

What ends happening is that, with the exception of those few movies that are actually based upon novels (see the Stephen King examples above), it is almost impossible to find a movie that is willing to commit to the permanent destruction of their characters, and refuse to relent even at the very last moment. As scary as horror movies are, someone always survives. As moving as dramas are, someone always wins an insurmountable struggle.

Occasionally, you will come across a movie that goes halfway, and doesn’t quite provide quite the satisfying ending you might expect. Donnie Darko does this well – certainly not a happy ending, but one that somehow resonates nonetheless with a just fate. There are bittersweet endings, such as in Toy Story 3, with a conclusion we know is coming from the very beginning, yet somehow don’t want to face.

But there are very few movies that have the guts to go the full distance. In the end, there are few that can claim this credit as a stand-alone film (American Beauty springs to mind as an exception), but even in novel adaptations, the temptation to veer from the story can be overwhelming.

The Road, however, is not one of these. It is in every possible way as bleak and terrible as the novel it was based on, and doesn’t stray from its course even at the final stage. In a way, the shattered world in which our characters live give us little reason for hope form the outset, but a vast canon of apocalypse tales (thank you, John Wyndham) has taught us that at least some sort of redemption awaits at the end. At first, we want to believe that salvation may, in fact, lie at the coast, despite there being no evidence other than the father’s words. When the father becomes ill, we expect this as the twist, the seat-edger. What happens from there, however, is the push too far that casts the whole story into despair. There is no redemption, and even as we watch the boy watch over his father’s body, there is still some tiny hope that maybe we’re wrong, and that he’ll come back.

This ending has earned The Road the dubious accolade of being my favorite movie I would never want to see again. I fell in love with it visually from the very first scene, and the impeccably executed plot was riveting. But as a father, the ending cut a little too close to home, and I watched the credits roll through a pretty thick veil of tears. I want to watch this again…but perhaps not any time soon.

In the end, of course, we are allowed at least a brief reprise from despair in the form of the family that take the boy in. Yet they are a poor substitute, and the genuine love and caring the boy has lost in his father is irreplaceable. Ultimately, the closing message seems to suggest that kindness itself is irrelevant; in a world such as this, there is truthfully survival – or death.

Douglas Adams on Tea

Yesterday, I ate a small chocolate egg and it gave me a throat infection. It isn’t very nice, and put a bit of a damper on the last day of our friends’ visit from England.

In fact, it seemed a little weird that the egg should make me sick, so I consulted with my biologist wife, who confirmed that I likely had a virus/bacteria already colonizing the wetlands of my esophagus, and the sugar from the egg was like rain after a drought – they just ate it all up, and then made lots of nasty germ babies.

Anyway, the upshot of it is that I’ve been eating very little, and drinking lots and lots and lots of tea. I like tea; I usually poison myself with coffee most days, but only because it gives me a swifter kick up the ass. Tea is good at night, and good in the morning, and…well hell, it’s good pretty much all the time.

All this thinking about tea, coupled with our delightful British friend who drank somewhere between five to ten cups a day while she was here, got me thinking of what Douglas Adams had to say on the subject, and since it felt pretty relevant right now, I thought I’d share it with you all.

As a side note, I have no idea how copyright plays into this; I’ll give all due credit, and if someone asks me to take it down, so be it.

Tea

One or two Americans have asked me why the English like tea so much, which never seems to them to be a very good drink. To understand, you have to make it properly.

There is a very simple principle to the making of tea, and it’s this – to get the proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boilING (not boilED) when it hits the tea leaves. If it’s merely hot, then the tea will be insipid. That’s why we English have these odd rituals, such as warming the teapot first (so as not to cause the boiling water to cool down too fast as it hits the pot). And that’s why the American habit of bringing a teacup, a tea bag, and a pot of hot water to the table is merely the perfect way of making a thin, pale, watery cup of tea that nobody in their right mind would want to drink. The Americans are all mystified about why the English make such a big thing out of tea because most Americans HAVE NEVER HAD A GOOD CUP OF TEA.  That’s why they don’t understand. In fact, the truth of the matter is that most English people don’t know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.

So the best advice I can give to an American arriving in England is this: Go to Marks and Spencer and buy a packet of Earl Grey tea. Go back to where you’re staying and boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to a boil, open the sealed packet and sniff. Careful – you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact perfectly legal. When the kettle has boiled, pour a little of it into a teapot, swirl it around, and tip it out again. Put a couple (or three, depending on the size of the teapot) of tea bags into the pot. (If I was really trying to lead you into the paths of righteousness, I would tell you to use free leaves rather than bags, but let’s just take things in easy stages). Bring the kettle back up to the boil, and then pour the boiling water as quickly as you can into the pot. Let it stand for two or three minutes, and then pour it into a cup. Some people will tell you that you shouldn’t have milk with Earl Grey, just a slice of lemon. Screw them. I like it with milk. If you think you will like it with milk, then it’s probably best to put some milk into the bottom of the cup before you pour in the tea*. If you pour milk into a cup of hot tea, you will scald the milk. If you think you will prefer it with a slice of lemon, then, well, add a slice of lemon.

Drink it. After a few moments you will begin to think that the place you’ve come to isn’t maybe quite so strange and crazy after all.

* This is socially incorrect. The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatsoever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.

Taken from “The Salmon of Doubt”, published 2002 by Macmillan

Original text written May 12, 1999

© Completely Unexpected Productions Ltd. 2002

And that’s how I’ve been drinking my tea for the past few days. Thank you, Douglas.