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With a weird name like Wilkie Collins, he sounds like a young hooligan from a Dickens novel, perhaps as a grimy compatriot to the Artful Dodger or the scheming school chum to Pip Pirrup. Thank goodness, young Master Wilkie was born to wealthy parents, and was therefore spared a life of poverty and such traumatizing though serendipitous coincidences that plagued the lives of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.
For the sake of my own amusement, I will break with standard grammar of referring to authors by their last name, and address this week’s writer in question by his delightful first name. Wilkie. If I feel so inclined, I might even throw in a ‘dear Wilkie,’ or ‘that silly Mr. Wilkie,’ because Wilkie Collins is no longer alive, and will never read my blog, and can’t yell at me for mocking his name.
Up until about a year ago, I had never heard the name Wilkie Collins, writer of “The Moonstone,” and “The Woman in White.” Oh, University of Michigan English professors, how I have failed you! My first introduction came while reading a non-fiction book, “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,” the history of Jonathan Whicher, a real life Scotland Yard detective from the late 1800s. It was Whicher’s famous skills of observation and deduction that inspired a certain knighted writer to create a character whose name rhymes with Shmerlock Sholmes. He also inspired an equally weirdly named author to write what is known as the earliest forms of detective or mystery novels. That weirdly named author was none other than our previous Wilkiekins.
Really though, I have only good things to say about our sweet little Wilkie. Every once in awhile, I like to read a classic to remind myself how much smarter I am than everyone else. On this occasion, the source of my literary superiority was one of Wilkie’s later works, titled “The Moonstone.” The book follows the scandal surrounding the theft of an allegedly cursed Indian diamond, which was originally stolen from a Hindu temple during the British conquest! Scandal indeed!
Sure enough, Wilkie’s writing made me remember why classics are considered classics. It’s not just because they’re old and our teachers make us read them. Most of them actually are light years better than the shlock clogging the shelves of Barnes and Noble these days.
On top of his immense writing prowess, his royal Wilkiness was also a gentleman of great intrigue and curiosity. I can just imagine the whispering behind fans that occurred whenever dear Wilkie entered a ballroom or tea parlor! Let me enlighten you to a few delectable morsels from our precious Wilkie’s life history. His first job was working for a bunch of tea merchants. Tea merchants! Just think of the sort of mischief he got into under their employment. Next he made friends with Charles Dickens (speaking of serendipitous coincidences!) and they took turns editing and publishing each other’s work while they’re younger siblings got married. Later, he grew a gigantic bushy beard, and from the years 1870 to his death in 1889, he was getting it on with two different women. He married neither.
If nothing else can be said of this grand wordsmith of yore, Wilkie Collins was a professional. The dear old chap included an introduction into “The Moonstone,” where he describes the unfortunate affliction of rheumatic gout that struck him just as his mother was dying of some other horrible British malady. Anyway, this came somewhere in the middle of writing “The Moonstone,” but instead of trying to get some rest, or taking time to mourn the passing of his mother dearest, Wilkie refused to stop working out of loyalty to his fans. He continued to write, dictating to an assistant as he laid suffering in his bed. Kinda makes me feel bad for slacking off on my blog just because I’m on vacation.
“The Moonstone” is the sort of novel that makes me wish I had been born in the Victorian era. I mean they really had every sort of spazzmoid and hilarious character back then. Like Betteredge, the wacky old butler obsessed with Robinson Crusoe, or the spinster cousin who tries to hide religious paraphernalia in her dying aunt’s bathroom, just in case she would like to read about saving her soul while on the toilet. There’s Rosanna Spearman, the hunchbacked, former thief turned second housemaid, who flings her crippled body into quicksand after falling in love with a man above her station. She actually drowns in quicksand! How tragic! How sensational! Add onto that a team of mad Colonels, villainous foreigners with weirdly speckled hair, engagements made and broken, not to mention the amount of opium consumed, and you’ve got more intrigue than a Jason Bourne movie. No, they did not need the antics of teen celebridiots to entertain them in the 1800s. They had dear Wilkie to amuse them.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
Aron Ralston: Hero? Saint? Chuck Norris' Long Lost Son?
At any given moment, I could recite to you about ten things that are currently making me anxious. Paying the bills. Finding an awesome new job. Possibly dying of some disease I don‘t yet know I have. Though my doctor sister has assured me of the improbability of my having throat cancer, I remain terrified.
It is far too easy to focus on the negative, on everything that can possibly go wrong. This is another one of those downsides to having an overactive imagination. As children, we create imaginary friends and monsters. As adults, I create imaginary tumors in my larynx and futures where I’m forced to live under a bridge and eat grilled cheese crusts I find in bins around Santa Monica. Needless to say, inspirational posters featuring fluffy, adorable baby animals are usually lost on me.
What does inspire me is when horrible things happen to people, and through the sheer power of their will and mind, they come out all right. Cue Aron Ralston, the famous mountain climber who had to amputate his own arm with a utility tool to free himself from a canyon in Utah. Has anyone ever asked you, if you had to be stranded on a deserted island with one person, who would you want to labor away under the blistering tropical sun with? Seeing as Jacques Cousteau is dead, I’ll take Aron Ralston. I apologize to his wife and newborn son for kidnapping their husband/father, but this is my hypothetical, and I want to live, damn it! I want to live!
A few years ago, I was putzing around the non-fiction section of Borders, and I came across Ralston’s book, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” Never has there been a more literal interpretation of that metaphor.
My God, what a book. What a story. You think you have problems? You think your life is hard? Well, you don’t and it’s not, because you are not currently pinned under a boulder in Utah, dying of starvation and possibly septic shock. If this were a game of who has been through more, and you are not a child in a war-torn, third-world country, or Aron Ralston, then you lose. Do you have both your arms? Lose. Haven’t drank your own urine yet? Lose. Tired after spending a whole day on your feet? What a good day to be a loser. Ralston was unable to lay down and rest his legs for almost a week.
Yes, Ralston’s book is absolutely horrifying to read at times, especially if you’re squeamish. He doesn’t hold back with anything, not with the emotional turmoil, not concerning the terrifying transformation as his body began to wither, his damaged right hand actually starting to fester though still attached to his arm.
The most graphic part, of course, is the amputation itself. Reading it made me wince and cry and gasp. I repeat, just reading about it. Imagine actually performing the act yourself. I can’t. The description in the book lasts a couple pages. The actual ordeal took forty minutes. Forty minutes of pausing, cautiously cutting, prodding and examining the wound, and cutting more. Without anesthetics. It was cut your arm off or die, and Ralston chose not to die.
Some may criticize Ralston for having made stupid mistakes that got him into this situation. I myself posted a blog not too long ago, mocking that idiot kid from “Into the Wild” for getting his silly self killed back in Alaska. What was different about Ralston? He made a near fatal mistake of telling no one where he was planning to hike. He himself discusses in the book, the sort of hubris he suffered from that pushed him into these dangerous situations. So what makes him different from the other shmucks who froze to death, or starved to death or got eaten by bears or pygmies or rabid baboons? Is it that he lived to be humbled? Perhaps. All I can say is that after reading the book, I liked Aron Ralston. I admired him, and I felt that if he could have the courage and determination to saw through his own flesh and snap the bones in his own forearm, if it meant living a little longer, than surely I can accept life’s minute frustrations and trials. Perspective, dear friends. It’s all about perspective. More moving even than the detailed descriptions of his physical suffering, were his reflections on family, on friends, on mistakes and regrets, and in the end, what he had left to stay alive for. I also loved the little anecdotes at the end, where Ralston’s sense of humor helps him to adapt to life with only one hand. There’s a particularly hysterical bit concerning a high five gone awry.
These pathetic words cannot convey how Aron Ralston has affected me. I’ve never met him, though I’d like to, for no other reason than to thank him for giving the world something good to think about and reminding me that extraordinary things can happen out of the darkest moments.
Slap that on a motivational poster!
Now, if you happen to live in a big city, or possess a career that allows you to globe trot to international film festivals, you may have seen the film based off of Ralston’s horrific incident, “127 Hours.” Starring the every dreamy James Franco, this is easily the most intense film I have ever watched. Remember those few pages I mentioned? While director Danny Boyle manages to condense Ralston’s forty minutes of self-surgery down to a five minute scene, they were five minutes of movie viewing I will not soon forget.
Let me close with this. Whenever I’m whining about something, my father always asks me, “Are you dying?” To date, I have yet to answer yes. I hope to not answer yes for a long, long time. In other words, I have nothing to whine about. Aron Ralston was dying, and then he turned around, and punched dying in the face with his own amputated arm. Aron Ralston wins.
It is far too easy to focus on the negative, on everything that can possibly go wrong. This is another one of those downsides to having an overactive imagination. As children, we create imaginary friends and monsters. As adults, I create imaginary tumors in my larynx and futures where I’m forced to live under a bridge and eat grilled cheese crusts I find in bins around Santa Monica. Needless to say, inspirational posters featuring fluffy, adorable baby animals are usually lost on me.
What does inspire me is when horrible things happen to people, and through the sheer power of their will and mind, they come out all right. Cue Aron Ralston, the famous mountain climber who had to amputate his own arm with a utility tool to free himself from a canyon in Utah. Has anyone ever asked you, if you had to be stranded on a deserted island with one person, who would you want to labor away under the blistering tropical sun with? Seeing as Jacques Cousteau is dead, I’ll take Aron Ralston. I apologize to his wife and newborn son for kidnapping their husband/father, but this is my hypothetical, and I want to live, damn it! I want to live!
A few years ago, I was putzing around the non-fiction section of Borders, and I came across Ralston’s book, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” Never has there been a more literal interpretation of that metaphor.
My God, what a book. What a story. You think you have problems? You think your life is hard? Well, you don’t and it’s not, because you are not currently pinned under a boulder in Utah, dying of starvation and possibly septic shock. If this were a game of who has been through more, and you are not a child in a war-torn, third-world country, or Aron Ralston, then you lose. Do you have both your arms? Lose. Haven’t drank your own urine yet? Lose. Tired after spending a whole day on your feet? What a good day to be a loser. Ralston was unable to lay down and rest his legs for almost a week.
Yes, Ralston’s book is absolutely horrifying to read at times, especially if you’re squeamish. He doesn’t hold back with anything, not with the emotional turmoil, not concerning the terrifying transformation as his body began to wither, his damaged right hand actually starting to fester though still attached to his arm.
The most graphic part, of course, is the amputation itself. Reading it made me wince and cry and gasp. I repeat, just reading about it. Imagine actually performing the act yourself. I can’t. The description in the book lasts a couple pages. The actual ordeal took forty minutes. Forty minutes of pausing, cautiously cutting, prodding and examining the wound, and cutting more. Without anesthetics. It was cut your arm off or die, and Ralston chose not to die.
Some may criticize Ralston for having made stupid mistakes that got him into this situation. I myself posted a blog not too long ago, mocking that idiot kid from “Into the Wild” for getting his silly self killed back in Alaska. What was different about Ralston? He made a near fatal mistake of telling no one where he was planning to hike. He himself discusses in the book, the sort of hubris he suffered from that pushed him into these dangerous situations. So what makes him different from the other shmucks who froze to death, or starved to death or got eaten by bears or pygmies or rabid baboons? Is it that he lived to be humbled? Perhaps. All I can say is that after reading the book, I liked Aron Ralston. I admired him, and I felt that if he could have the courage and determination to saw through his own flesh and snap the bones in his own forearm, if it meant living a little longer, than surely I can accept life’s minute frustrations and trials. Perspective, dear friends. It’s all about perspective. More moving even than the detailed descriptions of his physical suffering, were his reflections on family, on friends, on mistakes and regrets, and in the end, what he had left to stay alive for. I also loved the little anecdotes at the end, where Ralston’s sense of humor helps him to adapt to life with only one hand. There’s a particularly hysterical bit concerning a high five gone awry.
These pathetic words cannot convey how Aron Ralston has affected me. I’ve never met him, though I’d like to, for no other reason than to thank him for giving the world something good to think about and reminding me that extraordinary things can happen out of the darkest moments.
Slap that on a motivational poster!
Now, if you happen to live in a big city, or possess a career that allows you to globe trot to international film festivals, you may have seen the film based off of Ralston’s horrific incident, “127 Hours.” Starring the every dreamy James Franco, this is easily the most intense film I have ever watched. Remember those few pages I mentioned? While director Danny Boyle manages to condense Ralston’s forty minutes of self-surgery down to a five minute scene, they were five minutes of movie viewing I will not soon forget.
Let me close with this. Whenever I’m whining about something, my father always asks me, “Are you dying?” To date, I have yet to answer yes. I hope to not answer yes for a long, long time. In other words, I have nothing to whine about. Aron Ralston was dying, and then he turned around, and punched dying in the face with his own amputated arm. Aron Ralston wins.
Monday, November 8, 2010
I Was Murdered By Bandits! P.S. Craig Likes Lisa
Mary Roach likes to write about dead people And sex. And also space. All interesting topics, though some more pleasant than others.
Mary Roach is a woman with an enviable writing career and very lovely reddish-blond hair. As she says on her website, she’s not a scientist, but she is smart enough to harass scientists into teaching her what she wants to know. Having dated several scientists, this is a definite skill.
Her first book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” follows the various mischief your corpse can get into post-breathing, should you opt for something less than the traditional pine box or tiny urn on your loved one’s fireplace mantel. Such activities include testing everything from weapons to the safety of automobiles, aiding med students in honing their scalpel skills, or showing forensic specialists exactly what a body would look like if it were abandoned in a forest on a warm summer’s day for five to seven hours. Messy work for both the living and the dead, but valuable all the same.
Informative and disgusting, “Stiff” is not a book to bring up while at a dinner party, hosted by your future in-laws who you’ve just met. Unless your in-laws are weirdos. In that case, let the grossing-out commence. And did you really want to marry that stuck-up jerk/bimbo who questioned your reading taste anyway? I say, you’re better off.
Fantastic! Now that you’ve thrown away all hope of marital bliss, you’ll have plenty of time to read the rest of Madame Roach’s books. Despite having only four in publication so far, the topics discussed run a wide enough gamut that there is a Roach paperback for every curious mind. After “Stiff” came “Spook,” a scientific search for the human soul/spirit, followed by “Bonk,” a biological and physiological study on sex. If you’ve ever wondered, what does Viagra have to do with pandas, then “Bonk” is the book for you. This past October, Roach published her fourth piece, titled “Packing for Mars.” I haven’t read it yet, but it promises to teach me more about ejecting bodily fluids in zero gravity than I ever wanted to know. I can’t wait.
As October drew to a close, I thought I’d take one last crack at Halloween related reading material. With such chapter titles as ‘Soul in a Dunce Cap‘ and ‘Chaffin vs. The Dead Guy in the Overcoat,’ “Spook” seemed an appropriate and intriguing choice. Roach starts the book out with a vow to remain as open-minded as possible while questing for the human soul. A skeptic and non-believer by nature, she seems to want nothing more than to be proven wrong through real, hard evidence of life after death. Of course, even before I read the first page, I knew her search would be fruitless. Considering this book came out five years ago, and barring a world-wide government conspiracy, I think it likely we would have all seen the Barbara Walters special by now if Roach really had communicated with those in the great beyond.
Still, no one can deny, just as with all her other books, she flung herself mercilessly into this project. Mary Roach is the sort of researcher that college professors have sexy dreams about. She interviewed doctors testing cardiac patients for out of body experiences. She poured over 19th century journals on the various ridiculous attempts to measure the soul, including the infamous study of dying patients claiming we all lose 21 grams of body weight upon the moment of expiration. To better understand the subtle art of psychic mediums, she attended an actual class on it, subjecting herself to all sorts of scorn and hilarity at the hands of her fellow pupils. I honestly know the feeling. At childhood slumber parties, deranged though my imagination was, I simply could not believe that some spirit would take the time to painstakingly spell out the names of all the cute boys in our fourth grade class on a Ouija board. What I would always feel was not disbelief, but disappointment. My gut told me that spirits were real, but they likely had better things to do than hang around a pack of tweens.
Maybe it’s because I’d like to believe all those weirdos from the 1920s really were shooting ectoplasm out of their mouth during seances and not just soggy cheesecloth, but I admit to feeling that same disappointment while reading certain chapters of “Spook.” Mary Roach chose to focus on a lot of nutty characters in her attempt to find proof of life after death. Does that mean the idea itself is nutty? Perhaps. Or perhaps all the ghosts were too busy hanging around slumber parties to tell Madame Roach what she wanted to know. Therefore, if we never successfully prove the existence of an afterlife, we know who to blame.
Teenage girls.
Mary Roach is a woman with an enviable writing career and very lovely reddish-blond hair. As she says on her website, she’s not a scientist, but she is smart enough to harass scientists into teaching her what she wants to know. Having dated several scientists, this is a definite skill.
Her first book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” follows the various mischief your corpse can get into post-breathing, should you opt for something less than the traditional pine box or tiny urn on your loved one’s fireplace mantel. Such activities include testing everything from weapons to the safety of automobiles, aiding med students in honing their scalpel skills, or showing forensic specialists exactly what a body would look like if it were abandoned in a forest on a warm summer’s day for five to seven hours. Messy work for both the living and the dead, but valuable all the same.
Informative and disgusting, “Stiff” is not a book to bring up while at a dinner party, hosted by your future in-laws who you’ve just met. Unless your in-laws are weirdos. In that case, let the grossing-out commence. And did you really want to marry that stuck-up jerk/bimbo who questioned your reading taste anyway? I say, you’re better off.
Fantastic! Now that you’ve thrown away all hope of marital bliss, you’ll have plenty of time to read the rest of Madame Roach’s books. Despite having only four in publication so far, the topics discussed run a wide enough gamut that there is a Roach paperback for every curious mind. After “Stiff” came “Spook,” a scientific search for the human soul/spirit, followed by “Bonk,” a biological and physiological study on sex. If you’ve ever wondered, what does Viagra have to do with pandas, then “Bonk” is the book for you. This past October, Roach published her fourth piece, titled “Packing for Mars.” I haven’t read it yet, but it promises to teach me more about ejecting bodily fluids in zero gravity than I ever wanted to know. I can’t wait.
As October drew to a close, I thought I’d take one last crack at Halloween related reading material. With such chapter titles as ‘Soul in a Dunce Cap‘ and ‘Chaffin vs. The Dead Guy in the Overcoat,’ “Spook” seemed an appropriate and intriguing choice. Roach starts the book out with a vow to remain as open-minded as possible while questing for the human soul. A skeptic and non-believer by nature, she seems to want nothing more than to be proven wrong through real, hard evidence of life after death. Of course, even before I read the first page, I knew her search would be fruitless. Considering this book came out five years ago, and barring a world-wide government conspiracy, I think it likely we would have all seen the Barbara Walters special by now if Roach really had communicated with those in the great beyond.
Still, no one can deny, just as with all her other books, she flung herself mercilessly into this project. Mary Roach is the sort of researcher that college professors have sexy dreams about. She interviewed doctors testing cardiac patients for out of body experiences. She poured over 19th century journals on the various ridiculous attempts to measure the soul, including the infamous study of dying patients claiming we all lose 21 grams of body weight upon the moment of expiration. To better understand the subtle art of psychic mediums, she attended an actual class on it, subjecting herself to all sorts of scorn and hilarity at the hands of her fellow pupils. I honestly know the feeling. At childhood slumber parties, deranged though my imagination was, I simply could not believe that some spirit would take the time to painstakingly spell out the names of all the cute boys in our fourth grade class on a Ouija board. What I would always feel was not disbelief, but disappointment. My gut told me that spirits were real, but they likely had better things to do than hang around a pack of tweens.
Maybe it’s because I’d like to believe all those weirdos from the 1920s really were shooting ectoplasm out of their mouth during seances and not just soggy cheesecloth, but I admit to feeling that same disappointment while reading certain chapters of “Spook.” Mary Roach chose to focus on a lot of nutty characters in her attempt to find proof of life after death. Does that mean the idea itself is nutty? Perhaps. Or perhaps all the ghosts were too busy hanging around slumber parties to tell Madame Roach what she wanted to know. Therefore, if we never successfully prove the existence of an afterlife, we know who to blame.
Teenage girls.
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