The Dogs of Babel (small spoilers) and Little Free Libraries

I just finished reading The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst. Usually, I wouldn't read a book like this at all--I have a bunch of books on my shelf I want to read, and a bunch more I'm planning on getting from the library. And beyond that, it's not the right kind of book. I usually read science fiction, classics, books for classes, and specific authors that I love. So why did I read this one? Simple: I got it from a Little Free Library.

Since I've been at college, I've noticed, every once in a while, that there are these little boxes by some people's houses that contain books. I had no idea what this was about until my fiancee's mom looked into it. They are part of the Little Free Libraries movement. Basically, it's a system by which people can put books inside these boxes for others to enjoy. You can take a book, you can leave a book. There are no real set rules to it, but the suggested method is to trade a book of your own for one in the box, read it, and repeat.

I've been intrigued by this idea for a while, but I always had something to read already, so I never took advantage of it, even though they're so close to my dorm. But one day, on a whim, I decided to take my copy of Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World, by Louis Fischer (book for History class, which I really liked since I hadn't learned much about him before then), and trade it in. That first day, I couldn't find anything that I liked. The selection in Little Free Libraries is rather inconsistent. One time I saw Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown in there, and I was kind of expecting to still see it there by this time, but I was disappointed. One of them even had children's DVDs in it once!

But the second time I went out with my Gandhi book, I came across The Dogs of Babel. I doubted that it would be a great book, but I'd begun to love dogs thanks to my fiancee's enthusiasm about them, and the way I used to like them when I was younger. Plus, the dedication in the book is, "For Evan, with all my love." So I felt a connection here, and decided to take it.

Well, it's an interesting novel; I'll give it that. The main character, Paul Iverson, finds out that this wife has died, and the only witness was their dog, Lorelei. Being a professor of linguistics, he attempts to teach Lorelei to speak, so she can reveal why Lexy died. When I first read the description, I thought it was more of a mystery novel, with a culprit and everything. I didn't know about the talking dog stuff until I started reading. So that was a bit disappointing already.

Quite a bit of the dialogue annoyed me, since it was kinda cheesy at times, and some people didn't feel very realistic. But my main problem with the book was that it made me believe that Paul would figure this out through Lorelei, and in the end she hardly even plays a part in it at all. His final revelation is one we could've easily figured out if he'd given us one big piece of the puzzle earlier...one which he knew all along, no less! Whilst at first it felt like the story of a man who would eventually accomplish something, I ended up realizing that, no, he was just a grieving widower who'd been driven slightly crazy by his wife's death. The ending, while it does fit the themes in the novel pretty well, wasn't the best one it could've been.

That being said, I did enjoy reading it. There were some pretty good ideas in there, some very poignant phrases, and really, really good use of dreams (I mean that Parkhurst actually described dreams as they are, instead of the annoying "was that a dream or not?" thing some writers do. It's a dream! When we wake up, we realize that's what it was. If you've had dreams before, you should understand that). There are some fun things in this book, and so I won't tell anyone to steer away from it if they're thinking about it.

Rating: 4.5/10

And for those who are interested in finding Little Free Libraries, here's the website: http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/

New Suggestion Box

I've just added a page for suggestions/recommendations. After all, it would be pointless for me to only consider those things which I already plan on reading/viewing/playing. Give me more things to think about!
So if there's anything you'd like to see me blog about, go to the Suggestion Box and tell me.

Timeless (or to Have and to Hold)

This is a note I wrote on Facebook about a year ago. I made some small changes to the list at the end.
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This idea is something I've always struggled with. Of course when I was younger, people thought it a positive thing that I read books at all. Now I look back and see that...well, let's just say that, of the 400 or so books I've read in my life, 64 of those were Animorphs. Now I find myself reading stuff like Utopia, The Time Machine, Vonnegut novels, Shakespeare, etc., for fun. Classics. But now that I find myself bored out of my mind reading Le Morte D'Arthur, but entranced by Shakespeare...and seeing the whole Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games thing going on... I feel like writing about this: What makes something a classic?

Ever since my freshman year in high school, I have begun to change my taste in books. That glorious winter when I read 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Catcher in the Rye will always remain as the most enjoyable break ever. After that, I started reading more classics. Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, Taming of the Shrew... Heck, the year after that I finished reading the entire Bible. The H2G2 series, the Dune series, Catch-22... But, at the same time, I was in book club, and read some newer books. I enjoyed them too, but it was about this time that I began to really feel the difference that time makes.

Traditionally, classics are thought to be "timeless." But does that really make any sense? Reading Shakespeare, there are hundreds of little details that most editions will give footnotes for. Explanations of what people in those times would've seen as commonplace, but which we have to be told in order to fully grasp. Without that background, you can't get the full effect of the words. And even when told about it, you still have to try and keep that in mind all the time while you read. You can still appreciate it without the background (I did so with both Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, and the latter is my favorite), but not in its entirety.

Even if you look beyond that, there are other considerations. For instance, originality is dead. Any story written now hearkens back to another story, and that one back to another, until you reach some classic at the foundation of that archetype (and even some classics are renditions of archetypes). If classics are generally firsts, then it would be impossible for new books to become classics, since they're all just re-tellings and remakes of a story we've all read or heard before. Classics are sometimes those books that break new ground, that change a genre or change our idea of what topics can be broached in our reading material. But now we can generally write about anything.

Think about it this way: take any sub-par or less known book written today that champions a modern mentality. Chances are, if that book had been written hundreds of years ago, we'd be studying it today as a classic of literature. Imagine if Twilight was a classic, just because it was different! Animorphs, Incarceron, Seventh Tower, etc. Of course, we don't see these as classics because they're mash-ups of other themes and stories, ideas already given to us. But what if they were the first of their genre? To say it plainly, is the original always the best?

The real problem, of course, is that our society has changed. Ever since Harry Potter started having movies, it seems like our culture, especially in regard to teenagers, has just been looking for the next fix--namely, Twilight and now Hunger Games. As I watched the movie of the latter, I couldn't keep back the thought: what would the next one be? Cuz it seems that's how Hollywood is thinking. Cultivate a YA sensation, and rake in the money people will inevitably fork over.

Needless to say, I have become rather wary of YA. Sure, I enjoy it sometimes (I'm waiting on the last Artemis Fowl book right now, I follow the Lorien Legacies, I liked the Hunger Games--excepting Mockingjay--and I will never tire of A Series of Unfortunate Events and am looking forward to Snicket's next books in that universe). But overall, I feel like YA is just made to pander to the crowd. Not so much to write a good book, but to pull in readers and make money. Not that that's always a bad thing (far be it from me to deny an artist the luxury NOT to be of a starving quality), but I feel like we lose something when that's the sole goal. There's an art in pandering, but I don't respect that as much as the art...of crafting art for art's sake. And then selling it, lol.

There is a major difference between stories that I think should be the deciding point of classics: the ability to Have or to Hold. Classics Have us. They encapsulate humanity, the time they were written in, or art itself. They Have it all, proving to be relevant expressions of artistic genius. Other stories merely Hold us, pulling us in for a second to take our attention and money and then put us down so another can Hold us for a while. They don't seek to make a lasting statement.

I don't care when a book was written, just so long as it's good. I like to be Held by a story every now and then, but I get the most satisfaction from finding a book that Has me. 1984, Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hamlet, Dune, Catch-22, Frankenstein, etc. These are classics, and they deserve to be called that. Not because of how they were able to change things, how they introduced new terms (such as "Big Brother" and the eponymous "Catch-22"), how they were misfits of literature at the time, or because they gather a following. They deserve it because they are well-written. They are beautiful works of art, and they will always Have us.

Not to say that I enjoy all classics. It wouldn't make sense if I did. Nor do I think that all popular books are crap (though quite a few are). I take a...timeless view of the literary scene. Heck, there are some newer books I would consider calling classics (The Road, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Historian, etc.). Maybe all I'm getting at is that I'm not on either extreme: I don't completely hate newer stories, and I don't hate the idea of classics being so darned sacrosanct. All books have something to give, every story is valuable. But, as George Orwell so beautifully put it, some books are "more equal than others."

Books I think everyone should read:

-1984, by George Orwell

-Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (preferably when your teenage angst has reached its peak)

-Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (avoid Closing Time, lol, really)

-A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket

-Dune, by Frank Herbert (and the rest of the books in that series that he wrote. Read his son's continuation at your own discretion)

-A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

-a smattering of Shakepeare plays (but absolutely read Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and Taming of the Shrew)

-some Kurt Vonnegut novels (probably Slaughterhouse-Five and/or Cat's Cradle)

-some Oscar Wilde (definitely both The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest)

-Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (the movies have ruined it, and you lose a lot of the point by not reading this. Trust me, it's beautiful)

-Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (the more of the series, the better)

-Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (and the rest of that universe, if you like it)

-Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

-any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books

-Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (it's long, but it's worth reading the whole thing)

-Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk (the movie's a good adaptation, but you get more out of it if you read the book as well)

Timecrimes (some spoilers)

One of my favorite movies is Primer, the smartest time travel movie I've ever seen. I happen to be taking a class called The Evolution of Sci-Fi Film right now, and we're talking about time travel. Most of our discussion towards the end was about how awful Looper is, but my teacher mentioned Primer and a movie that was slightly similar. I asked about this, and he let me borrow his copy of Timecrimes.

I just watched it the other night, and...I don't know how to feel about it. The worst part was the dubbing. It's a Spanish movie, and I was lazy about subtitles, so I watched it with all English voices. And all that does is make the characters sound like idiots. I watched parts of it over again in Spanish, but of course the subtitles just said exactly what the English dub said, so...yeah, no real improvement.

Basically, the movie shows Hector, a middle-aged man who, upon seeing something strange in the woods by his home, goes to investigate and gets chased by a dangerous man whose face is covered in bandages. As one can easily guess by the nature of the movie, this is himself from the future, and he soon stumbles upon the time machine that leads to him doing everything he already saw himself do. It's a bit of a paradoxical thing, since he has no reason to force the girl who follows him into doing what she does other than to create the scene he saw originally. As far as being consistent with time travel, this movie wins a gold star. But this consistency comes at a price. The main character switches between being very dumb and very insightful at almost random times. He does almost everything in an attempt to recreate the right conditions, but his motives aren't very clear from time to time. I thought that he would make a big deal about saving his wife, but the way he does it--while very clever--doesn't make it seem like he's very passionate about doing it. While most people would try to change things drastically, he sticks to the plan, almost without emotion.

So with those things in mind, it's a very strange film. I would've liked it better if it were a bit more complicated, or if the characters were more developed. Still, it's worth watching.

Queerness (or the Orientation Disputation)

Reading about queer theory in my Intro to Literary Studies class has inspired me to write about something which has been on my mind for a while now. I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower recently, and it made me pretty angry about the homophobic mindset of our society. When watching the election results last year, I wasn't as interested in the presidential side of things as much as the Senate. Partly because I already knew Obama was going to win (it was closer than I thought it would be, but there was still no way, in my mind, that Romney could've pulled it off), but also because Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay Senator, and I got to be part of making that history.

Better yet, some states legalized gay marriage! It is a slow process, but I am hoping that, in my lifetime, I will see the majority of the U.S. with such legislation. After all, it is ridiculous to deny anyone the ability to marry another person. Especially in a country that nominally extols freedom as a human right. Freedom should only be impinged on if the exercise of it harms others, or keeps them from exercising their own freedom. And gay marriage doesn't harm anybody. Trying to stop it, however, does.

I haven't always been in favor of this, though. For most of my life, I was a Christian, and my upbringing had led me to believe that homosexuality was wrong. I didn't hate people for it, but I at least thought that they needed to change, and that what they were doing was a sin. I cringe when I remember that I once thought to myself that gay men should be shown porn in order to help them like women again (notice, I assumed heterosexuality was the natural starting point).

But slowly, over the course of my high school years in particular, I began to accept homosexuality as an orientation. First I thought it was wrong. Then, I thought it was okay, as long as homosexuals kept it to themselves. Then, as I became friends with a few bisexual people, and, at the same time, began to lose my faith in God...I went to the extreme and figured that nothing is right or wrong. As such, homosexuality isn't bad. I still believe that nothing is right or wrong, but I have since then developed the sense that, given an objective moral standard, homosexuality still wouldn't be wrong.

(People misunderstand me a lot when I say nothing is right or wrong. Mostly they focus on the "wrong" part. What if someone raped your kids? What if someone steals from you? What if someone murders someone you love? I get questions like that, invariably, every time I explain this. I think the problem comes with the phrasing, and the normal way people think about right and wrong. When I talk about this, I mean that the objective standards of "right" and "wrong" don't exist. When we say something is bad, we are merely saying that we don't like it, or it harms us. It is not "wrong" to steal/rape/murder. It is, however, very detrimental to the current societal system and the individuals involved to do any of these things. If you hurt me or steal my things, I won't call it "wrong" in any objective sense, but I definitely won't like what you've done. I will get angry. But that's the point: when something goes against our ideal, we call it bad. We call it "wrong". But objectively, there is no quality of wrongness inherent in the act.)

My first college course featured a graphic novel called Stuck Rubber Baby, about a man who was gay but didn't accept it. There were a lot of parallels between that story and the one of civil rights for African Americans (especially since they took place in the same period of time). Reading this pretty much sealed the deal: I respected homosexuality, and even went so far as to question myself. Instead of just naturally saying I'm heterosexual, I asked myself if I really am. It became clear pretty quickly that I am not sexually attracted to men. I can, however, grasp the homosexual mindset, in the same way I can grasp the female sexual mindset--I have no experience of it, but I can understand it (mostly through the more truthful media representations, or just thinking about what it would be like).

When I took Intro to Literary Studies, probably my favorite class ever in terms of content, I got a different spin on the whole idea of sexuality. We read some Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, etc., in our Queer Theory section of the class, and at first it didn't really reach me. But then we watched some videos of Butler discussing the topic, and my mind was blown. It was this experience that made me think that everyone should be required to take a class that explains stuff like this.

Simply put, the idea behind Butler's theory is that gender is performative. There aren't any real, biological distinctions between what a man inherently does and what a woman inherently does. We choose what we do. And this extends to sexuality. As Foucault points out, homosexual acts were originally thought of as just acts--not as part of an orientation. The term "homosexual" is actually fairly new, and came into being before the term "heterosexual." The point being that our culture decided to treat these acts as part of an abnormal identity, something that would define people along a sexual boundary. In reality, though, "heterosexuals" have just as much ability to have sex with those of the same gender.

Our society today is guilty of heteronormativity, the practice of treating heterosexual acts as the only normal, right ways of expressing sexuality. This creates a homophobic culture that goes so far as to make the phrase "no homo" necessary in some same-sex interactions. There was a time when males saying they loved each other wasn't a big deal. No one automatically saw them as homosexuals, since the idea of same-sex love as an identity didn't exist back then. As I learned in my Shakespeare class, it was normal for men to only see other men as their equals, and thus their same-sex friendship was something akin to how women act together now (except it was about manly stuff). This is why most people don't understand Shakespeare's male characters, and automatically assume that some of them might be gay. While it's possible, they're mostly going off of a modern day understanding of social norms that didn't exist at the time the plays were written.

Our culture today is a bit of a mixture of perspectives, but overall it's still homophobic. And it really surprises me that the people who are so strongly against homosexuality don't see the parallel between this issue and racism. There are some people who do see it, and have commented on it, and yet there is no change. But that's not really where I want to go with this post. I want to get even more philosophical with it.

I saw a question online once that interested me (okay, I'll admit it, I was on Omegle, since I'd never used it before and I thought it'd be fun. I did the question-and-answer option, which can be pretty entertaining at times). A guy was confessing that, while drunk, he gave a male friend of his a blowjob. He asserted that he wasn't gay, but wanted to know if this could make him gay. I pointed out that this was done while he was drunk, and so it had no real connection to his orientation. I went on to talk about how "gay" is an identity, not an action. The person who I was talking with agreed with me, and we had a discussion about politics and philosophy, ending with her saying that this gave her hope for our generation.

But after a while, I thought about what I'd said in light of what I'd learned in class. And I decided that I was wrong. What Queer Theory is really getting at isn't that homosexuality is an identity, an action, or even, for that matter, a real orientation. "Homosexuality" is just a construct. A term. A label. And, like all other labels, it is mere generalization. It was used to point out that some people were different, and that a certain identity--heterosexuality--is right, normal, and correct. Foucault's works make it quite clear that such labels are used to make distinctions that prescribe for us what "normal" is. And if we don't act "normal", then there must be something wrong with us. And if there's something wrong with us, this can be fixed--hence the existence of correctional institutions. Such places reinforce the subconscious conception of what "normal" is, and scare us into trying to remain within the norm. With these institutions in place, our culture contains multiple examples of what "normal" should be, and so we accept these things, and hide our idiosyncratic deviations. As a result, we police ourselves, and the illusion of normalcy is maintained.

This state of things is what creates such things as homophobia. But of course, since we're able to look at it in this way, we can analyze the truth behind it. Is being attracted to someone of the same sex wrong? No. It's just that part of the "normal" conception of sexuality as prescribed by the doctrine of heteronormativity makes people think it is. Butler takes things further, and that is where I'd like to steer this post. The fact of the matter is that "homosexuality" doesn't exist. Neither does "heterosexuality."

How is this possible? Because these terms are constructions, and have nothing to do with the reality of sexuality. Sexuality is not a binary distinction. Rather, it is a personal expression. I like to think of it as a spectrum, but that doesn't even come close. If there have to be labels, then the the two I would choose are "sexual" and "asexual." Either you are sexually attracted, or you are not. But I would even go so far as to reject this, and posit that no label fits better than..."human."

With whom you have sex, whether or not you have sex, how you have sex, who you are attracted to...all these things are just part of being human. I understand that the idea of "orientation" is just to simplify matters and get a general idea of a person's inclination, but the conception of sexuality as a spectrum of orientations hasn't really helped us as a society to understand how each person is equal. Making these distinctions only led to us counting one of these orientations as better than the others. Just like racism, it leads us to assumptions about intrinsic value that don't make any logical sense. So I support the LGBTQ community, but I hope that someday we tear down these constructs, and simply see the variety of sexuality as something to be celebrated.

The Expanding Trend

When I first saw the movie of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I was really mad. They rushed the shit out of that movie, and the plot really suffered. It was much darker than the movies before it, and the way they made a lot of scenes go by so quickly gave me the feeling that it was more of a series of impressions than a movie adaptation of one of my favorite young adult novels.

David Yates returned to direct Half-Blood Prince, and this downward spiral seemed like it would ruin the better books of the series completely. But then they made a decision I will always be thankful for: the seventh movie was split into two parts. I was still skeptical, since I hate what Yates did to the series, but once I saw Deathly Hallows: Part One, I was amazed by how good it was. Granted, there were some weird additions and subtractions like always, but this was the closest Yates had ever been to getting it right. That film is probably the best of the Harry Potter movies (it's either Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, or Deathly Hallows: Part One). Of course, the Part Two really pissed me off, since they took far too many liberties, but in the end I thought that this technique of dividing it into two movies made perfect sense.

But this seems to have started a trend in YA book-to-movie adaptations, Twilight being the next example of this. I read the Twilight series in my senior year of high school, not because I thought it would be a good read, but just so I wouldn't be bashing something that I'd never really given the time of day. It sucked in the end, but I don't regret doing it. After all, it made me realize that this trend of splitting movies isn't always a good thing.

Breaking Dawn is the book/movie in question. Now, this book hardly has any real action taking place in it, and was more of a place for Meyer to tie up all the loose ends that didn't necessarily need to be tied up. While Bella does finally become a vampire, the rest of the book is horribly dull and anticlimactic. Even though it was the biggest of the books, the least amount of things happened in it. And yet, when it came to making the movie, they decided it should be split into two. I was confused when I heard this, since I thought that there was no way you could really make two films out of that book, unless you took extra time for the characters to talk about their feelings, or made up some battles that never took place (I haven't seen the movies, but I'm betting the latter of these two happened).

But I don't really care about that franchise that much. If anything, I was mostly annoyed that the whole thing wasn't ending soon enough. I first started to be truly mad about this trend in film-making when I found out that Mockingjay would be in two parts. I read The Hunger Games trilogy, and Mockingjay was, without doubt, the worst. The first two were actually good, but the fast pace didn't work well with the plot of the third book, and everything ended up being crazy, confused, and too short. I saw The Hunger Games when it came out, and I thought it was a great adaptation, staying mostly true to the book. I have somewhat high hopes for Catching Fire, but I don't know how to feel about Mockingjay. On one hand, it is a bit of a compact book, so spreading it out might help. But on the other hand, we might just end up with two really bad movies.

Gotta love Memebase

And to top it all off, the end of 2012 faced us with the knowledge that Tolkien's prequel, The Hobbit, was to be split into three movies. This one's got to be the most ridiculous of them all. The rest of the Lord of the Rings series (or, at least, the main trilogy) was really long reading, and made for some extremely long movies. Return of the King was, like, 3 hours. Now, none of these movies were split, even though with hindsight we can see that there was more than enough content for that to happen. It's especially crazy when you take into account the fact that The Hobbit is shorter than any of the other novels.

I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and to be honest I can slightly grasp why splitting it would make some sense--most fantasy stories could be split, after all. But I didn't really like the movie itself. It was too slow, and Bilbo, in my opinion, did not bring it all together, unlike what I've heard so many people say. If anything, it just reinforces the logic of those critics who say that Gandalf could just solve all these problems himself: bring the dwarves together, fly the eagles to Smaug, and fight. Though I'm sure there's some cockamamie reason he can't do that.

Why do they split movies? Who makes this decision? As the above meme points out, the reason behind it is most likely the money they can get out of it. Money's the whole reason anybody produces anything these days, sadly enough. But the other reason for this trend seems to be that filmmakers are trying to solve the problem of long movies. A problem which really has more to do with the average American's attention span than anything else. As a society, we tend to see long movies as bad movies. Or at least we put that down as a con when we evaluate a movie. People make a big deal about any movie that goes over 120 minutes, and especially if it goes near 180. We simply don't want to invest that much time.

But really, is that a good objective measure for a piece of art? Of course not. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I saw The Dark Knight Rises, and some people complained that it was so long (165 minutes). I complained that it needed to be longer, to flesh things out more and set scenes correctly. See, it's not about how long the movie is--it's about what they do with that time. I would've liked if The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey had been shorter, and perhaps if they split the book into only two movies. There was a lot of stuff in the movie that didn't need to be there, or could've been done better. Perhaps it didn't really need to be shorter--all it needed was for the content to be changed.

When we focus so much on the running time of a movie, we forget about the actual storytelling aspect of it. Focus on that, and let it be as long as it may.