Dracula

If the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys got together with a Victorian expert and a diehard fan of everything vampire, and then they all read Bram Stoker's Dracula together, they would write The Annotated Dracula, by Leslie Klinger. As it turns out, Leslie Klinger is all of those types of people, as well as an extremely intelligent and philosophical guy. It reads like you and Klinger got together and read every single word of Dracula (not an easy task), which has something to say on almost every single page.

You'll learn more than you thought possible about Victorian England. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the railway schedules for almost every train in England and Europe. (I'd forgotten how much train travel there was in this book.) You'll also learn much about specific London streets and whereabouts, as well as about Carfax, Parfleet, and many other places in England. You'll learn the rivers, streets and locales of Buda-Pesth (I did remember that this was--and maybe still is--the original spelling of Budapest. But now I know why it is.) You'll learn everything you'll ever want to know about everything vampire and Dracula--including the surprising fact that the original Count had no problem at all walking around in the daylight. (That's a movie construct, mostly from 1922's Nosferatu.)

You'll see all of the discrepancies, minor (none of the journal and diary dates jive) and major (I did remember that Stoker had his characters give poor Lucy many blood transfusions--without concerning themselves with blood type. Even as a kid I knew you can't do that, as you can't empty and change a person's blood like you can a car's oil. But blood transfusions were a relatively new-ish thing in 1897, and Stoker took a chance and threw it in there.). Many of these discrepancies, like how there seems to be a full moon every single night, and how one train in Varna couldn't have gotten someplace as it says because it would actually take a lot longer, you could probably do without. But it's like MTV's Pop-up Videos: if you're in the mood for such arcania, you'll love it, if for no other reason than to just pass the time. (You don't watch Pop-up Video to learn something, do you?) Anyway, if you don't enjoy that kind of quaint nothingness, you probably shouldn't be reading this.

I'd read Dracula twice before, but I wanted to read it again with somebody who knew a lot about everything Victorian, as my current WIP partially takes place in 1890s New England. (Not the same, I know, I know.) But I wanted a feel for the time. And Klinger is an expert on everything Victorian, as he has also written a book that annotates every single Sherlock Holmes short story and novel that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. Klinger did the same for Poe, too, but of course Poe was of an earlier time. (These books are all on my list of things to do.)

The constant sidenotes don't deter from the actual reading of Dracula, though someone who's never had to read scholarly things with a ton of footnotes, endnotes or sidenotes may take awhile to get used to this. I read the book and stopped to read the notes every time a little number appeared, and never got sidetracked. Some of these notes are short, some very long, and often there are consecutive pages of notes without the novel, to get caught up with itself. And the print of these notes are not the super-small letters you may remember from the glosses of your collegiate or academic days, so they're fine to read, without straining.

My one caveat is that Klinger uses a conceit that all of the characters are real people, and that the discrepancies are an intentional attempt to hide the truth that they don't actually kill Dracula at the end, and that he lives to fight another day--in tons of other books, movies, comics, graphic novels, etc. You get the idea. Occasionally this conceit did stay me, and I swiftly moved on over such notes. Klinger did this in his Annotated Sherlock Holmes as well, and I wish he hadn't done so here, but how else can you do this kind of thing and yet make it different from all of the similar annotated books of Dracula out there? (Yes, there are several.) Klinger also had to convince his publisher to print such a book as this, and I guarantee this conceit was in his pitch. Otherwise, it may have come across as yet another glossed scholarly work, and who the hell wants to publish or read another one of those? (Well, okay, I read a lot of the scholarly articles Klinger cites in his bibliography, cuz I'm cool like that.) Still, you've got to make it different, and you've got to make it interesting.

So I forgave Klinger this trespass (and I skimmed over many of those annotated conceits) and I read it to enjoy all of the other notes--plus the book itself. Don't forget about the book! It was still as clumsily written as I'd remembered it, and yet it was still as effective as I'd remembered it--sometimes in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way. (Everyone interrogates Renfield as he's dying, and then they all leave him to die alone on the floor as they--finally!--run to Mina's room.) And, yeah, Dracula, as it turned out, was hiding in the building next to Seward's asylum almost the whole time. Whatever.

So if you like Dracula, the book, or the movies, or the Victorian Era, or if you're in the mood for a MST3K riff on all of these things, then this is the book for you. It also comes with the famous short story, "Dracula's Guest," that looks like an early attempt at a Dracula chapter, but not a "missing" or edited-out chapter, like you may have heard. There are many more discrepancies between novel and story than similarities, and it wasn't published at all until after Stoker died, which means it probably was never supposed to see the light of day. (See what I did there?) He published a few books of collected short stories, so if he'd wanted to publish it, he would have. This story looks like a discarded draft of a chapter that was going to show part of Harker's journey to Transylvania, but it's obviously not necessary, and Harker himself is never mentioned in it, so you should enjoy it as a separate story. It's still cool, as "The Dead Travel Fast," is still there, and it's still creepy enough.

Overall, highly recommended, especially in an appropriately-nerdy, have fun as you learn kind of way. And there's nothing at all wrong with admitting that.

Another Sherlock Holmes -- The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Photo: Book's front and back cover, from kernelscorner.com.

A good Dan Simmons book, though not one of his best (Drood and The Terror are that), The Fifth Heart has a lot going for it, and not too much against it--depending on the reader's level of patience and tolerance.

It's a lot of things, perhaps too many.  It's a thriller in a potboiler vein--like Conan Doyle's work.  (He's often mentioned but never seen.)  It's a mystery of rich people's manners and mannerisms--a la Henry James, perhaps the book's main character.  It's a mystery of deduction and induction--a la Sherlock Holmes, the book's other main character.  It's a historical adventure, like Simmons' Drood and The Terror.

But--and here's where the reader's patience and tolerance comes in--it's also a pseudo-metaphysical work, one that has the characters very self-aware, and pondering their reality: Are they themselves, or are they characters?  The one failure of all this to me is that the characters remain surprisingly productive and un-neurotic despite these philosophical quandaries.  We know that Holmes is a character, but the conceit of the novel is that he is not: He's a real person, and so is Dr. Watson.  Arthur Conan Doyle is nothing more than the editor of Dr. Watson's unfortunately melodramatic scribblings of Sherlock Holmes's adventures.  (Conan Doyle and Watson--both never seen--get a lot of verbal abuse from the many characters.)  The reader has to swallow this.

The reader is also forced to swallow the occasional interruptions of a first-person I / omniscient-writer narrator who never fully shows himself.  Is it Simmons?  Conan Doyle?  Watson?  Or someone else entirely?  It's never definitively shown; the question, in fact, is shied away from.  But we, the reader, are supposed to wonder about it, which seems to be the purpose: to cause philosophical wonder.  This is a drastic break of the fourth wall / suspension-of-disbelief, and so it needs the reader's tolerance. 

This last bit struck me as unnecessary.  The philosophical ponderings of existence, of character / person, of reality, and of unreality are all over this book, so we don't really need the intrusive first-person narrator break.  It's too much. 

Another unwanted intrusion is the much-more-rare Dan Simmons statements.  This single-handedly ruined Flashback, which was really just one long Dan Simmons diatribe.  He really tones it down here.  But you can catch a few times that he elbows his character aside for a moment so he can speak directly to the reader.  The most blatant of these was when Simmons makes his characters talk about the Pledge of Allegiance that apparently came from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  Simmons actually makes a character ask if anything interesting came of a certain meeting between characters.  That question is answered by bringing up the Pledge.  Another character says how barbaric it is to make students say it, and Holmes himself says that making them do so is something that would happen in Germany.  This is a constant Simmons break: He says something disparaging about the American education system as often as he can, in any book.  And so he does here.

However, at the end, this book is a good distraction--which Simmons himself seems to realize, as he constantly has characters refer to badly-written but entertaining mystery-thrillers, clearly referring to himself and to his own book.  This book, like its characters, is very, very aware of itself.  Dan Simmons is always hovering in the shadows over every page, his tongue in his cheek, pleasantly aware and happy about his own literary magic trick.

If you have the tolerance to handle these breaks--which are not as avant-garde as Simmons seems to think they are--then chances are good you'll enjoy the book.  It is as meticulously researched as Simmons's historical novels always are, often to the point of approaching info-dump.  The characters are amusing, though distinct--so much so that you'll wonder why their married or friendly with each other.  The characters had all been real people, and they all get knocked around a bit verbally by the other characters and by Simmons himself.  Samuel Clemens, John Hay, Conan Doyle, President Cleveland, and especially Henry James all get some chiding, some of it quite heavy.  You'll learn more than you'd probably want about the 1893 Columbian Expedition (read Erik Larson's book about that, too), about the horse-drawn carriages of the time, about Mark Twain's foolish financial disasters, and about train schedules.

It all works somehow, and you'll feel like you're really there.  Whether you're able to get back there after the author intrusions and first-person fourth-wall breaks is a big question.  I was able to again suspend my disbelief, but only mostly, and only barely, while watching for the next unwanted and unappreciated break of that wall.  It didn't ruin it for me, but I could understand how it might for somebody.

I still recommend that you try.

The View from the Bridge by Nicholas Meyer--Book Review

Photo: Cover art of the book, from trekmovie.com

A very interesting book, more about writing and directing in Hollywood than about just Star Trek.  Having said that, it would help mightily to be a fan of the series.  It's not that you have to be a fan to enjoy it; it's that Star Trek, in some way, takes up probably 50% to 75% of the book.

Still, there are other interesting things here:

--It takes about two seconds for directors to become nobodies in Hollywood.  I thought it was fast for actors...

--If you're not going to act, you'd better be able to write.  And fast.

--Meyer culled five or six screenplay drafts of Star Trek II and wrote Wrath of Khan by combining the best elements of those unfilmed drafts, plus his own ideas.

--And he wrote the screenplay for free. 

--In twelve days. 

--And didn't take a screenplay credit for it.

--I watched Wrath of Khan again last week, after finishing this book.  It holds up surprisingly well.

--He insists those are Montalban's real pecs.  Says so repeatedly.  I still don't believe it.

--And there's no way a genius like Khan doesn't get the twice-repeated "If we go by the book" coded message from Spock to Kirk near the end.

--The latest Star Trek movie is, of course, a parallel-universe version of this.  Abrams clearly liked Wrath of Khan and honors it constantly in his film.

--Which is in some ways better.  But mostly I don't think one is better than the other.  Just...different.  Each couldn't have been made in their respective eras.

--(Back to the book.  Sorry for the digression.)

--Nicholas Meyer somehow survived very successfully in Hollywood despite very powerful depressive and neurotic tendencies.  By his own frequent admission.

--He says the Trek movies he wrote and wrote / directed (II, IV and VI) were the best ones.  He is, of course, correct.  One had its moments; III was okay but too predictable and violent; and V was just plain awful.

--His first novel, one that made Sherlock Holmes meet Freud, was very good.  I haven't read his others, but plan to.  His books overall have done pretty well, especially his Holmes.

It's an easy read.  If you're a fan of movies, writing, Hollywood, and / or Star Trek, give it a shot.

The Best American Mystery Stories--1998, Part 3

photo: book cover from its Amazon page

This is a continuing series of short story critiques and summaries from The Best Mystery Stories--1998.  While these stories are a bit old, of course, the hope is that the reader will check out the authors of the stories positively reviewed, as many of these authors are still pounding the keys today.  Check out the other blog entries here and here.

The Adventure of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, by John H. Watson, M.D., edited by John T. Lescroart

Shame on you and go to the back of the class if you didn't recognize the name of the good doctor as the character who was the author of his adventures with his friend, Sherlock Holmes.  Lescroart has apparently received permission from Conan Doyle's estate, or maybe the publishing company owned the copyrights and gave the series to him, or something, not sure of the legalities here.  I suspect it's like Jeffrey Deaver now writing the James Bond novels, and whomever else is doing Robert Parker's Spenser novels.  Might be worth a little Google search...and you might be wondering why the story would be in a "Best of..." volume of American stories.  Either Lescroart's American, which would be sort of blasphemous, considering Holmes is a very British creation, or the story was first published in an American publication--which would be even more blasphemous.

Anyway, the story is short and crisp and well-written, with all the little details that you would expect Holmes to get and you (and, often, Watson) to miss.  This one's a good one about the possibility of a nasty plague, which, if you've been reading my blog for awhile, you know I'm interested in.  I won't give away the mystery here, so you'll have to get a copy of the book somehow, but I will say that the only problem I have with this series is that Holmes is portrayed as such a genius that we may not even try too hard to figure it out before it's told to us.  That's the trap I fell into here, which is unusual for me.  I put some of the pieces together before Holmes tells it all to us--and to Watson, which has always been a clever writer-ly trick, so that the reader doesn't feel spoken to, though of course we are.  (That trick is maybe original to Holmes, unless Poe pulled it off first.  Now that I think about it, I think Poe did, and Conan Doyle took it.)  I usually get pieces of these stories right, such as the dirt on the knees of the guy in "The Red-headed League," which, by the way, is one of the more ridiculous short stories I have ever read.  I mean, what moron wouldn't suspect that something is up when he's chosen, without reason, among hundreds of other red-headed guys, and is hired only to copy every letter of every word of a dictionary?  Ludicrous.  But I digress.  This one is not ludicrous, and is far better, actually, than "League," so read it.  Though it's a stretch that Holmes would notice the existence of the crime at all from the newspaper articles mentioned, but whatever.  That's Holmes's genius, right?  Again, you expect that he'd get things that you wouldn't, which gives the writer more of a pass than most mystery writers would get.  (I suspect Agatha Christie got away with much the same thing.)  But, when you're done, you'll be impressed with the author's cleverness, so he got that part of the series correct as well.  Memorable.

Night Crawlers, by John Lutz

This one is passable, though just a solid okay.  Nothing you wouldn't see coming, really, and there's a bit of a cliche about motorcycle gang members with tattoos.  And that the whole town is scared into silence by these three guys.  Wouldn't they just get ten townspeople together and take care of them?  Guess not.  Anyway, the swampland is used to good (cliche) effect, and it's well-written on the whole.  It's just that what happens and what's said is what you'd expect to happen and what you'd expect to be said.  But still done well, I guess.  Not a big fan of the "this happens then this happens" type of mystery, as the writer never tries to hide the mystery too much, and the bad guys are very clearly bad guys right away, so the suspects aren't the mystery, either.  In fact, there's no mystery to this mystery, but it's readable and you won't be worse off for reading it.  'course, you won't be better off, either, but, hell, at least the title means two or three things at the same time.  Just read it and move on.

Prayer for Judgment, by Margaret Maron

This one is a small, impressive little nugget, solved practically between cases in the judge's spare time.  It starts off with a well-written description of North Carolina flowers and scents, which has been done a billion times before in short stories and novels, just change the state.  (It also frequently repeated the word "gardenias," which was discomforting to me as it reminded me of one of Marlon Brando's bald head in the darkness blabberings towards the end of Apocalypse Now.  But that's me; not the writer's fault.)  Anyway, the author tried to glaringly bookend it with a two-sentence mention of the same at the end of the story, and it didn't work.  The whole flower/scent thing is unnecessary at the beginning and at the end.  Luckily, the mystery in the middle is set up as a minor puzzle, and you should be able to follow along and piece it together as the judge does, so that when she pulls apart the curtain at the end, you're nodding along, and satisfied at your own cleverness.  Well-written but for the flower nonsense.  Title sounds like it'll have more gravitas than it actually does, as you're waiting for a double-meaning that never really asserts itself.

More to come.

Sherlock Holmes--A Game of Shadows

Photo: Movie poster, from its Wikipedia page.

Very visually appealing, fast-paced, intelligent, fun and styled film that stretches the limits of Conan Doyle's character--but not as far as you'd think.  You'd have to read the stories to appreciate this, but Basil Rathbone's Holmes was only a small part of the total person; he wasn't all big hat and big pipe, deducer and inducer.  He was also a boxer, a fighter, an addict (which this film strays from somewhat) and many of the things that Downey's Holmes is--though, of course, not to the degree that Downey and Ritchie play him.

The sets are awesome, though I suspect that there's more CGI then I think...a lot more.  But they are still impressive, especially to a lover of the 1890s as I am.  You'll never catch all of the small things that Holmes sees and induces and deduces (though I was proud to have caught the dead plant), so don't try to hard.  As Roger Ebert says in his mostly-positive review--it's not the creaking-stairs and super-intellectual 1890s that you'll see here, so just sit back and enjoy the ride.  I wanted to see this because I became a great fan of the first Downey film, and if you liked that one, you'll very much like this one.  There's more scenery, more action, more thinking ahead, more clues, and a villain that is, in fact, Holmes' equal, intellectually and physically.  The only thing you won't see more of, sadly, is Rachel McAdams, and her statement of warning to him at the end of the first film is a harbinger of sorts here.  Or is it?  One never knows.

As a follower of the stories, most of the elements are here in the film, including the dive into the falls that so famously ends one of Doyle's stories.  It's the one where he tried to kill Holmes off, as Doyle was sick of him, and he wanted to write more of what he thought was more important--his histories and mysticism books.  The general public and even Doyle's own mother disagreed, to the point that they, and she, ordered Doyle to bring Holmes back.  Which he did, but in an unfortunately tortured and twisted way.  The movie, I have to say, handles it much better.  Nothing is, indeed, what it seems.  But, then again, we live in a world of seems.

Robert Downey is again very, very good.  True, he's an American playing a Brit, with nothing close to an accent, but what the hey.  Jude Law is very good as well.  They are both charismatic and they get along very well on-screen.  (In a way, theirs is the true relationship--and, yes, that's hinted at, as well.)  Noomi Rapace is good, in a limited role.  I suspect that her Lisbeth Salander from the original Swedish films was much better.  (Seeing the dubbed originals is on my list of things to do.)  Jared Harris is super as Moriarity--so much so, that you hope to see more of him in the next, too.  (Though I doubt it.) 

Go see it.  Read the stories, too, but forgive the filmmakers for the liberties they take.  They have been surprisingly faithful to the character and to the gist of the series.  The direction is top-notch; can't say enough about it, especially their travails through the forest.  It's stop-action of a different sort (not of the King Kong 1933 type, if you've seen that).  It's a combination of all the mystery, clues, action, direction, sets and overall Victorian-ism--with 21st Century direction.  A really intelligent action film.  What's more old/modern than that?

A Mistaken Premise--ADHD America

I mentioned in a Red Room comment to someone that I'll bet that Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe would not be successful characters in today's publishing world.  Not as they were initially created.  The reason I gave was that the American public is seen as too ADHD, too hyper, too bent on immediate gratification, to accept a work that takes a while to build its characters and crimes.  Chandler's novels are, first and foremost, about Philip Marlowe (and, one suspects, Raymond Chandler at the same time) and about the L.A. of the time.  The crimes and plots are so secondary that the novels often seem plotless, actually.  In fact, the plots were stitched together from many of Chandler's short stories, published in pulps like Black Mask, and they often don't hold up very well as plots.

But the novels, taken in their entirety, work very well, mostly due to the Chandler style and Marlowe's Voice (which are practically the same, but not completely).  Could such a work do well today?  Can a mystery noir be first about character, secondly about writing style, and thirdly about plot and actual mystery?  I thought so, which is why my ms. works the same way, but I can tell you that agents--and, perhaps, the entire publishing business--does not think so.  At all.  Readers don't have the patience.  Crime on page one.  All mysteries up front, with more to follow consistently.  Suspense on every page.  Crime, mystery, suspense, repeat.

Character and setting?  Writing style and Voice?  Fine, they'd say, but first: crime, mystery, suspense.

The publishing business isn't the only one to feel this way.  The education business does, too, I assure you.  The teaching colleges push the law of entertaining lessons so hard today that you'd swear they expect their teachers to be singers and dancers, too.  They really believe that if the lesson is super-duper-interesting, the teacher will never have a behavior problem, and everyone will love learning, and everything's rosy.  I've seen a lot of student teachers crash-and-burn because they believed this to the bitter end, only to learn---

But I digress.  Or do I?  Are the American Readers--and the American Youth--that ADHD, that hyper, that demanding, that needy for immediate gratification?  Are they, or does everyone think that they are?  Which came first, the supposed ADHD American Reader, or the publishing industry that's based on the model of immediate gratification for its readers?  You can ask the same about the education industry.

I propose that the whole thing's a mess.  With the state of both industries today, someone needs to step back and re-think this initial premise.  It's a chicken-and-egg scenario that did not exist in my student and first-reading days.  I don't know when it started, but what if the whole concept is a mistake?  I don't know about the publishing industry, but I can tell you that it's a disservice to many students, and that it's actually insulting and offensive to many of them.

I'm in the Mood for Something Random

Random thoughts:

I've put pictures on most of the blog entries on this site.  Go look at 'em.

Most overlooked Christmas movie: Die Hard!  Sure, A Christmas Story is funny, and Charlie Brown cartoons are cuter and more nostalgic, but who can deny that Die Hard kicked Christmas butt in the 80s?  I still quote Alan Rickman saying: "When Alexander saw the breath of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.  Benefits of a classical education."  I remember seeing it in the theater and people laughed A LOT, and we were blown away by the sound.  One of the first to use the new sound technologies.

I'm seriously jonesing Sherlock Holmes.  Don't know why.  Haven't seen the latest Robert Downey movie.  But I did just buy an awesome huge book of the short stories as originally published in The Strand Magazine, with the original drawings by Sidney Paget, and the original type from that era.  Cool, man.  I'm listening to a reading of Sherlock Holmes by the guy who does Shut Up and Think!  Go there and check him out.  He sounds a bit like Rush Limbaugh, but I'm not holding that against him.  He must get a ton of traffic, because two ads precede everything you click on.

Gotta work more on my writing and on my paper.  A bit of anxiety is beginning to creep in about both.  Paper is due December 7th or so.

Losing weight isn't hard.  A few simple rules: Burn off more calories than you consume.  Do more, eat less.

I will never be able to clean out this office.  I fight an avalanche of paper and mountains of books every day.

I'm busy almost every second of the day, but I never seem to get everything done that I want/need to get done.  How can that be?

I have more books to read than all books combined that I have ever read.  Or it just seems that way.

Baseball season couldn't start soon enough.  I'm hoping that it'll be so cold this winter that it won't snow.

I'm feeling so overwhelmed that I Googled daily planner forms and printed them out and am using them.  I can't tell if that's responsible, or pathetic.

I have at least three short stories I haven't sent out yet.  I have three novels I'm trying to write, all at once.

I go back to work tomorrow.  It's been 4 days and I haven't come close to accomplishing everything I wanted.  I realize that I'm coming across as a bit of a nut about this.  I feel like I'm losing time, but for what?

I'm tired of the Blogger stats not working.  What happened?  Blogger says it's working on it.

I got accepted to RIC and URI networking sites on LinkedIn, but when I scrolled through the members, I didn't know any of them.  I'm a member of 20 groups, just on LinkedIn alone, which seems like too many, and not enough, at the same time.  I become exhausted and eye-strained just responding to all those things.

Josh Hamilton and Joey Votto will be one-hit wonders, especially Votto.  His 328 total bases for an MVP has to be amongst the all-time lows.  Hamilton has a few more good years if he keeps his eyes on the prize.

That's enough randomness for now.  There'll be more to come, believe me.