October 2005 Archives

Being Halloween it seemed like a good day to finish rereading the Shelly classic, "Frankenstein." I read this once before in high school and now, in my advanced old age, I looked at the book with an entirely different kind of cynicism.

The sort of amusing problem I had while reading the book is I just couldn't get myself to swallow the science of the thing. I was willing to accept that Victor Frankenstein was able to animate this creature, I was even able to understand that the monster was actually strong and able to survive in the wild. But when it came time to build a female companion for the wretch, Victor decided he couldn't do it, he was too concerned that the two beings would procreate and breed a race of monsters to eventually wipe out all humans. I kept thinking to myself, "if you're building the female companion from discarded body parts, just build her without ovaries, you idiot." Anyway, I suppose that's not really the point of the book.

The other point where I have to struggle to quell my disbelief is when the monster takes shelter in a little wood shed outside of a house and coincidentally inside the house the occupants are teaching a foreigner to speak the language. By observing this education Frankenstein's monster gets to learn to speak, apparently like a college educated classics major. It's a little too convenient, though it would be less of an interesting parable and more like the horror movies you see on television if the monster just wandered around groaning all the time instead of engaging his creator in philosophical debate.

Aside from these issues it's a good book. Victor Frankenstein is sort of a schmuck, and I have a lot more sympathy for the monster than for him. Victor spends at least half the novel in a stupor, either caught up in the frenzy of science, collapsed out of fear and exhaustion, or rambling in fever and remorse. Sometimes you just want to slap him and say, "Go be nice to the poor wretch you created for like ten minutes and maybe you'll stop having all these problems."

It's interesting to note that the monster as described in this book sounds a lot SCARIER looking than the traditional Frankenstein's monster we see in movies and television (you know, the one with a big flat-topped head and bolts in his neck). The monster in this book has translucent skin which reveals all the blood and muscles working beneath it, and apparently is so horrible looking that no human can look at him (even his creator) without totally freaking out.

It's also got me wondering: if an eight foot tall monster speaking with the diction of an english professor walked into my apartment and pleaded for a moment of my time, then proceeded to explain his difficult situation and made no other request than for my friendship, would I listen to his plight or would I run screaming from the room? I'd like to think I'd at least give him a chance, but who am I kidding? I'd run away screaming.

Whenever some major change occurs around these parts it seems like I suddenly lose all interest in posting. It happened when I first made my temporary switch to blogspot, though eventually I got my act together and the floodgate of nonsensical flimflam reopened. Then I got excited about resurrecting the original blog but once again the waters have run dry after this move. Maybe it's just because I have nothing funny to say... but when has that stopped me before? It's certainly not stopping me now. Oh, lord, this blog is so stupid! Why do I even have a blog? WHY? I'm just polluting the web with random noise, drowning the universe in additional needless communication. Did you know that there are 23 exabytes of electronic information communicated or stored per year in one form or another (over phone lines, e-mail, newspapers, etc)? That's 23,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information a year, a million times a million times a million, if a byte is one letter in a word, that's over a million million million words, that's a stack of books 150 feet high for every person in the world per year, and that's just the words exchanged in some sort of written or electronic format. I realize MixedMetaphors.net is just like .0000000000000000001% of that, but still, do we really need more?

I'm on a three-day whirlwind insurance tour of Indianapolis, IN, Schamburg, IL, and Merriville, IN. Oh, how did it come to this? Didn't I escape this lonely traveling salesman life for a more stable existence in NYC? Teach me, Schamburg, for I am weak with weariness and you must hold some answers. Last night I ate at The Cheesecake Factory. Oh, The Cheesecake Factory, you are such a ridiculous attempt at chaining a high-end restaurant, with your fifty page ad-filled menu and your oversized portions and your seasonal pumpkin cheesecake! I swore never to eat at you again, but in Schamburg, IL I did. You are the sign of how low I have sunk. Oh, you have made me exclaim "Oh" three times in a single post, four if you count that one in quotes.

Finally, after months of suffering the evil clutches of a canned blogger site, the original MixedMetaphors.net web server is back.

That means you get all of the following:
- Maroon colored background!
- Impossible to read font size!
- Incredibly slow load times!
- And Excel artwork!!!!!!

Maybe Blogger hasn't been such a bad host after all. I may end up messing around with the blogspot templates and embedding the blogger blog directly into the MixedMetaphors.net site. In the meantime, please make sure to leave comments at www.MixedMetaphors.net and NOT misplacedmetaphors.blogspot.com.

A man selling batteries - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A man playing a tambourine and spinning around and around without falling over - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

Another man selling batteries - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A man asking for money - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A woman asking for money - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A three-piece Mariachi band consisting of one trumpet, one guitar, and one bass guitar player, each member wearing full Mariachi garb, who played/sang two songs between the Columbus circle and 125th street stop on the Uptown A Express line - GAVE MONEY

Notes:

- There seems to be a lot of people selling batteries on the subway, and I'm constantly surprised by how many people actually buy batteries from these guys. Apparently the subway is home to a bustling battery marketplace.

- I expect this list to grow significantly when I have lived in NYC for more than a couple of weeks.

- I'm a sucker for Mariachi bands.

Last night on the subway I witnessed and participated in what is probably a mundane experience to long-time New Yorkers but, to me, was fairly interesting. As I entered the subway car (the A line, going uptown) my first hint of something wrong was when I noticed a pair of ratty shoes on the floor. This was followed by my noticing a pair of very dirty bare feet, which in turn were attached to a man lying down on one of the subway car benches. I decided to go sit on the other side of the subway car, far from those extremely scary feet, where I began writing in my notebook, otherwise oblivious to my surroundings.

A few stops later, I glanced up to notice a horde of people crowding down to my end of the subway car, all pushing to get through the doors connecting to the next car. Sure enough, shambling towards us was the barefoot homeless man, moaning incoherently. What made this barefoot shambling moaning homeless man particularly more offensive than your typical New York City barefoot shambling moaning homeless man was that he was spitting up some sort of saliva/vomit mix all over the floor. I decided it might be in my best interest to also change location, but due to a hold up in the crowd, I actually had to dart past the man and exit from the other end of the train. For the rest of the ride I sat and watched as people would get on to the original subway car and then immediately come pouring through the interior doors to safety.

Since you know how my mind works, it was impossible for me not to immediately compare this event to a minor zombie attack. I witnessed a diseased, barefoot, moaning, drooling man shambling after a running mob. In fact, I'm still not convinced that it WASN'T a zombie attack. Frankly, I think the entire New York subway system could be overrun by zombies for about a week before anyone noticed anything different.

But to avoid the fantastical and focus on the cerebral for a moment, this event also made me wonder the same thing I wonder whenever I see a human who has fallen to such catastrophic depths: what is keeping me from a similar fate? Could I end up as the next foul-smelling, mumbling, saliva-spewing, barefoot man on a subway car? Where is the line that divides me from him? Is this a "there but for the grace of god go I" sort of thing or is my very essence such that I could never sink so low? And why do I even consider it sinking low? Who am I to compare lifestyles and judge? Perhaps that man has actually discovered some meaning to life I have missed and has reached a pinnacle of human existence I will never be able to comprehend.

Well, the title of the post really says it all, but I'll kill the joke by explaining it. As you may or may not know, I'm commuting three hours both ways from NYC on Thursday and Friday to finish out this ill-advised consulting gig I started over the summer. I'm supposed to be done at the end of October but the project I'm leading keeps changing requirements and we've been pushing back the release date. Since I won't have "fulfilled" my commitment until we finish the project, I said today that I feel like Sisyphus. Someone overheard and poked her head in my office to say the title line. I was impressed with the immensely depressing sense of humor required to compare one's job to Sisyphus and choose his.

I was only supposed to read four Hemingway short stories for my class but I managed to misplace my notebook where I'd written WHICH four short stories. So instead I jumped around the book reading any short story with a title that sounded in any way familiar and might have been one of the titles I'd written down. Finally I found my notebook and discovered I'd not read a single assigned short story, but at least I found it in time to read the correct short stories. Fortunately Hemingway stories are pretty short. Anyway, I've probably read at least half of the book by now, and with short story collections I consider that enough for BookTrack.

My biggest takeaways:
1) I can see how Hemingway is considered a master craftsman
2) I waver between thinking these are fantastic short stories and thinking that I really don't like them.

I have a very un-Hemingway writing style, with a lot of long sentences and, more importantly, with a lot of intentionally embedded and linked themes and symbols.

After discussing three of his short stories in class ("Indian Camp," "After the Storm," and "The Light of the World") I have some more respect for the work. There is an incredible amount of depth and characterization that Hemingway gets across in very few words. While he may not be doing the sort of things with themes and symbols and words that my favorite authors do (Rushdie, Marquez, Wallace, DeLillo, etc.) he is doing something else entirely. My great uncle is a minimalist painter, with large whitewashed canvases focusing on small items (trash cans, mailboxes, etc) in the middle. I really like his work though I still appreciate other, less minimalist types of painting. I guess it can be the same thing with Hemingway.