The Holiday Hoard

So in lieu of a full blog post this week I would like to unlock my word hoard (in this sense I refer not to Beowulfian vocabulary but rather to the fun idea that collecting books is, essentially, a way to hoard words) and gloat over the increases that this past Holiday season has contributed to my collection. I'm only posting this now because the final Amazon.com order has finally arrived (Chretien was a bit of a slowpoke).

From left to right, top to bottom:
1. The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes, Translated by David Staines
2. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
3. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, Translated by P.G. Walsh
4. 1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth
5. Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (I actually bought this a while ago but have started reading it during Christmas break so I'll count it)
6. The Complete Book of Home Improvement (not too literary but very practical for a guy looking to buy very soon. Thanks to my best friend Hayik, fellow handyman)
7. The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. The Metamorphoses by Ovid, Translated by Allen Mandelbaum
9. Student to Student (this is a series of devotionals for college students and I'm actually a contributor, yay for being published! Not yay for having to buy the book I'm published in)
10. The Lays of Marie de France, Translated by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante

So far I've torn through The Children of Hurin, made it halfway through Foucault, The Consolation, and 1066. Finishing 1066 is probably the last thing I'll have time for before the new semester begins but overall I'd say that this Christmas was both highly productive and highly rewarding. I can't wait to catalogue them all. I just need to find a shelf that they will fit on...

Sherlock Holmes films

I had originally thought to simply review the recent Sherlock Holmes film but since I have some items of a similar flavour in my collection I thought I might try to develop some sense of the transmission of Holmes to celluloid. I'm mostly prompted by a late night TV session a few weeks ago where I caught the second half of the 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Peter Cushing as the brilliant detective (and though I may be the only one who either noticed or cared I feel obliged to note that the same actor also portrayed Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars Episode IV).

Some years back, no doubt after an impulse buy from the DVD bins at Sam's Club my dad presented me with a mammoth Sherlock Holmes film collection. This set included a number of the old, old Holmes films as well as episodes from the well-known television series staring Basil Rathbone, whom has come to define the classic Holmes image (Calabash pipe, deerslayer cap, Inverness cloak, magnifying glass, etc.). I can't say that I've watched them all, not only for a lack of time but in some the sound and video quality is so poor simply as a function of the age of the film that they are practically unwatchable. But some of these films, even as early as a century ago, began a trend in altering literature for film which has become an extreme point of contention among modern moviegoers.

I can say with some authority (see last week's blog) that Conan Doyle developed a very specific style and temperament for his most interesting character. Holmes is eccentric, brooding, but confident and almost unfailingly genius. Who else can keep his tobacco in a Persian slipper on the couch yet intricately outwit the most dastardly of Professor Moriarty's plans? In many of these old film versions, whether because of time restrictions for character development, the adamant stylings of directors or actors, or simply a limited familiarity with what was then a new performance medium (the oldest of the films in this set was made in 1931), Holmes usually is only capable of exhibiting the confidence and a very brief moment of genius (usually in the final denoument). Don't get me wrong, these old black and white relics are still very fun to watch, but in terms of presenting Holmes for what he really could be, they fall short (but really only in the eyes of someone who knows the detective's potential). But this brings me to the rub of the recent film.

Since discovering that Robert Downey Jr. would be playing Holmes I had been quite excited and was not at all dismayed with the more action-esque dressing the character would be receiving at the hands of Guy Ritchie (I'm a big fan of Lock Stock and Snatch. Layer Cake not so much). But it was the trailers that prepared me for the reality that the Holmes I would be seeing would not be Doyle's Holmes exactly. I personally have found this strategy quite useful in enjoying a film and I have been ever surprised when Harry Potter fans or (barf) Twilight fans express disappointment that the film wasn't exactly like the book. In this case Holmes had the advantage of being a very dynamic character not necessarily tied to a specific plot. This both made the story new (which is refreshing for one familiar with Doyle's formula) and allowed me to be rewarded every time something book-accurate did happen to pop up; thus the quote I began with last week. In my opinion never before has an actor been more committed to exploring all of Holmes character traits nor has a filmmaker been so well funded to allow it. True it may lead to some repeated Hollywood gags and action crowd-pleasers but for me they are easily forgiven.
----
Sherlock Holmes Case Files: 10 Movies (plus selected episodes)

The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

“You have a grand gift of silence, Watson,” said he. “It makes you quite invaluable as a companion. ’Pon my word, it is a great thing for me to have someone to talk to, for my own thoughts are not over-pleasant."

Though this quote may have been used to comedic effect in the recent Guy Ritchie film it actually appears in a classic Holmes adventure entitled "The Man with the Twisted Lip." This will undoubtedly play a part in next week's blog about the film but here I find it particularly humorous when the conversation is directed at our nearly omnipresent narrator in the best loved tales by Conan Doyle. Watson, of course, was not entirely silent since he, despite his usual lack of deductive skill, provides the brilliant Holmes with both someone to talk to as well as a means through which the exploits of such an icon of the detective genre can be believably recorded.

Though Holmes had been preceded by Poe's Auguste Dupin ("The Purloined Letter") by nearly thirty years whether as a result of Doyle's more expansive works within the genre or through the multitude of idiosyncrasies that marked his character Sherlock Holmes has come to exemplify the perfect detective. It could be argued that Doyle's stories have a tendency to become formulaic or at least somewhat contrilved but their entertainment value cannot be lost and has in fact captivated its audience without slackenign since the late 1800's.

I'm not sure where I had even had the opportunity to experience any thing Holmsian in my early youth, no doubt through a cartoon of some sort, but I distinctly remember putting two baseball caps on my head, one foreward and one reverse, in an attempt to emulate Holmes' classic deerslayer. Nearly fifteen years later I actually had the opportunity to visit 221B Baker Street and peruse the museum and gift shop that has been established in that location. There I managed to pick up the real article; a genuine Holmes deerslayer cap, a souvinir which subsequently became my calling card.

The nice part was that I felt particularly qualified to wear it since a few years earlier at Christmas my grandfather had bestowed upon me the grand volume pictured above. As you might imagine it is quite a brick, containing all four Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear, and The Hound of the Baskervilles) as well as every other collection of Holmes adventures (Adventures of..., Memoirs of..., The Return of..., His Last Bow, and The Case Book of...). It must have been the following Summer break, while working as a cashier at a gas station with very little to do during the slow Saturday shift, that I managed to devour all 1122 pages, leaving me feeling particularly intelligent. For some reason reading Holmes makes one feel particularly qualified to develop grand deductions about the world around him that one realizes weren't all that grand once the book-buzz has worn off. I can't say that Doyle presents an immensely artistic series of tales but then again I don't think that is what he was going for. Ultimately Holmes is amusingly cerebral and entirely entertaining; this particular mindset also made the recent film quite fun, but I will leave this for next week.
----
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. New York: Doubleday, 1930.

Let's All Kill Constance - Ray Bradbury

Welcome back all. Thank you for enduring my brief holiday hiatus. The book I would like to talk about today will complete my brief Bradbury series and though I have plenty of other books by the same author I think I'll go ahead and save them for another time.

I have been looking for a copy of Let's All Kill Constance since I finished A Graveyard for Lunatics a few years ago, albeit not diligently. On a whim a few weeks ago I decided to look for it on Amazon and found a copy for a ridiculous price. I think my fellow used-book-buyers will chuckle at the familiarity of paying more for shipping than for the actual item. Though I had already decided on an ambitious reading list for my winter break when I received this novel and read its first few pages I discovered the need to put those plans on hold for two days (the time it took to voraciously devour this new adventure). Now I have the simple, nerdy satisfaction of a completed "set." I don't think Bradbury intended these three books to directly follow (though their internal chronology flows the same way as publication order) they do mark beginnings and endings for the three characters I've enjoyed discussing these last few weeks, but not in the way I expected.

I have mentioned before that I found Constance Rattigan to be one of the most interesting characters Bradbury had developed. He had built her as an icon of a tarnished Golden Age of film and Let's All Kill Constance delves deep again into the fictional history of a tarnished Tinsel Town. The unnamed narrator and Elmo Crumley search for the missing Constance from Venice Beach to Mann's Chinese Theater but the enigmatic character who begins the novel running mad in fear of her life is tragically always a step ahead of our unconventional detectives.

Though my interest in the character was what inspired me to pursue the book the further I dug into it the more I found the author forcing me to ask "who is Constance?" Ultimately this becomes the novel's main mystery; discovering exactly who to look for when searching for a person who spent their life pretending to be someone else. Of course I will not give away the ending but I will say that the experience was cathartic enough to inspire me to create a link (since deleted) in Wikipedia's list of people interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

In all Let's All Kill Constance was not the mystery I expected; but Bradbury's stories are never really what we expect. But I find that this genre leads nicely into the subject I have chosen for next week's blog, Sherlock Holmes.
----
Bradbury, Ray. Let's All Kill Constance. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.