02 July 2004 20:51
yet another ode to Douglas Adamsa couple nights ago i read "dirk gently's holistic detective agency." on the whole i found it somewhat tedious and dull, but kept plugging, for indeed it was a douglas adams book. who is he? i know exceedingly little about him, albeit exceedingly more than most of my aquaintences. i do know that his earlier works are light and bubbly and addictive, while his later works are dark and not bubbly and not quite so addictive. not knowing much about him, i would still hazard a guess that he was growing less and less enthused about living a purposeless life and that getting saved would done him wonders, but i think he died back in the late nineties.
much of his charm lies in his colourful juxtaposition of literallicy and abstractness. this shows up in a number of ways, best of all are his metaphors/similies. classic, classic example: "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." second are his corollary statements, where he takes the obvious, twists it, and comes out with a laugh. "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." third are his little ingenious observations of humanity's quirks (of which the last quote was also an example) "It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "As pretty as an airport" appear."
anyway, dirk gently... wasn't really tremendously funny, though i have higher hopes for his sequel, "the long dark tea-time of the soul." though i must admit, that while the title is infinitely more interesting than "dirk gently's...", its subject matter isn't very hopeful at first appearances. we shall see. but reading dirk gently.. ever so often i would catch a glimpse of the douglas adams i am familiar with from hitchiker's guide. it started with the dedication.
to my mother,
who liked the bit about the horse
i could picture his mother, one of those mother's who would read this book without smile or exclamation, and setting it down at the end would say quite honestly, "that was very nice douglas." she would be proud of his work, not because of his skill, but because he was her son, and thus anything he accomplished would be worthy of her pride and quiet satisfaction. to have her then, make some comment of appreciation on "the bit about the horse," would be a small momentious occasion to her son, eager for her approval.
so my first thought was, "awww, how cute." my next thought was to look forward to the bit about the horse.
when the bit about the horse came on, i was not dissappointed per se, in that my hopes really hadn't been that high. it was cute enough (cf the first horse quote below), but not really worth chuckling over. later on, i came to the main bit about the horse, and at that point my hopes were indeed realized, for it was quite funny. i wont' put it here, because it doesn't separate from the story very well, too many connotations are lost for it to be funny. however, following i have culled the remaining quotes that are at least somewhat funny by themselves, esp if you've read the book before. (that's another beauty of adam's quotes, if you've read the books three or four or twelve times, just reading a webpage full of quotes brings back the whole story, so you can compress three hours of reading with sporadic laughter to twenty minutes of almost continuous chuckling :) ).
And time began seriously to pass. (Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 1)
So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was skeptical about things? Unusual behavior for a horse, wasn't it? An unusual horse perhaps? No. Although it was certainly a handsom and well-built example of its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinoin about them. (4)
One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted heron. (9)
[re college founder from 200 years ago] "Coleridge. Samuel Taylor. Poet. I expect you've heard of him. This is his Dinner. Well, not literally, of course. It would be cold by now." Silence. "Here, have some salt." (15)
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to. (32)
Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn't the slightest idea what he was meant to do about it. It wasn't a situation he had encountered before. (64)
[i'm not british, whereas i'm sure this would be funnier, but i found it funny anyway] Richard pushed the phone back into its cradle and slammed his car into reverse for twenty yards to have another look at the signpost by the road junction he'd just sped past in the mist. He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for. (76)
[apartment] Number 33, when he eventually found it neatly sandwiched between 37 and 45, was in a poorish state of repair, but no worse than most of the rest. (112)
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