There’s a passage I read this weekend in Cuckoo’s Nest that I really loved so I thought I’d share it here.

In the scene, our narrator, Chief, is doing what he does – cleaning the floors. But as you probably know from the movie, Chief doesn’t just clean the floor. Instead, he’s observing and soaking in the events taking place around him. I think that’s one of the most fascinating aspects of his character, is that he plays deaf and dumb (that word should be taken in more than one way), all the while he’s probably the smartest person in the story. But that doesn’t mean that Chief doesn’t have issues.

Throughout the book, Chief discusses “the fog”, which he likens to the artificial fog created by the military to blanket an airfield that he landed at during his days in the service. Chief seems to think the fog on the ward is being created by machinery hidden inside the walls of the building. He says the hospital purchased a fog machine from military surplus and they use it to cloud the minds of the patients.

But Chief doesn’t just go into the fog. In the passage below, he completely steps out of this world and into another. He steps into a painting on the mental ward wall.

There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at that visiting doctor talking with the residents. I can see him stabbing some point in the palm of his hand with his fingers, but I can’t hear what he says because of the crash of the cold, frothy stream coming down out of the rocks. I can smell the snow in the wind where it blows down off the peaks. I can see mole burrows humping along under the grass and buffalo weed. It’s a real nice place to stretch your legs and take it easy.

Of course there is no actual fog; it’s all in the big Indian’s mind, much like the world inside the painting. The fog seems to be more a metaphor for his bouts of insanity, a time when he becomes detached from himself and the world around him. I suppose it’s sort of like blacking out, but I have a feeling it’s a bit more subdued than that, too. The fact that he thinks it’s real, though, gives us an interesting insight into his character. He’s only partially acting the part of the insane mental patient; he can play deaf and dumb, but he can’t fake his hallucinations. The odd thing is, while he does lose clarity from time to time, making him a less-than-reliable narrator, for whatever reason this doesn’t detract from the faith we put in him and his observations.

Why do we trust Chief? Or should we? For all we know, McMurphy might not exist. Maybe McMurphy is simply a projection of a part of Chief that yearns to be rebellious and free, but is unable to express itself. Maybe the entire book is the raving hallucinations of a mad man. If the entire story is told through Chief’s eyes, there’s ample evidence that those eyes are seeing things that are not there.

This makes me as giddy as a schoolgirl…

I’ll definitely have to make sure I get Watchmen read before the film comes out.

While I’ve never read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest until now, I’ve seen the 1975 film so many times I’ve lost count. Ken Kesey, the author of the novel, claims to have never seen it, though. He was upset that the production company (including film star Michael Douglas) had changed the point-of-view of the film from the novel’s narrator, the giant Indian, Chief. Kesey, who was involved with the film’s production for a brief stint before a myriad of disagreements made him leave, was also upset over the casting of Jack Nicholson as the mental ward badboy, R.P. McMurphy. He wanted to see Gene Hackman take on the role instead. And from the description of McMurphy in the novel, I have to say I could definitely see where he was getting a vision of Hackman:

This guy is red-headed with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, been needing cut a long time, and he’s broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and he’s hard in a different kind of way from Papa, king of the way a baseball is hard under the scuffed leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody laid him a good one in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam.

The physical description might not match Hackman per se, but if you’ve seen Hackman in films from the time – The French Connection especially comes to mind – you could see how Kesey would have thought that the underlying hardness Chief describes in the passage above could shine through with Hackman. While I don’t know that anyone would say that Nicholson’s portrayal was a bad performance, I can definitely see how Hackman might have approached the character in a very different way. I think we might have questioned McMurphy’s insanity a little more had the part been played with a more subdued, laid back aire, instead of the frantic, manic, pretty-damn-close-to-psycho character that Nicholson delivered. Again, not to say that Nicholson gave us the wrong McMurphy, it’s just a different one than Kesey had probably pictured.

Now the casting of Chief…I don’t know how anyone could complain about that. Talk about perfect.

With Guantanamo Bay, “The War on Terror”, CCTV cameras blanketing London, Homeland Security wiretaps, and our seemingly endless war against a faceless, nameless enemy, it’s very, very, scarily easy to compare the world of 1984 to our own 2008. But I’m not going to do that. Like I said, it’s too easy. And a bit cliched lately, too.

This was my second time reading 1984, but the first time I’d noticed how well Orwell constructed the tone of Oceania. While reading, all I could think of was the color gray. Even when he describes the interior of the notorious Ministry of Love as being room after room of pure white walls, floors and ceilings, in my mind it was still gray. The land of the Proles was gray and muddy. The city of London was gray and dilapidated. The world is just drab, depressing, and completely oppressive, which is exactly the world he wanted to convey.

However, for the characters who love Big Brother, being gray is exactly what they want. Gray is nothing. Gray is neither one or the other. Gray helps them forget about black and white, right and wrong. There is no choice. There is only Big Brother.

Tolkien might have spent countless words describing each and every leaf in Middle Earth, but it’s amazing how Orwell does just the opposite – by not describing anything with any sort of detail other than vague snippets of description, he creates a world that’s believable, tangible, and utterly horrifying. That’s just plain good writing.

It had been some time since I’d read this, one of HP Lovecraft’s longer works, so I felt like it was one worth re-visiting.

Of HP’s works, I think this one is perhaps the best use of his particular writing style. His third-person, scant dialog approach is perfectly suited for re-telling the tale of a group of explorers who happen upon a “cyclopean” city of a long lost civilization deep within the frozen mountains of Antarctica. Much of the story is description as we are led through the labyrinthine halls of the alien Elder Things’ immense metropolis. There is very little action save for the last few pages when we discover that the term “long lost” might not be as accurate as one might hope. However, that’s exactly what the journal of an explorer/anthropologist would be in this situation – detailed descriptions of the artwork, the architecture, the gathered history and anything else that defines and tells the story of a society that has since gone extinct. The way the story is told, with so much detail and a convincing atmosphere of both wonder and dread, it succeeds in creating a blurred line between reality and fiction where you have to occasionally ask yourself if this really is a story or an account of actual events.

Lovecraft is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. Every story I’ve read of his is long-winded, often vague when you wish most for details, then detailed when it seems almost unnecessary, yet I keep coming back to them. Perhaps it isn’t so much the writing, but the concepts that draw me to Lovecraft and the world he designed. His concept of the Great Old Ones, an ancient race of gods who once ruled over earth and the universe before time began, has just enough of a taste of mystery, philosophy, and religious uncertainty to give the connecting stories great weight as you read and consider all of the things we really don’t know about the world we live in.

Sadly this is the only Lovecraft on the list, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it in the first place. It’s good to see HP is getting his due respect.