James Franco is directing As I Lay Dying. I'm not sure what to say. Granted, this is the guy who played Allen Ginsberg in Howl and Hart Crane in the biopic The Broken Tower. And he's taken the English-grad-student route, so he's probably got some idea of what he's getting himself into. It doesn't hurt that he’s already cast a bumper crop of Southern actors, including Danny McBride, Tim Blake Nelson (aka Delmar from O Brother Where Art Thou), and Ahna O’Reilly from The Help.
But still. As I Lay Dying? Our own Mr. Fee just did a post on films adapted from difficult books, but Faulkner is a whole new level of unfilmability. Let's look at a few of Franco's gravest challenges.
First, an overview for those of us who didn't read it in high school: As I Lay Dying is the story of a deceased matriarch, Addie Bundren, and her family's journey from her deathbed to Jefferson County, where she asked to be buried. The genius is in the fifteen narrators who tell the tale, from Addie's oddly named children (Cash, Jewel, Dewey Dell, Darl, Vardaman) to a rogue's gallery of opinionated neighbors and countryfolk. One of the chapters is narrated by Addie herself; she declares from beyond the grave that “people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
Faulkner actually worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. It makes sense: his characters are that vivid, that real. So it should be sort of feasible.
But. But, but, but.
How could a film possibly do justice to this page, the most famous page in the entire book?
I’m serious. The rest of the page is blank. Film just can't withhold information like this. If we see Vardaman onscreen, a small boy sitting on a porch or eavesdropping or smelling the fish that we later learn is cooking nearby, then that thought, my mother is a fish, simply won’t carry the same weight. The audiobook has an exaggerated pause, and that’s as close as we can get.
That's not all. Right before that chapter, another one of Addie's sons has a numbered list explaining how and why he built his mother's coffin the way he did.
Pretty sure that's going to get adapted beyond all recognition.
James Franco was able to pull off Allen Ginsberg and Hart Crane because they were essentially biopics. But here, he's set himself the task of extracting the story from the book. And the story really isn't the point.
I can’t wait to hear James Franco’s brilliant cast toss around lines like “I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel” and “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” But if I go to see As I Lay Dying, I guess I'll be prepared to experience something completely different from what I read in English class. Good luck, Franco; you’re up against Faulkner now.
Image credits: photosmoviessongs.com; bigbowlofsoup.tumblr.com
The triumph of those scientists who justencoded a textbook in DNA reminded me of Christain Bök’s latest project, The Xenotext Experiment. Bök's plan to implant a poem into a radiation-loving bacterium sounds organic alright; what do we make of this coming age of poetry literally made flesh?
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My parents were flower teenagers when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the Moon. Despite cabin-mate Buzz Aldrin's pop culture ubiquity, it was Armstrong's gravely voice — “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” — that inspired generations of deep-space dreamers. The lunar legend's passing last week, and a selection of his letters reproduced on mental_floss, got my mind drifting. What if the first moonwalk occurred in the 19th Century? What if classic authors transported their tales to the cosmos?
This is not an easy concept. Resetting novels in celestial environments can result in some wack-ass mashups, and I'm definitely not a fan. I'd make a pitch for Bram Stoker's Dracula — two words: “space vampires” — except it's been done, even inspiring a pretty sweet film adaptation.
Still, I've identified some classics that would convert wonderfully in outer space. Take a giant leap (of faith) with me and read on.
Star Wars Episode VII: Revenge of the Realist
What if Chichikov, of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, piloted around Russia in the Millennium Falcon instead of that spacious britzka? Manilov's “Britishly” over-politeness demands gold-toned protocol droid C-3PO, while in-your-face Nozdryov could be any of the bruisers boozing at Mos Eisley's cantina (which, in this version, would be called "Gogol's Bordello.") Sobakevich cuts a Jabba-esque figure, if not in sluglike physique and penchant for malice, then in his shrewd business acumen and voracious appetite. And miserly Plyushin could be Yoda fallen from the Force, and his halcyon garden — shadows “yawning like a dark maw” — the lonely swamp of Dagobah.
Alien vs. Kafka
In The Trial, Franz Kafka conjures a labyrinthine city around accused Josef K, echoing a convoluted, inaccessible authority. Now picture K wandering the gas-spewing corridors of an industrial spaceship, like Nostromo in Ridley Scott's Alien. Sliding doorways and claustrophobic crawlspaces lead not to a drooling Xenomorph but to legions of lawyers, or perhaps batty court painter Titorelli. Though I like the idea of the sadistic Flogger becoming a Facehugger, tonguing K's pitiful arresting officers instead of beating them.
Charlie and the Magic Mountain at the End of the Universe
Except for a few snowshoes into town, The Magic Mountain dwells way up in a Davos sanatorium. Thomas Mann's masterwork could double as a huge-ass spacecraft with breathtaking views and a killer kitchen, combining Milliways from Douglas Adam's The Restaurant at the End of the Universewith the luxurious Space Hotel from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Spacewalks replace young Hans Castorp's meandering strolls with humanist Settembrini and radical Naphta, while Davos' idyllic panoramas could be swapped for crazy shit like the Pillars of Creation. Plus, Castorp's harrowing hallucination in the chapter “Snow” easily translates to deep-space distress.
Neuromancer in Venice
I'd even chance converting the beachfront Grand Hôtel des Bains of Mann's novella Death in Venice into Freeside, the glitzy cylindrical space resort from William Gibson's Neuromancer. Better still, consider sunny Ursa Minor Beta from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (fine, I'm an Adams fanboy), with its endless subtropical coastlines and perennial Saturday afternoon climate, “just before the beach bars close.”
Told you these re-imaginings aren't easy. If I've implanted any intergalactic mashup ideas in you, jot them down below. And if this all seems a bit far-fetched, I'll leave you with Mann's time-traveling meditation on the Lido di Venezia:
the sea, so bright with glancing sunbeams, wove in [Aschenbach's] mind a spell and summoned up a lovely picture: there was the ancient plane-tree outside the walls of Athens, a hallowed, shady spot, fragrant with willow-blossom and adorned with images and votive offerings in honor of the nymphs and Achelous.
Image: The Magic Mountain cover via the author's own scan + Pillars of Creation via ScienceBlogs, photo-chopped by the author
Onscreen shagging to a boom-chacka-chacka soundtrack remains stigmatized in puritanical America. Despite the distinguished lineage of adult talent in non-pornographic films — a list longer than John Holmes'super-schlong — porn stars rarely cross over into more "legitimate" areas. Lit-lovers will want to read on, though: starlet Kayden Kross is making waves as a published short-fiction writer.
Before we check out her fiction, as well as the more mainstream work of some of her colleagues, a few guesses at the life of a porn star.
If we learned anything from Charlie Sheen's winning porn meltdown last year, it's that adult-industry performers have flexible schedules — particularlycrème de la crème “contract girls.” As Capri Anderson's manager explained, high-end actresses shoot typically four films a year, spending two to three weeks on each. Even with exclusive endorsements and appearances, that's still over six months free.
Some preferred outlets of porn diversification are a bit...obvious, like reality TV (try Googling “Survivor + pornstar”) and liquor (if Jesse Jane's goddess-inspired tequila doesn't wet your whistle, try a swallow of Ron de Jeremy). Autobiographies are customary, too, perhaps none as famous as Jenna Jameson's New York Times bestseller How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale.
So here's what's groovy about Kayden Kross: her contribution to Harper Perennial's Forty Stories positions her with Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins, National Book Award-finalist The Zero), Blake Butler (There Is No Year), and other young or established writers. In the collection's sparse bios, the only indicator to Kross' onscreen persona is a sorta cheeky (NSFW) website tag. “Plank,” which first appeared on her blog, reads like a breathless, second-person lucid dream:
You threw your head back and faced the sky and watched the way the green never caught up to the blue, watched the way they spun when you tried to stay too still.
A major tease in 1,400 words, way more so than Kross' multiple roles inPerfect Secretary: Training Day. Besides the repeating “screaming and wet” line, “Plank” isn't overtly sexual. See for yourself. And her long conversation with The Instructions' Adam Levin is worth a read while awaiting her next short story or Complex column.
So who else is equally talented in porn and prose? I'm a fan of alt-porn performer Zak Smith's vivid, figurative artwork, like his 2004 Whitney Biennial contribution: page-by-page illustrations of Gravity's Rainbow. Smith's visual memoir We Did Porn combines sexy, acid-toned portraiture with postmodern asides on tentacle porn (see above; there's that Pynchon again!) and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Kross' bosom buddy Stoya gets geektastic gold stars for reading Terry Pratchett and (very NSFW!) William Gibson. Plus, she debuted Stoya's Bookclub, video-reviewing Chad Kultgen's Men, Women & Children alongside Kross.
C'mon, Stoya, let's see that insight in print, preferably in the post-Neuromancer realm! A sexy screen starlet writing sci-fi — now that turns me on.
Image: 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses (detail) via Zak Smith
My first bout with consumption happened in junior high. Tuberculosis has a long literary history, complete with a dedicated Wikipedia listing, but until I wrapped my pubescent mitts around Crime and Punishment, I didn't associate it with consumption. To me, TB meant Mantoux tests and subsequent Masters of the Universe action figures as reward for sitting still. But Fyodor Dostoevsky unveiled a world of impassioned and desperate players, literally “consumed” by the harsh world around them.
Below are three cherished Dostoevskian consumptives, from the physically frail to the societally suffering. Dostoevsky newbies, you'll also find some emblematic quotes to whet your appetites—all from the superior Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translations. I've tried to keep it spoiler free.
The Idiot: Ippolit Teréntyev, ailing atheist
My favorite Dostoevsky novel features such enduring characters as the “idiot” Prince Myshkin, a kind, innocent—and widely appraised as “Christ-like”—epileptic, and the bubbly Aglaya (I always preferred her to the femme fatale Nastassya Filippovna). Add to these the iconic, flush-cheeked, suicidal consumptive Ippolit. The 18-year-old's plot-stealing aside “A Necessary Explanation!” contains some of this emotional roller-coaster's most forsaken prose:
Isn't it possible simply to eat me, without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me? Can it be that someone there will indeed be offended that I don't want to wait for two weeks? I don't believe it; and it would be much more likely to suppose that my insignificant life, the life of an atom, was simply needed for the fulfillment of some universal harmony as a whole.
The Eternal Husband: Liza Trusotsky, casualty of circumstances
I'm haunted by Liza, born of a clandestine affair between dashing Velchaninov and consumptive Natalia. Velchaninov senses Liza's suffering and tries to pry her from her abusive, cuckolded “father” Trusotsky. Liza's torn existence between Velchaninov, who truly cares for her, and Trusotsky—who, despite his cruelty, she still loves—resounds in her departure to a foster family:
“Is it true that he'll [Trusotsky] come tomorrow? Is it true?” she asked [Velchaninov] imperiously.
“It's true, it's true! I'll bring him myself; I'll get him and bring him.”
“He'll deceive me,” Liza whispered, lowering her eyes.
“Doesn't he love you, Liza?”
“No, he doesn't.”
She succumbs to fever, and though Doestoevsky never explicitly calls it consumption, the implication of wilting under the world's pressure, abandoned first by her “real” father Velchaninov and then by her booze-addled “father” Trusotsky, is deafening.
Crime and Punishment: Sonya Marmeladov, self-sacrificer
The interplay between sickly Katerina Ivanovna and stepdaughter Sonya evolves consumption beyond illness. While Katerina defies a crowd (“I'll feed mine myself now; I won't bow to anybody!”), coughing up blood before her terrified children, I feared most for Sonya. Her world threatened to “consume” her, as she prostituted to support her younger siblings. Add her unyielding devotion to Raskonikov, the impoverished student behind the novel's murder:
Stand up! Go now, this minute, stand in the crossroads, bow down, and first kiss the earth you've defiled, then bow to the whole world, on all four sides, and say aloud to everyone: 'I have killed!' Then God will send you life again. Will you go?
And...she doesn't break. Altruistic Sonya follows the condemned man to Siberia.
This is why I am hooked on Dostoevsky: for conjuring such compelling “consumptives." Though I may not relate to their hardships like I do Haruki Murakami's everyman boku, it's thanks to Dostoevsky's fully-realized creations that I want to know them. Raskolnikov says it best:
Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men, I think, must feel great sorrow in this world.
Image: Vassily Petrov's Portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky via Rhode Island School of Design
My geek-heart fluttered as the Resident Evil-themed restaurant Biohazard Cafe and Grill S.T.A.R.S. touched down in Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood. For the unaware, Resident Evil is a survival horror video game that spawned zombified novelizations, comics, and feature-length films. Since it's Japanese, S.T.A.R.S. wouldn't be complete with just a Resident Evil-derived menu (though no “brain” dessert like at Shinjuku's Capcom Bar) and tons of memorabilia. And so, unlike Chuck E. Cheese's, where pizza comes with aweird-ass animatronic theatre show, the centerpiece at S.T.A.R.S. is a life-sized Tyrant that, via 3D projection mapping, “comes alive and attacks,” only to be subdued by the all-female S.T.A.R.S. ANGELIQUE staff's sexy choreography. You just can't make this shit up.
FROM THE DESK OF TODD
"Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We’re all nerds, on one subject or another."
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My geek-heart fluttered as the Resident Evil-themed restaurant Biohazard Cafe and Grill S.T.A.R.S. touched down in Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood. For the unaware, Resident Evil is a survival horror video game that spawned zombified novelizations, comics, and feature-length films. Since it's Japanese, S.T.A.R.S. wouldn't be complete with just a Resident Evil-derived menu (though no “brain” dessert like at Shinjuku's Capcom Bar) and tons of memorabilia. And so, unlike Chuck E. Cheese's, where pizza comes with aweird-ass animatronic theatre show, the centerpiece at S.T.A.R.S. is a life-sized Tyrant that, via 3D projection mapping, “comes alive and attacks,” only to be subdued by the all-female S.T.A.R.S. ANGELIQUE staff's sexy choreography. You just can't make this shit up.
Think of the potential for other fantastical eateries! Consider Milliways, akaThe Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the time-bending brasserie and titular sequel to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Obliging cattle that converse before being butchered, mixologist-worthy drinks like the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, exorbitant prices, and the bestpeople- (or otherwise-) watching...sounds a bit like NYC's Meatpacking District, yeah?
I'm sure some ambitious local restaurateur could conjure a virtual “Gnab Gib”: the universe-terminating extravaganza enjoyed at Milliways. Evidence: the semi-private “Purple” room of superlounge hellhole Tenjune and the agoraphobia-inducing Great Hall in Buddakan around the block. I despise these places and the surrounding neighborhood, but the American propensity for outsized hyperbole—in restaurants and in life—is limitless.
Unfortunately, Martin Freeman quashed the possibility of a bigscreen Hitchhiker's sequel, so we'll not be seeing Milliways on celluloid anytime soon. All the more reason to consider brick-and-mortar.
Meanwhile, let's think smaller. Cyberpunk novels (and their steampunk cousins) tend to feature awesome, character-riddled booze havens. China Miéville's Perdido Street Station has The Moon's Daughters: your favorite dive bar, if you swap the bikers for “artists, thieves, rogue scientists, junkies and militia informants.”
The opening chapter title of William Gibson's Idoru is the Kafkaesque bar Death Cube K, whose chitinous, surgical, and chilling chambers recall The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Trial, respectively. And though the Black Sun within Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has a prohibitive door policy and dodgy drug undercurrents rivaling Little West 12th Street, this noirish virtual nightclub is strictly no-drama, hacker-approved.
Given the choice between these and any of New York's countless faux speakeasies (especially one masquerading as a deli), I say without hesitation: So long, and thanks for all the absinthe.
Main image: 4Gamer.net; Milliways via Hitchhiker Wiki
Desmond Pepperdine has a secret — one that’s revealed on the first page of Martin Amis’s new novel, Lionel Asbo. The secret itself is pretty unthinkable, but it precipitates a crime so unthinkable that, once it’s happened, Desmond can’t think about it. All of which got me thinking about the secrets that run riot though Amis's whole oeuvre. Here's my Top 5.
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Stephen King, horror's überscribe, is still setting the pace with new novels. If 2013's print-only Joyland doesn't get you going, check this: a recent Los Angeles Times article details Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining penned 35 years after the original. Doctor Sleep focuses on a now-adult Danny Torrance, the child with “the shining,” drawing intriguing parallels to youngShining-era readers who are now adults themselves. But the article's final paragraph bears the most divisive news: Hollywood is also talking about a prequel.
NO. No, no, no. Look, some doors do not need to be opened. Where's Hallorann when we need him, warning Danny (or us, or the filmmakers):“You ain't got no business goin' in there anyway. So stay out.” Take my hand through this Shining survey, from the late 70s original to futures unknown.
1977, Stephen King's novel horror: King's first hardcover bestseller is terrifying to this day, a modern haunted house tale enveloping a semi-autobiographical core: the tormented, alcoholic writer terrorizing his own family.
The good: Father Jack Torrance wields a sadistic roque mallet: “Roque...it was a schizo sort of game at that. The mallet expressed that perfectly. A soft end and a hard end. A game of finesse and aim, and a game of raw, bludgeoning power.” The bad: no "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (typed by Jack, perhaps in subconscious homage to Christopher Knowles). The ugly: Danny's skin-crawling encounter with the old hag: “Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards.”
1980, Stanley Kubrick's film: It's rare that a film stands so vividly over its source material, but Kubrick's Shining does. His Overlook is my Overlook.
The good: Kubrick transformed the Overlook Hotel into a practically living, breathing entity, a frightening, temporal maze of impossible passageways, sometimes containing Grady's twin daughters (also absent from King's novel), intoning: “Come and play with us, Danny. Forever...and ever...and ever." The bad: not a damn thing. The ugly: the old hag, or rather, the young woman who seduces Jack and turns into the old hag.
1997, Re-adaptation as TV miniseries: King's major disappointment in Kubrick's adaptation was casting wild-eyed Jack Nicholson, as King preferred a more believable everyman for the role of Jack Torrance. Hence King's screenplay for an ABC miniseries, arriving nearly two decades later.
The good: As in King's novel, Hallorann survives the horror, and it's Danny who discovers the old hag. The bad: the Stanley Hotel location, while true to King's writing, lacks the labyrinthine dread of Kubrick's environs. (And don't get me started on the soap-worthy acting.) The ugly: those hedge animals, wisely absent from Kubrick's film, proved scarier in print than on screen. ABC gave King's verbose IT similar treatment in 1990 (without King's screenwriting credit), traumatizing coulrophobes everywhere and proving that living topiaries are no Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Did you even know there was a Shining miniseries?
2013, Doctor Sleep, a three-decades-hence sequel: I got into King as a preteen, probably around the same age as younger Shining readers, tackling Desperation (disgusting) and Bag of Bones (heart-wrenching) in the late 90s. It's notable, and unfortunate, that both became avoidable TV movies. I approach Doctor Sleep guardedly.
The good: We'll know in wintery January if Doctor Sleep is crud or an early classic. The bad: King's preview of Doctor Sleep at the 2012 Savannah Book Festival, featuring a still-young Danny revisited by the old hag, closely mirrors The Shining in disgusting descriptives. The ugly: Evidently, adult Danny will be fighting quasi-vampiric immortals.
201?, The Shining filmic prequel: I don't need Danny's “shining” ability to foresee this as a very bad idea.
The good(?): Screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (who penned claustrophobic Shutter Island) is involved. The bad: I fear this “Outlook origin story” becomes a near shot-for-shot remake like The (2011) Thing and/or casts Ryan Reynolds or Channing Tatum as the Outlook's caretaker. The ugly: old hag in her carefree pre-bathtub days?
If a more authentic TV miniseries couldn't shake Kubrick's masterpiece as the definitive cinematic Shining, what more could a prequel possibly afford? I hope it ends like Jack in Kubrick's film—spoilers!—lost and frozen in a (developmental) maze.
Images: Main image via The Overlook Hotel; Danny via GoneMovie.com;Here's Johnny! + Grady Twins; Pennywise + Hedge Animals; Overlook Hotel party photo via Haunted American Tours
It's fun to argue about difficult books (cf. Publishers Weekly's Top 10 and the ensuing comments); it's even fun to read one every now and then. But what about unreadable books—the ones where you can't hope to get to the end, no matter how hard you try? Remember now: we're not talking about long books or simply challenging books. I'm used to those. In college, I had to read War and Peace, down to its dual epilogues, in two weeks; I readUlysses in eight days on a bet. I'm talking outright unreadable.
Here are five books that make JR look like JWOWW.
I love Péter Nádas, but this Hungarian master pushed his first great novel to the limits of the form, and barely made any concessions to readers. Even the brilliant bookseller Sarah McNally says reading it is “like climbing a mountain.” There are two first-person narratives—the memories of a Hungarian man in a love triangle, and his alter-ego in a lightly fictionalized memoir of the first narrator’s own life—and, near the end, a third narrator who punches holes in the first two. I’m a careful reader, but I had a hell of a time figuring out who was narrating some chapters. More than anything, though, the sentences can be downright impenetrable:
“Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality, which is in no way the mathematical sum of their two bodies but something more, something different, something barely definable, both a quantity and a quality, for the two bodies contract into one but cannot be reduced to one; this quantitative surplus and qualitative uniqueness cannot be defined in terms of, say, the bodies’ mingled scents, which is only the most easily noticeable and superficial manifestation of the separate bodies' commonality that extends to all life functions..."
Okay, the PW people were right to put this on their list. Finnegans Wake(no apostrophe there!) is filled with multilingual puns from European and non-European languages. Your only hope, they suggest, is to read it out loud in your “best bad Irish accent.” I might add the suggestion to pick up Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake—then you’ll know that the looping sentence on page 75 boils down to, more or less, “As the lion in our zoo remembers the lotuses of his Nile, so it may be that the besieged [man] bedreamt him still.” There’s a dream-narrative, a long internal monologue, the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section that incorporates thousands of rivers’ names, and quite a few puzzles and tricks to make any regular reading a nearly nonsensical experience. And that's not even getting into the last sentence, which begins what the first sentence ends.
3. Maze
Now we’re getting into more concrete definitions of “unreadable.” Christopher Manson's book is narrated by a strange beast who describes you, the reader, traveling through a maze of 45 rooms, but the maze in question is actually encoded in the book itself—a room on each page spread—and it’s fiendishly difficult (chew on that, House of Leaves). With Choose Your Own Adventure, you can look through all the pages and pick the story you like best. But no matter how many times you flip through these pages, there's no way to just guess your way out of the Maze. The Internet has made this challenge a mite easier, but computers can’t solve the riddles within for you. And even when a shortest path is found through the hundreds of doors between Room 1 and Room 45, there’s another riddle encoded in the random objects within each room. Why was the maze built, though? Why are there so many clues that people once lived there, or can be heard in other rooms? What other riddles remain to be found? The book has been uploaded to the Internet, so go ahead and look.
Okay, so it probably isn’t fair to include philosophy here, but Jacques Derrida devised his writing style specifically to evade any hope of a central, compact conclusion—the premise behind his literary theory, Deconstructionism, being that there no longer exists (if ever there did) a stable organizing principle in any text or system of thought. He did a fantastic job of proving his point with his own words, which famously loop around themselves and move farther and farther away from any truly linear argument. On Grammatology is where he takes that logic to its extreme—even (like modern art writing) to the point of being nearly incomprehensible in translation:
"Let us now persist in using this opposition of nature and institution, of physis and nomos (which also means, of course, a distribution and division regulated in fact by law) which a meditation on writing should disturb although it functions everywhere as self-evident, particularly in the discourse of linguistics. We must then conclude that only the signs called natural, those that Hegel and Saussure call “symbols,” escape semiology as grammatology. But they fall a fortiori outside the field of linguistics as the region of general semiology. The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign thus indirectly but irrevocably contests Saussure's declared proposition when he chases writing to the outer darkness of language..."
There’s unreadable, and then there’s unreadable. A manuscript from the 1500s written in a script and language that resembles no other on earth, theVoynich manuscript has stumped amateurs and professionals alike. The pages include many strange drawings, from naked women in basins with tubes to plants that do not exist in real life. The Beinecke Library, which houses the original sheets of parchment, says that every week they receive numerous emails claiming to have broken the code, “but so far no theory has held up.” Until that changes, though, the entire manuscript is available on the Internet for codebreakers everywhere to solve.
image credit: Duncan Long, http://duncanlong.com/blog
Fantasy bibliophiles and lovers of lush cinema are facing acute overstimulation via the epic-length Cloud Atlas trailer, which surfaced last week. Even attempting to translate David Mitchell's award-winning book—its interlocking stories, its sprawling landscapes—into a standalone production is crazy ambitious. But considering co-director Tom Tykwertackled the unfilmable Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and the Wachowskis wrote the solid screenplay to V for Vendetta, I think we're in for something special.
Were there a “Most Daunting and Badass Literature-to-Film Adaptations” award, I'd vote for David Cronenberg. He practically defined “body horror,” but Cronenberg balanced gore with ballsy, bookish films like Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard's paraphilic voyage Crash. His adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (young multimillionaire/recovering vampire cruising across Manhattan via limo for a haircut) premiered at Cannes 2012. Should Hollywood ever consider another go at James Joyce's Ulysses, Cronenberg's the one to helm it.
The nine-plus hours of Hobbit-sized heroism igniting Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films deserve even the most elf-averse filmgoer's respect. Now that Jackson has confirmed that The Hobbit prequel will indeed grow by half, his Rings legacy usurps Scott Pilgrim vs the World's cheeky tagline: “an epic of epic epicness.”
On the flipside, there's Philip K. Dick. His sociopolitical sci-fi sired a succession of big-screen adaptations, ranging from the superlative (Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and backed by the author) to the splashy (Paul Verhoeven'sTotal Recall, née “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”, and its unnecessary remake) to the wildly aberrant (Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau).
Here we have the double-edged sword, for what appears compelling on page could become a cinematic shitshow. Minority Report's steroidal action obscured the original story's metaphysical elegance, and though I was stoked as a kid to see a live-action version of Masters of the Universe, Gary Goddard's goofy result epitomized '80s schlock-cinema. That Jon M. “Step Up 3D” Chu is plotting a He-Man reboot does not bode well.
Sci-fi literature is particularly rife with “unfilmable” gems. I doubt William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk classic Neuromancer will ever make it to the big screen, though Vincenzo Natali has been pursuing the project for eons. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash—a decade younger than Neuromancer and a billion times more irreverent—is equally enticing and elusive, in its mix ofronin action, virtual reality, and cryptic archaeology. It's telling that Natali considers Snow Crash unadaptable as a commercial film.
Should Cloud Atlas' emotional takeaway not equal its gorgeous visuals, Ang Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's fantasy-adventure quest Life of Pi will be waiting. This fall's cinematic options are looking truly sublime.
Main image via Badass Digest and Wikipedia, photo-chopped by the author; LOTR montage via LOTR Wikia; Blade Runner via Ghost Radio
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