Retrospect — Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

[Reviews from HexWhyZed are not in any way timely or culturally pertinent, just the impressions from a dimly-lit island in the distance and the flotsam jettisoned along its shores. They may also contain spoilers—you have been warned.]

For all of humanity's polarizing inclinations, we frequently fail to realize that others are Not Like Us—that they don't share our experiences or internal chemistry or preconceived notions, so when someone reacts to a situation in a way contrary to our presumptions of normalcy, suspicion often percolates before empathy.

This is the initial propulsion of Gone Girl, the story of a wife gone missing, her husband's inappropriate behavior as Sisyphean catastrophe, the internal realities we keep consistently to ourselves despite protestations of love and hate.

Retrospect — The Stranger Beside Me

[Reviews from HexWhyZed are not in any way timely or culturally pertinent, just the impressions from a dimly-lit island in the distance and the flotsam jettisoned along its shores. They may also contain spoilers—you have been warned.]

I meant to start recording my thoughts of the various media from which I imbibe quite some time ago, and yet...and yet....

The first sacrifice is an appropriate one, however: The Stranger Beside Me by true crime author Ann Rule. Stranger recounts the career of serial killer Ted Bundy, but is more about the unique and shocking circumstances Rule found herself in writing it--old friends with Bundy,  hired to write a book on the Washington murders before he was ever named a suspect, her emotional ambivalence regarding his guilt or innocence.

Adaptation — Translation of Form and Effect

Adaptations come in many forms—painting to song, song to poem, poem to picture--but the ones we are most familiar with are adaptations of written literature to film, be it for television or movies. Many still seem to believe that an adaptation should be a simple visual illustration of the text and that any change to character, event, or plot is an affront to the integrity of source material (ASoIaF fans, I'm lookin' at you).

But adaptation is not illustration; it is much more akin to translation—you begin with one language (the novel) and must translate it into another (film). Writing and film are indeed separate languages, with functionalities, tropes, devices, strategies, tricks, and tools, some of which translate well into the new language and others for which no translation is possible.

The Necessity of Graphic Sex and Violence in Game of Thrones

Aside from various book readers complaining about barking dogs or intact noses, the most frequent gripes I've read concern the incessantly graphic nature of both sex and violence in HBO's rendition of Game of Thrones. "Why did they have to stab her in the stomach? Over and over and over??" "Is it necessary to show whores playing with each other in the background of this-or-that scene?" "Did they HAVE to show him cut that horse in half?" 

Did they have to? No, of course not. Should they? Abso-freakin-lutely. 

"In Defense of a Friend"

What of the
cognitive functioning of
the Octopus, that grand
gesture of gesturers, as it
slips one long and wispy tent-
acle down the clear plastic
tubing of an aquatic
Knossos to delicately discern its
direction, and after escape, will
undoubtedly recall the route upon
prodding from those cephalopod
seers supping on the tasteless,
arid "out there"?

Or how its problem-solving skills put
most human children--and many of the
not-so-young--to shame, morphing text-
ure and hemming its hues to
coordinate with the coral, a hedge
of rock, or even a grid laid like
a gauntlet at his eight-folded
feet--where is his
"Theory of Mind"?

Acrobats and escape artists,
pranksters preening in mime of
greater prey than they, three
hearts pumping great escapes as they
satisfy an uncommon curiosity for
cameras and deep-sea divers, all those
tasty fish swimming so short a tank
away, so why not slither and slime
a course across and pay one's
dinner a visit?

I'd venture to guess that
should someone shine too bright a
spotlight upon my bedchamber at
night, I'd also direct a precise and
powerful jetstream to short the bulb and,
well, if it takes the building out also, so
be it, but you won't find me twiddling my
tentacular toes, only instead the inky blush of
my immediate retreat, hiding like only
I could would I were as brilliantly beaked as
this intrepid intellectual of the sea, under-
estimated, undefined, deserving of
devotion I can only render writ large,
if not, at least, with
longing.

Tall and gangled, leaning
solidly rightwards on the
interstice of cane connecting
with wood, indentured to
injury and skeptically scanning the
faces forested below.

My memory spasms, then
falters as I study the
hard-edged lines of this
seeming stranger's face, a
familiarity aching from
pictures past, days spent
clutched in the menacing but
brotherly grasp of another
time, a not-so-other
place -- could it be him?

I wonder if perhaps he is
not so tall and gangled
enough. I search his ears for
the gauges that once
gaped in open greeting as
he strode down astride shops and
street kids, of which I was one.

I stare solid and un-
blinking into the steel
silence his eyes return, and
wonder, "Is that you, John?" If
it was, I am sorry for saying
nothing, for refusing to rattle the
fermented foundations of both our
younger days.

If not, then thank you,
stranger, unknown soldier, for
transporting me back, through
no effort of your own, to
a time when all seemed lost,
save, except, my self.

"Encounter"

Mustachios point out
two seemingly divergent
poles, his eyebrows
arching recognition from
over the nibbled remainder
of his muffin top, and mine
do the same, a greeting
whispered from the shore of
my lips against the foaming
waves of my caffeed confection.

I could make a
great deal of all this,
some analysis of the
quality and quantity of our
facial foreplay, but instead I
think to let it go and
simply bask in the
fleeting attention of the sex
opposite my own before
we all, as such frivolous
creatures do, turn the flashlight
of attention toward
all the other maybes we hope,
finally, to yes.