This issue: It’s the Saturday show, done in the Tuesday style! Rodrigo is absent, leaving Matthew and Stephen to run the asylum and they do their best talking about comics, Adam West, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!
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8 Comments
I discovered the Hitchhiker’s Guide in college, possibly due to Matthew.
At the time I was already a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut.
I found Vonnegut’s and Adam’s writing styles to have a lot in common, namely the digressive style of humor. This is particularly evident in reading Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galapagos, and I wonder if they were recursively influencing each other.
I also read Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! Trilogy around the same time where there are some stylistic similarities (at least in my mind). Wilson’s Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy has a lot of this style as well. I guess the rambling point I’m trying to make is that context matters especially WHEN you discover certain artifacts of Pop Culture and how they can be tied together in your own experience.
The thing about Wilson’s work, much like the Hitchhiker’s books is that the plot doesn’t matter. It exists so there is something upon which to hang observations about humanity, culture and civilization. The plot, and it’s mechanics are far less memorable in these books than the humorous asides, the observational stuff about how man functions in the universe, the absurdity of our beliefs, and the ridiculous habits we continue to perform simply because they are habits.
I’ve never read Mostly Harmless, and tried reading the whole thing again recently (I think when the movie came out), but had a fair degree of difficulty doing so. I have the BBC miniseries in my Netflix queue…perhaps I should start there, then move onto the novels again.
Good podcast, I like it when you explore areas of pop culture outside of comics, that are equally as nerdy.
I was introduced to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when the text adventure game was one of the first games I got for my computer just before high school. I loved the game and so I looked up the books at my local library. I remember that I picked it up after school one day in high school, and by the time the end of school the next day, I had read the entire thing. I’m a slow reader, so this means that I spent a large amount of class time reading the original Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The Guide, along with Doctor Who, became the obsession of my high school years. I have read all of the books multiple times, and I was thinking of building a graphic novel version (despite NOT having any experience telling a story visually) of the original novel when I found out about the movie version. I had assumed (semi-wrongly) that the movie would successfully introduce the world to the deep well of wit that was Douglas Adams.
I remember his work fondly, most particularly the Guide.
“Nooooo, You bastard!” is what I screamed at the computer screen when I hear those forbidden words, well played sir i thought you were bluffing…
How easy is it to read Hitchhiker books in one sitting? I like to read books in one go.
I read all of them over a week of leisurely summer a few years ago. They are definitely not hard to to read one in one sitting if you give yourself the time.
Great, now all I have to do is find a good English library (no way in Hell I’m reading them in French)
Matthew’s comments on instructions on using a toothpick remind me of a sticker I saw on the side of the fare boxes in buses where I grew up. They have the instructions on how to log in to the system, the first of which was “board bus”. First of all NO FREAKING GUFF, but second of all, this sticker was inside the bus, so if you were reading it…. Grrrr.
nice episode but I have two complains.
1. one of the first things said in the douglas adams discussion was: the books are from 1979 so they are 41 years old. I’m born in 79 and felt old when you said that. You corrected it, but still the damage was done :-)
2. I was hoping to hear the explanition on the use of the word Belgium instead of Fuck. I live in Belgium and in the versions we get over here they were just swearing, not using Belgium as a swearword.
I’m two weeks behind in the podcast, so this comment might not find a home. But the Dirk Gently talk reminded me of Mysterious the Unfathomable by Jeff Parker and Tom Fowler. Both creators have often stated they created Mysterious as a tribute to Dirk Gently and Douglas Adams. The TPB that Wildstorm put out this year would be great for a weekly review!