And now everything has raisins 'cause you fell for a raisin-crazy fool

[sovay]

I had a very nice time this evening reading Charon and listening to everyone else in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997) on the Scintillation Discord, notably featuring nineweaving and rushthatspeaks as the older and younger Housman, and then as I was driving home from dropping off Rush-That-Speaks I turned on WGBH and found myself in the middle of a jauntily jaundiced jazz un-standard that sounded like a lost Rodgers and Hart and turned out to be Rachael and Vilray's "Hate Is the Basis of Love" and now it's stuck in my head and so is some Anakreon, so after all this has been a pretty good night.

P.S. I completely forgot to mention the turkey that approached me at a stop sign earlier in the afternoon. I hope it was able to catch the next cab.

Comments

[alexxkay]

Do you think it would have been less distracting if the changes to the story had not been so out of character?

No, on two counts. One, the only way (I could see) to make it less distracting would be to really integrate form and function. And while there is certainly precedent for trying to make Frankenstein be a story about complex technology, I've never found those attempts very successful.

Secondly, I wouldn't necessarily categorize the changes as "out of character". This was only an adaptation of the novel in the simplest of senses. It was far more a conscious installment of the ongoing cultural conversation of many different Frankenstein variants over the decades. Sort of similar to how no modern production of Hamlet can be solely based on the text of the play. Having accepted that, I wasn't going to be upset by the fact of there being significant changes. Some of the changes failed to land with me for aesthetic or political reasons, but I felt that they were justified in making their own decisions of what "in character" meant.

After all, my own personal headcanon of the story is pretty wildly different from any other I've seen :-) [In brief, there's very little textual evidence that the Creature actually exists, and tons of evidence that Victor has some serious mental health issues, probably tied up with repressed homosexuality. Victor is strongly suspected to be the culprit in several of the Creature's murders -- maybe he is both the murderer and Creature. This does require a bit of textual contortion, but not enough to make me abandon the headcanon.]