Adam Hutchinson's Blog, page 3

To Those who Don't Make the cut

This post is about a character who is very dear to me, a character from the very beginning. Edwin (or at times referred to as Mr. E) was a rather insane man whose thoughts often drifted off into nonsense, while at times converging into perfect clarity. He had a pet toad (don’t ask me what its name was), and he told jokes that didn’t make any sense. He was a “drifter” who rode transports without paying for a ticket. He brought comic relief to tense situations and also served as the perfect “prophetic voice” for the story. His sincerity also provided bittersweet moments of resolution.

Unfortunately, as great as he was, Edwin didn’t add anything to the plot, and as the novel continued to shift, he didn’t add anything thematically either. He had to go. That doesn’t make him unimportant, just not part of this story. As consolation, I named a cactus after him. (I don’t really like living things, so my friend gave me a small cactus for my apartment.)

Maybe all of our unused characters have their own story somewhere, and they’re fantastic friends with wild adventures. I hope so.

Finished

The very long rewrite is finished, and yes, Timothy and the Interchange is the best unpublished novel of the decade, according to an anonymous source who is definitely not myself.

And now, on to the next project.

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"I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaft-mutes. That way, I wouldn’t have to..."

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaft-mutes. That way, I wouldn’t have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversation with anybodies. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”

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Holden Caulfield

The Catcher in the Rye (via sadboyjay)

Woody Allen's Manhattan

"Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people."

Tracy is hands-down one of Woody Allen’s best characters. Not only does she mature in the movie, she does so in a way that causes the other “more mature” characters in the film to appear naïve.

Moving and Killing

“He knew he was killing people. Moving, that was the trick. Moving and killing he felt wonderful.”

Okay, so here’s the thing, and I’m kind of going to ramble here which doesn’t matter because I don’t have many followers and I haven’t even logged on in a year. I read this book, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, over the summer. And I loved it, but it haunted me. And I became addicted to it. And then I wrote about it a few days ago for my final essay in one of my classes. And now I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m having dreams about it.

There’s lots of reasons why and I won’t go into it because the book just has to be read to mean anything. But there’s one character in particular, James Houston, who won’t leave me. He’s only in about half the book, and he’s a young, little fucker that the reader isn’t supposed to like much.

When the novel opens, James is a 17-year-old boy from a working-class family in Arizona. He feels trapped in his life, especially with his girlfriend, so he enlists in the army—lying about his age—and ships off to the Vietnam War. While over there, he begins his descent into disillusionment. It’s not the war itself that changes him. In fact, the war gives him freedom and a sense of self-control. What’s really tragic about his character is that, as the novel progresses, he comes face-to-face with the so-called “powers” of the war, the characters in command positions who use the war to fuel their own idealisms. For them, the war is about democracy, capitalism, and pro-America propaganda. But James has to watch his friends die, lives in the reality—not the myth—of the war: “He knew he was killing people. Moving, that was the trick. Moving and killing he felt wonderful.”

He becomes bipolar, schizophrenic, hallucinatory, paranoid, and the rest. Partly because of drugs, mostly because of the war. But he’s okay in the war; he’s okay when he’s with his buddies in the field, when he’s in control. But when he returns to base, and especially when he returns home, he is unable to cope. Everything is so meaningless. And it’s tragic. And I love him for it. Because he doesn’t create any bullshit meaning to justify his actions. He just is. He just does. He moves, and he kills.

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7,956,250

New Pinball high score!

from Moonrise Kingdom

from Moonrise Kingdom