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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

#112: Oct. - Dec. 2012 (Fiction)
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MaryLupin

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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Hey all, it's been a long time since I've been around so I was excited to see Hitchhikers Guide up when I checked in yesterday. I'm thinking about HG as a kind of coming home present to me. I read them years ago and remember laughing so hard I was in danger of messing up the seat. I'm a big fan of British humour and attend (in my own town) the annual Vogon Poetry Slam just to keep my hand in. So thanks for all those in this community who suggested this book. Looking forward to some roars and giggles in the next few days.
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Welcome back Mary Lupin, made my day to see you back. :D
Only those become weary of angling who bring nothing to it but the idea of catching fish.

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad....

Rafael Sabatini
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MaryLupin

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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Thanks Penelope :lol: Been busy and time just went someplace. I've got a "complete" version of HG (trilogy in five parts); took it out into the sun this AM at my local coffee shop (not a beer drinker so couldn't honour Ford and Arthur that way) and re-read the first chapters. Wow. I'd forgotten how funny and how biting DA could be. What a fabulous way to start a day. I think I might have to make reading something funny my morning ritual. Seems fitting somehow. Either that or make a daily obeisance to the gods of intergalactic by-passes.
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Glad to have you on board Mary. And I agree, Hitchhikers is a laugh out loud funny book and I really don't say that about many books, I think it takes a special talent to write a book funny enough to make people laugh when they are sitting all by themselves in their living room, or on a bus or ... well, you get my drift.
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Mary:

took it out into the sun this AM at my local coffee shop (not a beer drinker so couldn't honour Ford and Arthur that way)
oooh, not fair, rain and blowing a gale here today. Still that means we must sit inside the pub and have a beer. Just in honour of Ford Prefect and Arthur you understand.

We almost always watch something funny on TV before we go to bed at night, even just for half an hour. It's good to go to sleep laughing....then we wake up laughing, is my theory.
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Snicker. Penelope, what a good excuse! May it gale!

Thanks Giselle. You know that you've got a good author when the preface makes you giggle. My edition has a preface which is titled "A guide to the guide - some unhelpful remarks from the author". I mean really! Snickered from the first line. Good sign.

The "guide to the guide" lists the various forms of the HG as it emerged from a radio show on BBC to tv, books and movies. He talks about his drunken walk through Innsbruck trying to find someone to ask for directional guidance and keeps running into one deaf-mute person after another. (out right laughing now).

"When the third man I spoke to turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind I began to feel a terrible weight settling on my shoulders; wherever I looked the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing aspects. I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind. I bumped into someone and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand me. The sky loured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin. If I hadn't happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention for the deaf and dumb was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely and I would have spent the rest of my life writing the sort of books which Kafka became famous for and dribbling."

Howl.
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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MaryLupin wrote:Snicker. Penelope, what a good excuse! May it gale!

Thanks Giselle. You know that you've got a good author when the preface makes you giggle. My edition has a preface which is titled "A guide to the guide - some unhelpful remarks from the author". I mean really! Snickered from the first line. Good sign.
Yes, that is a good sign. Funny thing about the story in this preface is that it has the ring of truth! And you are touching on something else here that has crossed my mind .. a 'guide to a guide' .. kinda post modern, eh? The Hitchhikers Guide as meta-narrative?
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Giselle - I hate to accuse DA of postmodernism (not at all sure he'd have liked that), but I do think HG is a commentary on our tendency to make grand statements and decisions that we forget are about as important as a pea in the face of 600 princesses with the necessary numbers of mattresses. All his stuff about Dent's house and then the Vogon's destroying the earth (unnecessarily as it turns out) is certainly a commentary on human decisions made without a heck of a lot of empathy. And that bit I quoted earlier in this thread - it can be easily construed as a commentary on the kind of mind (often found in those wanting a god or goddess as an explanation for all those odd - synchronous - things that happen and that we don't easily understand, but are, in fact, easily understandable) that shivers at signs and portents and then uses those shivers to "prove" whatever form of deity is momentarily instrumental. Anyway. I do think he's making a commentary on the big stories we build but I hesitate to think of HG as a critical theory exactly. Just think about analyzing Virgina Woolf via the actions of Ford Prefect! :lol:
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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Ah, the Hitchhikers Guide. A book that was wildly popular in my Highschool years that I didn't read, being into fantasy at the time, and only read years later when it was published as an entire collection. I only read one non-fantasy book in Highschool and that was because the title tricked me. I've played the text based game and never made it out of the house before it gets bulldozed, but I'm looking forward to re-reading The Guide with you all.

Book On!
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Re: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Introduction

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MaryLupin wrote:Giselle - I hate to accuse DA of postmodernism (not at all sure he'd have liked that), but I do think HG is a commentary on our tendency to make grand statements and decisions that we forget are about as important as a pea in the face of 600 princesses with the necessary numbers of mattresses. All his stuff about Dent's house and then the Vogon's destroying the earth (unnecessarily as it turns out) is certainly a commentary on human decisions made without a heck of a lot of empathy. And that bit I quoted earlier in this thread - it can be easily construed as a commentary on the kind of mind (often found in those wanting a god or goddess as an explanation for all those odd - synchronous - things that happen and that we don't easily understand, but are, in fact, easily understandable) that shivers at signs and portents and then uses those shivers to "prove" whatever form of deity is momentarily instrumental. Anyway. I do think he's making a commentary on the big stories we build but I hesitate to think of HG as a critical theory exactly. Just think about analyzing Virgina Woolf via the actions of Ford Prefect! :lol:
Mary: I missed this post earlier :( .... thank you, I think your comments are quite insightful. And yes I think DA would not like being branded a post-modernist at all, actually I don't think he would like being labelled period. I could label him a 'humourist' but I don't know if he would like that either! Labels aside, I find myself reading HHG as a 'big story' as you describe (not sure I would risk saying "meta-narrative" :P ). I think one can read and interpret HHG in many ways ranging from a rather silly story to a truely profound work and I would hazard to guess that DA wanted his readers to think about this. The HHG story is clear but the existence or non-existence of the meaning of that story is unclear and what about the grand stories we build, are they meaningful? Through HHG, Adams prompts us to wonder about all this, much like we might wonder in life generally.
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