Erik Boisen

In my last post I stated that I had read The Body by Stephen King and that I was going to watch the movie Stand by Me, which is based on it.  I found the movie on Amazon.  It seems like Netflix never has any of the old movies I am looking for.  Oh well, thanks Amazon!  I was happy to see that it was offered in HD.  The movie was made in 1986, but you weren’t given a hint of it’s age by watching it.   I am always amazed at how the Stephen King film adaptations use dialogue directly from the book.  No wonder he is so popular with film makers – he writes a great story and he also does the script!  The only really notable deviation of the film from the book is that in the movie Chris is the only one of Gordie’s friends that dies by the end of the movie.  In the book, Gordie, only 34 by the end of the book, is the only one to make it to the final chapter.  This does not effect the story much.  Some other minor deviations:

In the book, there is a scene with a shopkeeper that tries to rip Gordie off by  putting his finger on the meat scale and also short him on his change.  Gordie still goes to the shop in the movie, but the shopkeeper does not do anything that appears to be dishonest.  The book also has Gordie firing a .45 at Ace’s feet as he wades through swampy water.  This does not happen in the movie.  All this is fairly inconsequential.

If you have not seen Stand By Me, or you have not seen it in a long time, it is definitely worth watching.  It is one of Meathead’s (Rob Reiner’s) early directing efforts.  Rob Reiner is one a heck of a director.

With The Body finished, I ventured into one of the other novellas in Stephen King’s Different Seasons.  The story was called The Breathing Method.  I am really hesitant to explain too much of the story because I investigated it before I read it and learned of the ending before I read the story.  I was doing so to try to avoid reading something too creepy before bedtime.  Knowing the ending, however, kind of ruined it for me.  I will not reveal the ending and I suggest you do not look it up if you intend to read the story.

Set in the 1930’s, the story follows David, an aging attorney in a large Manhattan law firm.  David follows a plain, uneventful life.  Despite his age, he is not a partner.  One day, one of the senior partners of the firm invites him to an after-hours event on short notice.  David is apprehensive to go, but sees no options.  He attends and finds that it is a recurring event in the bottom floor of a Manhattan building where everything appears to be one-of-a-kind.  From the furnishings to the endless bookcases filled with the works of authors and publishers that do not seem to exist anywhere else.

The main point of this event and the recurring ones is the telling of great stories.  One is told by an old medical doctor who tells the story of a lovely young unwed woman who enters his office looking for help with her pregnancy.  She comes into the office long before it is obvious that she is pregnant and she makes regular monthly visits for check-ups.  The doctor was a general practitioner, but was very fond of delivering babies and devised a breathing method to assist women with their deliveries.   His new patient becomes a star pupil.  She takes to this breathing method and practices it religiously throughout the pregnancy.  In the end, the method really proves to deliver.  Oddly enough, for completely unrelated reasons, while I was reading this, my girlfriend took up the practice of doing meditative breathing exercises for five minutes prior to bed every evening.  This seemed to give additional realism to the story.  As far as Stephen King creepiness is concerned, the story is completely harmless until the very ending, at which point it is not.  I have been told that this story is going to be released as a feature film in 2020.

As explained at the end of my last post, The Body is a novella by Stephen King assembled into a collection of novellas named Different Seasons.  This story was fairly long for a novella.  If another couple of scenes were added, it could have filled out a 250 page novel.  It’s pretty hard to discern fact from fiction in this novel.  It is well known that Stephen King witnessed a friend of his get killed by a train as a youth.  There definitely seem to be elements of this event sprinkled into The Body.

The story follows a group of four 12 year-old boys through an adventure toward the tail end of summer.  They learn that a classmate’s body has been found after being hit by a train.  The body is initially discovered by an older brother and friend of one of the boys in the group.  The older brother and friend are afraid to reveal that they located the body because they found it while driving around in a stolen car.  The body is quite a distance from the boys’ neighborhood.  The adventure covers the boys’ thirty, or so, mile trek along the train tracks to find the body and hopefully, some notoriety.

The plan starts with all the boys asking their parents’ if they can camp out for the night in a friend’s field.  They setup a fake camp site complete with tent and lit flashlights and head out with sleeping mats in tow.  Their journey to find the body will take the better part of two days.

During the story the dis-function of each of the boy’s family is explained.  None are from great environments.  The main character, Gordie, who appears to be a young Stephen King, has the best upbringing of the group, but his family is troubled by the unexpected death of Gordie’s older brother.  Neglected by his distraught parents, Gordie narrates much of the story.  Gordie is revealed to become a famous author later in the story.  This is a primary reason for my suspicions that Gordie is a young Stephen King.

Stephen King does a great job of describing of the characters.  He provides just enough of the “essence” of the character’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and history to allow the reader to vividly fill in the rest.  I think this is key to much of his work.  Readers make the story somewhat “their own” by the way he creates characters and settings using just the essence of their characteristics.

There is a scene where the boys are camped out for the night and Gordie tells the story of “Lard ass Hogan”.  It is about a big chubby kid that turns a small town’s pie-eating contest into a barf-O-rama to get revenge on his fat-shaming tormentors.  I read this portion on a plane and had trouble not laughing out loud.

In the end the group of boys find the body, but decide not to report it.  The boys did a great deal of bonding during their adventure, but grow apart as they get older.  It is revealed that only Gordie makes it into his 30’s.  Memories of those few days with his friends stay with him forever.

This is a great story and it is prompting me to find the movie (Stand by Me)  on Netflix or Amazon to watch it again.

I enjoyed Stephen King’s book On Writing so much that I looked for something else from him.  Preferably something that is not creepy.  This was not a full novel, but a novella.  It is part of a collection of novellas entitled Different Seasons and bound into one book.  This novella was made into the film The Shawshank Redemption.  I loved the movie.  It has been a long time since I have seen it, but I do not remember it being creepy, so this looked like a good place to start.

After about 20 pages I was hooked.  The main character, Andy, is a successful banker.  His cheating wife and her lover are murdered.  The police believe Andy did it.  They do not have much in the way of evidence other than a strong motive and the lack of a solid alibi from Andy.  Andy, in fact, had nothing to do with the murders.  He is the victim of some very unfortunate circumstances and a very flawed judicial process.  It is not really explained, but for some reason Andy testifies at his trial.  This almost never happens in reality because it rarely has a good outcome for the defendant and the defendant cannot be compelled to testify at his own murder trial.  Anyway, he is convicted  and wrongly sent to prison.

Having the appearance and many of the mannerisms of a typical banker is not generally helpful in a prison population.  Throughout the beginning of Andy’s residency in the prison, he is regularly sexually assaulted by a group of its most depraved inmates.  He eventually gains the favor of the “screws” (prison guards) and the warden by helping them with various legal and illegal financial matters.  This eventually gains him extra privileges and protection  which eventually keeps him safe from the prison’s miscreants.

Well into his stay, another inmate recounts a story of another inmate in another institution.  This inmate brags about killing a man and a woman.  The murder matches the one Andy has been sentenced for very closely.  Andy attempts to have the warden look into it, but this just pisses the warden off.   The warden has enjoyed Andy’s help on many shady dealings, and has no desire to see him as a free man.  Andy protests and is punished until he realizes that no justice will be given to him.  He appears to fall, “back in line,” as a model inmate to appease the warden.  All the while, for 27 years, I believe, he is implementing a plan for escape.  He burrows through his cell wall with a rock hammer and then squirms through 500 yards of disgusting sewer pipe to freedom.  This is where the movie differs somewhat from the book.  In the movie Andy sends incriminating evidence of the warden’s illegal activity to the local media, picks up large sums of money from local bank accounts, and heads off to Mexico to live a new life.  He is then joined there by his longtime prison friend who is paroled after Andy escapes.  In the book Andy does not leave anything to indict the warden.  The warden does, however, leave the prison embarassed and broken by Andy’s escape.  I liked the movie’s ending better, but I loved both.   There is one more story in this book that does not seem too creepy.  It is called The Body.  The title sounds creepy, but it was turned into the movie Stand by Me.  It also was a very good movie and not too creepy.  I will start on that next.

I have never read a Stephen King novel before this one.  I have never been big on horror for entertainment and have noticed a stronger aversion to it as I have aged.  Life itself has provided me with more than ample horror.  I have no desire to supplement it, but I figure that there has to be something about Stephen King’s writing, beyond the subject matter, that has made him so prolific.  I really wanted to understand his methods.  

This book is a very easy read.  He starts it off with several stories about his childhood and upbringing.  It is very captivating, but after a while, I was wondering when he was going to talk about writing.  Stephen King believes that one should write what one knows about.  This includes what may be learned from his or her upbringing.  I began to understand his point and saw how I might apply this concept.  He provides stories from early childhood all the way to when the book was written.

His writing style seems effortless, but he reveals the work he puts into it.  He has methods for setting time aside (which mirrors a previous book I read – The War of Art) for writing.  He outlines the type of setting he does his best work in and when to start marking up a first draft – it’s a strict six weeks after completion.  No more, no less.  He also urges the reader to read and write often – every day, in fact.

The only grammatical thing he really touches on is the adverb.  He does not like adverbs and he feels that your reader will not like them either.  My biggest takeaways from the book were to write what you know and provide just enough detail describing people and things to give the reader the ability to fill in everything else.  His physique resembled a walrus in a tank top.  The previous sentence is an example of being descriptive, but without burying the reader in details.  Each reader will likely have a slightly different, but very vivid image of this unfortunate character’s appearance and won’t be bored with an overly detailed description.  It helps to keeps the story moving.

This was a really good book.  It is worth a read even if you have no intention of becoming a writer.  I really appreciate that Stephen King took the time to do this.  There are very few authors that have gained an audience as large as his, and even fewer that have given a glimpse as to how it was done.  As time goes on, this may be looked at as one of his most important works.  I am also happy to report that his methods should translate quite well to all fiction writing, not just horror.  He just appears to be writing what he knows.

This is the second Jon Krakauer book I have read.  The first was Into the Wild.  The book details the events leading up to and following the ascent of several climbers up the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest, during the Spring of 1996.  The author was one of the climbers.  He was there to write a piece for Outdoor magazine, which he did, but the events that unfolded went beyond what was expected and a magazine story was not enough to tell the tale.  The author paints mountain climbing beyond 20,000 ft as something that is far from enjoyable.  Mount Everest is 29,029 ft above sea level.  That means that nearly one third of the ascent is packed with misery even under the best of circumstances.

On this particular excursion, an unexpected storm appears just as several climbers are near the peak of Everest.  Through misfortune and altitude-clouded judgment, a series of unfortunate events occur that leave climbers scattered over the upper portions of the mountain unable to move, see, or communicate with one another in a blinding snowstorm.  In the end, a dozen climbers are lost, including two experienced guides.

I had previously watched the movie Everest, which is based on the same events, but told by a climber named Beck Weathers.  Beck is mentioned heavily in the latter portion of Into Thin Air because his particular story is so incredible.  Beck was left for dead high up on the mountain, only to show up under his own power at a campsite despite being blinded and having frostbite so bad that parts of both his feet, his hands, and nose had to be amputated.  He claimed to have found his way to the campsite, without sight, by following the direction of the wind in an area that had a 7,000 foot drop-off!  Could it have been divine intervention that gave him a guiding breeze.  Was it just luck?  He spent more than 24 hours without shelter in -100° F temperatures with hurricane force winds at an altitude that had 1/3 the oxygen of sea level!  Beck, a physician by trade, was a native of Texas, so none of these were conditions he could have been accustomed to.  He was left for dead again at the campsite where others put him in a tent with the intention of just trying to keep him comfortable until he passed.  He was a frozen zombie that seemingly couldn’t be killed.  Beck still practices medicine and still works as a motivational speaker.

The book is very well-written and paints a very grim picture of high-altitude climbing.  The movies based on this event leave out much of the ill-effects of altitude climbing.  Even under good conditions, people often have difficulty digesting food and sleeping at high altitude.  The movies seem to place most of the blame for the misfortune on the storm.  It becomes obvious from the information provided by the author that even the most advanced and experienced climbers are compromised both mentally and physically as they get above 20,000 ft.  It makes me question why people with a casual interest in climbing the peak are allowed to do so.  It appears that anyone with the desire, basic fitness, and $60,000, or so in cash can attempt a guided climb.  To me, skydiving seems a far safer and enjoyable experience, but to each, his own, I suppose.

The only knock I have on the book is something that I am not sure could have been mitigated.  The author, due to this being a work of non-fiction, includes more characters than is practical for a reader to keep track of.  Many are secondary characters to the story, but the author seems to have a fear of leaving anyone out.  There are seven main characters, which the film adaptations focus on, but the book contains at least 20 characters.  Overall, I highly recommend the book.  It does a great job of bringing vivid pictures of high-altitude climbing to the reader without the inherent risks.

I traveled to Toronto recently and brought this book with me.  It was a very easy read.  I read 89 pages during my flight over and the remainder over the course of two evenings.  The book is implicitly for someone who has a desire to be successful in creative endeavors such as writing.  Obviously, the author, Steven Pressfield, has experience doing this since I am writing about his book.  He also had success with the novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance.  This book goes much deeper than just pursuing something artistic.  It explores avenues to discover your “true genius”.  The author believes that everyone has a strong purpose for existing on this earth.  Every individual may vary on the spectrum of attributes as to what that purpose is.  The idea is to give in to the process of creation in such a manner that allows an almost mystical force to help guide you.

This book is valuable even if you do not view yourself as a creative person.  The point that stuck with me most is to find the non-essential thing in your life that you would still do if you were the last person on earth.  This thing is probably related to your purpose.  The author also touches on individual and societal happiness  as being related to the pursuit of one’s purpose.  In this respect, this book really applies to everyone.

The book was released in 2002, so it makes some references to successful people such as Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and Arnold Schwarzenegger prior to their respective ignominious fiascoes.  The examples are appropriate in referencing their successes, but I am guessing the author would have found different people had he known their not-too-distant futures.  I highly recommend this book.  It is very thought-provoking and was well worth the time you’ll spend reading it.

I just finished my third Kurt Vonnegut novel.  I had high hopes for this one.  It is always cited as one of his most ‘famous’ works, behind Slaughterhouse-Five.  I found Slaughterhouse-Five to be incredibly creative and captivating.   It is a once-in-a-lifetime type of work.  Even Breakfast of Champions was fun to read despite being Vonnegut’s own least favorite work.

I just checked to see where in his career Vonnegut wrote this novel.  It was his first.  That explains some things.  He seemed to have some portions of the book really polished, but there were others that seemed below par for a writer of his caliber.  The pictures he paints so vividly in other novels are obviously being painted with tools he did not enjoy at this point in his career.  Player Piano was published in 1952, and Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.  That is a world of difference.  I am a little happier with having read the book, knowing this.  I got to see the progression of a really great writer.  He must have really worked on his craft.

The book starts off in a world where everything has been automated and there is no need for the “average” worker.  The automation equipment that produces everything is run by only the most educated engineers.  Revenue is generated by taxing the automation equipment.  The tax proceeds are then distributed to the common people in the form of furnished housing and small stipends.  Anyone with an IQ below a certain number is destined for a life without purpose.  Those with a higher IQ are allowed to maintain the equipment and run the manufacturing facilities.  These higher IQ people are not given lavish wages, but but are given many times the discretionary income of the average person.

Most people fell below the high IQ threshold and were thus marginalized.  Many of them were skilled machinists or tradesmen before the complete takeover of automation.  They were not the smartest people IQ-wise, but some were able to do extraordinarily skilled tasks.  They were proud of their skills and they wanted to use them.  Being provided for was not enough.  A life without a purpose was not a life.

Early in the story, the main character, Paul, a high IQ engineer, stops in a bar frequented by those with lesser IQ’s.  He sees that he is despised for what he has, and what they do not.  He recognizes that his wife enjoys the life of someone with a high IQ despite not having one herself.  She married into it.  He recognizes that this status is all she desires.  She doesn’t really care for him.  This situation causes Paul to become despondent and push away the system that he seems to be the benefactor of.  In the end, he becomes the unlikely figurehead of the “Ghost Shirt Society” that eventually rebels and overthrows the oppressive machines.

I built my first app in Android Studio.  I have used IDEs such as Visual Studio, Netbeans, and Eclipse previously.  I understand that whenever someone is new to something, there is often a natural aversion to it, but this IDE is complete garbage.  Almost nothing is intuitive from a hierarchical menu perspective.  I had to take notes so that I could find my Java code and layout after I had created them.  I can’t think of anything else that is so poorly designed from a human factors perspective.  Why would it not be obvious where the main code would be in the project?  I am having a really hard time believing that people who write apps for a living actually use this.  This is Google’s “Official” platform.  Google is a smart company with really deep pockets.  I can’t  believe this is what they have come up with – even if it is free to download.  Every time I do anything with Android Studio, it seem like it barks a nondescript error that I have to spend 20 minutes looking up on Google.  Maybe that’s the purpose – to make people use their search engine more, or maybe they put their ‘B’ team on creating this one.

Anyway, I wrote an app that encrypts text that is typed into to it by means of a 16 character encryption password, or “key”.

The text is typed into the top field, in this case “Peace sells, but who’s buying?”  A 16 character Encryption key, “a16 CharacterKey”, in this instance, is entered and then the “Encrypt” button is pressed.  The original text becomes jumbled and unreadable.  To get the original text back, the user presses the “Decrypt” button the same number of times the “Encrypt” button was pressed.  This little app allows messages to be hidden from others.  You can copy the jumbled text over to an email or text and send it to a friend.  That friend can read the text only if he/she has the app and knows the encryption key.  It is a pretty bare-bones app, but it does work really well.  The algorithm is basically the same one I used to generate license keys for the DeltaV validation software I wrote.  I came up with it based on the principles taught in my NCSU ECE574 Network Security and Encryption course.  I did not, however, use any standard encryption method.

I finished Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel.  The entire setting is in a far-off galaxy in the distant future.  The story shows how religion and economics influence and shape society.  The setting is futuristic and fictional, but the core of the story could easily be told with modern day Earth as a setting and each of the fictional worlds as different countries and their representative governments.  Asimov appears to have a keen understanding of how large groups of people function and malfunction as a society.  This novel could easily be made into several films.  I believe it would actually tell much better as a film.

There are far more characters in this book than most people are able to follow without backtracking, myself included.  Multimedia(film/tv) would allow this story to be told without the viewer/reader losing track of who is who.  There are five characters in the beginning  “Psychohistorian” chapters, nine in the “Encyclopedists” chapters, and fifteen in the “Mayors” chapters alone.  I have read that this novel was compiled as a “fix-up” – a collection of four short stories grouped as a novel.  There are two Foundation novels following this one, forming a Trilogy.  It does not appear that the other two novels were compiled in this manner.  I love the story-telling and writing style, but prefer a much shorter list of more-developed characters.   I recommend this book for the great insight that Asimov gives on human behavior, but believe most readers will find the voluminous cast of characters tiresome to follow.  I am likely going to read the next novel in the Foundation trilogy because I enjoyed the story-telling of Asimov and hope the following novels will be more cohesive as they were not written piecemeal as a collection of short stories.  For the time being, however, I already have a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, so that is next on my list.