“A towel, (The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) says, is about the most massively useful
thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”
My deep admiration for Douglas Adams is no secret. (Link here if you have only just crawled blinking and confused from a cave.) Those
who know me very well might know that the first possession I would rescue from
my burning house is my signed edition of The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Those who know me inordinately well know
that nearly every night of my life, I’ve gone to sleep listening to recordings
of the Hitchhiker’s radio shows.
This morning, a couple of new Amazon reviews compared my
writing and Rhubarb to DA and THGTTG. I fully, and shamelessly, claim
him as an influence. But it got me thinking. What is it about Douglas Adams that
I admire so much?
I was introduced to DA in the eighth grade by new friends in
a new town, who thrust his books into my hands flabbergasted that I’d never
even heard of him. (Hipster moment: I read DA back when his trilogy had only three
books.) So is my admiration simply nostalgia—that I spent my most embarrassing
emotionally formative years comforting myself by reading and rereading those
books? Nah. It’s got to be more.
I do admire his writing style. He’s concise. (A sentence
construction and paragraph design and planning skill, often related to proper
word selection, that I have often neglected in the recent past.) He took big risks
with his writing and never shied away from absurdity; yet somehow always seemed
to make a salient point. (See almost any quote from Marvin the Paranoid
Android.) I admire his work ethic. (“I love deadlines,” he famously said. “I
love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”) And I have learned to enjoy
a good soak in the tub now and then. (What better use for a towel?)
Do I admire his later work in the cause of endangered
species? Is it his ability to blend true satire and speculative fiction to lampoon
everyone and everything? (“To boldly split infinitives that no man has split
before…”) Do I admire his willingness to wade into any and every medium that
would have him—radio, novels, comics, nonfiction, television, computer games, Hollywood,
theater? That the Guide is ostensibly
the inspiration for Wikipedia? It’s impossible to put a finger on a single
thing.
During the production of the notoriously horrible BBC
television series of Hitchhiker’s, a bit actor called in sick, so Douglas
stepped in to replace him. This wasn’t unusual; he played other bit extra parts
in the series, and had appeared on Monty
Python’s Flying Circus. But on this particular day, Douglas Adams stepped
in front of the camera, and on action promptly waded naked, and towel-less,
into the ocean.
That’s the kind of author I’d like to be.
