gulliver travels

just finished gulliver's travels by j.swift. was first bored with lilliput, then bored with the begining of brobdingnag but became more engaged, then liked laputa, balnibarbi, glubbdubdrib and loved luggnag. i continued to love the houyhnhms and was a little bit sad when he returned back to england.

the problem i have with reading classics is the mass of history and critque that comes with it. you can't clear your mind of cant because characters and ideas have already been fused into our culture. fused in a watered down heavily edited way. i think i've seen at least 2 cartoon versions of gulliver's travels (the lilliput part), 1 live action film and countless parodies. images and themes been sabotaged and preempted.

pehaps that's why i liked the bits i didn't know about more. i loved the academy of lagado in balnibarbi. loved the laputaian's way to destory cities. loved the houyhnhms and his refections on laws and war. loved the many references to piss and shit and gigantic nipples.

it is, as you should know, a satire and very ironic. he delivers everything straight with no nudge nudge wink wink of second rate sketch shows. he is barbarous and spikey. the back of the book calls him corrosive. i quite agree. the worlds he creates are absurd and uncanny at once. he leads with the fantasical (very small, very big people, floating islands, ghosts, talking horses) and sucker punches with comments of their/our world. he seems to hate a lot of humankind and has special reserve for lawyers and polticians. he shows respect and patience for compassion and the common ideals and these holy tenets are better represeted in nature than in man.

another thing is the relative shortness. each island covers less that a hundred pages and so therefore the whole society and culture. he bounces round from place to place like some 18th century homer simpson bouncing from rock to rock with elastic skin. he tell us of only the basic colour of his surrounding, the base smells and feel. it's all brains with swift. no sense of the rough waves, no heat from the sun, no hunger or thirst.

and he attacks. at first he attacks with the patter of baby shoes upon a bald minister's head. then from baby shoes he changes to flip flops. then slippers, then plimsoles. by the time he gets to meet the houyhnhms he's using celebral football boots, studded with sledgehammers made of adamantium and coated with acid.

and he protects. with warm blankets made of rabbit pelts and defended with his trusty hanger. he's resourceful and makes things with the materials he as. he makes a place to live, clothes, boots and finally a boat, so he can get home.

he's learnt a lot but has no answers. he has many complaints and wishes that we could use our capacity for reason in a reasonable way. he can't even face his wife and children and returns to his home to raise horses.