Ogami's Shadow Gallery!

[spideyfan76]

All this Dune talk has my curiosity piqued. I may just have to read the books now.

[Ditch Fahrenheit]

Can't find my Dune books. I didn't keep much when I moved, but those were in a box somewhere.

 

I did find my essential Harlan...

 

[newshane]

All this Dune talk has my curiosity piqued. I may just have to read the books now.

 

You should absolutely read at least the first novel. It really is a masterpiece. Deeply complex and rewarding. Well-paced. I couldn't put it down. I also think it's the best novel in the series from a literary aesthetic.

 

I tremendously enjoyed the first four novels in the series. Although I enjoyed Messiah, I thought it was the weakest of the first four novels. Children was quite a bit better.

 

Now God Emperor? That's when stuff gets really weird and bizarre. I really liked the novel, but I understand why many people start to complain at about this point in the series.

 

There are LOTS of rambling monologues from the God Emperor concerning the philosophy of power and the structure of time itself. I enjoyed most of it, but at times it was too much. You could tell that the editors had backed off in the name of "creative control" by this point in his career.

 

I also thought the ending was absurd and disappointing.

 

I tried Heretics but lost interest about 1/4 of the way through. I just thought the story had run its course by that point.

 

Anyway, just rambling at this point. I really love discussing the novel...I just don't want to ruin it for anyone who hasn't read it...if you haven't read it...just eject yourself from this thread and get busy!!!! It's a wonderful book...if you're a nerd you HAVE to read this.

 

[Ditch Fahrenheit]

Real men love Dune.

 

Duncan Idaho was a hero of mine as a kid.

[spideyfan76]

Real men love Dune.

 

Duncan Idaho was a hero of mine as a kid.

I didn't realize the originals were carved on stone tablets.

[Ditch Fahrenheit]

Real men love Dune.

 

Duncan Idaho was a hero of mine as a kid.

I didn't realize the originals were carved on stone tablets.

 

 

How did you get your mom's computer password?

[Ogami]

Real men love Dune.

 

Duncan Idaho was a hero of mine as a kid.

I didn't realize the originals were carved on stone tablets.

 

 

How did you get your mom's computer password?

 

to the both of you.

 

And for Shelly finally figuring out the proper response.

[spideyfan76]

Real men love Dune.

 

Duncan Idaho was a hero of mine as a kid.

I didn't realize the originals were carved on stone tablets.

 

 

How did you get your mom's computer password?

It's my Dad's password

[Ditch Fahrenheit]

Real men love Dune.

 

Duncan Idaho was a hero of mine as a kid.

I didn't realize the originals were carved on stone tablets.

 

 

How did you get your mom's computer password?

It's my Dad's password

 

Is it sewn into your underoos?

[spideyfan76]

Real men love Dune.

 

Duncan Idaho was a hero of mine as a kid.

I didn't realize the originals were carved on stone tablets.

 

 

How did you get your mom's computer password?

It's my Dad's password

 

Is it sewn into your underoos?

of course

[Ogami]

This is exactly how I envisioned the Dune Book Club.

[TupennyConan]

This is exactly how I envisioned the Dune Book Club.

 

Everyone gets sand in their drawers?

[TupennyConan]

I better be more spoiler free in future posts. I've only ruined a book & a half so far.

 

What's the proper etiquette for Dune posts going forward? I'm going to read all the Herbert books back to back & would love the posting freedom I've had thus far but realize that could be a bad idea.

 

I'm far enough in to 2 to understand what is meant by drop or shift but I don't think the book is a fail. I think it is different than Dune, but not in its level of excellence.

 

Discuss away. I will just skim any Dune posts real quick.

 

[Ogami]

This is exactly how I envisioned the Dune Book Club.

 

Everyone gets sand in their drawers?

 

No, that's Rupp's thread in CG.

 

This one is where we sit around in smoking jackets and talk Lit-rit-chu.

[Ditch Fahrenheit]

This is exactly how I envisioned the Dune Book Club.

 

Everyone gets sand in their drawers?

 

No, that's Rupp's thread in CG.

 

This one is where we sit around in smoking jackets and talk Lit-rit-chu.

 

I don't think Furries wear drawers.

[Number 6]

All this Dune talk has my curiosity piqued. I may just have to read the books now.

 

You should absolutely read at least the first novel. It really is a masterpiece. Deeply complex and rewarding. Well-paced. I couldn't put it down. I also think it's the best novel in the series from a literary aesthetic.

 

I tremendously enjoyed the first four novels in the series. Although I enjoyed Messiah, I thought it was the weakest of the first four novels. Children was quite a bit better.

 

Now God Emperor? That's when stuff gets really weird and bizarre. I really liked the novel, but I understand why many people start to complain at about this point in the series.

 

There are LOTS of rambling monologues from the God Emperor concerning the philosophy of power and the structure of time itself. I enjoyed most of it, but at times it was too much. You could tell that the editors had backed off in the name of "creative control" by this point in his career.

 

I also thought the ending was absurd and disappointing.

 

I tried Heretics but lost interest about 1/4 of the way through. I just thought the story had run its course by that point.

 

Anyway, just rambling at this point. I really love discussing the novel...I just don't want to ruin it for anyone who hasn't read it...if you haven't read it...just eject yourself from this thread and get busy!!!! It's a wonderful book...if you're a nerd you HAVE to read this.

 

Ok, so it's not just me.

 

I knew there was a "tonal shift" to the books - that the series deals with the deconstruction of the messiah phenomenon. So I knew it wasn't going to be all happy-happy like Star Wars or something.

 

The 2nd book just seemed....I don't know how to describe it....not as fleshed out as the first one? I kinda chalked it up to the fact that the first one was written as a novel but had to get broken down and serialized in Galaxy before it got published as a book. Whereas Messiah was written as a serial and then the parts were compiled to make a book. It just seems not as smooth of a read as Dune

 

Maybe I'll have to start re-reading the series again, see if it's different this time. I would like to eventually read all of the original novels.

[Ogami]

Bill,

 

You earlier asked the question, "which god" but I think that is the wrong question for the Dune series.

 

The right question is, "which religion", as in, what would religion look like four thousand years from now?

 

I find Herbert's answer compelling.

 

It would be manifold, jaded, patchwork and useful.

[Ogami]

Started Dune tonight!

 

This will be my fourth or fifth read thru of the six Herbert novels and his son's two to complete the story.

[Jimmy Linguini]

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/jodorowskis-dune-would-have-been-more-insane-than-you-can-even-imagine

 

Jodorowski's Dune Would Have Been More Insane Than You Can Even Imagine

 

In 1974, the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky set about turning the classic sci-fi novel Dune into a major motion picture. He recruited Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, H. R. Giger, David Carradine, Salvador Dali, and Mick Jagger to the project, completed 3,000 pieces of story art, and spent millions of dollars preparing for production. Investors balked when he asked for more—and when they realized the -script would account for a meandering 14-hour film—and it was ultimately shelved.

 

David Lynch would famously take up the mantle and go on to turn Dune into an epic flop. So today, Jodorowsky's effort remains one of the most famous movies never made. A documentary about the lost film debuted at Cannes, and it's getting rave reviews—it's essentially a prolonged bull session with Jodorowsky about the aborted project.

 

 

 

But it's whetting sci-fi, Dune and Jodorowsky diehards' appetites for a glimpse of the fabled production. I mean, how insane was this thing going to be? Well, I have a bit of a spoiler here: the answer is "very."

 

A few years back, Jodorowsky evidently published a piece in Metal Hurlant, a French comic/culture mag/inspiration for Heavy Metal called "Dune: Le Film Que Vous Ne Verrez Jamais"—that's "Dune: The Film You Will Never See." In the piece, he explains at length his ambitions and inspirations for turning Dune into an avante garde sci-fi carnival of insanity.

 

Here's a taste:

 

In film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblem of the Atreides house being a crowned bull...) Jessica - nun of the Bene Gesserit -, sent as concubine at the Duke to create a girl which would be the mother of a Messiah, becomes so in love with Leto that she decides to jump a link in the chain and to create a son, Kwisatz Haderach, the saviour.

 

By using her capacities of Bene Gesserit - once that the Duke, insanely in love with her, entrusts her with his sad secret [that he's castrated, remember] - Jessica is inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in -script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and sees its meeting with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it fertilises it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his father but of his blood...

 

Not a sentence of that is in the original novel, of course. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, notoriously disavowed Jodorowksy's project—which may have been part of the reason investors cut off funding. It's not hard to see why; Jodorowsky didn't just deviate from the source material—where there was no castration, no blood-Christs, no virgin births—he obliterated it, leaving only the names and, occasionally, some of the characters' thematic hallmarks intact. And H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who would go on to achieve worldwide fame by designing the titular creature in Alien, admitted to not basing his art on the book at all.

 

And it only gets stranger from there. The main character of Jodorowsky's Dune wasn't even going to be Paul, in fact, but the Emperor; only a minor character in the novel. Bear in mind as you read Jodorowsky's thoughts, that he intended the Emperor to be played by Salvador Dali, for an alleged rate of $100,000 an hour.

 

In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine...

 

In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes.

 

Imagine for a moment a God-Emperor Salvador Dali and his attendant robot clone taking spongy blue drugs on a planet made of gold, and you shall understand precisely what the world was robbed of when Dune came crashing down.

 

 

 

The end of the film, would climax with Paul's throat getting cut and the hero announcing, "I am the collective man." Then Dune the desert planet is transmuted into a verdant paradise with "three columns of light" shining from on high, and rainbows, and forests. It ends with Dune "now a world illuminated, which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it light - which is Consciousness - to all the universe."

 

And however did Jodorowsky come up with that ending? Glad you asked.

 

To conceive this final sequence of transmutation of the matter, I was likely to come into contact with true alchemists... Mysterious beings (one of them seemed to be more than one hundred of years, advanced age which however enabled him to move with an energy of young teenager) which approached me because Dune could be a philosopher stone, the stone which changes into gold all other metals...

 

You're getting the point. Jodorowsky's Dune was a colossal undertaking by a wild, bizarre, and visionary director who had little regard for conventional narrative, studio demands, or staying faithful to a widely beloved sci-fi story.

 

But his Dune wasn't a total loss. Jodorowsky salvaged some of the story, and turned it into a series of comics called the Incal with the French artist Moebius. That incarnation was on the verge of getting transformed into an animated feature, but it too was ultimately canned. Enough footage was left over to piece together this trailer:

 

 

 

Still, it's a pale shadow of what could have been a fantastic mind- of a film—unlike any ever attempted and one unlikely to be attempted again. World-class surrealists, international rock stars, top-billed actors, and one of the most enigmatic directors of all time, all trying to adapt a space opera set on a desert planet loaded with drugs and man-eating worms. No wonder the saga of Jodorowski's Dune saga has captivated cinephiles and sci-fi aficionados for so long—and why we're actually anticipating a feature-length documentary about a movie that was never even shot.

[TupennyConan]

Bill,

 

You earlier asked the question, "which god" but I think that is the wrong question for the Dune series.

 

The right question is, "which religion", as in, what would religion look like four thousand years from now?

 

I find Herbert's answer compelling.

 

It would be manifold, jaded, patchwork and useful.

 

Well, I think that's my point. The references to an eternal supreme being are few in Dune & fewer, so far, in Messiah.

 

This religion is a cult of personality or man-worship, like fascism or Imperial Japan & such. Their man is messianic yes but is also cast in the role of divinity.

 

Which god? Only Paul, at this moment. This moment will pass, his life is finite, there's no suggestion of immortality beyond the practice of careful breeding & preservation of genetic lines. So yes, manifold indeed because this establishes the soil for polytheism & new gods following the death of the old.

 

Observe how Paul lusts to retain his throne. He draws a clear line: his throne, meaning the throne he intends to give to his offspring. Paul understands all of this, hides himself away on Dune to preserve his temporal life from assassins, is jealous of power, & indulges the religious role to inspire his Freman killers. In a rare use of the word god & even rarer use of the word goddess, Paul describes his sister as a goddess. He insists upon it. Divinity's a power device.

 

I’ve had a bellyful of the god and priest business! You

think I don’t see my own mythos? Consult your data once

more, Hayt. I’ve insinuated my rites into the most

elementary human acts. The people eat in the name of

Muad’Dib! They make love in my name, are born in my name-

even cross the street in my name. A roof beam cannot be

raised in the lowliest hovel of far Gangishree without

invoking the blessing of Muad’Dib!

-Book of Diatribes

from The Hayt Chronicle