Ten People Who Inspire Me, Part 2

So, this actually started out as one post, but loquaciousness won the day, so now you're getting a gander at a two-part post!

6. Grant Morrison- Hm, just like I started out last post with a British comic book author, so too with this one. It's kind of interesting, how so many of my favorite authors manage to be British. I mean, I'm really not an Anglophile. I only have a few British friends, I don't see much merit in Monty Python, and though I love the Beatles, I am of the realization that they aren't deities (*gasp*).

But what inspires me so much about Grant Morrison is his imagination. Whereas Alan Moore is so cool for the way he humanizes super heroes, Grant Morrison really takes these spandex-clad heroes to a whole new level of imagination.

For instance, there's this group of super heroes called Doom Patrol, who were supposed to be, "The World's Weirdest Superhero Team." But in the 80's, they were a bunch of angsty teens led by an old bald guy in a wheel chair. As you can tell, the X-Men had exerted something of an influence (though to be fair, the bald guy had been there all along.) Well, whereas most comic book writers would look at an assignment and either say, "Yipee! I've always wanted to write an X-Men rip-off!) or, "Amsterdammit, how am I gonna be original with this?" Grant Morrison saw the title "World's Weirdest Superhero Team," and drove the whole book in a completely different direction. Killing off half the cast, he inserted some of his own characters, like Crazy Jane, who had 64 super powers to match each of her 64 personalities. The book was a smash success.

Simply put, he looks at what makes super heroes tick, but instead of deconstructing them and sending them crashing down to earth, he takes those absurdities and exults them, celebrating them.

7. Walter Gibson- Well, this one was a tough one for me. You see, Walter Gibson was the 30's author of many of the old Shadow pulp novels. Essentially, twice a month he wrote a novel about a double-gunned avenger of justice, who used the help of his many cohorts to stop crime. So he was essentially writing 70,000 words EVERY OTHER WEEK, which I imagine as being bloody difficult.

Of course, his novels were mostly crud. I don't want to step on the guy or anything, but the stories are pretty one-dimensional. The character of The Shadow is infuriating. He's not characterized all that much, but is instead shown cackling all over the place, telling his followers what to do, and occasionally shooting people. I can deal with the fact that that sounds more like a villain's job than a hero's, but frankly the villains were the only interesting parts of the story. They tended to have all of these quirks and personality quirks. But when it came to the actual protagonist, the characterization was terrible.

So why the heck am I putting him as one of the ten people who inspire me most? Well, to be completely honest, quantity beat quality in my eyes, with him. To this very day it shocks me that someone could write so many words in such a short period of time. And it really opens my eyes to the fact that not all literature is about crafting the perfect sentence or dazzling people with witty plot twists. Sometimes, it's just about simple entertainment, or even just simple communication. And that's pretty cool.

8. Jack Kerouac- Truman Capote said, in regards to Jack Kerouac's works, "That's not writing, that's typing." Well I've actually gotta disagree with him on that one. Walter Gibson? That's just typing. Jack Kerouac? That's just genius.

He's probably most remembered for his crazy prose style, his road trips, and his hedonistic life styles, but there's so much more to him than that. There really are two poles to his personality, with the one side being the crazy, drinking, partying side, but there's also the quieter, more melancholic side. Sometimes, he has these philosophical thoughts which are so amazing when juxtaposed with his more hedonistic exterior. I feel like he's such a deep person and that's why I've loved all the books of his that I've read. I feel like I'm not explaining this well, so I'll throw up a quote of his:

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."

9. Clint Eastwood- OK, this probably seems like another strange choice, because I'm not exactly running around with a Magnum .44, asking criminals if they're feeling lucky. I'm not a cowboy and I most certainly have a name. So why did I choose him?

Well, I honestly respect Clint as an actor. He's not exactly a character actor and he only plays one or two sorts of characters over and over again, but that's alright, because what he does do, he's very good at. And that's all that really matters. I know actors think it's so important to play a variety of roles, but why is that? If you find one roll you're good at, why not stick to it? I guess this slot just as easily could have been filled by Jack Nicholson or Alec Baldwin, but quite frankly there was this massive Dirty Harry marathon on AMC not too long ago and it just validated in my mind the awesomeness of Clint.

10. Aaron Sorkin- Strangely enough there's a small link between Aaron Sorkin's inspiration and Craig Ferguson's. Essentially, I love conversation, and as far as conversational writers go, Aaron Sorkin's the best. He's probably most well-known for West Wing, or maybe the Social Network. But either way, I just love the words he puts into people's mouths.

I think I wish I could speak like I was in something Aaron Sorkin had written. I wish all my conversations were super-fast, involving me walking from room to room, looking like I had something important to do, while arguing whether or not abortion should be legal, or something.

So that's it. Those are the ten people who I think inspire me the most. Those are the ten people you can blame for what you see before you.