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The indoctrinationtraining has begun…the kid’s got promise.

(updated and revised this 5/25/24)

I’ve been trying for a few years now to come up with a tribute to Adams. This isn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’s a start. In my mind, this is a work in progress, but I’m posting it anyway. Next year’s version will be better—or at least more complete.

Some time in 7th or 8th grade (I believe), I was at a friend’s house and his brother let us try his copy of the text-based Hitchhiker’s Guide game, and we were no good at it at all. Really, it was embarrassing. However, his brother had a copy of the first novel, and we all figured that the novel held the keys we needed for success with the game (alas, it did not help us one whit). My friends all decided that I’d be the one to read the book and come back in a few days as an expert.

I fell in love with the book almost instantly and I quickly forgot about the game. Adams’ irreverent style rocked my world—could people actually get away with saying some of these things? His skewed take on the world, his style, his humor…and a depressed robot, too! It was truly love at first read. As I recall, I started re-reading it as soon as I finished it—the only time in my life I’ve done that sort of thing.

It was one of those experiences that, looking back, I can say shaped my reading and thinking for the rest of my life (make of that what you will). Were my life the subject of a Doctor Who or Legends of Tomorrow episode, it’d be one of those immutable fixed points. I got my hands on the next three books as quickly as I could (the idea of a four-volume trilogy was one of the funniest ideas I’d encountered up to that point), and devoured them. I do know that I didn’t understand all of the humor, several of the references shot past me at the speed of light, and I couldn’t appreciate everything that was being satirized. But what I did understand I thought was brilliant. Not only did I find it funny, the series taught me about comedy—how to construct a joke, how to twist it in ways a reader wouldn’t always expect, and when not to twist but to go for the obviously funny idea. The trilogy also helped me to learn to see the absurdity in life.

Years later when the final volume (by Adams) was released, I’d already cemented what I thought about the books from these frequent re-reads. I’m not sure that <b>Mostly Harmless</b> changed things much (except for making me think for the first time that maybe I didn’t want him to write more in this series). His non-Hitchhiker’s work illustrated that he was capable of making you see things in a new light–either with a smile or a sense of regret—even when he wasn’t writing the trilogy, even when he was writing non-fiction. It was never the setting or the genre—it was Adams.

But here on Towel Day—as with most of the time I talk about Adams (but I need to change that), it comes down to where I started—the Trilogy. I read the books (particularly the first) so many times that I can quote significant portions of them, and frequently do so without noticing that I’m doing that. I have (at this time) two literary-inspired tattoos, one of which is the planet logo* featured on the original US covers. In essence, I’m saying that Adams and the series that made him famous have had an outsized influence on my life and are probably my biggest enduring fandom. If carrying around a (massively useful) piece of cloth for a day in some small way honors his memory? Sure, I’m in.

So, Happy Towel Day You Hoopy Froods.

* I didn’t know it at the time, but Adams didn’t like that guy. Whoops.

(updated and revised this 5/25/24)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Towel Day, for the few who don’t know, is the annual celebration of Douglas Adams’ life and work. It was first held two weeks after his death, fans were to carry a towel with them for the day to use as a talking point to encourage those who have never read HHGTTG to do so, or to just converse with someone about Adams. Adams is one of that handful of authors that I can’t imagine I’d be the same without having encountered/read/re-read/re-re-re-re-read, and so I do my best to pay a little tribute to him each year, even if it’s just carrying around a towel.

In commemoration of this date, here’s most of what I’ve written about Adams. I’ve struggled to come up with new material to share for Towel Day over the years, mostly sticking with updating and revising existing posts. But I do have a couple of new things coming today. But let’s start with the old material. A few years back, I did a re-read of all of Adams’ (completed) fiction. For reasons beyond my ken (or recollection), I didn’t get around to blogging about the Dirk Gently books, but I did do the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, The Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish
Mostly Harmless
I had a thing or two to say about the 40th Anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I took a look at the 42nd Anniversary Illustrated Edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I should also point to a posts I wrote about Douglas Adams’ London by Yvette Keller and 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies—both are great ways of illing-out one’s understanding of Adams and his work. I have to mention the one book that Adams/Hitchhiker’s aficionado needs to read is Don’t Panic by Neil Gaiman, David K. Dickson and MJ Simpson. If you’re more in the mood for a podcast, I’d suggest The Waterstones Podcast How We Made: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—I’ve listened to several podcast episodes about this book, and generally roll my eyes at them. But this is just fantastic. Were it available, I’d listen to a Peter Jackson-length version of the episode.

I’ve only been able to get one of my sons into Adams, he’s the taller, thinner one in the picture from a few several years ago.
(although I did get he and his younger siblings to use their towels to make themselves safe from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal a few years earlier:)

You really need to check out this comic from Sheldon Comics—part of the Anatomy of Authors series: The Anatomy of Douglas Adams.

Lit in a Nutshell gives this quick explanation of The Hitchiiker’s Guide:

TowelDay.org is the best collection of resources on the day. One of my favorite posts there is this pretty cool video, shot on the ISS by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.

Even better—here’s an appearance by Douglas Adams himself from the old Letterman show—I’m so glad someone preserved this:

Love the anecdote (Also, I want this tie.)