PBR Book Club

Miranda July: Definition of a Hipster Multi-media Artist

2012-03-08T11:42:00.006-08:00

We are always looking for hipster books to read for our PBR Book Club. Our current book of short stories is written by quirky hipster Miranda July. We know July as a filmmaker and as a writer, but July is also a well known visual artist. Her art involves interactions with people and words and is web and performance based.

One of her main works, a web project that lasted seven years called Learning to Love You More, has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The online project was started in 2002 and ended in 2009, and worked with over 8,000 participants. July and others created assignments for the participants to complete. Participants accepted the assignment, completed it, and sent in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and their work was posted on-line. Examples of assignments include spending time with a dying person, braiding someone's hair, and growing a garden in an unexpected spot.

See Website: http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/hello/index.php

Assignment #66 Make a field guide to your yard

Assignment #62 Make an educational public plaque

In another project set up in Washington Square in New York in 2010 called Eleven Heavy Things, July set up a series of gray pedestals with text written on them by July herself, encouraging people to stand on and interact with its components.

Reaction to July's movies, books, and art have mixed reviews. In an October 2011 Guardian article by Paul Harris entitled Miranda July-doyenne of the art house chic or epitome of trendy indulgence?, he writes "To their fans, the works of July, Anderson and Baumbach are whip-smart and intelligent. But to their critics they are indulgent and overly focused on the perceived problems of a literary, white middle class......The criticism against July and others who create similar genres of art are nearly always rooted in the same arguments. Their work is all too often

twee and overly self-conscious..."

I love the the new buzz word "twee" and I actually love July's art. Whether or not you love or hate July's work, July is the definition of a multi-media artist. More about her work and her artist statement can be found at:http://mirandajuly.com/art/

A Hip-Hop Mix for Misha & Alyosha-Bob

2012-03-07T09:26:00.016-08:00

In the opening pages of Absurdistan, Misha tells us a little about his favorite hobby:

"Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as the Gentlemen Who Like to Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old-school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with "Ass-N-Titties" by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre."

Making this hip-hop mix for you, PBR Book Club, was the most fun ever! To honor Misha and Alyosha-Bob, I disciplined myself to stay away from political and conscious raps and instead piled on the ghetto tech. "Ass-N-Titties," of course, is on the mix. And: plenty of old-school.

Track List (* = mentioned in the book):

1. Salt-n-Pepa: "I Like to Party"
2. Lil' Kim: "Big Momma Thang"
3. * Mr. FReDeRiCK: "Dick Work"
4. Notorious B.I.G.: "One More Chance"
5. Ol' Dirty Bastard: "Got Your Money"
6. * DJ Assault: "Ass-N-Titties"
7. Clipse: "Dirty Money"
8. * Ice Cube: "Look Who's Burnin'"
9. DJ Funk: "Every Freakin Night"
10. * Ice-T: "What About Sex?"
11. Tupac: "What'z Ya Phone No."
12. LL Cool J: "Back Seat"
13. Boogie Down Productions: "Super Ho"
14. Peaches: "Set It Off"
15. Eric B. and Rakim: "Paid In Full"
16. Nas: "N.Y. State of Mind"
17. Notorious B.I.G.: "Juicy"
18. Boris S.: "Don't You Wanna Pussy Ride"

If you didn't get a mix cd yet and you want one, let me know! Also, the sound quality of those already out there might be kind of sketchy. Will totally burn you a new one if you ask.

“THIS YEAR’S WHITE NIGHTS BROUGHT TO YOU BY DAEWOO” : Courtneybelle on Absurdistan

2012-03-02T15:33:00.003-08:00

I was thinking it was fate that we chose to read this book, because as it happened I read a majority of it while I was in Saint Petersburg, Russia. However, it turned out that this was not really a book about my beloved Saint Petersburg. Nevertheless Shteyngart paints an honest if sneering picture.

“Now, it’s no secret that St. Petersburg is a backwater, lost in the
shadow of our craven capital, Moscow, which itself is but a third-world
megalopolis teetering on the edge of some spectacular extinction.”

Absurdistan fed the reader some gorgeous pearls of Russian experience like,
“I absolutely refuse to sleep with one of my co-nationals. God only knows where they’ve been.” And my personal favorite,““ It’s Monday,” Lyuba said. “I never get pregnant on a Monday.””

There’s no question that the author has a clever and poignant turn of phrase. Like a tourist, he runs past a subject taking a memorable snapshot. And like all tourists, the subject really isn’t the countries they visit, but the luggage they bring with them. Shteyngart seems to abandon a chance to say something more about the Russian soul than this:

“I’ve been to Europe. The streets are cleaner, but there’s no Russian soul.
Do you know what I’m talking about here? You can’t just sit down with a
man in Copenhagen and look him in the eye over a shot glass and
then-boof-you are brothers forever.”

For @bananasuit I will leave the obvious but necessary commentary on how each woman is portrayed as a glittering, money obsessed, sex octopus. That discussion I hope will address the protagonist’s “generalized fear of women”.

In spite of its charm and wit, Absurdistan seemed to me like a big wet kiss to Voltaire. What am I to learn from the revenge fantasy of a lovably despicable fat guy? Was there something about human weakness I didn’t already know? Was the reader to think that a superfluous man could find love without God? Will Jorge Garcia be cast as Misha in the film? I didn’t learn anything about love from Absurdistan that a tube of KY and some anal beads don’t know. Even though the social and political commentary is razor sharp, I never really felt like the author had anything more to tell the reader than a memorable story.
Don’t get me wrong. I love this book. If for no other reason than that Snack Daddy and I agree: “Let me tell you something: without good friends, you might as well drown yourself in Russia.”

“…and what is worst of all, our intelligent, depressive citizenry has been replaced by a new race of mutants dressed in studied imitation of the west…”

Bananasuit on Weiner & Weiners, or: Why Lady Writers Love to Hate on Shteyngart

2012-03-01T14:03:00.013-08:00

I wish I could parse the following out for all you lazy hipsters, but I think I'm going to go down a few PBRs instead. Several months ago, chick lit authors Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult picked a fight with male literary darlings Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Franzen. This blogger does a nice job describing the feud, or you can also read about it at HuffPo.

In a nutshell, Weiner complained in this feminist tweet: "NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance. And now, to go weep into my royalty statement." (Interestingly enough, Weiner and Shteyngart now appear to be bff on Twitter.)

And our March author, Miranda July, has the same complaint about twee male filmmakers: "All those men [like Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson] are also personal. I don’t mind that, but I do mind that it’s not really questioned, whereas I or another woman is looked at as so self-obsessed. Men are just not being judged in the same way. They’re never going to be annoying in the same way." (Thanks, Richard, for pointing us to the source article!)

And so I pose the feminist dilemma to you, PBR bookclub: are chick lit, or "twee", female artists getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop when they create personal art? First: crack open your PBR. And now: discuss!

PBR Book Club's March Selection: Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You

2012-02-29T13:10:00.003-08:00

First off, our Absurdistan discussion fast approaches: next Monday evening at the Tap!

Second, after much Twitter banter, the March selection has been officially selected! Just when I was poised to inflict a profound month-long inquiry into Jewish cultural memory on you fine folks (with Nathan Englander's much-praised new collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank), a vocal contingent of local scenesters rose up and said, Nah, let's get twee with Miranda July instead.

So we'll be reading No One Belongs Here More Than You. Yes, it's a collection of short stories, which is a first for PBR Book Club (but likely well-suited to our habits: aim for at least one beer per story).

I recommend you also read this New York Times Magazine profile of July, and make sure to watch her two films prior to the March meeting as well (since I want to talk A LOT about that damnable kittycat narrator of The Future).

And please visit the website for No One Belongs Here and click through the messages using the red arrow in bottom right corner. If you stick it out without finding it insufferable, you're probably ready to embark on this journey with us.

And also ponder these thoughts on short stories (which comes from a review of the Englander book that we are not reading):

"A short story is by definition an odder, more eccentric creature than a novel: a trailer, a fling, a warm-up act, a bouillon cube, a championship game in one inning. Irresolution and ambiguity become it; it’s a first date rather than a marriage. When is it mightier than the novel? When its elisions speak as loudly as its lines."

Richard on Flight, Freedom, and Fatness in Absurdistan

2012-02-23T08:17:00.002-08:00

Since our book club blog has been silent for far too long, I'll offer up a quick one (and word on the street is that Steve and Courtney have full "book reports" on the way). Next meeting is still scheduled for the Tap on Monday March 5.

[No major spoilers]

Absurdistan's prologue ends with images of flight, of Misha sailing "like a fat beam of light" over his beloved, multi-cultural New York neighborhoods. It's a lovely moment of freedom ("The city rushes out to locate and affirm me."), but of course most of the book is about the difficulty of obtaining such moments. As Misha tells us from the outset, we are reading not just a love story but "a book about geography," and it is one which reveals that the borders of the modern world are not so porous as one might assume. Misha spends the first half of the novel trapped in Russia. Then he's trapped in Absurdistan, deprived of even "mobilnik" service in a world that's half lavish and built on American oil money, the other half mired in poverty and war: "Respected mobile phone user...your attempt to make a connection has failed." Modern literature is nothing if not failed connections, and it's easy to feel for poor obese Misha, whose largeness seems both a symbol of his cultural appetites and also a storehouse for all his frustrated desires: he describes the "toxic hump" on his back as "a repository for all my anger, a kind of anti-heart on the back of me that keeps the sadness pumping."

Special Valentine's Edition from Karen: Absurdistan

2012-02-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

More Romantic Love

Warning: Major Spoilers

I finished Absurdistan around Valentine’s Day. How appropriate. After reading the epilogue, one is reminded that among other things, Absurdistan is a book about enduring romantic love; Misha loves New York, and he loves Rouenna.

It is argued that romantic love as we know it is a relatively modern and western notion. Although French troubadours wrote about courtly love, and Shakespeare included romantic love in his plays, the notion of romance as a prelude to marriage started in the late 17^th century. At this time, the rise in the middle class with its disposable income allowed for a market of romance novels and magazines. Romance novels, by definition, have conflict and climax, and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. Today, romance novels are the most popular genre of literature in North America, comprising of almost 55% of paperbacks sold in 2004 (according to wiki, my beloved resource).

The romantic ending in Absurdistan in the form of hopes and dreams may be an additional stereotype or satire, both of which saturate the book. However, are we cynics? Is it absurd to think that these two people could live blissfully in domesticity in a row house near 175^th street in New York, happily folding socks together? Knowing the romantic inclinations of my fellow bookclubbers, I would guess that we will agree that the ending to this book is emotionally satisfying and optimistic; …in other words, very romantic.

Richard Laughs Along with a Few Passages From Absurdistan

2012-02-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

[No serious spoilers, all quotes taken from first 50 pages or so]

Sure, there's going to be plenty of serious business to discuss with Absurdistan, if we're so inclined, but I suspect most of our next meeting will consist of laughing loudly (and drunkenly) at various passages.

There are a lot of different kinds of humor at work here, and most of it is pretty successful so far, it seems to me.

You've got the absurdity of bizarre and tragic situations presented in a deadpan fashion, as in the mutilation of poor teenage Misha's "khui" in a traveling circumsion-mobile, or the murder of Misha's father: "Who murdered the 1, 238th richest man in Russia?...I'll tell you who: Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora."

You've got the merciless satire of social class/caste systems in both America and Russia. Here's Misha describing why he's popular among the barmaids in his favorite lower Manhattan dive bar: "I was known as a very generous tipper and would occasionally spring for an abortion."

But my personal favorite passages work in a lower-key register that's more wistful, illustrating Misha's longing for an America that's perpetually out of his grasp:

"Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck."

The one recurring (meta) joke that's not working so well for me (at this point, anyway) is Shteyngart writing himself into the novel as Misha's foil, Jerry Shyteynfarb, a pompous professor who "managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process" and who won acclaim for his debut novel which Misha calls The Russian Arriveste's Hand Job (a reference to Shteyngart's own debut The Russian Debutante's Handbook...get it?). It's playful and humorous, no doubt, but comes off to me as too showy somehow. Is our author insecure or defensive about his well-earned literary reputation? Perhaps he'll answer these questions in person at our next meeting if Courtneybelle and B-Suit keep tweeting him! We'd certainly enjoy buying a PBR for the funny son-of-a-bitch!

Courtneybelle's Intro to Absurdistan

2012-01-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

[No spoilers]

“I was born in Russia and came here as a boy.
And in Russia all you can eat are bowls of tears.”
- Eugene Mirman

Even though I had been to Russia several times and professed my undying love of its people and culture, I never truly understood the Russian Idea of love till I heard this introduction on This American Life. It is from an episode called "Lost in Translation." It clarified for me what years of reading Russian literature could not. Moreover it explained why I’m comforted by Russia’s salted, broody subtlety.

This excerpt is preceded by a short story about correspondent Alex Blumberg, who was, at that time, a student. This whole exchange between Ira glass and Alex is five minutes long and can be found here .

But the important part is this…

“I have a clear, perhaps, culturally informed idea of what a great date is. It has to do with my idea of falling in love. In my mind, what I see is like the falling in love montage in the movies. When you go on a great date this often involves a board walk, there is a great deal of throwing your heads back in laughter, you might chase each other around a tree, the splashing of water is almost always involved. In Russia it is a totally different thing. In Russian literature there is a lot of talk about the soul and soul mates. So for them FALLING IN LOVE MEANS FINDING THE ONE PERSON ON THE PLANET WHO UNDERSTANDS THE MISERY OF LIFE AS DEEPLY AND FULLY AS YOU DO."

When I asked my teacher about this theory that Americans and Russians have completely different views of what it means to fall in love, she totally agreed. And then she went on a rant about Americans. “Americans have no understanding of what it’s like to fall in love! I never understand why do you always say “he makes me laugh”? Why is that so important? Every American I’ve ever met, all they say when you ask them how the relationship is, they say “he makes me laugh” as if that’s the greatest thing in the world! What’s so great about it?””

I think about this story almost every day. I suspect it might help us on our journey to Absurdistan.

Karen Contemplates the Idea of Romantic Love

2012-01-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

In anticipation, we book clubbers are checking our mailboxes daily to see if our next selection, a Russian novel, has arrived. In the mean time, I am contemplating the notion of romantic love as it’s portrayed in our past two selections. A common theme in both IQ84 and Ready Player One is the sappy relationship between the main characters. In both books, the couples love each other from afar; and after enduring difficult obstacles, hook up passionately. Oozing in sentimentality, we assume they will spend the rest of their lives together. During our discussions, I am a pragmatist among romantics, protesting that in real life, love doesn’t happen that way. I predict these couples will stay together a month or two before the demons they carry surface, leading toward a devastating break-up. Love, I say, is very complicated.

However, I have a confession for my dear book clubbers. That sappy romantic love is how my long-term relationship started in true storybook fashion. We saw each other from afar. It was love at first sight. A bolt of thunder hit us. Under it all, I am a deep romantic.

Of course, in both our novels, escape from reality is also a theme. When we are in the Oasis or IQ84 worlds, we are not sure just how real anything is. I am curious about what daily life would be like for these characters if they stayed together in a real world. Would Tengo change diapers? Who would cook the meals in the Art3mis/Wade household? Would Aomame insist that Tengo get rid of his shabby pants? Would Art3mis argue with Wade if he forgot to take out the trash? For me, the question of “could these couples stay in love? “ is more intriguing than how they fell in love.

We’ll see if the Russians choose to tackle a love theme in our next novel.

For February: Absurdistan

2012-01-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

Courtbelle has spoken: in February, PBR Book Club shaves 600 pages off the reading assignment for a comfortable 333-page read, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart. Because he's Russian, and he's not dead.

This is the only thing you'll need to read to be convinced to go get a copy, right now:

"Why praise it first? Just quote from it — at random. Just unbutton its shirt and let it bare its chest. Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself." (From the NYT book review.)

Next beer drinking session is tentatively planned for Monday March 5. See you then!

What Does 1Q84 Mean

2012-01-18T21:45:00.000-08:00

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

My experience with “1Q84”, my introduction to Haruki Murakami, was that it was a beautiful, insightful and surrealistic gem that works on the multiple levels of a plot-driven tale of magical realism, a love story where abused children grow up and finally fall in love decades later as a way to heal, and a literary and philosophical statement about the power of the novel, of the imagination and of the creative and subconscious impulses and their effects on both reader and author. What’s not to like.

...

I also choose to see a strain of quantum mechanics’ Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Schrödinger's Cat style, in which in chain-of-dominoes fashion the act of observation from Perceiver to Receiver transmits the power of the narrative from author to author (Chekhov’s gun to Murakami) to work to other works (Murakami’s character Ushikawa in “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” persisting into “1Q84”) to character to character (Fuka-Eri to her sister to Tengo to Aomame to Ushikawa) to reader (we enter the author’s environment that he conceived out of thin air like a cocoon and it seems real to us while we are immersed in it). And even from this collapsing chain to the reader’s own sense of reality if insanely successful. Don’t be like an author that gets so obsessed with his characters and literary world that it causes damage to those around him in his real life; don’t mistake the narrative for the reality. Don’t become bewitched by the moon and become a lunatic. But can we truly distinguish one experience of reality from the other when we become heavily immersed in our inner worlds.

...

To consider these ideas in modest detail:

1 The Little People come out of the forest.

2 They come when we are sleeping.

3 They are neither good nor bad but they can cause trouble.

4 They create things out of nothing that give birth to other things.

5 They beat the drum to keep things moving.

The Little People are our subconscious impulses and will, creative and unruly. 1Q84 is the world of our imagination. If we stay on the expressway, on the built road, teaching math, the Little People can’t affect us as much and we stay in 1984, the world of perception seen through our cerebral cortex (the latest part of our brains which evolved in the last blink of an eye in the grand reach of epochs). But what happens if we do the unthinkable and follow our impulses sometimes, deviating from our customary arc through time and existence.

We climb down the emergency stairs like Aomame; we keep to the forest like the venerable Gilyaks; we move to the unsettled world of narrative creation like Tengo. And now our subconscious wills and impulses can drive us to other worlds, to forgotten memories intertwined with current patterns that govern our lives, where cause and effect break down. We perceive the universe around us through a different filter bubble, through a different way of knowing. We truly experience a different reality. Can we call it anything other than 1Q84.

There is a tension between our ancient subconscious mind and our more dominant Johnny-come-lately abstract, rational concepts-and-symbols-using mind. Fuka-Eri, Tsubasa and perhaps other characters seem to be abstractions and ideas more like Plato’s Platonic Forms than flesh and blood figures. But symbols and concepts can be conduits to channel our subconscious and give birth to new developments in our living narratives, to work through painful memories from childhood, or to give birth to children in consummated literary storylines – storylines that are driven by desire and longing but shaped by conscious manipulation of possibilities and ideas. Symbols and concepts can be used to counteract the effect of our innate drives and strong impulses, the triumph of reason over instinct – the rise of an opposing force to the Little People. But sometimes our cerebral cortex, our Professor Ebisuno, sees the subconscious as something to be feared, to be lured out and contained by equations, facts and the mechanics of cause-and-effect, as something bordering on thought-crime when experienced through the top-down filter of logic and reason.

...

There is a tension between our ancient subconscious mind and our more dominant Johnny-come-lately abstract, rational concepts-and-symbols-using mind. 1Q84 explores this balancing act – one of the most difficult challenges we face in the course of our sentient journey in this world and through our time awake here – with spectacular insight, humor and creativity and for this reader, just the perfect dose of surrealism blended in throughout. What more could one ask for from a 925 page odyssey.

This Thursday. 7:30. The Taproom.

2012-01-18T07:10:00.000-08:00

Come on out to the Taproom tomorrow night for a tipsy discussion of hand-holding, magical boners, and misshapen heads! Even you, lurkers -- we know you're out there. The meeting will commence at 7:30 when Bananasuit chugs a PBR.

Richard and Reality and Fiction and Dreams and Time and Narrative and Proust

2012-01-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

{No spoilers]

One of the most impressive things about IQ84 is how skillfully its themes are bound up together. A good example is a small moment regarding Aomame's reading of Proust where we see reality/dreams/fiction/time all merge.

Aomame describes the world that Proust creates (in In Search of Lost Time) as feeling like a "lonely little planet...like I'm experiencing someone else's dream. Like we're simultaneously sharing feelings. But I can't really grasp what it means to be simultaneous. Our feelings seem extremely close, but in reality there's a considerable gap between us" (775).

The gap recalls the gap between Aomame and Tengo, of course, on a narrative level, but also suggests the gap between writer and reader. Aomame's attempt to explain the feeling of reading Proust might well resemble our own experience immersed in Murakami's world: "there is a sense of time wavering irregularly when you try to forge ahead" (775).

A few pages later Aomame describes a dream as feeling like "a detailed scene from a small planet somewhere else" (781). Obviously the "small planet" links back to the description of Proust, connecting it to her dream world, which she recognizes as a dream even as she dreams it, just as Murakami's world takes on a reality of its own within our reading experience even while we recognize it as fictional.

I'm sure we'll find plenty of things to criticize when we meet, but can all of you book-clubbers agree that Murakami delivers a very enjoyable and sustained mindfuck?

Now check out this pic of Murakami browsing some records circa 1980:

Bananasuit's Life Lessons Learned from 1Q84

2012-01-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

Aside from being a deeply metaphysical and profound book, Murakami has given us some prescriptions for living happy, healthy lives in his 925 pp tome, 1Q84! I don't get why they don't shelve this thing in the self help section. Here are just a few of the life lessons I've gleaned:

1. Eat simple food. Veggies, tofu, miso. Sometimes fish.
2. Iron your clothes.
3. Read no more than 20 pages a day, then reflect.
4. Wash your pajamas, especially if there's a chance a physically attractive 17-year-old with freshly made ears will wear them.
5. Look at the moon unironically (this one's for you, hipsters).
6. Own dogs, not cats.
7. Visit your parents in the hospital.
8. Don't take money from strangers.
9. Pay your NHK fee.
10. Don't go into weird sex paralyses and then have ambiguous congress with shrine maidens.

What about you, fellow PBR Book Clubbers -- what lessons do you have to add to the docket?

Richard and IQ84 and DeLillo and Chekhov's Gun

2012-01-03T07:28:00.000-08:00

{very minor spoilers regarding Book 2]

Good old Chekhov. Try as I might, I can rarely convince my Intro to Drama students that The Cherry Orchard is a comedy (even after reading statements from Chekhov himself insisting that the play is a comedy).

The wily old Russian has popped up twice in IQ84. Once with the Gilyak travel narrative that Tengo reads to Fuka-Eri (which you book-clubbers have already discussed) and again in Book 2 with the idea of "Chekhov's gun," introduced by Tamaru as he procures a handgun for Aomame. This oft-cited maxim states, basically, that if a gun is introduced early in a narrative, we know it's going to get fired later on. It's a very meta idea, if you think about it, diverting our attention away from the "reality" of the work and toward its artificiality, toward the narrative devices that make the work cohere. This is appropriate for IQ84, of course, since "reality" seems to be bending more and more toward Tengo's fictional world.

Aomame has found herself suddenly transported from one world to another, from 1984 to 1Q84, and (as one might suspect in such an instance!) she feels a little unbalanced. The gun, however, brings a sense of power, restoring a bit of control over "reality": with one bullet SHE can control the transition from one world to another, in this case from life to death. But such a power transfigures reality as well: "The awareness that she now possessed a pistol was enough to make the world look a little different. Her surroundings had taken on a strange, unfamiliar coloration" (353). Those lines, in particular, transported me from one literary world to another: out of IQ84 and into DeLillo's White Noise, in which Jack Gladney, mild-mannered professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the Hill, experiences for the first time the power of holding a gun: "The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate." Jack has spent his life terrified of death, living a purposefully mundane life because he doesn't want to "enmesh" himself in "plots." "To plot is to die" is one of his mantras. But late in the novel, in possession of his trusty "25-caliber Zumwalt automatic," his philosophy undergoes a complete reversal and he begins to believe that "to plot is to live." So what will Aomame's future hold? Like Jack, she too has found herself bound up in a dense plot, the likes of which she has heretofore managed to avoid, yet she feels like the "rules" can be defied: "not all guns have to be fired," she thinks, in reference to Chekhov's law.

Let's stay tuned and find out who's right.

Murakami Side Trip: 19th Century Erotic Japanese Woodblock Prints

2012-01-02T05:24:00.000-08:00

Among other things that we pondered during our last meeting of Murakami’s book is the Japanese view of sexuality. Steve proposed that Japanese society is probably open about sex. “Look at 19^th Century erotic Japanese woodblock prints.” I corrected him with a know it all authoritative voice, “But the buyers for these types of prints were exclusive. There were government bans on erotic prints.” We know of their existence, but exactly who was buying erotic printmaking of this time? Was it a small niche of buyers? Was it an exclusive upper class? I decided to explore the topic further.

I have many books on Japanese printmaking. One example is a survey Japanese Prints, from the Early Masters to the Modern by Michner, published in 1959, once considered a staple of survey books of Japanese printmaking. The inside jacket cover explains the book as a “tour so carefully arranged as to give a deep understanding of the history of aesthetics of Japanese prints….so far as consonant with his aim at presenting a full survey, Mr. Michner has illustrated the book with lesser known masterpieces rather than with those few prints that have been reproduced almost at Nauseam.” Among other illustrations, the book includes dainty courtesans, often with attendants, with fans or musical instruments “representing the beauties of Edo.”

Utamaro: The courtesan Imose of the Yoshiwara House Akatsuta-ya parading with her Kamuro

Another book, The Japanese Print, a Historical Guide, by Munsterbeg, 1982, is a survey, and points out the three main genres for Japanese woodblock prints: Kabuki actors, glamorous courtesans of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, and heroes and heroines. The informative book outlines the masters, their students, and the genre they specialized in. Examples of courtesans depicted in the book show women in beautiful flowing costumes like a fashion plate. Some illustrations show courtesans with a “companion” serving tea or entertaining with music. There is a notable inclusion of an explicit work by Utamaro, Lovers, 1790. The book is published with a black line through middle of the illustration. In two paragraphs, the book admits the existence of erotic printmaking. The book explains that the prints are Utamaro’s “ supreme achievements” (he is probably considered the greatest master of this genre). Production was made with the best craftsmen of the day. “It is probably no exaggeration to say that these Japanese woodblock prints of the 1790’s are the most perfect works executed in this medium in any age or during any civilization in the entire history of art.” The second paragraph gives insight, “although the portraits are often said to depict specific women such as the celebrated tea house waitress Okita….they all look very much alike, for they embody the ideal of feminine beauty envisioned by the artist rather then the actual women themselves.

Utamaro Lovers

Both of these books were bought at library book sales in Lawrence and were former public library books.

A book I picked up years ago when browsing the stacks at the Murphy Art History Library included another genre of prints from the floating world, the sexual shunga. The prints show couples in the act of sex with graphic depictions of insertion. Although most of the figures represented in shunga are heterosexual couples, prints include women masturbating with objects, women with women, men with boys, and women with animals. The prints often show the “it girl” courtesans and actors of the day who appear glamorous, and the subjects desirable. However, the book points out that this is an idealized portrayal for what was probably in reality a difficult life for prostitutes.

For my quest, I interviewed Kris Ercums, curator of the Spencer Museum Asian art collection. I knew of their existence, but who was purchasing the erotic prints of 19^th century Japan? According to Kris, the answer is “Everyone.” The floating world represented the sanctioned entertainment district of Edo. Although there were government restrictions, erotic art in the form of printmaking was extensive. All major artists created this genre of work because it sold well. Although I could never again find the book I had looked at when browsing, Kris told me the name of the book is Sex in the Floating World: Erotic images in Japan 1700-1820 by Timon Screech, 1999. It is frequently checked out at Murphy, so I ordered it on Amazon.

My incorrect assumption that erotic 19^th century Japanese printmaking was a niche was based on incomplete reporting from former public library survey books that ignored an important genre because it was viewed as inappropriate. I was pondering Japanese views of sex through information from survey books of art, but the lack of inclusion of shunga by publishers and editors reveal, instead, a prudish American view.

More: From Wiki: Shunga was probably enjoyed by both men and women of all classes. Superstitions and customs surrounding shunga suggest as much; in the same way that it was considered a lucky charm against death for a samurai to carry shunga, it was considered a protection against fire inmerchant warehouses and the home. From this we can deduce that samurai, chonin, and housewives all owned shunga. All three of these groups would suffer separation from the opposite sex; the samurai lived in barracks for months at a time, and conjugal separation resulted from the sankin kotai system and the merchants' need to travel to obtain and sell goods. It is therefore argued that this superstition was euphemistic, and ownership of shunga was not superstitious, but libidinous.^[2]

Records of women obtaining shunga themselves from booklenders show that they were consumers of it.^[1] Though not shunga, it was traditional to present a bride with ukiyo-e depicting scenes from the Tale of Genji.^[2] Shunga may have served as sexual guidance for the sons and daughters of wealthy families. This has been disputed since the instructional nature of shunga is limited by the impossible positions and lack of description of technique, and there were sexual manuals in circulation that offered clearer guidance, including advice on hygiene.^[2]

Who the F*** is Narrating This Thing?

2012-01-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

(Spoilers for Book 1)

One of my favorite threads of inquiry from our mid-1Q84 support group session was about the narrator. A lot of weird things happen in Book 1: Aomame assassinates a guy with a homemade ice pick, seduces a bald man, and starts up an all-night sex feast ritual with a complete stranger. A 17 year old dyslexic girl recites epic Japanese poetry about Nuns. Tengo puts Fuka-Eri to sleep by reading her Chekhov's passages about the poor Gilyaks. Aomame sees two moons in the sky.

But I think the weirdest passage from Book 1 is when the dowager goes to sleep next to ten-year-old Tsubasa, and the safe house falls quiet:

"Soon [Tsubasa's] mouth began to open wider, and from it emerged, one after another, a small troupe of Little People. Each one carefully scanned the room before emerging. Had the dowager awakened at that point, she might have been able to see them, but she remained fast asleep. She would not be waking anytime soon. The Little People knew this. There were five of them altogether. When they first emerged, they were the size of Tsubasa's little finger, but once they were fully on the outside, they would give themselves a twist, as though unfolding a tool, and stretch themselves to their full one-foot height. (ch. 19)

This passage freaks me out because it's the first time otherworldly phenomena are described firsthand, by someone other than Aomame, Tengo, Professor Ebisuno, or Fuka-Eri. It's the first time our omniscient narrator confirms that the Little People exist outside of Fuka-Eri's imagination. It's the first time shit gets REAL.

And so we wondered: who is narrating 1Q84? The narrative structure is definitely split between Tengo and Aomame, but they are both unreliable third-person narrators, and there's still the question of true authorship -- is Tengo writing the Aomame story? ... Vice versa? Murakami seems to be playing with the idea of authorship and what happens when a story is told, retold, and told over again, creating echoes and ripples co-authored by different voices. So who is this third omniscient voice that confirms the existence of the Little People when everyone else goes to sleep? Is he Murakami? The reader? A metaphorical "Leader" or Little Person? Obvi this question can't and doesn't really need to be answered. But it's uncanny, unsettling, and begs the question: who's telling our stories?

Holiday Interim B-Pig Meeting

2011-12-28T09:25:00.000-08:00

This is not meant to be minutes of the meeting or anything, just a few hurried lines of random remembrances - hopefully it'll trigger others to add to it in the comments or their own posts.

We wondered about whether cultural filters that we lacked were causing us to miss anything about the story regarding popular culture, sexuality (including a brief tangent on wood cuts), potential lingering effects of WWII and also commented on a review some had read about how Murakami has Western influences and in fact his work seems ripe for translation to English. We marveled out how difficult it must have been to translate, even so. Also, apparently, the work was released in Japan in books, so it wasn't a huge tome to be intimidated by all at once.

We talked about surreality at the level of the story and world as well as in the moments created scene by scene, such as the telephone ring taking on the personality of the caller. We noticed the detailed descriptions of what everyone wore and tried to reconcile it with our ideas of how people dressed in the 1980's in America.

We talked about the mirrors motif, the symmetry in the story as well as in the printed book and how "real life" appeared frequently in the reading, 30-some-odd times in all based on a search of the e-book on tablet. We noticed a parent/child theme echoed here and there, from the religious organization splitting off to the idea of an air chrysalis as a shell or birth pod to the significance of Aomame's name: "green bean" as a pod containing seeds.

I am intrigued by the pervasive echo of being on a main road or expressway versus being off the grid and moving through the forest - Aomame on the expressway, the Gilyaks sticking to the forest even after roads were built, Fuka-Eri being good at disappearing and moving through the forest (but you can hear a road in the background nearby on her tape), and I think it's even present in the contrast between Tengo's love of math with its formulas and equations (reality of sorts) and his fascination with writing (the not so rigid or defined "forest" of the narrative world).

1984

We pondered the use of the term "Little People" (curiously enough we didn't really ponder what they were) and the general consensus seemed to be it was an intentionally drawn contrast with or at least a play on "Big Brother" in Orwell's work; a decentralized, distributed presence versus a top-down central omniscient authority. Speaking of "1984", I described the tension I felt between knowing that the love interests in that work ended up betraying each other when put to the test and me really not wanting Tengo and Aomame to betray each other at some later point in "1Q84" !

I meant to bring up but forgot to bring up the concept of the "memory hole" (ironically) and revisionist history presented by Orwell and discuss their potential relevance to Murakami's book. The protagonist in the former has as his main job the re-writing of history as the current propaganda changes and in the latter we have Tengo (in concert with Fuka-Eri) writing narratives that other people (like Aomame) seem to be experiencing as part of their reality.

I foisted my half-baked idea that some of the tenets of quantum mechanics run throughout "1Q84" and raced through a nutshell description on the differences of the Copenhagen versus the Many Worlds interpretations of what happens when potential outcomes are selected. No cats were harmed during this discussion and BananaSuit also mentioned the concept of parallel universes with CourtBelle referencing string theory. Murakami has that effect on people like us.

Some wondered if everything about Aomame and Ayumi was plausible but generally liked the characters. Aomame seemed to be a favorite with the dowager and Tamaru in the mix as well.

Finally, we talked about Russian writers and generally hoped the Gilyaks were doing okay in spite of their shortcomings.

The Pig

2011-12-27T07:48:00.000-08:00

Tonight Nog will be crying his eyes out, because we'll be meeting at the Pig without him. That's the Bourgeois Pig, 7:30 p.m., for any of you literary hipsters who'd care to join us. @afreshstand has even teased us with the prospect of a PBR coozie; you'll have to show up tonight to find out.

As evidenced by our December blog entries, most of us are too intimidated to write anything longer than 140 characters about Book 1 of Murakami's 1Q84. But there's been a lot of chatter over on twitter about bald heads, falling down wells, and all-night sex feasts.

If you can't make it tonight, have no fear -- we'll be meeting again soon to discuss Book 2. ... Does that mean Nog is giving us an extra month to read Book 3?

Richard and IQ84 and "the Mirror Stage"

2011-12-15T11:20:00.000-08:00

Early in my PhD program I took a seminar in Southern Lit. The reading list was top-notch: Faulkner, O'Connor, Percy, Twain, a little Morrison, some Richard Wright. I was ready to talk about the South, man! But little did I know my prof was a hardcore psychoanalytic critic (particularly of the Lacanian variety) and that we'd spend A LOT of the semester scouring the texts for "primal scenes"...or at least halfway reasonable approximations of such. If you're not up on your psychoanalytic theory, a "primal scene" is a moment where a child witnesses (or perhaps fantasizes) sexual relations between the parents.

The recurring "primal scene" in IQ84 doesn't fully fit the definition, but I assure you my prof would have jumped on it anyway. In Murakami's novel, Tengo is occasionally overwhelmed by a memory from infancy (odd enough in itself) in which a man (not his father) sucks on his mother's breast. What this means and why it keeps surfacing is not yet clear (at least at 200+ pages in), but the power of childhood sexual experience is clearly a primary concern. Aomame, too, is occasionally launched into the past via memories of her own first sexual experience, a childhood encounter with her female friend Tamaki. It's interesting that this memory surfaces for the first time as Aomame descends the expressway ladder into the "alternate"(?) reality she begins to refer to as IQ84. And are the Little People as well connected with sexual experience, or perhaps in this case repression of traumatic sexual experience? I'm at the point where they have just emerged from the mouth of a sleeping child victimized by particularly nasty sexual abuse at the hands of a religious cult.

But the point where my prof might have particularly gone Lacanian all over Murakami's ass is with the idea of the "mirror stage," the moment when an infant becomes cognizant of the self, which for Lacan is less about recognition than misrecognition or separation from the self. Fits right in with this book's focus on duality, right? And notice how many times we actually see Aomame staring at her own naked body in mirrors.

But the truth is that these kinds of psychoanalytic readings never do much for me. So most likely my future posts will just focus on abstract business regarding time and history and memory. And maybe I'll try to work in some shit from my dissertation on those subjects. I need to be doing something with that tome anyway.

Quote to ponder:

"Aomame visited several little rooms she possessed inside her, tracing time backward the way a fish swims upstream. She found there familiar sights and long-forgotten smells, gentle nostalgia and severe pain. Suddenly, from some unknown source, a narrow beam of light pierced Aomame's body. She felt as though, mysteriously, she had become transparent" (220).

Brautigan on Steroids with Vonnegut as his Bookie and Campaign Manager

2011-12-11T05:41:00.000-08:00

One delicious aspect of this book is whether it is a retelling of George Orwell's "1984" or not. It keeps flirting with the reader that way and generates additional tension above and beyond the clever, fantastical storyline.

I am deep into the work and have become attached to the characters and the universe they inhabit and really don't want them to end up betraying each other with rats in cages eating their faces. Will "1Q84" end up mirroring "1984" in some way or will it use it as a springboard or will it perhaps lovingly parody it? I guess that's what the "Q" is for in the title.

I got a couple hundred pages into this and found myself enjoying every turn of phrase, every synesthesiatic swirl of intuition-metaphor-image-concreteness, every whimsical gesture, every playfully abrupt change in meta-narrative level.

As Nog hinted at with his observation of the two currents, this work is rife with so many wonderful not-quite-exact symmetries, parallels, mirrorings, and echoes. I think somehow Tengo's dichotomy of math prodigy and powerful writer serves as a touchstone for much of the near-symmetry throughout. As Tengo leaves the (for-him) safe comfortable world of equations and numbers (the basis of reality) he ventures into the much less rigid forest of the narrative world.

Even Aomame climbing down the emergency expressway stairway from the superhighway at the beginning of the story mirrors this idea of choosing to leave the mainstream reality and strike out through a thicket of uncertain narrative. We even end up visiting other cultures and realms in the course of the book that cleverly echo this as well.

So far the physical size of this volume hasn't been a deterrent in the least, as I'm always looking forward to the next page, the next chapter, the next insight. At one point I Wiki’d Murakami and found that two of his greatest Western influences were Vonnegut and Brautigan – my two favorite authors! No wonder I am loving this - for me it is like Brautigan on steroids with Vonnegut as his bookie and campaign manager. I can only hope that this entry point for Murakami for me doesn't spoil any possible enjoyment of his earlier works if this turns out to be his masterpiece because right now I can envision retiring from PBR Book Club for a year to drown myself in Murakamiism.

A Very Murakami Christmas: Our December and January Selection

2011-12-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

All right, book clubbers, we've had our fun with an escapist romp through 80's pop culture in Ready Player One , but we largely agreed it was pretty shallow. So let's tackle the 80's in a more profound (and profoundly weird) fashion with Haruki Murakami's 900+ page opus IQ84.

From what I've gathered, our usual book-clubbers are not particularly knowledgeable about Murakami, even though he seems to be increasingly regarded as one of the world's great living authors. My experience is limited to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (true, it's considered the masterpiece, but my reading was so long ago that it barely registers now).

Perhaps we should all begin with this terrific recent NY-Mag piece, which asserts that the author "has produced, over time, one of the world’s most distinctive bodies of work: three decades of addictive weirdness that falls into an oddly fascinating hole between genres (sci-fi, fantasy, realist, hard-boiled) and cultures (Japan, America), a hole that no writer has ever explored before, or at least nowhere near this deep. Over the years, Murakami’s novels have tended to grow longer and more serious — the sitcom references have given way, for the most part, to symphonies — and now, after a particularly furious and sustained boil, he has produced his longest, strangest, most serious book yet."

Not yet convinced that you need to devote two months to this project? Then try this:

"About halfway through, the book launches itself to such rarefied supernatural heights (a levitating clock, mystical sex-paralysis) that I found myself drawing exclamation points all over the margins."

Yep, that's how we'll be spending January, folks. Join us if you dare.

[Minor spoilers in next section]

As for me, I'm about 80 pages in and enjoying the dual narratives. So far I'm a little more intrigued by the inquiry into the nature and process of art and writing in the Tengo sections than I am by the "down the rabbit hole" tale (in this case, the "down the elevated expressway ladder" tale) of Aomame. But I'm also having a blast wondering what Bananasuit will say about Murakami's creation of his lead female character (Aomame, which means "green peas") and especially a wild scene in which she beds an old dude because she likes the shape of his head and then feels an overpowering desire to kill him.

Let's take a look at this portentous passage in the opening paragraph:

"...he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents."

Is this simile also a description of the novel's narrative technique, with its two stories of Aomame and Tengo gradually converging? (at least I'll assume they converge). Or does it suggest the notion of various realities colliding, which seems to be the case so far despite Chapter One's philosophizing cabbie telling us and Aomame (in bold print no less!) that "There's always only one reality."

Folks, this is going to be a wacky ride.

Ready Playlist One

2011-12-05T20:49:00.000-08:00

Not confined to the 80's but centered on it. Reaches back before and after some, like the book. Two disks:

Yes, There Will Be Homework

2011-12-04T20:39:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. we convene at the Tap for a pretentious literary discussion about Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. PBR Book Club has big shoes to fill as "the precursor of the synthesis of extrainstitutional intellectualism," and that's why I'm assigning you homework:

What's one person, event, or issue that you want to make sure we address? Of all the burning questions you're dying to ask, pick just one.

Obvi, RP1 is loaded with retro pop culture references. What pop-culture relic did Cline miss (or gloss over) that you'd argue to put in a major scene?

Would you recommend this book to your mom (or zombie mom)? Why or why not?

See you at 8:30 tomorrow night, ready to chat! I hear it helps to skim the first and last chapters right before you come. Your answers will be graded.

Sincerely,
The Minister of Inquiry

Ready for Easter Eggs

2011-11-24T13:10:00.000-08:00

[No major spoilers up front; I will warn you later when I head into spoiler territory so be cautious if skip-reading ahead]

In high school I went on a road trip with my D&D cadre of friends to the 13th Gen-Con (founded by Gary Gygax) when it was in Racine, Wisconsin. Yes, Gary Gygax was there and we heard him speak (I realize this means nothing to most people). We also discovered that the way most people played D&D sucked compared to the way we played it at home. I later found this suck way of playing to be endemic across lots of role-playing games, even up through the 90's when I'd drop in on them occasionally.

But I was not part of that group of friends and acquaintances exclusively, which itself did not fit the cliché at all – football players, straight-laced straight-A kids that were also relatively skilled at hitting on their female counterparts at nightclubs, a bit of juvenile delinquency here and there, Bob-Marley-cassette-toting-weightlifting-vegetarians-in-man-sandals, preacher’s sons, aspiring photographers, talented soccer players (when soccer wasn’t popular), you name it. But I was never wholly in any one niche at that age; rather I had one foot in all of the cliques to one degree or the other.

This man-without-a-country tendency only grew as I moved on from high school though I gravitated for the most part to the fresh textures, raw energy and the wonderful spectacle of the non-mainstream. To me music in the 80’s was much more about Black Flag, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Minor Threat, the Cocteau Twins, Big Black, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, The Chills, and Brian Eno as it was any of the 80’s musical references made in the book (I can’t even remember the references in the book because most of the names didn’t ring a bell, though the songs themselves irritatingly did once I YouTubed them).

Rush 2112 is different for me though because it and Rush in general is set squarely in the 1970’s for me. I first heard more of Rush than just the radio hits like "Fly By Night" at a friend's house in junior high after a late guitar jam session when he popped the 8-track for "Hemispheres" in as we crashed on the couch and drifted away to that ethereal album. Later, I not only listened to my vinyl copy of Rush 2112 over and over (and had the poster from the album on my wall along with Einstein in a hammock), I actually saw Rush live on the supporting tour for that album. Ouch. Worse still, I can actually play most of the riffs and chords to 2112, excepting the amazing odd-ball meter guitar solos of course. However, I quit listening in 1981 except for what I heard on the radio now and then – Rush had become big enough to be mainstream and so it fell off my everyday cultural radar at that age.

I felt similarly about the TV and cinematic references – he hits the obvious movies but since I did not own a TV for a good chunk of the 80’s all of the TV references went over my head – yes, having never seen a full episode of Family Ties or Eight Is Enough I apparently mix them up and I had no idea Michael J. Fox was known early on for anything other than his role in the Back to the Future movie trilogy. However, I did watch Twin Peaks live, episode by episode at a friend’s house, and to me that is as much a vital part of that era of TV as any of the standard references but then again Twin Peaks hit in 1990, right when Nirvana still seemed ground-breaking and before Teen Spirit came out and heralded the end of the 80’s for good..

So I’m voicing a complaint here about the incongruity of 80’s musical geekdom depth to the game and lit geekdom depth, which itself runs adequately deep for my tastes (or is my rancor on the musical and TV selection of focus just radical subjectivism on my part, Bananasuit?). It can’t be easily answered by emphasizing the “pop” part of the cultural reference frenzy, as the depth of gaming attribution is anything but surface-level.

And that minor complaint leads to a major observation that I am recusing myself from tackling: How in the world does this book read to anyone not already familiar with late 70’s and 80’s American generally-middle class pop culture? It relates to the age-old tension between the philosophical poles of decreeing that art must stand on its own versus that it must be evaluated in the context of its time and place: Putting aside for a moment whether this is a work of art or not, for anyone that knows this cultural era, Cline’s book really forces one down towards the context-weighted end of that spectrum in strong Duke Nukem 3D fashion.

This problem is actually woven into the storyline of Ready Player One itself, where he contrives a social and ultimately economic obsession with 80’s culture as the explanatory mechanism for why so many people would be interested and able to participate in this Willy Wonka style quest for geek glory and riches. I have tried to imagine that I know nothing of this era and how the story would read but I simply can’t do it. I mention some specifics in the self-indulgent post script below. But I don’t have time to play with myself right now. Sorry, had to get more Duke Nukem into this discussion.

Which leads me to my bottom-line review of Ready Player One, including spoiler material, and wherein I explain how I found it a light-weight romp that was thoroughly enjoyable from chapter two all the way through to the last page. It was like watching True Blood - not on par with say, The Wire, but still a guilty pleasure indeed. The title of the book says it all. “Ready Player One” is what blinks at you in the most classic of early video and arcade games as you ready yourself for another run at it. Reading this book is like playing a game. Many readers I've polled say they like the first half better and then are disappointed in the wasted story potential in the second half. But to me it was like playing out the game to the end - and of course Wade is going to triumph over the dark cynical competing interests and of course the unsung hero gets the girl and saves the planet - what kind of a loving homage to the game experience would it be if it were otherwise? I'd fallen in crush with Art3mis by the end myself!

I can’t help but singling out one scene (the prize-winner though being the playing-Joust-with-a-liche scene in a D&D module that my group actually played through at one point!) that didn’t overtly mention a specific game reference but which strongly triggered a game memory for me. It is the floating club scene in chapter 18 where then-celebrities Wade and Art3mis attend the Ogden Morrow 80’s Dance Party at the Distracted Globe. The description of the scene with the suspended DJ pod at the center establishes the feel of it and then the ensuing combat action immediately invoked in me strong sense memories of hours spent playing the video game Descent, though I had to search for the title online since I couldn’t even remember it and it wasn’t mentioned. If any of you played that game about flying spaceships on a remote mining colony with six degrees of control (unheard of at the time and difficult to get the hang of at first but creating a truly liberating feeling once mastered), re-read that chapter and see if there isn’t some resonance there.

As far as the issue of moralizing at the end about “you kids oughtta get outside in the real world and PLAY!” (something I feel strongly about in RL, actually), any preaching on valuing real life rather than playing games would seem like a silly and unnecessary plug-in to this light work but even that aspect struck me as more an indulgent game-play narrative related to getting the girl (and a positive relationship) in the ultimate sense at the end (in real, not just virtual, life) than it did any real finger-wagging, so for me it fit right into the obligatory warm-glow-of-success ending duties - the equivalent of the never-ending hobbit-hugging scene at the end of the Lords of the Ring movies - and I didn't really notice it much or take it seriously. After all, the kid that was supposed to win against all odds had just won the all-time high score – and the kids that were collectively supposed to win against all odds all won, including, again, in reality, not just in the quest, which itself is the ultimate Easter egg I suppose.

While I went into it with a chip on my shoulder and was feeling nothing but disparaging towards it as other readers began to comment on how much fun it was even during the introduction, once I began to view the book as an offering to immerse myself in a video role-playing game extravaganza, I didn’t bother to compare it to the predictive fantastic imaginings of Gibson or Donaldson – those are real science fiction; this is not. But there is enough of a framework there to hang the game questiness on and allow the American pop culture love to shine through in spades and he provided enough hooks for those of us that are culturally predisposed to dive in for the campy ride.

=================

SELF-INDULGENT POST SCRIPT:

Ready Player One is bizarre in its effect that I assume makes anyone who was young in the late 70's into early 80's feel like a secret club member in one way or the other. Other than the general ensnaring like recognizing video games we played back then or music or movies or TV from the era, here are just a few of the pre-existing specific hooks it leveraged in me as best I can recall:

I had not literally seen "TRS-80" in print in decades when I first read it in the introduction. A voice in my head blurted out "the Trash 80!". I discredited the author at that point for not being aware of the popular bastardization of it but lo and behold it is not only mentioned later in the book but plays a role in plot development.
I remember using BBS's, Gopher, Lynx, FidoNet, IRC, etc. and the exciting leaps forward in baud rates on dial-up modems, getting bounced offline when a roommate picked up the line to make a call in the middle of a game or download, so forth. Social media has been around forever; it's just that it's far easier to use nowadays and you don't have to actually use your mind to create the visuals. Curmudgeonliness acknowledged.
Not only did I used to play D&D for a short stint in high school but in fact for a while I was a DM (no, not a Direct Message). I later sampled Vampire and others, but it wasn’t quite the same.
I remember lining up quarters on the metal band across the marquis on arcade games (similar to stacking quarters on a pool table) and also walking through an arcade glancing at lines of quarters to estimate wait times on various machines.
I used to watch Ultraman during the early years of grade school in the afternoons when it was on; we used to play Ultraman outside on the playground and argue about who had the beta-capsule and if Ultraman's red warning light had started blinking yet.

As I read through the book, I increasingly enjoyed the orchestrated feeling of belonging to a secret club - I got so many of the references and details it's frightening. I thought I'd successfully repressed most memories from that era. Cline pulled strings like a master puppeteer throughout.

A final comment on the power of gaming - when I was in Santa Monica recently (I'd never been there in my life) the people that were driving the car said "Oh you have to check out the boardwalk and pier while you are here; it's such an icon" and we turned onto Santa Monica Blvd several blocks uphill from the pier and when I saw it stretched out into the ocean with the carnival rides silhouetted in the afternoon sea glare I got the strangest feeling. We drove down and onto the pier and I heard the click-clack click-clack under the wheels and took in more detail and I got a powerful sense of deja vu until it suddenly hit me that I knew this place because I had played a virtual version of it for untold hours in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas", running through both mandatory scenarios as well as just free-world playing, on everything from cars to motorcycles to bicycles to walking and running. All of this virtual game play and it was positively uncanny how real my memories felt when I encountered the physical location years later. Maybe someday we all really will have haptic gloves and headsets.

Hey, That's Racist!

2011-11-22T14:45:00.000-08:00

[Serious spoilers, salty language]

Let me start out by setting something straight. For the record: I really love Ready Player One. This in spite of the fact that I typically go for the same navel-gazing fare that makes bookish bastards like Nog swoon. I don't play videogames. I grew up in the 80s, but fuck if I know much about retro gaming culture. Yet there's something irresistible about Cline's exuberant, dungeon-masterly hero quest, and I loved it til the bitter end.

But Ernest Cline: what the fuck? In the book's last 50 pages, the four characters who've known each other virtually in the OASIS finally meet each other IRL. We learn that Art3mis is beautiful although insecure (we'll discuss that over beers at the Tap). Shoto is the token Asian non-character whose token Asian buddy gets rubbed out halfway through. Or is that Daito? Nevermind, doesn't matter.

And then there's Aech. Let's revisit the scene:

"A heavy set African American girl sat in the RV's driver seat, clutching the wheel tightly and staring straight ahead. She was about my age, with short, kinky hair and chocolate colored skin that appeared irridescent in the soft glow of the dashboard indicators. She was wearing a vintage Rush 2112 concert T-shirt, and the numbers were warped around her large bosom."

OK, so she's got big breasts. And she's also a lesbian, by the way. Whatever. Fast forward to Wade's reaction:

"A wave of emotion swept over me. Shock gave way to a sense of betrayal. How could he -- she -- deceive me all these years? I felt my face flush with embarrassment as I remembered all of the adolescent intimacies I'd shared with Aech. A person I'd trusted implicitly. Someone I thought I knew."

So what's the most egregious sin here: that Aech "lied" about being a girl, or that she "lied" about being black? Both clearly cross a line for Wade, who lives within a privileged framework that gender and race are fundamental aspects of personhood, and that to perform a gender or race other than those you were assigned at birth is tantamount to betrayal. How convenient for Wade, who just happened to be assigned "white male" in the being born lottery.

But oh my god, this is the fucking virtual OASIS! With wizards and cat people and shit! Haptic suits!! Let's remember that Shoto and Daito look nothing like their avatars, but no big deal. Meanwhile, Wade's panties are in a monumental twist just because his best friend is missing a certain manly appendage and tweaked her RGB.

Wade defines and inscribes Aech with the attributes "fat" "black" "lesbian" "chick" because he's invested in the privileged heteronormative assumption that it's "regular" to be a skinny white straight dude. Thanks, Robinson Crusoe. Meanwhile, Aech represents all that is opposite or "other" -- the transient dark enigma that's somehow subverted the IOI's panoptic gaze.

But then Wade decides he's cool with it. 'It's OK dudes, I've got African American friends.' Ultimately, Wade has an enlightened epiphany that allows him to understand why Aech would want to perform white maleness in a Virtual. Fucking. Reality:

"In [Aech's mother's] opinion, the OASIS was the best thing that had ever happened to women and people of color. From the very start, she had used a male white avatar to conduct all of her online business, because of the marked difference it made in how she was treated and the opportunities she was given."

Oh, really. Because at the end of the day, we'd all just be so lucky to pass as straight white men. Nevermind black power, second wave feminism, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.... the practice of radical subjectivity. Nope, Wade's so right: we'd rather just assimilate and pretend we're all bros. #bitch #please.

Nick Examines One Page

2011-11-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

In my copy of Ready Player One, I think page 194 perfectly sums up the entire book. There's an excerpt from Anorak's Almanac - as a matter of fact, it's the only full excerpt from Halliday's journals, and it's about whacking it:

"AA 241:87--I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right--including our own."

It goes on for another quarter-page, but I think you get the drift. And, when you consider it coupled with the umpteenth instance of reference explanation below (explaining the specifics behind Wade's choice of "Max" as his system agent software), it's the whole book in microcosm. It's a condescending, detailed breakdown of what any reference means -- essentially, masturbation via words.

It fits in with the book as a whole -- namely, that the gunters are super-obsessive people prone to one-upmanship and proving that they know more than the next -- but the unfortunate side effect of all this is to end up with a book that, ultimately, has more in common with fan fiction than anything else.

There are parts of this book (the final assault, specifically) that bear an uncanny likeness to the material offered up as part of Fan Fiction Friday over at Topless Robot (minus the face-melting, mind-raping sexual perversity). Is Cline just a fanboy who got lucky with a book that shows how much he knows about Rush's 2112, or is Ready Player One about the triumph of knowledge over power?

Bananasuit, a Lowly Level 3 With No XP, has Found Her Favorite Quote

2011-11-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

"I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukeleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukeleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend." - p 60ish

What would a great book be without some kind of weird girl fetish, am I right? Ukeleles = totally crushworthy. And now, back to the Liches and Mayan doomsday prophecies.

Nick Logs On, Draws Comparisons

2011-11-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

Ready Player One is not the first book to explore the idea of virutal reality as a place to escape the monotony of real life. Neal Stephenson did it with a sense of futuristic, Gibsonesque flair in Snowcrash -- a book which only serves to make his later name-dropping, "look how fucking clever I am" works like the Baroque trilogy seem like exercises in forced cleverness. However, while Snowcrash certainly pioneered the idea of the avatar and online persona, it's a little dievergent from what reality would end up being, as lead character Hiro Protagonist (best name ever? possibly) is just as much an impressive, katana--wielding badass in real life as he is in the digital world.

A more apt comparison would be Bruce Bethke's Headcrash. That work, published three years after Stephenson's, also deals in the realm of avatars and Internet escapism, but certainly more accurately mirrors the reality that would come to be online identity. Jack is an IT guy in St. Paul who likes "Weird Al" and model rockets, but online, is the hacker god MAX_KOOL. The concept of taking the anonymity of the Internet and using it to one's social advantage has been set, and we're off and running.

Cline's book obviously owes a massive debt to geek lit the world over. All those footnotes in the introduction? Totally swiped from Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. It's also continuing the Headcrash comparison, jam-packed as that book is with asides in the form of pop-up-like infonuggets.

Unfortunately, all of the authors/books I've name-dropped thus far have much better sense of humor. Ready Player One is perfectly suited for PBR Book Club, in that the references are more in the vein of clever and smart, rather than funny and witty. This is a book that's desperate to show off that it knows more than you, rather than you marveling at how great it is that you get the references therein.

Richard Completes Level One, Retains Top Spot on Scoreboard

2011-11-05T07:36:00.000-07:00

[Minor spoilers]

Halfway through and I'm still enjoying the hell out of Cline's book. If it were solely up to me, PBR Book Club would probably read nothing but ponderous, postmodern navel-gazers, but there's something to be said for a book with momentum (and a quest tale, no less). Thanks, Abby! If ever there's a good time for more folks to join PBR Book Club, it's probably now, since the next two months have been officially dedicated (I think) to Murakami's 900 pager IQ84, which should also be fun, but time-intensive and heavy as a son-of-a-bitch.

Abby's prior post suggests that, despite her enjoyment, Cline's book (at least early on) is largely a mish-mash of sci-fi ideas we've seen everywhere from William Gibson to Tron, combined with a truly impressive command of 80's pop culture. I tend to agree, although I think the recycled nature of the material correlates with the subject matter in clever ways. Since the novel's virtual world, "The OASIS," largely consists of recycled 80's geek culture, it makes sense that Cline would simply borrow from the "canon" to tell his tale (I love the way the characters modify the usage of the word "canon" to refer to any of OASIS-creator Halliday's obsessions, no matter the quality or obscurity: even Ladyhawke can become "canon").

Cline is interested in the deep layers of pop culture embedded in a fan's mind, the ways that a movie memory might trigger a magazine or a video game image, so certain descriptions that may seem, at first, too clogged with references nonetheless enhance his vision. Look at this passage from Wade's arcade Joust tournament (versus an "undead lich!"):

"It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game." If the passage stopped there, it would seem to be a completely unecessary bit of description: surely we already recognize the absurdity! But it stretches on for one beat longer: "It was the sort of surreal image you'd expect to see on the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal or Dragon magazine." Even though Wade's virtual OASIS adventures approximate "reality," his mind drifts out of the virtual moment, back into the kinds of images that led him to seek out this world in the first place.

A favorite quote:

"Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-80's postapocalyptic sci-fi girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way. In a word: hot."

Level One: Abby's Honeymoon Phase

2011-11-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

Oh man.

50 pages in, and I’m already in love. This may sound a little premature. It is. I have a terrible habit of basing relationships on a shared ability to geek out over stuff like Discworld and the filmography of Rutger Hauer. Those relationships, however, tend to stay shallow and die out fast. I’m really hoping that won’t happen here.

I can’t help but admire what Ernest Cline’s doing here. As far as cultural reference-dropping in books goes, it’s a hard thing to do well. The only other writer I can think of who does it as much as Cline is Brian K. Vaughn. In Vaughn’s case, those references get old fast, because they don’t usually have anything to do with the main story, and really distract from the main action. You like “Miller’s Crossing,” Brian, I get it. You’re cool. Now quit. But in the case of “Ready Player One,” Cline’s managed to make those references something that actually propels the plot forward, and informs us about the inner lives of the characters. There’s a whole two-page argument about “Ladyhawke” in here (more words than I’ve ever seen dedicated to that movie, even in real-life conversation), and not only is it fun to read, it seems like a believable conversation.

But already I’m recognizing that Cline’s story is far from original. It’s basically “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Brazil” and a dash of “The Westing Game,” all put together in William Gibson’s Cuisinart while Gibson watches “Tron” with John Hughes in the next room. Complicated analogy, but you get the idea. It’s a lot of bits and pieces of stuff that’s been done before put back together in a giant homage that feels different enough to be interesting, but familiar enough that it’s not saying anything new or compelling. That’s either a recipe for solid entertainment or a burnout fart in the wind. Whether “Ready Player One” is one or the other remains to be seen, but it’s off to a good start so far. Don’t disappoint me, Ernest Cline. Let’s see if we can make this relationship last.

Note:
I have a friend who holds to the belief that we’re living in the Matrix, and that the Matrix is being run by Chris Hardwick. The more I think about it, the more I think he may have a point, because only in a world run by someone like Hardwick would a book like “Ready Player One” get published to general acclaim, snag a movie deal with Warner Bros., and have an audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton. One day we’re going to wake up to discover that we’re actually living in the OASIS, in the Nerdist quadrant.

November's PBR Book Club Pick: Ready Player One

2011-10-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know about the rest of you but, after an October of Japanese matricide with Kirino's Real World, I'm more than ready for a romp through a virtual world of 80's geek culture with Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. Perhaps you book-clubbers will want to check out the official mixtape for the book from Ernest Cline's blog. Now it's time to read and drink PBR and listen to Buckner and Garcia's "Pac Man Fever!"

And who else thinks that the cover of the "Advance Reader's Edition" is far superior to the official cover?

Cubism and Rashomon

2011-10-17T19:41:00.000-07:00

[contains spoilers]

"Deregulation of the Japanese capital asset markets set off what was, and would remain until the NASDAQ, the largest speculative bubble in human history, combining speculation in stocks and speculation in real estate to an astonishing degree. Valuations in both became wholly unhinged."

"MacKaye's lyrical approach had changed dramatically in the two years since Minor Threat. He wasn't railing against teenage hypocrites, bullies, and poseurs anymore - the subject of his songs was often himself."

"As the postmodernists would remind us, we have stuff, we have signs for stuff, and we have symbols of signs."

"With no armor, and no shielding of any kind, we were totally exposed. Our vehicle was like an elephant wandering past the lions' den, holding the tail of the Bradley in front of it. An IED would kill us all."

"Having reached this conclusion, the limbic system sends an all-clear signal to the reptilian brain, and you find yourself walking toward the intruder with open arms."

What do all of these quotes have in common? Together they make an intriguing aleatory cut-up abstraction of the PBR Book Club's October pick? No, it's that they are all NONFICTION. Which is all I have been reading lately. Then along came a lady in a banana suit and forced some fiction my way for a change. I must have needed it because I tentatively began piecemeal reading it and suddenly I'm at the end. While she isn't quite a Picasso or a Kurosawa by any means, the more I read Natsuo Kirino's "Real World" the more I felt like I was wandering through a Cubist painting with "Rashomon" playing on a black and white TV in the cultural background.

At the center are four teenage friends. Surrounding them are their families, their prehistories, an outsider, a few peripheral connections, and an abrupt circumstance. What begins as a relatively straight-forward narrative with flashbacks to the past casually slips into n-dimensional space when the first persona shift sneaks up pleasantly from behind.

I got into an argument with a friend at Mirth Cafe recently in which I claimed that every human being was capable of great evil and great good but that most of us spent most of our time in the comfortable middle of the bell curve (the opposing viewpoint was that some people just don't "have it in them" to commit murder, for example). This novel examines those places and times where people find themselves suddenly and gradually near the extremes of that distribution. Or rather, it uses those situations as a seer would a crystal ball to glimpse how our minds and relationships work out at the edges of everyday experience.

At the root of this Cubism - this differential in perspective that emerges from a flatter tapestry of assumptions about other people's views and motives when viewed from the differing viewpoints of the various persona - is a pervasive space. I didn't actually interpret this space as emotional distance but rather as indicative of the personal space that so epitomizes the Japanese cultural answer to high population density across a small territory - when there is no physical space, people and ultimately society create a mental and behavioral space to compensate.

One of my favorite interludes (other than Worm's salt suit phase - I totally dig the salt suit!) is Terauchi's telling of her entire childhood seemingly spent commuting long distances on a busy metro and suffering all kinds of injustices with no support or guidance other than to just deal with it. The cultural difference here is hammered home, at least to my mid-western sensibilities, even allowing for the large urban aspect of her commuting experience.

In a train where many of the same people are packed in every day, in our culture I have to believe that if a grade school girl were by herself every day, getting shoved off balance and cutting open her cheek, puking up her breakfast on a bad morning, or later as a teenager getting sexually abused by office workers and students there would generally be a different response from some of the "regulars" than just looking the other way or verbally criticizing the young woman and deriding her. Let's just say some vigilante-style pervert-ass stomping would be going down.

In addition to this pervasive sense of cultural or social space overlaid on the close confines of their physical existence, the sibling element that made this experience engaging for me and evoked the sense of Cubism is the mismatching and misreading of each of the characters by the others as a result of this insidious space and the more general human tendency to make false assumptions about what's going on in even close friends' or loved ones' heads and then proceed as if the assumptions were real. Occasionally they guessed right (Terauchi about Yuzan's sexuality for example), but most of the tension in the story line and in the reader coming to understand the inner workings of the characters is derived from this fascinating menagerie of failed mind-reading.

I suppose the fact they each thought they were individually to blame for the tragedies involved is not only the aggregation and culmination of all the interpersonal perceptual slippage but is also representative of the unavoidably self-focused universe that is a teenager's mindset at that phase of life; it certainly brings the morass of missed cues and intentions over a lifetime into sharp relief.

Kirino does a great job at painting these mental landscapes for us without an excess of detail. Worm's evolution from wanting to steal the neighbor lady's panties to obsessing on Toshi to the dazed and sleepy running phase (did I say I love the salt suit!) to the amplification of the old Japanese movie that had made an impression on him as a child into this all-consuming inner narrative to a final abandonment of these constructs - each of the characters has these and they're all adequately interesting. But a series of insightful internal portraits alone wouldn't have done the trick - inviting us into the web of mismatches and misreads reaching back over their entire lives is what engages us and provides us a glimpse into the reasons why people commit murder or take their own lives.

I found myself frequently flipping back to prior narratives to see how something said by one character from a given viewpoint interfaced with the current narrative's timeline and viewpoint through a twisty hallway of offsetting times and places, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle where you can only see part of the puzzle at any given time and the pieces look different when viewed from different sides of the table.

I've seen too many examples of disenfranchised people throwing away opportunities and too much suicide in my life, as I know many people have, and perhaps my personal history helped these particular stories to resonate more easily with me because of that, but mostly I respect the overall effect of the entire webby ball of it - the juxtaposition of all the out-of-kilter (and occasionally dead-on) interconnections against each other and onto these passionate young minds bludgeoning their way through personal and cultural space and the intense pressures and expectations that seem undiminished by that space.

Dan's take on narrative structure and Yuzan's window

2011-10-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

Now, before I begin, a little caveat. Textual and layout analysis of a translation is problematic, but since I’m agnostic, and gave up Walter Benjamin a long time ago, lets make Gabriel the author, and turn the translation into the text. If we can ignore questions about God, we can ignore the Japanese.

I’m about, or rather, exactly 1/3rd of the way through Real World. Location 1000. Worm is going on about his salt suit. So far, Kirino’s novel is easy to read. It’s compelling, and the violence, fear and isolation go down easily. I can sit here at the pig, be a compliant reader, and the words just slide along. There was one jarring narrative moment, though, near the end of Yuzan’s chapter. Yuzan is a comfortable first-person narrator. She doesn’t address me as ‘gentle reader’, but might as well. She describes the ping, the crack in the glass of her window, and the phone call when she learned her mother died. Suddenly, another reader interjects, “So what you mean is that pebble was your mother?” Disturbing, to learn I’m reading along with Worm.

I like this shock in the narrative structure. It’s clever, bringing the symbol of the window, crack, and pebble into high-relief, for explicit analysis and interpretation within the novel itself. It turns Yuzan’s poignant description of loss into an anecdote she relates for a social purpose. Within the structure up to this point, it is unique, highlighting this particular symbol (window, pebble, crack, loss) and its subsequent interpretation.

Lets pull back for a minute and look at the structure of Yuzan’s chapter. We start with Yuzan as a first person narrator, reflecting on the end of the chapter before, where we left Toshi. The change in perspective is casual, unremarkable, continuing in the same plot-based timeline. Following Yuzan through the chapter, we read her perspective on recent events, her personal history, struggle integrating her sexuality, loss of her mother, and her relationship with the other mother killer, ending up, in the plot-based timeline, directly before the chapter begins--Worm leaving with Yuzan’s bicycle and the new phone, Yuzan returning Toshi’s bicycle and phone.

There are 4 major breaks in the page layout, separating five parts of the chapter:

1) From describing the assault to Yuzan’s return from Toshi’s house (Maybe that’s why it wasn’t such a shock when Dahmer suddenly disappeared. / It was exactly eleven when I got home. Dad was waiting outside for me, looking unhappy.)

2) Between Worm’s most recent call and his first call (The glass was perfect, not a scratch on it. / The first time Worm called my cell phone was after dinner, when my dad and I were in the middle of a fight.)

3) Transitioning from Yuzan’s identification with Worm’s matricide to her experience with her terminally ill mother (This wasn’t a lie. I might not have done it with my own hands, but inside it felt like I did. / They found out Mom had ovarian cancer just when I entered junior high in April.)

4) The window, pebble, crack and loss (Not long after this the phone rang with the news my mother died. / “So what you mean is that pebble was your mother?”)

The window, pebble, crack, and loss figure prominently here, with the mother killers’ analyses tying them together in the final transition. Yuzan’s revelation throws light on the novel’s major themes of isolation and violence, using the bond of violence and hate as a reluctant attempt to escape isolation.

“I thought my mother was blaming me,” I began. “That she hated me. When you hate someone like that, your spirit still hangs around and you can’t properly pass on. That’s when I started to get scared. Not scared of my mother or her ghost or anything. Scared of how strong the bonds between people can be. So when I decided I’d abandon my mother I felt like I’d murdered her.”

Courtneybelle Asks: Maybe Japan Just Needs Central Air Conditioning?

2011-10-13T10:18:00.001-07:00

(Warning: spoilers)

So, I had noticed the near constant whining about the heat and sweating in Real World.But after hearing a recent NPR story, I finally decided that heat is a character in this book. The NPR story was about how baseball pitchers hit batters more frequently in stifling heat. The researchers have several theories, as do players, about the relationship between the temperature and this behavior, but the numbers were undeniable. So, while reading Real World, was anyone else reminded of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing?

I admit that this book could be an account of the way self centered adolescents become self indulgent adults. Kirino might indeed have something to say about the bone crushing pressure Japanese youth are stranded under. She clearly has something to say about the sexualization of young people in Japan. And she might even want the reader to think that Japan still doesn’t have this giggling, subservient female archetype neurosis thing sorted out yet. But, I want to suggest that maybe the author just sees an opportunity for better climate control. Moving room to room turning on air conditioners and what appears to be a complete lack of box-fans, might be enough to drive Japan’s super-industrialized posterity into a buck-wild manga murder sex fiasco.

As an American who only studied one semester of Japanese, I couldn’t help feeling I lacked cultural knowledge and perspective to fully appreciate this book. Her real message seemed continuously just out of grasp. If Kirino wants me to have a strong feeling about the changing gender roles in modern Japanese society, I’m going to need more than 200 pages of sexually repressed teenagers kvetching about how brain-fucked their parents are. I grew up in the Midwest, I already know that story. If she wants the Japanese art of subtlety to inadvertently drown her message in subway sweat, then sure, I love it. Message received.

On a lighter note, it was generous of Kirino not to let the afflicted and simpering “Worm” die a virgin. At least there is some justice in the Real World.

Nick Wonders How It All Breaks Down

2011-10-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

[Spoilers for the latter half of the book]

Going back and forth, from character to character, as Real World approaches the end, it's almost like a frame-by-frame analysis of Worm breaking down. The first half of the book, Worm's almost charming. When he first meets Kirarin, he seems almost clever and suave:

"I'd pictured Worm as this haunted-looking sweaty, smelly guy, confused and saddened by what he'd done. But the real Worm was tanned and healthy-looking. He looked neat and tidy, with a clean white T-shirt on and oversize black shorts. [...] Could he really have killed his own mother?"

This contrasts with Worm's own description of himself just hours before, in a convenience tore, where some guy's going to puke, he stinks so much. Kirarin makes mention that there's a "metallic, rusty sort of smell" about him that's usually from guys who want to have sex, but that it seems to be some other desire driving Worm.

That desire is some sort of twisted, confusing (even to Worm) conflation of anger, control, and sex. Worm attempts to seduce, cajole, and outright threaten Kirarin into sex, but every time he's rebuffed. She's well aware of whatever lurks within him. It seems like Worm has flashes of impulse that can quickly be subverted by a strong-willed woman. His ability to maintain any sort of idea or plan for very long seems weak, and easily deflected into some other thought - usually by Kirarin or Toshi demeaning him in some fashion.

Here's your question to ponder: Worm repeatedly gets the butcher knife out to threaten Kirarin. He never actually attacks her with it, but it's repeatedly pointed to as the possible method of death for Kirarin. Is this foreshadowing of the fact that cutting the cab driver's throat results in her death>

Richard Ponders Real World's Parent/Child Relationships

2011-10-10T07:54:00.001-07:00

[Spoiler alert: this focuses on the Worm 2 and Terauchi sections]

So our astute writers have been doing sharp work parsing individual passages and meta moments, but I want to look at the bigger picture. Since this is, after all, a book with a matricide at the center of it, what point is Kirino making about parent/child bonds (or lack thereof)? And why DOES Worm kill his mother anyway?

In the second Worm section, he attempts to explain his actions: "She was guilty of creating a history between us, a past that justified me putting her in her place...I was a colony and she was the occupying force...A colony where everything was plundered. I don't know what exactly was stolen from me. But most definitely the old lady continued to steal something."

Worm's military language (occupation) is obviously significant here, as he uses it throughout this section, believing himself to be "transforming" into some sort of Japanese soldier. And there's definitely an us-against-them mentality in regards to parents and children that extends to the novel's female voices as well. Is there a single well-developed adult figure in this book? (or are they similar to the nonsensical "wawawa" voices of authority figures in Peanuts cartoons?). Fathers tend to be absent figures who work late then go out drinking. Mothers, if living, are smothering figures, ostensibly looking out for the girls' best interests but also stifling their individuality. The Terauchi section drifts into a lengthy flashback regarding her childhood and how her parents forced her into solo train rides at a young age, left alone to fend off the perverts on her way to school. "This was my reailty," she says, accepting her fate, but Worm's drastic action seems a rejection of such a fate. He's hellbent on forging his own "reality," though Terauchi, interestingly, is the only girl so far who's overly critical of what he's done. In fact, she sees her own loss of faith in her parents as a tragedy far greater, more "irreparable" (her favorite term) than Worm's matricide: "Kids lose their trust in the parents they love, but still accept them, so they end up not trusting themselves anymore."

This is a dark fucking book.

"Real World" Stops Kidding Around and Gets Pretty Meta

2011-10-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

Kirarin and Worm are the perfect foils for each other in Chapter 5, which ends in an ultra hip, postmodern cliffhanger. I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't gotten there yet, and instead just leave you with the bread & butter of meta-ness, found on p. 123.

Worm has just decided that Terauchi is the only one of the 4 girl friends who's enough of a "cadet" to ghostwrite the manifesto of his crime:

"I want you to pretend you're a boy who's killed his mother and write a story about it. It doesn't have to be long, but something that's better than what that killer Sakakibara wrote. Sprinkle in some Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche or whatever. But do a good job of incorporating those, so nobody can trace the source. Then sort of wrap it up like 'Evangelion.' Or maybe--it might be better to make it all avant garde-ish, know what I mean? Philosophy of life, moaning and groaning about the absurdity of it all, like that. I'm counting on you. If a story doesn't work out, then a poem's fine. If you make it kind of incomprehensible and look cool then a poem might just do the trick. The kind of poem that they could use as evidence in a psych evaluation, that sort of thing. Something that hides my real intentions and confuses the reader."

Scenesters, discuss! 8 page paper due next week.

King of the Road

2011-10-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

Having worked my way through Real World, I keep coming back to the introduction of Worm's reading habits. The books by Stephen King that he mentions liking are The Running Man, Carrie, and The Long Walk, in addition to Battle Royale. It almost seems too easy - like Kirino is following the High Fidelity adage that "What really matters is what you like, not what you’re like."

All it takes is a surface gloss of the plots of these books, and Worm's personality is laid out: three of the books are about teenagers (and two of those deal with teens being placed in life-or-death situations by adults), and one is about a man trying to get away from the system. One book deals with an oppressive mother, and all four end in death.

Hell, take the fact that The Running Man and The Long Walk are both books Stephen King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and you've got another layer to parse: hidden identity, and whether what's presented is in fact the truth, or if it's a front to fool the world.

A reviewer on Amazon (accurately) noted that the various internal monologues are essentially indiscernible from one another. While I agree, the fact is that each of the girls has her role - slut, brain, lesbian, and plain Jane - externally. Internally, they're all the same, and that's significant. The girls all essentially mention the fact that they feel like none of the other girls would understand what they've got inside, and thus maintain the role they've assumed, yet all the while, each girl is having the same issues.

Peeping Toms and Other Reasons You Should Love This Book

2011-10-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I was a little nervous during the first two chapters of Real World. I'd already picked a crappy book, and then I made the executive decision to make everyone jump ship to another book. "Please don't let it also be crappy," I prayed.

For such a short, 200 pp. book, Kirino sure takes a long time -- 60 pages -- to warm up and set the scene. We're introduced to Toshi, who has a few witty, wisecracking things to say about feminism, and then Yuzan, who reads kind of like a bad cliché -- the closeted lesbian who's mother died of cancer. But the weirdness does slowly start to accumulate: There's Toshi's alter ego, Ninna Hori. Yuzan's mother who comes back as a ghost pebble. The mysterious killer Worm who randomly starts calling up girls in Toshi's contact list.

Readers, Kirino cracks it wide open in Chapter 3. Worm begins to reveal, in his bizarre soldierly way, the reasons why he killed his mother, and the choppiness I was so leery of in chapters 1 & 2 starts lending itself to hilarity. Opining on manga vs. novels: "The guys in my class see only the outer surface. Same with their parents. Guess they find that makes living easier, like that's the smart way to approach life. What a bunch of assholes."

Then, on page 76, we're finally treated to our first boner ("As I imagined her, I got an erection."). From there Worm shares his back-story of being a Peeping Tom, and the rest is history -- guys, I can't even keep up with this guy's quotables. Let's just say Chip would be very titillated. And then chapter 4 builds on the freakiness, with a bona fide Naughty Japanese School Girl.

I'm not sure where this is headed, but I'm pretty sure I like it.

Pretentious discussion topics: Personas & alternate realities; the Novel as a way to "show you the real world with one layer peeled away, a reality you can't see otherwise."

Best critique of hipsters:

"My old man said he'd use the Japanese-style room on the second floor as his study. A study? Don't make me laugh. All he's got are dusty old sets of collected works. Those aren't books -- they're furniture. And how about all those records he's collected since college? He never listens to them. Hello! Ever heard of CDs? We got MP3s and DVDs, too, in case you didn't know. And don't give me all that crap about how great analog sounds, okay? [...] Okay, so you bought a computer, but do you ever use it? You're just trying to look cool. Do you know that I sneak into your room, surf the Web, and play around on porn sites?"

Richard Breezes Through Three Chapters of Kirino's Real World

2011-10-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

[Spoiler alert level: high!]

What it lacks in a distinctive style, Natsuo Kirino's Real World is making up for by being utterly bonkers. It's like a J-Horror Japanese schoolgirl film with the nihilistic literary aesthetic of someone like Chuck Palahniuk.

Told in alternating voices, Real World begins with the mundane. Toshi has a stable family and she's going to "cram school" to prepare for college and she tells us she is "honest to a fault." But two pages later she's lying to solicitors and several pages after that she's covering up for the matricidal maniac next door whom she calls Worm (a kid she barely knows and doesn't like). In fact, she's created a whole new identity, "Ninna Hori": "Hori is the character for 'moat,'" she says, and the identity seems to be her way of keeping herself apart from a world "assaulted by commercialism" (not to mention random perverts haunting the subway stations).

Then there's Yuzan, Toshi's friend, coming to terms with her sexual identity by hanging around in gay bars with a girl who's renamed herself after a serial killer (Dahmer). Yuzan's had a rough life, losing her mother at an early age, and she too finds herself drawn to Worm's violent acts. Unlike herself, shaped by actions beyond her control, she feels that Worm is creating a "real world" for himself by assuming (insane) responsibility over his own destiny.

And then there's Worm. He enjoys reading Stephen King, listening to the neighbors screw, and trying to steal the neighbor's wife's panties. Typical teenage scamp, until he picks up the baseball bat one morning and gets matricidal. Worm may be a little confused about where the "real world" begins and ends: "Novels are closer to real life than manga. It's like they show you the real world with one layer peeled away, a reality you can't see otherwise. They're deep, is what I'm saying."

Real World is not very deep (so far). It's worldview doesn't seem to extend much beyond "everything is terrible and getting worse." But you can read this sumbitch in a few hours and begin preparing for November's choice...which might be Abby's suggestion of Ready Player One (unless we decide to go big and tackle a postmodern classic like DeLillo's Underworld, which I am needing a good excuse to read again).

Real World, Quarter 1: Nina Hori & Yuzan

2011-10-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

***Now with fewer spoilers!***

A lot of you lazy Larryville scenesters are really hurting for a copy of this month's PBR Book Club book, so tonight I did my booksharing due and cracked open Real World for a speed-reading session.

It's a weird little book so far. The thing I loved about Kirino's earlier, better-known book, Out, was the juxtaposition of sterile box-lunch factory ladies against surprisingly grisly yet homey dismemberment scenes. In Real World we have none of the gore, and are instead just getting to know a few chatty Japanese high school girls who are doing their best to navigate a sterile, detached "Real World" in which cold-blooded matricide warrants a "yeah, whatever." The whole thing so far is kind of an absurdist neo-Japanese The Stranger. The translation feels a little awkward and forced, but I find that it somehow helps if I imagine everything in Woody Allen's voice.

My favorite part so far: Toshi talking about all the stalkers and perverts who prey on nice girls for their mailing lists whenever they set foot near train stations and shopping malls. So true! Gentlemen of the PBR Book Club -- take note.

Most depressing quote: "The world laughs at losers."

Moving on to the "Worm" chapter next -- I hope he says lots of crazy existential stuff and starts talking about his 'cool,' 'incomprehensible' manifesto.

Richard Reads 80-ish Pages of Anthropology Before Bananasuit Tosses It Out the Window

2011-10-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

So it turns out that a sensitive 600 page coming-of-age novel was maybe not the wisest choice for a snarky book club that wants to throw terms like "meta" and "postmodern" around a lot. So I support Bananasuit's executive decision to discard it in favor of a bit of the old ultraviolence* (Japanese-style!) with Real World (which to Chip's chagrin is not a novelization of the never-ending MTV series).

[*free PBR for the first person to get the italicized reference above]/

But since I waded through most of the first section of Anthropology of an American Girl, I'm damn well going to say stuff about it. First off, it's not AS bad as some of us expected. Evie's an "artist," all sensitive and shit, so naturally she's prone to poetic descriptions, some of them total clunkers, some of them memorably bizarre in a twee sort of way (..."the smells were like fairies escaping"). I can buy her way of thinking, mostly, but I'm dubious that even the most artistic of teenage girls really speaks to her boyfriend this way: "It's life, demystified. A place out of self. Not a waltz, but the whirls within a waltz". Also, nearly a hundred pages in, I still don't buy her as a serious "artist." We've been told that she draws and takes photos, but there's no real exploration of what her "art" means to her, even though the book seems to want to present a Portrait-of-the-Artist-as-a-Young-Woman.

I do sort of like the cultural context in the background though. We start in 1979, and Evie's mother is a left-over hippie, her boyfriend's father is a rapacious capitalist, and her only real adult role model is her best friend's mother, Maman, who is French (and dead).

Will I finish it? Nope. I'm convinced that Evie will successfully come of age without my attention.

Best boner description:

"...something both majestic and vile."

After Democracy Fails, the PBR Book Club Switches It Up

2011-10-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

Scenesters, let this be a lesson to us all in the failures of democracy and consensus building. We collectively fell for the hip title and the aesthetically pleasing book jacket design -- and were collectively let down by the first sentence of this sensitive 600 pp. coming of age tale: "Kate turned to check the darkening clouds and the white arc of her throat looked long like the neck of a preening swan."

Tonight I'm making the executive decision to chuck Anthropology of an American Girl out the window, and invite all of you to channel your hipster rage into Natsuo Kirino's tale of murderous Japanese teenagers, instead. 'Bloated self-indulgent cliches' be damned; ready yourselves for some Heathers meets Natural Born Killers action in October's new pick: Real World! I'm stoked for the beer-induced discussions we're bound to have about violence and class warfare, and for us to write our own 'cool' and 'incomprehensible' PBR Book Club manifesto.

So don't be mad that you spent an extra $15 on Anthropology, and instead get excited that this month's new pick is only 200 pages long. We scenesters may enjoy pretentious postmodern literature, but we're also pretty lazy. (This will give me way more time to catch up on Breaking Bad.) See you at our tentative time & place, 8:30 p.m. October 27th at the Replay!

Richard Finishes Cloud Atlas and Prepares to Drink PBR at Replay

2011-09-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

Now that all the excitement over next month's choice has died down, let's get back to some pompous ramblings about Cloud Atlas and the nature of time and history, shall we?

The last time I taught Intro to Fiction, we read a series of books that dealt with history and cultural memory, all of which (to varying degrees) explored time as something more cyclical than linear (those books: Morrison's Song of Solomon; Foer's Everything is Illuminated; Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and Eugenides' Middlesex). Cloud Atlas could certainly be added to the mix (though I probably wouldn't inflict it on hapless sophomores).

For all its undeniable suggestions of reincarnation ("Does death always make you so verbose?" What do you mean 'always?'"), Mitchell's novel is ultimately more interested in historical cycles, in civilizations reaching a peak, destroying themselves in the process, and starting over again. "Eat or be eaten," is Dr. Henry Goose's Darwinian guide to life (and, given the the novel's cannibalism and processed clone meals, it often applies quite literally).

What I love about the latter half of Cloud Atlas is how Mitchell conveys a notion of forward momentum even though we're moving backward in time, imparting a very cyclical notion to the reading process itself (for instance, as Louisa Rey's section ends, she begins to read Frobisher's letters). And, as I surmised in an earlier post, Frobisher's musical composition certainly is meant to mirror the novel's structure, as Frobisher himself describes:

"In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmickry? Shan't know until it's finished."

Oh, Mitchell! You clever, meta bastard. You made for a good start to the PBR Book Club. See you kids at the Replay on Thursday at 8:30!

Best Dirty Joke:

"His favorite position is, uh, called 'the Plumber.' You stay in all day but nobody comes."

And October's Book Is...

2011-09-26T05:47:00.000-07:00

Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann
Scenesters, apparently the phrases "Bloated. Self-indulgent. Cliched." and "equal parts pretentious and poetic, bratty and poignant" really spoke to you. Or maybe it was the Twilight reference. Whatever the case, Anthropology of an American Girl is October's clear winner. I'm trying not to secretly resent you all for picking the 597 page book.

Actually, I'm pretty stoked that there was a lot of buzz about this book in the comments, and am excited to see some new scenesters prowling around Mass. with the (597 p.) PBR Book Club book shoved awkwardly into your back pockets. This one was a big seller last fall, so go snap up your copies at Raven and The Dusty Bookshelf ASAP. Lawrence Public Library still has one copy on the shelf, too, if you, unlike Courtneybelle, aren't compelled to collect books you've read like trophies for a serial killer.

We'll announce time and date for October's meet-up, well, later; in the meantime, come on down to the Replay at 8:30-ish this Thursday to drink beers and pretend you read Cloud Atlas.

Pretentious Picks for October: Holla at the Ladies

2011-09-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

Hipsters of Larryville: what do you want to read with your PBRs in October? Here are three very pretentious, very postmodern books -- each by talented authoresses -- that have been on my to-read list for ages. I think I secretly know which one I want to read most... but leave me a comment with your top pick, and we'll get this party started.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The NYT book review calls it an "unclassifiably elaborate novel." That sounds so pretentious and postmodern! Loosely, its about kleptomaniac former punk rockers, journalists & record execs. Let's see what else the review has to say: "The narrative feels as freely flung as a bag of trash down a country gully." "Egan's essential challenge to herself is to see how wide a circumference she can achieve while still maintaining any sort of coherence and momentum." Fun! This book won lots of prestigious awards that you're probably too hip to care about.

Real World by Natsuo Kirino
Real World is Heathers meets Natural Born Killers on 'roids. In a world peopled by teenagers, the kids are mad about the "total idiots" who force them to attend prestigious high schools, and they worship the rare iconoclast who takes a stand. At the center of Real World is Worm, a teen killer who talks his four female classmates into writing a manifesto for the crime he's committed. From the NYT book review: "He'd like it to be 'something creative' rather than 'introspective,' a 'cool' and 'incomprehensible' poem or story. Otherwise, his readers might conclude he isn't the disaffected nihilist he imagines himself to be." So postmodern! Natsuo Kirino has declared Flannery O'Connor her favorite American writer, and in this book's worldview there is no possibility of forgiveness or salvation.

Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann
The reviewer from the NPR books blog seems pretty damn reluctant to have liked this book. "Bloated. Self-indulgent. Cliched." "And yet," she laments, "there is something so beguiling, so charming about the book." The teenage heroine, Eveline, is "equal parts pretentious and poetic, bratty and poignant" (perfect!), capturing exactly the thought processes of an introspective teenage girl as she goes through regular, teenage girl stuff: drama club, romance, outgrowing high school friends. The best part? Anthropology of an American Girl earns a comparison to Twilight for its totally implausable love story. Perfect for those of us who are (ironic) fans of sparkly vampires! This one's long, but apparently totally addictive -- and, of course, pretentious.

Richard, On Reincarnation Theories and Getting Reacquainted With Sonmi and Cavendish

2011-09-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

If you can successfully ford the "Sloosha's Crossin' " section, the pace of this thing picks up significantly. We're now revisiting the characters of the first five sections, in descending order. As Bananasuit has pointed out, all of those sections ended with a "cliffhanger," of sorts, so these new sections open with a bang and push forward with actual momentum.

The second Somni section is especially rewarding, filling in some of the blanks of exactly how "The Fall" came about and hinting strongly at my earlier theory of reincarnation. Sonmi has a sudden "memory of blackness, inertia, gravity, of being trapped in another ford. Where was it? Who was it?" Well, it would certainly seem to be Louisa Rey plunging into the river. Later Somni hopes that she'll be reincarnated into the Abbess's colony: does she become Meronym? All of these people, of course, possess the recurring comet-shaped birthmark.

It all sounds good, but upon further reflection, it doesn't quite hold up. If Louisa Rey is merely a character in a manuscript called Half-Lives, she can't fit in with these "real" characters, can she? And when Cavendish's section resumes, Mitchell gets all meta on our asses, as if chiding us for buying into these reincarnation theories. Cavendish, the editor, threatens to cut reincarnation references from the Rey manuscript (which suggest that Rey is the reincarnation of Frobisher) because such references are "far too hippie-druggy-new age."

So, I can't say I've cracked open the mystery box yet, or if this will ever be possible, but I'm enjoying the downhill slope that will eventually lead us back to Adam Ewing's journals.

Favorite line:

Cavendish: "She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman."

Best euphemism for male genitalia:

"Her furry fawn rubs up against my Narnian-sized lamppost and mothballs."

Drinking game:

A shot and a PBR every time Mitchell obnoxiously references the title ("What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable. To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.").

Courtneybelle's Cloud Atlas Cliff's Notes for Lazy Scenesters

2011-09-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

Are you a scenester who desperately wants to read Cloud Atlas but just can't find the time between PBRs at the Replay and PBRs at the Tap to keep up with its demands?

You're in luck. Courtneybelle has composed this handy Cliff's Notes version for the first seven sections! Enjoy.

Requested:

The Map of My Emotional Responses to Cloud Atlas
By Courtneybelle
Or Cliff’s notes to Cloud Atlas

Chapter 1
Blah, blah Human teeth
Blah, blah Is this Moby Dick or Huck Finn?
Pig heart? Are you Lord of the flies now?
Blah, blah The Moriori = Maori (?)= Whale Rider= Frackin’ Moby Dick again!
Moriori=Maori (?)=Baadaaasss tattoos + obscure genocide= legit reason for hipsters to read this
Blah blah What?! No ending? Lazy twat.

Chapter 2
Blah, blah Man whore
“Girls fascinate in different ways. Try ‘em one day.”
Scuppered, onanist, escutcheons
Claude Debussy was a slut?
Yada, yada Is faith a theme I’m looking for?
“The devil, Sixsmith, is in the pronouns.” I know, right!

Chapter 3
Ooh! Film noir, cool, he can write his own screenplay.
Blah, blah nuclear science something whatever
“swindling sperm gun”
Blue suede suit? Are you sure?
Corporations are bad, sure, that’s true.
Oops! Boys try to kill clever girl reporter. Big shock.
Is there a bridge in the first two chapters? Is that a thread I should be looking for?
I’m still in, but we better go somewhere soon.
Next!

Chapter 4
Cavendish. Nice name. Do you publish books AND make pies?
How come you can say “shat” but not “c***” or “F*****g?
Throw a guy off a building, sure, that happens.
Blah, blah Financial failure, family failure, (soon enough bladder failure)
Drugs-oh, yeah I thought there was a reason we were reading this.
“…and a memory from a university Halloween Ball cracked
on the hard rim of my heart and the yolk dribbled out-“
Yes, we ALL want to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Blah, blah more incarceration/conspiracy
Wait? Was there a bridge?
Next!

Chapter 5
Oh, you better be fucking kidding me with this?!
Future bizarro corporation world
Blah, blah who talks like this IN AN INTERVIEW?
“Humor is the ovum of dissent,…”
Blah blah Brave New World, 1984, Aeon Flux (animation, not film), The Island, Equilibrium

Chapter 6
Okay, now you’re just being a dick (with this dialect crap)
Blah blah Post apocalypse, everyone is smelly, goats
Same island from chapter 1 and Sonmi, from chapter 5, is their god. Okay, sure
“the Ship-woman she’d got that vin’gary stink o’ Smart…”
Blah blah Noble Savage, Hero’s Journey
“…see you’ll b’lief in a mil’yun diff’rent b’liefin’s if you reck’n jus’ one of ‘em may aid you.”
Faith again. “Old Georgie” has me stumped- WTF is up with that?
Conspiracy/Incarceration again
I can do without child rape, if it’s all the same to you, jackass!
Meronym turns baadasss.
Bridge again.

Chapter 7
FINALLY, we’re getting somewhere
Sonmi from Chapter 5 goes down the rabbit hole to Blade Runnerville
Gets a face change a la Alien From L.A. (What? What? Where my peeps at?)
Hae-Joo gets better (hotter) by the page, “These are the tears of things.”
Sonmi gets wiser by the page- similacrum
Soilent Green is made of people! It’s people!
OF COURSE Big brother is killing you and feeding you to yourselves
THAT’S WHAT HE DOES!
But OH, SNAP!!!!
Sonmi= Jesus ?!?
“but if you knew about this…conspiracy, why did you cooperate with it?
Why did you allow Hae-Joo Im to get so close to you?”
“Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?”
HA! Good one! Circle of life, bitches! Bridges and water
Whew! Now that I think the author has some point, I can finish this Godforsaken book.

Richard Has Crossed the "Sloosha's Crossin' " Section and Plunges Deeper into the Clouds!

2011-09-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

[full of spoilers, as usual]

So this section is basically a post-apocalyptic western. If Cormac McCarthy fused The Road and Blood Meridian together and decided to write the whole thing in a ridiculous made-up dialect, it might resemble "Sloosha's Crossin.'"

I'm not a particular fan of dialect (I tossed The Help aside pretty quickly because I couldn't bear the author attempting to appropriate those African-American voices). Mitchell, at least, is up to something sort of interesting with his use of dialect (annoying as it is). We're several hundred years beyond the Sonmi section at this point, long after some horrendous unspecified cataclysm known as "the Fall," and the remnants of civilization exist in various tribes. Our young hero, Zachry (the Brave!), speaks in a slangy ungrammatical fashion that is perhaps meant to suggest language evolving back into a more "civilized" form. Post-Fall civilization has forgotten its ancient gods, and now worships Sonmi (wow, she must have really Ascended!) and fears Old Georgie, a Satanic figure who will eat your soul with a spoon if you don't watch out! Most of the section concerns Zachry's relationship with a "Prescient," a group who live on an island somewhere and have preserved knowledge of the world as it once was. As Zachry says, early on, "This ain't a smilesome yarn," but despite some nasty, nasty brutality, it does work its way to an ending that's at least somewhat hopeful, seeming to reach out toward us as readers and invite us in: "Hold out your hands. Look." Presumably this is as far as we will proceed in chronological time (based on section headings) so, in a sense, we have reached not THE ending, but AN ending, reinforcing the novel's theme of interconnection and the cyclical nature of history.

Random observations and questions:

Obviously, we're meant to connect Zachry's tribe to the Moriori from the Adam Smith section (civilizations predicated on peace).

Storytelling is emphasized throughout, once again, with several stories embedded within the larger narrative, much of which (we are told) may well be unreliable (just a bunch of "musey duck fartin'").

Cloud Atlas, we know already, is a musical piece by Frobisher but it's also a description of the novel's themes: "Souls cross the skies o'time...like clouds crossin' skies o' the world" (302).

So what about this recurring birthmark? Are those characters all the same character, reincarnated?

I like the fact that Zachry's culture uses "horny" as a verb and a noun at various times: "We'd got a feverish horny'n for each other, see...". I will be employing this grammatical structure in my own vocabulary.

Holy Hell, Reading Right Along...

2011-09-18T20:35:00.001-07:00

God I hate sci-fi. Better plow right ahead through "An Orision of Sonmi-451" so I can pretend it never happened. But first, a few quick thoughts on "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish."

I'm happy to see that Mitchell is back to his zingers in full-force with the character of Timothy Cavendish! Started marking up my copy like an overachieving Mormon girl in high school English class again (I can say that because I was one).

Here we see a return of my three favorite motifs! Broken clocks, weird dreams, and golden geese. Just after Cavendish boards the train to "Hull," he complains about his broken watch: "My watch was stuck in the middle of last night." Ensue pot smoking hallucinations and Alice in Wonderland / Dante's Inferno references. Here Cavendish winds up in a nightmarish Lynchian hell, an echo of Adam Ewing's descent into the irrational, time-less hog heart's pit in the South Pacific. Also, we've got great lucid dreams about little boys who turn into Nancy Reagan. And finally, Cavendish's golden goose: "I, yes, I, had exclusive rights to this platinum goose with a bad case of the trots!"

Mad props to Nog for laying out the nested structure of Cloud Atlas thus far! To that I'll add that each vignette ends in some sort of horrible transitional state -- drinking poison to ward off brain-eating parasites; a botched cuckolding with a gun in the mix; an (attempted?) assassination & impending nuclear holocaust; imprisonment in a bizarro old-folk's home.

And my favorite snippet of the whole damn book so far:

"When your family is all tucked up asleep in your snug little beds, he'll slide into your house through the crack under the door and eat--your--puppy! ... He'll leave its curly tail under your pillow and you'll get blamed. Your little friends will all scream, 'Puppy slayer!' whenever they see you coming. You'll grow old and friendless and die, alone, miserably, on Christmas morning half a century form now."

See you on the other side of Sonmi-451!

PBR Book Club: Author Trivia Edition (Mitchell Was Nominated for the 2006 Bad Sex In Fiction Award)

2011-09-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sure, David Mitchell is most often praised to the heavens with lines such as this:

"His best-known book, “Cloud Atlas,” is one of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is — and should be — read by any student of contemporary literature" (NY-Times).

But did you know he's also been nominated for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for 2006's Black Swan Green?

Behold this passage if you dare:

"If Dawn Madden's breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie's got two Space Hoppers. Each armed with a gribbly nipple...

Tom Yew got on her and sort of jiggled there and she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and wrapped her legs round him, froggily. Now he moved up and down, Man-from Atlantisly. His silver chain jiggled on his neck.

Now her grubby soles met like they were praying.

Now his skin was glazed in roast pork sweat.

Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll...

Her fingernails'd sunk salmony welts into his arse.

Debby Crombie's mouth made a perfect O."

Yes, we've quoted this passage before on our other blog, but how could we resist this rerun in connection to PBR Book Club? We simply could not.

As Richard Reads Full Speed Ahead, Bananasuit Considers Luisa Rey's Fashion Choices

2011-09-17T12:14:00.000-07:00

Ladies, I'm disappointed in Luisa Rey's fashion choices. Blue suede suit? Worn twice??

The women do get a little more interesting in the "Half-Lives" chapter of Cloud Atlas. Finally, they have back stories, and thoughts! Although Luisa's still a young, naive object of desire (god knows why, in her blue suede suit...), she's got some bite. Witness this sassy comeback to her creepy boss:

"If Bob Woodward had told you he suspected President Nixon had ordered a burglary of his political rival's offices and recorded himself issuing the order, would you have said, 'Forget it, Bob, honey, I need eight hundred words on salad dressings.'?"

Oh, snap!

But my favorite females in "Half-Lives" are: 1) Janice from Esphigmenou, Utah, that "stony matriarch" with a "mountainous bust" (Is Mitchell just really horny? Hard to believe if you've listened to audio of his lilting British accent...) who subdues Luisa's hotel-managing-assailant and then tells a weird little ghost story, and 2) Fay Li, that stone-cold business woman who transfers her horny co-worker to the middle of Kansas in the middle of January. Damn!

Three chapters in, and we've left some of the earlier dream-motifs behind. But what seems to be a common thread are the wanderers, travelers, characters on the fringes who are slinking their way through borderlands.

This chapter was a little slow, and not nearly as charming as Frobisher's tale. But I hear there are bananasuit-wearing billionaires just around the corner. And, more boners!

Richard Grapples with An Orison of Sonmi-451

2011-09-17T08:10:00.001-07:00

[Read after Section 5]

This section is presented in an interview format, as an Archivist collects the testimony ("orison") of an Ascendant clone called Sonmi-451. Whaaaaat? Yeah, we're in the future, and I'm not always great at parsing science fiction so feel free to correct any errors.

Mitchell's futuristic vision is a bit like Wallace's ultra-consumerist future in Infinite Jest. In Jest, time itself has been sponsored by corporations ("The Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar."). In Cloud Atlas, ads are projected on the face of the moon ("Hae-Joo said an AdVless moon would freak him out") and objects are referred to solely by the corporate names (automobiles are "fords" and all movies are "disneys," no capital letters). "Dewdrugs" keep people looking young and the service economy is staffed entirely by different kinds of enslaved clones ("fabricants"). There's an Abolitionist movement afoot to free the clones and apparently some clones, like our protagonist Sonmi-451, are beginning to develop a stable consciousness and transcend their environments (to become "Ascendent."). War's a-brewing, most likely.

Observations:

It's certainly easy enough to link these ideas of freedom and slavery and civilization back to Adam Ewing's adventures among the savages in Section 1.

The connection between this section and the previous Timothy Cavendish section feels clever, certainly, but maybe a little forced, unlike the previous connections. However, it sort of resonates thematically in more interesting ways, since Somni-451 and Cavendish are both sharing their tales while imprisoned.

For the perverts:

This section has a tentacle porn reference ("The octopoid rapine on 3D distracted him.").

Favorite line:

Sonmi-451 sees an illustrated book of fairy tales for the first time and describes Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in this fashion: "Seven stunted fabricants carrying bizarre cutlery behind a shining girl."

Richard On Storytelling and "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish"

2011-09-15T07:53:00.000-07:00

[Spoilers galore; read after Section 4]

Like many/most postmodern novels, Cloud Atlas is concerned with the idea of storytelling and with foregrounding its own narrative devices and trickery. Let's review for a sec. Section 1's journal of Adam Ewing is discovered by Robert Frobisher in Section 2. Frobisher's letters are read by Sixsmith in Section 3 and by Louisa (who shares a comet-shaped birthmark with Frobisher: what in hell?). And Section 4's Timothy Cavendish, a publisher, is reading Half Lives: The First Louisa Rey Mystery (as I surmised in a previous post, it's indeed a manuscript).

Okay, let's talk Section 4. "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" sounds like a Poe title, and indeed Poe's "The Black Cat" gets a nod at one point, but perhaps the true genre of this section is a bizarre (and very funny) variation on a certain kind of B-movie in which the sane hero is mistaken and imprisoned (the genre is also directly referenced). Whereas the first three sections were (relatively) straightforward takes on journals, letters, and mystery novels, respectively, this section seems to me the most obviously "post-modern," full of dense wordplay and clever (obnoxious?) self-referential moments such as Cavendish professing a disdain for "flashbacks, foreshadowing, and tricksy devices" which "belong in the 1980's with M.A's in postmodernism and chaos theory" even though his own writing (and Mitchell's) is full of such "tricksiness."

Points for discussion:

The similarities between Frobisher and Cavendish are intriguing: both are on the run and end up engaged/imprisoned in strange, farcical situations.

Best euphemism for male genitalia:

"Prince Rupert and the Boys failed to stir."

Favorite line:

"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."

And for Bananasuit, a reference to a banana suit:

"...my malcontent author wore a banana suit over a chocolate shirt and a Ribena tie."

Bananasuit, on Liking Frobisher In Spite Of Herself

2011-09-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

Courtneybelle is a genius -- Frobisher is totally a 1930s Euro hipster.

So guys, Frobisher's just making up his exploits to make Sixsmith jealous, right? We must discuss over PBRs.

And I agree -- despite my best efforts to dislike the cad, Frobisher's just too hilarious and lovable. My favorite scene is just after he sells the rare books (&c.) to Jansch and exclaims "Sweet bird of solvency," then blows his wad on new spats, a sharkskin cigarette box, and beers. Adorable. And he slays me with his truisms: "Whoever opined, 'Money can't buy you happiness,' obviously had far too much of the stuff.'" So true!

Other glimmerings of doubles & pairings: Jansch calls Frobisher "a naughty goose who lays such illuminated eggs." Are we to infer parallels between Frobisher and Dr. Goose of the Thomas Ewing journals?

And fellow readers, I hope you appreciate the restraint I'm exercising in order not to discuss feminism in the context of Mrs. Crommelyncks and equestrian transformation motifs in The Mabinogian & Ukrainian folklore. Can't wait to meet Luisa Rey in section three!

Courtneybelle on Letters from Zedelghem / And Thoughts On Section 3: Half-Lives: The First Louisa Rey Mystery

2011-09-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

Here's Courtneybelle's fun take on "Letters from Zedelghem":

Regardless of breasts, I feel ill-qualified to comment on Letters from Zedelghem from a feminist perspective. I will say this section of the book appeals to my love of the "superfluous man". I never felt that one should spend the energy to think of the acts of a superfluous man as either praiseworthy or despicable, which is why I can't take pains to dislike Frobisher. Suffice it to say that I can see that this character has more than a little in common with the shiftless, meandering spirits of the hipster generation or "generation why". Well, more in common than just Venereal disease.

"That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities."

Well bespoke! While this is certainly a popular sentiment among females, it always puts me off. Sisters, don't you know what crazy, possessive freaks you are right now? I'm open to the possibility that the ladies presented so far haven't had many redeeming qualities because we actually don't have that much to recommend us in the first place. I'm not going to fault the author for that, yet.

I can't lie, I admire the moxie of a person who can straight out call Claude Debussy a man-whore.

My Favorite Line from section 2:
"Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman"

Lastly, as a lover of individual words, I must admit the damnable author has caused me to forgive him for using the word "hamlet" twice in the first chapter. By using two of my all time favorite words in this chapter, onanist and escutcheon, he managed to pull me begrudgingly back to the possibility that this book might go somewhere.

---

[Read after third section]

In the third section, titled Half-Lives: The First Louisa Rey Mystery, we shift from the first person journals and letters of the first two sections and into a standard third-person format. Straightforward, with brief chapters. Is this a piece of a novel(even though it seems to be telling a story with real characters?) And who's writing it? We don't know. Yet.

The link to the second section is made immediately apparent here (hello, Sixsmith!) so there's no clever mid-section reveal (though we do learn what Cloud Atlas refers to, which is nice).

Bananasuit will likely be pleased by the emergence of a plucky female heroine, Louisa Rey, a reporter who's toiled too long covering trivial gossip and finally gets her chance to break a major story involving a nuclear plant cover-up (if she's not rubbed out first).

I remain most intrigued by the idea of "interconnection." Why does Louisa Rey possess the same birthmark as Robert Frobisher? The ideas about shifting identity are occasionally mirrored by the prose itself. One short chapter begins with a character who sits at a hotel bar and "watches yachts in the creamy evening blues" and ends with another character who sits at the same hotel bar and "watches yachts in the creamy evening blues."

Memorable moment:

During a bit of snappy repartee, Louisa refers to an ex-boyfriend as a "swindling sperm gun."

Best description of America thus far:

"...our denuded, heroic, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, berserking American continent."

Bananasuit Examines the Women of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing"

2011-09-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Readers (all four of you!), we're having a lot of fun with the PBR Book Club, and what we'd love is to get a lot of different responses to the various sections of the novel and create a collage of voices worthy of the book itself. Get in touch if you'd like to write something.

Here's our co-captain Bananasuit's take on the first section of the novel. Come watch her shotgun a PBR at our first meeting on Sept. 29 at the Replay!

"Yes, I will shotgun a PBR! Although what I'd like to shotgun is a martini. I'll save that one for the Pig.

Clearly, in the first seafaring section of Cloud Atlas, we're situated in a masculine realm. Let's inventory the female characters encountered so far, shall we?

1. That corpse in petticoats, Marchioness Grace, who's going to be gifted a set of cannibalistic dentures via Dr. Goose.

2. Your run-of-the-mill sullen maids and whores at the service of the seamen.

3. Mrs. Evans, that dull churchlady who retires to her kitchen duties after serving Sunday dinner.

4. Widow Bryden, a frigid old sow who requires "Dr. Quack" to frisk her, for medical reasons.

5. Kupaka's wife, who naively serves Kupaka the poisonous fish that will send his slave Autua to the whipping block.

What really fascinates me, in this first section, is the clashing of a rational world, governed by clocks, statute books, and soup tureens, with a more "indelible, fearsome & sublime" cthonic realm, where clocks stop working and rotting hog's hearts hang from trees. Will Adam's mysterious parasite make him surrender to this realm -- ruled by slaves, cannibals, and whores -- or will he learn, as the conquistadors before him, to manipulate and subdue the magical for his own unimaginable power & riches? Stay tuned.

My favorite line from Section 1: "Torgny, give me your gift instanter or, by the hinges of hell, you shall regret the day you crawled from your mother's [my quill curls at recording his profanity]."

And my favorite character: Boerhaave, that brutish first-mate, who's first introduced on page 7, sitting "amidst his cabal of trusted ruffians like Lord Anaconda & his garter-snakes." The ultimate villain. And, he's Dutch!

Cloud Atlas: Letters from Zedelghem

2011-09-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

[Read after Section 2]

I can tell the great joy of this book, for me, is going to be the revelations of how each part fits together. I'm a fan of interconnecting storylines in film (I love Altman's Shortcuts and PT Anderson's Magnolia especially). There's a certain thrill that comes from seeing how the pieces unexpectedly lock into place. So I loved the moment where we finally learn how this section's narrator, a music-obsessed, bisexual scoundrel named Robert Frobisher, connects to Adam Smith of Section 1. I won't spoil it here.

Section 2 departs from the journal of Adam Smith and offers up the letters of Robert Frobisher. Ah, the epistolary novel. Having been forced to make my way through such tomes as Fielding's Pamela during Ph.D comp exams, I'm not a particular fan of this genre. But Frobisher's letters (to someone named Sixsmith) have a great, almost musical rhythm, to them, relaying the story of how he insinuates himself into the role of amanuensis for a legendary ailing composer named Ayrs at Ayrs' estate in Zedelghem and the two begin to compose together (while Frobisher conducts an affair with Ayrs' wife).

Favorite line of this section:

"Bedroom farce, when it actually happens, is intensely sad."

Point of discussion:

Is the music of Ayrs and Frobisher meant to mirror the novel's own way of linking past and present? Frobisher states: "Musicologically, he's Janus-headed. One Ayrs looks back to Romanticism's deathbed, the other looks to the future...Watching him use counterpoint and mix colors refines my own language in exciting ways."

Is there more "doubling" in this section, as Frobisher begins to almost transform into Ayrs?

Pretentious poetry reference and wordplay regarding the "cliffs of Dover":

"Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue."

Best piece of advice:

"When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first-or-second floor window."

Coming soon to PBR Book Club:

Bananasuit (or possibly Chip) applies a feminist perspective to Frobisher's shenanigans. What do we make of a whole slew of rather misogynistic comments that emerge especially near the end of this section?

Cloud Atlas: Thoughts on "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing"

2011-09-07T12:56:00.001-07:00

[No major spoilers, but those who actually plan to read the novel should probably not read this post until completing the first short section of the book. Those who are not planning on reading the novel should probably just skip to the end for the jokey stuff.].

So I'm pretty well-versed in the young contemporary hotshot writers. I've read some DFW (yes, I made it through Infinite Jest). I've read some Franzen and some Lethem and some Safran-Foer (the Jonathans, as they are often called). I've read some Chabon. But this is my first real experience with David Mitchell (I think I read a few pages of Black Swan Green once and got bored).

What I've gathered over the years from encountering Cloud Atlas reviews is that it's essentially composed of interrelated pieces that inhabit different genres (from the old-fashioned seafaring adventure to pulp-fiction to post-apocalyptic sci-fi). The first section offers up selections from the 19th century journal of Adam Ewing, an American notary embarking on a journey home from the Chatham Islands. We're talking some flowery and ornate language here, folks, with a shout-out to Melville as early as pp. 10. Our group member, Courtneybelle, who is not a fan of Moby Dick, will probably be displeased. But it all seems fairly straightforward, so far, with the exception of a single footnote that appears unexpectedly and displaces the sense that we are reading a present-tense journal by alerting us to the existence of the journal's curator and (possibly?) editor.

Thematically, the first section probably recalls Conrad as much or more than Melville. There's some not-quite "doubling" going on with Adam and a cannibalistic tribesman named Autua (who's a bit like Melville's Queequeg). When Adam first encounters Autua, who is being lashed, Mitchell offers up this unexplained tidbit: "The beaten savage raised his slumped head, found my eye & shone me a look of uncanny, amicable knowing." Note also a passage later where Adam dreams that "not English but the guttural barkings of an Indian race burst from my mouth." Readers, we're ready to talk pompously about colonialism and race. Brush up on your Edward Said.

Random thoughts:

--Obviously there's an interest in the roots of civilization in this first chapter, with an embedded tale about whether a society predicated on non-violence can survive (the answer seems to be no). Presumably the novel is eventually headed toward some post-apocalyptic civilization. Taking us from the beginning of time to the end of time is so hip right now! (see Malick's Tree of Life as current example and, in its bizarre and ultra-quirky fashion, Miranda July's The Future).

--There's at least one good dick joke, with a character who insists on referring to Adam, the scribe, as "Quill-Cock."

--Dr. Henry Goose is also a funny name.

--The section of the novel ends in mid-sentence: obnoxious!

Best pretentious, postmodern sentence so far:

"Occasionally I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent."

Signs and rumors:

--Someone pointed out that the PBR of our club could also stand for "Postmodern Books (at) Replay." Wow. This book club is surely meant to be.

--Each meeting of the book club will be called to order with the recital of Frank Booth's immortal words from Blue Velvet: "Heineken? Fuck THAT shit! PABST. BLUE. RIBBON."

--Bananasuit will shotgun a PBR before each discussion.

Who's got stuff to say? Leave a comment or get in touch and write for us.

Larryville's PBR Book Club: Chapter One

2011-09-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

What Larryville needs is a group of scenesters who read pretentious tomes and other relevant hipster texts and gather infrequently to talk about them (drunkenly) over PBRs at the Replay and the Tap. So this blog will offer occasional posts about what we're reading (written by us or maybe the bananasuit librarian or maybe others if any of you will actually agree to join us).

First choice: David Mitchell's 2004 Cloud Atlas.

Our first meeting is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 29 at 9:00 at Replay. So read Cloud Atlas before it becomes a shitty Tom Hanks film directed by the Wachowski brothers and join us and Bananasuit if you will.

From the New York Times review: "On one hand, Mitchell's strategy is boldly antithetical to what most narrative-driven novels have been up to since Cervantes. On the other hand, what Mitchell is doing is basically James Michener's ''Alaska'' with an I.Q. transplant."