Category: Books

Drummer Hoff fired it off.

And so we’re introduced to the motley crew that will construct and fire the “Sultan”.

The art is stiffly whimsical in a stained glass style that is makes one nostalgic of the 60’s.

The text is rhythmical, based on a march.

The names are alliterative, each man and their rank.

The cannon is creates a big explosion, and nature returns to reclaim what’s hers.

This ending is both definitive and ambiguous.

Was it fired but once? What happened to all the characters we met?

Looking at the publication date, it foretold our hubris as we were stumbling into Vietnam.

Is it subtly subversive against the military industrial complex? Highlighting the wasted efforts of men and capital?

Or is it doubly subversive, inducing children to march to the war beat while assuaging its mildly pacifistic parents?

All we know is that the birds win in the end. But at what price?

Murakami makes the slightly absurd seem perfectly normal. This was already apparent from his first two novels. The great step forward in this third book is he modulates the flow of the narrative.

The first couple books created a uniform effect by being very flat. The Wild Sheep Chase stays within the general contours mood of its predecessors, but he adds dynamics to the mix. He doesn’t resort to anything extreme, but feeling undulates throughout the story. He’s now included a (restrained) climax.

Speaking of climaxes, these three novels are full of failed romances. Some that just leave you with a lingering longing, others just tragic. The girl with four fingers, the twins, and the girl with ears. The french major, the cafe girl, the ex-wife.

It’s odd to think that Mr. Murakami married young and has been happily married this entire time. His writing is so personal, it makes you think he himself is the protagonist. However this factoid of his biography reminds you of the fundamental disconnect between the author and the reader.

You might feel a closeness to the writer, but it’s just an artifice. It’s a novel…it’s all artifice! Murakami’s gift is making all that wacky ass shit seem perfectly normal.

And yet (like a sheep that infects your soul) it’s so true, it can’t be unreal.

I made two mistakes in reading this book. I read the blurb in the back which colored my expectations of what was to come, and then I read a couple reviews which tinted my perception of what I just read.

Normally that’s not a big deal, but I don’t think either those are good dynamics when I’m going to publish my own book report. However, lesson learned, so here are a few thoughts of that may be more or less original.

Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing are ultimately forgettable novels. After completing this one, I’m quite certain I’ve read these two books in the past. I just can’t remember when or where.

That sounds like an vicious indictment, but I don’t mean it that way. reading Murakami is like floating down a lazy river on a moderately warm afternoon.

In that goal he succeeds thoroughly, even for his freshman and sophomore attempts. By the time you’ve completed each book you feel as if you are the protagonist who just recounted a tale from your own distant past, hazy muted memories of an incredibly strange and ordinary event.

However, I understand why Murakami was hesitant to re-publish these books in English. I would not recommend this pair as an introduction to his works, but I am grateful that he allowed them to be issued again. Everything that is special about his later works is embedded in these stories, just not as much.

I also see why these two novellas were published combined in a single volume. I don’t think Pinball, 1973 would make any sense on its own. It relies so heavily on the first book that I would say it this second novel is an extended coda. The two boys in the first book have moved on to their separate lives, and their stories are entwined only because of what you learned in the first book.

Beyond such dry analysis, it is worth mentioning that this book still tinkles the little bells buried in the depths of your soul. However it will resonate differently depending upon your age.

Murakami wrote this work in his early thirties, dead center between my college years and my current comfortable government life in the burbs. Twenty years ago, I would have identified strongly (too strongly) with the protagonists as they were navigating the moment. Now, I sit with the narrator as he relives his memories of a bittersweet past.

This book was published the year I was born.

I have an odd thing with numbers, so I suspect this is played a part in starting this new project to read through Murakami’s ouvre.

Like any other freshman work, you see both the talent and a lack of polish. This contrast is particularly highlighted when you compare it against the silky smooth introduction written in 2014, thirty five years into his career.

The book is quirky novella, where the protagonist does stuff and ends up more or less where he was, except he isn’t exactly the same. Which vaguely aligns with my memory of the other Murakami novels that I read a decade ago.

While reading the book, I got the sensation I may have read it before. I know that I downloaded a PDF of an english translation during my first Murakami kick, but I generally hate reading books online. I remember borrowing it from the library a couple years ago – though I don’t actually remember reading the book.

Then again, I can’t tell you anything about his other novels that I’ve read, aside from the covers of the five novels we transported from Houston to Las Vegas.

Hell, it’s only been a week since I finished this novel and I honestly can’t tell you what is the plot of this one either.

But goddamn. His writing, even as a freshman.

It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams.

But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place.

p. 89

I took an art criticism class in my first semester in college that introduced me to John Berger and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. I don’t remember anything from my essay, aside spending a considerable amount of time at the gallery at the SF MOMA and noticing the color imperfections on different reproductions of this image.

Those afternoons at the gallery are among the few warm memories of a tumultuous year.

As for this little book, I vaguely recollect picking it up in Houston, without actually reading it. So about almost-quarter century after my introduction to Matisse, I finally read something about the man.

The book is fine, maybe a little small, but a succinct overview of the final period in his life. The writing is straightforward, but not simplistic. Now that I live in Vegas, the home of zero institutions of high art, I can’t be picky about reproduction colors, but I’ll attest that the printing is bright and vibrant.

It was a strange experience to read the last chapter of an artist’s life with no knowledge of him outside of staring at a single piece that he painted at the start of his career.

If I were to pursue it further, I’d need to pick up a good biography (which I most likely won’t do), but I almost certainly will purchase his own monograph Jazz which collected many of his cutouts.

I generally prefer artist monographs over publisher collections, since those books are usually a journey, not merely a collection of highlights.

However, highlights are famous for a reason, and I will be ever grateful for this little collection because it showed me this melancholy masterpiece. The Sorrow of the King.

This book is a cute collection of 75 nano-nonfictions. Little windows into the lives of the contributors, revealing a larger window in to the authors’ realities.

I have a standard critique of NPR radio programming that gets overless precious, and many essays comes close to crossing the line, but the photographs ground the collection.

Whatever the text may emote, the image of a “thing” to keeps the pairings from falling into pure sentimentality.

It’s a fun quick read, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.

I have a note in the front cover that I got it from Half Price books on 28 November 2008. So I suspect this was pick up on one of the two Black Friday’s where I ended up winning a $200 gift cards from that store.

Was it worth lugging around between two cities and four houses over twelve years before finally getting read while in exile in the midst of a pandemic?

Doubtful, but it does got a nice backstory.

I heard about this book on an interview of Brian Koppelman on the Tim Ferris podcast. Brian recommended this book highly, and it makes sense given other books that he recommends. This memoir is the non-melodramatic version of the War of Art, which makes it a far superior book.

There is very little about writing in this book, but when Murakami talks about writing, it pops. Especially when he takes a couple pages in the middle of the book to discuss the three key ingredients to making it as a novelist – talent, focus, and endurance.

That passage alone is worth the cost of the book if one is an aspiring writer.

I’m not an aspiring writer, but I am an occasional blogger and a slob who has always known the need to get off the couch and start exercising.

He doesn’t glamorize running either.

Running is both the subject and the metaphor.

Put one foot in front of the other. Again and again.

He doesn’t claim any particular epiphanies during his runs. He just enjoys the solitude of running. But that is quite comforting as well.

As I’ve broken forty, I’ve become a better at getting bored. During this quarantine, I’ve started talking walks on a regular basis. Just a mile or two sprinkled with the occasional 10k.

It’s nice to exercise without expectation, not waiting for the runner’s high or some special insight. Just log a few more miles, one foot in front of another.

Coda:
As pedestrian as this book may be, it has resulted in three key decisions. Few books can claim such an impact on my life, even if it only lasts a short duration.

1. I’ve decided to read the entirety of Murakami’s english-translated ouvre. His writing is so forcefully delicate, personal and piercing, that I need to read it all. I had considered this exercise years ago, but his books had not yet been widely translated. They are now, and I have no excuse.
2. I’m quitting self help books. I’ve known for the longest time they are the junk food of non-fiction prose – quick easy reads that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something but invariably leave you empty after a few days. Just as John Maxwell quit reading for pleasure to focus on his study of leadership, I am going to quit work related reading so I can focus on life.
3. I think I will refocus this blog with a new tag line “thoughts on my consumption”. My excursion into daily blogging last year was an interesting practice, but without a center the experiment felt rootless. “Write every day” may be a rule that works for many people, but I found myself being starved of input, since I was spending all my free solitude keeping up with the next blog post. “Write about any book that I’ve read” may result in a better balance between input and output. It doesn’t require constant output, but it doesn’t allow the blog to lie fallow for extended periods. Plus, it also addresses my great fear of becoming merely a passive consumer. We’ll see where this goes!

I revisited Count Zero, the second of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, for maybe the fourth or fifth time since I first read it in college.

It’s odd to think that I’m further from my initial reading of the book than my first reading of the book was from its publication date. I guess that’s life, it keeps moving forward, but some artifacts keep staying along for the ride, and Count Zero is one of them.

This book is the tightest, cleanest, and meanest of the trilogy. Almost a novella compared to its older and younger siblings. That’s why I love it. It feels effortless. It’s a story that says plety but doesn’t try to tell you anything.

It seems odd that I still enjoy such a simple rip roaring genre yarn as a middle aged adult comfortably ensconced in the desert with a prototypical family of four. But then again, I’m not any more sophisticated than my collegiate self, just more willing to embrace the same old dopeyness.

Certainly nostalgia plays a big part. The heavy, physical tech brings warm memories from computer class elementary school, descriptions of cyberspace resonating with flashy MTV logos, even as the direct neural connections of jacking-in seeming so gauche in this wireless age.

As I walk around my Vegas suburb thinking of the book I just reread, it seems the real world has ended up closer to the gleaming spotless clones of Star Wars prequels, but during this time of pandemic, it feeling that the decrepit barbarism of Gibson’s Sprawl is just around the corner.

Given the guests on the podcast with the same name, I went ahead and borrowed EntreLeadership from the library. The book is a simple, quick enjoyable read.

Admittedly, I’ve never run a business and have no intention to do so in the future. However the book seems like it could be a good primer spanning for a would be entrepreneur, even if much of the topics are covered elsewhere (such as Covey’s 4 quadrants, or Ziglar’s 7 spoke Wheel of life).

However there is one piece of advice that did not sit well with me. He proudly flaunts his “no gossip” policy, which is a fireable offense. It seemed odd to me, so I slipped onto the internet and came across the Daily Beast expose on his exceedingly heavy handed leadership practices.

Then it all snapped in focus. This is a man who has been the boss so long he has forgotten what it is like to be an employee. He has no idea that his position as the founder and owner is a singular one. His perspective is applicable only to himself.

Just flip one of his other exhortations around. He wants each of his employees to act like entrepreneurs. So if I’m running my own little freelance gig, shouldn’t I talk with my fellow freelancers about market conditions? Shouldn’t I make sure that my primary client is treating me fairly? Shouldn’t I “gossip”?

I get that employees should not waste their time bellyaching at the break room. It is better if they bring up concerns to their management so the problems can be fixed. However, that type of trust is earned, not demanded.

This writer has been boss so long, he has mistaken great culture with a populace that has been cowed into submission. And that too is a classic mistake entrepreneurs make.