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Found in Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel* by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Found in Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel* by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud.”

Photo taken at The Handle Bar

I lied. In Hear the Wind Sing,* his first novel, Murakami cleverly predicts his own fate at the hand of his most ignorant critics. He includes a fictional author named Derek Heartfield who was a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald but is now (1979) largely forgotten, in part because he dabbled in speculative fiction rather than writing “literature.” Hear the Wind Sing begins and ends with biographical information on Derek Heartfield. And from pages 101 to 104 there is a brief synopsis of a typical Heartfield story. Heartfield is described as having a difficult style, impossible stories, and infantile themes; yet the narrator claims “I’ve learned a lot about writing from Derek Heartfield. Perhaps almost everything.”

Of course Murakami went on to include significant elements of speculative fiction within his own writing. And some critics have deprecated his stories, themes, and even style. The style is not difficult, but it is highly structured. In some cases, the pattern seems to be the most important element, certainly more important than plot. Indeed, Murakami is often criticized for the thinness or even absence of his plots. Nothing really happens. Especially in Hear the Wind Sing.

And I think that’s why I like Murakami so much. Because nothing does really happen. In life, I mean. We read. We listen to music. We prepare tasty meals and clean up after ourselves (sometimes). We enjoy a cold beer and some salted nuts.

Nothing really happens. People are born and they die. They contract diseases. They meet and they part. They wait for something to happen. But it never really does. And maybe at the very end, we realize that all the time we have been waiting for something to happen, it has been happening. We just never noticed.

But if we are good readers and good people, we can learn from Murakami, learn to be in every moment. We can learn to make that sandwich, to eat it, and even to wash the plate and the mayonnaise knife. That sandwich is what’s happening. And so are we. And that’s enough. It really is.

So it’s true that the narrator in Hear the Wind Sing just wanders aimlessly. He meets a girl who eventually disappears. He remembers past loves and drinks beer with the Rat at J’s bar. He eats french fries. He listens to some music. He remembers reading the works of Derek Heartfield.

Listen. This is what happens in a story by Heartfield in a collection called The Wells of Mars.

The Martians have disappeared and have left behind deep wells, only these wells and no other trace of civilization. The Earthlings try to explore the wells. The explorers can be divided into two categories: some go down tethered so as not to get lost, and can thus not go far enough to discover anything; others go down untethered and never return.

Among the latter is a boy, “a young space vagabond” who is “tired of the vastness of space” and simply wants to die. But as he travels through the various passages in the well, he becomes more lighthearted and filled with positive energy. He loses track of time. He finally emerges from a different well, connected to the one he originally descended. He notices a change in the sun, which now looks as if it’s setting.

He hears the voice of the wind, which alerts him to the fact that the sun will explode in 250,000 years. The boy is startled and asks how this happens. It’s just old … a fact of life … everything and everyone dies … “Not a thing you or I can do.” Just the same, the boy wonders how such a thing could have happened so suddenly. But it turns out he had wandered through the wells for 15 billion years.

Now this voice says at one point that it is the wind, but that the boy might think of it as a Martian. The voice concedes that it is not even a voice at all, but that it is planting “hints” in the mind of the boy. So the voice represents the “Martians” who constructed these inscrutable wells. “[T]he wells were fashioned with consummate skill” yet “dug to avoid hitting any water veins.” The boy has wandered aimlessly through these wells.

The Martian/wind “says” to the boy: “we are wanderers through time—from the birth of the universe to its death. For us there is neither birth or death. The winds we are.”

The boy is left with a question: “Have you learned anything?” The response of the wind to this is laughter. And then silence. So the boy takes a gun from his pocket and shoots himself in the head.

Pointless wandering. Futility. The end.

But was it really pointless? The boy has forgotten the feeling of lightness and the “wondrous energy.” That was when he was actually in the well, untethered and in the eternal moment.

It turns out that the narrator and Murakami did learn a lot from Derek Heartfield, even though he didn’t even exist.

And you know, that sandwich is really really good. Put everything you have into making it and eating it and even washing the plate. It may be all we have, but it’s worth it.

I guess I’d rather be reading than writing about it. I remember reading in a book by Larry McMurtry (either Books: A Memoir* or Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen* if I recollect correctly) a statement to the effect that as he gets older, he is more keenly aware that the time he has left to read books is growing more limited. And time spent writing books takes away from time spent reading them. I get it. So every time I see my category “What I’m Reading,” I think I really ought to do a post. And then I just keep on reading whatever it is that I’m reading.

So I was fairly well through The Scent of New-Mown Hay* (of the mutant mushroom women mentioned in a previous post), when I started reading other novels as well. The mushroom women were a little bit of a let down. Some lurid covers (mine is a chaste yellow hardbound library book) lead one to expect firm-gluted amazons spanking spectacled solicitors … alas. It’s a typical early cold war setup, but in a twist, the human responsible for these weird mutations is a former Nazi, not a commie. The writing is not great. I still need to read the last 30 pages.

But I started Titus Groan,* the first book in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. This writing is very good indeed. It’s very poetic in places and has a kind of baroque feel overall. It seems like some weird late-nineteenth century book, but it’s really from the mid-twentieth century (sort of like the drawings of Edward Gorey seem Victorian, though they’re not). And Peake was an artist, too. The old Ballantine paperback I’m reading is illustrated by him. The characters are strangely broken down eccentrics, if not outright monsters (I’m thinking of the chef Swelter). Strange character names, of which I’m a big fan,* are the norm (Prunesquallor, Sourdust, Lord Sepulchrave, and Nannie Slagg). All the characters seem tormented, as if they suffer from chronic anal boils … this aspect of the novel, and some of the writing, reminds me of the early novels of Samuel Beckett. With all of this to recommend it, I cracked another book.

I couldn’t resist Hear the Wind Sing,* Murakami’s first novel. It has been sitting on my desk since I got it, tempting me. I gave in. Murakami doesn’t like his first novels so much. And admittedly this one is a bit thinner in every respect. But it’s still Murakami and it’s still great. The book introduces the character the Rat, who appears in A Wild Sheep Chase* (my copy is missing … did I lend it to someone?). The novel is narrated by Murakami’s usual drifting first-person narrator. The music and pop culture and dissatisfaction with reigning social conventions are already there. But so far, there is no real fantastic element, as there is in much of his work (I am about halfway through).

And speaking of the fantastic, I have just started Michael Saler’s As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality,* a study of how works of fantastic literature came to be the dominant books to readers (but not academics). I got it based on a review by a former professor, Tom Shippey. I won’t say anymore about it, because I just started and because Shippey’s review is such a good one. So just read that.

[page two is blank]

Photo taken at Schlafly Bottleworks

This one. Yeah. The essay “Greatly Exaggerated” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again*.

This is maybe, yeah, a little more aimed at academics. It’s about (OK, as I remember, because it’s been a week or more since I read it) “author-ity.” Like how author is different from writer. Critical-theory wise.

He refers to a lot of lit-crit theorists of whom I’d never heard — Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Said — had I not been married to Patrick when he was getting his Ph.D. And some who are totally new to me. Not being a lit-crit person myself. Or an academic. Or even a college graduate.

I digress.

But yeah, speaking of not being a college graduate. Yeah, I wasn’t really into college. I mean, the drinking was fun.

And meeting all kinds of different people from different backgrounds was great. But class? Meh. Not so much. And once I learned where to find the answers I needed — you know, how to look things up. For real. — and how to think — you know, for myself. Critically. Analytically. — I didn’t really feel like staying in school. I tend to learn more on-my-own-like. Just researching and practicing.

Long story short, though. I probably would have liked it (college) a lot more if I’d a.) known what the heck I even wanted to do with my life (I still don’t, really. Does anyone?), b.) majored in English, like I always said I would when I was younger (instead of dabbling in business admin (?! I know, right?), radio-television, theater (that was pretty cool though)), and, possibly the most-likely-thing-besides-meeting-Patrick-there-(which unfortunately I did not)-to-make-tree-actually-enjoy-college, c.) had DFW for a professor.

Reading this essay really made me wish I’d had the opportunity to take a class with DFW. And (if you read the last two paragraphs, you know this already) I’m not a big class-taking kind of person, so that’s saying a lot.

This is the fifth post in a series.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
• E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
• Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
• Greatly Exaggerated
• David Lynch Keeps His Head
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.”

Photo taken at The Silver Ballroom

If, like me, you are fanatical about Gravity’s Rainbow*, then you may already know that a really talented artist named Zak Smith did an illustration depicting, well, what happens on each page of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

When I got the book of these great illustrations*, I immediately made a T-shirt of one of my favorite images (the banana breakfast, see GR page 10). So then it occurred to me, I liked all the images so much, I wanted to make a T-shirt of each. And … and … take a picture of me wearing each as a completely pointless project that would occupy 760 days. But not right in a row. That was my original plan (to do it 760 days in a row), and it was frankly a little too ambitious for someone of such monumental slothfulness as myself. And local thrift stores failed to turn up the requisite number of blank shirts. And those dumb iron-on transfer things are kind of expensive. But if I did them in order and took my time …

So today starts with page one. Who knows how long it will take. I hope Zak Smith won’t care. I’m not making any money here and figure there’s no reason why he should care. Besides, he’s probably too busy drawing and painting and making porn films* to worry about it.

When we were in Springfield, IL recently, I read the third essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,* “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All.” This was great: I was in Springfield, and it was (sort of) about Springfield!

Springfield is the home of the Illinois State Fair, about which this essay was written. When I was old enough to ride my bike to the fair, and young enough to still be eligible for free admission, I was a Fair regular. I’d say that was for about three years. Vicki — and later Jenny — and I would ride our bikes up there every day.

Of course the last Sunday was our favorite day of the Fair, really,¹ because for five dollars, you could get a wristband that allowed you free, repeated access to all the rides in Happy Hollow. Oh yeah! How many revolutions on The — what was it called? — Himalaya² would we turn that day?

When we weren’t riding rides³, we’d stand for too-long periods listening to the carney in the dunk tank insult passers-by, hoping to avoid any of those insults being hurled our way. One year, the carney was pretty funny… at least to a couple of giggling 15-year-old girls, he was. He kept calling this audience member “Pewey Lewis.” We couldn’t get enough of that.

We never spent much time at the livestock venues. We might stop by to look at the horses or sit in the coliseum for a few minutes and watch a horse show. Between the smells and the oppressive heat, buildings housing animals weren’t really the most pleasant places to be.

You had to get a corn dog and lemon shake-up⁴. And Tom Thumb donuts. And Spiess fries. And an Italian or Polish sausage with peppers, onions, and cheese. Or a Philly cheese-steak. Basically, you gorged yourself on pretty inexpensive fried goods, mostly. And an elephant ear or funnel cake (fried and fried). DFW has some fun remarks about some of the edibles.

We’d go through the Expo and Grandstand buildings on the hunt for gew-gaws. It was my tradition every year to get myself a one- or two-dollar birthstone ring. Why was I obsessed with that?

There was also a ton of free stuff to be procured — pencils and rulers and bumper stickers and buttons and magnets… and… and… and… — in tents devoted to local politicians, farmers’ groups, seed companies, safety organizations, unions, mega-corporations, you name it.

DFW wrote about his visit to the ISF in 1993. I bet Patrick and I were there; I know we went at least once or twice in our early dating years. We might have seen him and not known it!

The last time I went to the ISF was probably something like three or maybe four years ago⁵. Patrick and I were going to be in Springfield visiting family anyway, and we thought, “What the heck! Let’s go for old time’s sake.” Happy Hollow wasn’t there anymore.⁶ What was down there? I think some livestock stuff, maybe. The “big-kid” rides were all where I think the big farm equipment used to be. And they just called it something like “Carnival Midway.” Or something.

In my fair-going heyday, the only thing you could get “on a stick” was a corn dog. Not so, the last time I went. Patrick and I saw all manner of stick-impaled edibles.

⁷

There was even a stand completely devoted to stick-borne foods: pizza, twinkies, deep-fried cheese, sandwiches… Am I remembering correctly? Was everything at that stand also deepfried?? I would love to know what DFW would have written about that!

OK, this is long.

I don’t need to tell you all about the Illinois State Fair. You can read DFW’s essay and get a really, really, really good idea about the whole experience. I mean, I could very vividly picture practically every single thing he wrote about. And not just because his writing makes you do that anyway, but because I’d seen the very same things.

Or you can go to the Fair and see for yourself. If you’re not in Illinois, I’m sure many State Fairs in flyover land are very comparable: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio…

But seriously. Do read DFW’s essay; it’s terrific!

This is the fourth post in a series.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
• E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
• Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
• Greatly Exaggerated
• David Lynch Keeps His Head
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again

As someone who lives in a TV-less household (by choice), I thought that this essay wouldn’t be very relevant to me. Oh boy. I was wrong. Or David Foster Wallace wrote it in such a way that it seems relevant to me. As usual.

Even though I really had to guess at what a lot of the words he used meant (no dictionary* handy in that particular reading situation). I mean, I thought synecdoche was a town in New York*. And really. How do you even pronounce that?

Really.

He uses that word a lot. I mean. A. LOT. I finally asked Patrick what it meant.

It’s just a tragedy that DFW isn’t still alive and writing. I’d love to read (maybe he’s written this already and I just haven’t gotten to it. Fingers decidedly crossed….) a sort of follow-up piece to this.

This particular piece was written in 1990. So it’s about television as it was then. And in the 80s. Before everybody was using the Interwebs. Watching shows on Hulu and Netflix. And YouTube. Before reality shows.

I think he’d write some wonderful words about today’s TV. I do.

This is the third post in a series.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
• E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
• Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
• Greatly Exaggerated
• David Lynch Keeps His Head
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again

As promised¹ in my last post, here’s a post about the first essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again* by David Foster Wallace. This essay is about tennis. Specifically, it’s about how DFW played tennis (and was highly ranked) as a youngster in Central Illinois.² There’s a funny bit about him and his friend practicing when a tornado is nigh³.

Ha! This is great! My footnotes might be longer than the text. hee hee.

So anyway. I didn’t come across too many words that made me wish I had a dictionary next to me. And it was fun to read something about stuff that happened not too far from where I lived.⁴ That’s a really kind of weird and not very specific way to say I really loved reading it.

This is the second post in a series.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
• E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
• Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
• Greatly Exaggerated
• David Lynch Keeps His Head
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again

Photo Credit: “Heather Bradley Photography”http://www.flickr.com/photos/senzenina/3787553493/

I’m almost finished reading Babylon Babies* by Maurice Dantec, a crazy Frenchman who emigrated to Quebec. I came across his name in a recent book of letters exchanged between Bernard-Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq.* (I’m a big Houellebecq fan). I was intrigued. I got the Semiotext(e) edition from the library rather than the stupid movie tie-in edition.* I was further intrigued by this copy from the back cover:

“A schizophrenic and the possible carrier of a new artificial virus, Marie is bearing a mutant embryo created by an American cult, the Cosmic Church of the New Resurrection. They dream of producing a genetically modified messiah, which will end all human life as we know it.”

I was a little disappointed that the “genetically modified messiah” was not a Monsanto product.

It’s a bizarre book. Maybe it’s the translation, but the language comes off as wooden in places and there are lots of warped cliches like, “They brought him tea, biscuits, Russian bread, blueberry jam, and he pounced on it as if his life were at stake.” I kept waiting for the next installment in this vein, something like ‘he devoured the omelette like a mountain lion raping a double stack of blueberry pancakes.’ But some of the weird language became endearing. And his use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze* was more interesting to me than Deleuze himself.

The novel tracks Toorop, a Bosnian soldier of fortune as he works for a shady group including a Russian general and the Siberian mafia, agreeing to transport and protect Marie Zorn, who has been impregnated with a pair of clones. She is schizophrenic and carries a new virus. Some of the minor characters are pretty interesting, especially the group of hackers in Montreal. (Favorite character name, a hacker called Commodore 64. I would have been called Vic 20 … 5 K of RAM was more than enough for my family, thank you very much). I’ll end this post now, then finish the book so as not to spoil it. I will say it took me about 100 pages to get into it. Overall, it’s been a pretty interesting read.

But I have to finish it and move on … to another weird sf novel i stumbled upon. Reading an old publication of the Penguin Collectors Society, I found this intriguing tidbit: “murderous mutant mushroom-women.” Oh Lord … The book is A Scent of New-Mown Hay* by John Blackburn. Murderous mutant mushroom-women sound almost better than the genetically modified messiah. They should have a battle for pre-eminence like that scene in The Ruling Class* between Peter O’Toole’s Christ and the Electric Messiah. So put that in your galvanized pressure cooker and … er … cook it, I suppose.

I love David Foster Wallace. He’s a genius.
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Was.
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And I’ve been procrastinating this post…

Started reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again*, oh, last week sometime, I guess. And like within the first paragraph, I was thinking, “I’m still pissed about that!” Yeah, so but then anyway….

Luckily I still have a lot of DFW’s work left to read, so I’m probably OK for a few years… but someday, I’ll never have a new DFW work to read. Ever. And I’m not happy about that. I mean, he’s a genius!
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Was.
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Anyway….

ASFTINDA is a book of essays, the first of which is about tennis, a sport about which I know very little. But like DeLillo (see, e.g., the first chapter of Underworld*), DFW captivates me. Even when I’m reading about things that really have no relevance to me, I’m rapt. And they really actually seem relevant to me. Weird.

But so then I thought, “I really need to post about what I’m reading.”
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“Maybe I’ll just read the next essay first, so I can do the book justice. [I won’t]”

Oh. But then so the next one’s about TV (in c.1990)… and 62 pages long. “OK, yeah. It’ll be longer before I do my post, but that’s OK.”

Finished that when we were in Springfield. I know I had my computer with me and could have written this thing before I started the essay about the Illinois State Fair. But I was in Springfield. Home of the ISF. And I was a regular at the ISF as a teenager (when I could ride my bike there and still get in for free)… Write? Read? Write? Read? Read.

So now here I am, say two-thirds of the way through. I really need to do this thing justice (I tell you, I won’t), so here’s what I’m going to do: I’ll write a post for each essay. You’re under no obligation to read any of them. And I’ll spread it out, so my posts aren’t dominating what’s really Patrick’s blog.

There. Decision made. Post complete. Good. Now I’d better start working on some drafts….

This is the first post in a series.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
• E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
• Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
• Greatly Exaggerated
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again

Some time ago, I started a project attempting to organize some of the major themes occurring in the work of Philip K. Dick. It is currently a rat’s nest of notes on different sized sheets of paper, covered with quotations, page numbers, and categories.

I cover major themes such as schizophrenia, entropy, drugs, but also try to track more eccentric concerns as they appear: the treatment/depiction of coffee, alcohol, and tobacco, and the appearance of postage stamps.

Oh, and music. I started listing the names of every musical composition that appears in any of PKD’s works. This is a project that I will probably never finish or even organize adequately. But in starting it, it occurred to me that most people focus their attention on a dozen or so main novels and a handful of major stories.

I decided to read all of PKD’s short stories and to write a summary of each one. These could be helpful for readers who want to track themes in the short fiction. Which stories, for example, are post-apocalyptic? Which deal with time travel? Which feature androids, animals, or agoraphobics? I want to track dreams, taxi cabs, and dark-haired girls.

The larger project will progress slowly. For now, I will post my story summaries one at a time. I have a notebook containing handwritten summaries I plan on typing up as time permits. I have covered the first volume of short stories so far. Eventually, I will have a summary up for every story PKD wrote. Paul Williams claims he wrote 121 short stories.

Here goes.