Murakami →

keeptryan:

I’m reading 1Q84 (275 pages in), and after reading several of his books and short stories, themes and motifs keep reappearing. I’ve decided to make a list of them as I encounter them.

• Cutty Sark
• Classical music
• Jazz
• Swimming as recreation
• Cats
• Western culture
• Alternative realities
• Manchuria/Siberia
• World War II
• Adultery
• Home cooking
• 1960/1970s radicals in Japanese universities
• Mountain retreats
• Religious sects
• Suicide
• Fake companies

It’s not bad that he’s reusing these things. It’s just his style. I like how he morphs them into idiosyncratic, mind-bending narratives that have no equal.

I’m also reading 1Q84 now and I have noticed this exact same list of ingredients in Murakami’s unique literary language. I suppose you could argue that with so many common elements, many of his novels blend together a bit and lose their individuality (especially in hindsight), but rather, I’ve found that I’ve come to love the palette he paints with, like a welcoming embrace each time I enter his weird little worlds.

shaneguiter:

youveescaped:

“I only figured it out up to I want you,” or how Stranger Than Fiction is so, so underrated

1. Spoon, in general, all the time, especially in this.

2. It’s a love letter to Chicago.

3. It’s a love letter to/by/for lovers of literature.

4. “I only know one song.”

5. Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, and Queen Latifah are hilaaaarious.

6. It’s a love letter to baking.

7. We learn about Buster Bluth’s desire to go to space camp.

8. Impending death or whatever.

9. The idea that it is possible to take control of your fate and have the life you want.

10. “I brought you flours.” (See above.)

Agreed. One of my favorites.

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adrianharwood:

Dream setup.

(Source: oldchum)

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fireland:

TEN SEXY LADIES

Hey group. Here is my new tumblr wherein I rate everything in the world on a scale from one to ten sexy ladies. I hope it makes you feel. Share it with someone special tonight.

Do yourself a favor and read everything this man writes - pure gold, I tell ya, sprinkled across every one of his web projects.

irunfrombears:

mcnallyjackson:

This is the first page of a handwritten draft of Infinite Jest. Found it on the website of draft, which is a new & exciting journal about the writing process: “mechanics, techniques, approaches, triumphs, failures, concussive frustration—everything that goes into crafting a publishable piece of creative writing through revision.” More here.

Annnnnd I’m done for the day.

And ditto.

Been thinking a lot about writing lately. Also the fact that the #1 one advice for would-be writers is “Stop thinking about it and just freakin’ do it.” Seriously, I think I heard Jonathan Franzen say “just freakin’ do it.” Just kidding, ha! But for real, I’ve been thinking about writing.

"

Every novel is a license to obsess. To fixate on a subject—chess, comic books, Yiddish, the Khazars. To go overboard; to pluck the beeswax stoppers from the ears, cut the restraints, and freestyle madly toward the siren subject that is calling from the shore.

Vinyl records, for example. Early on, I decided to make a used-records store on Telegraph Avenue one of the key settings of my novel in progress. Okay, maybe “early on” is an under-exaggeration. Maybe it would be more accurate to say “the entire novel is just a pretext for spending as much time and money as I possibly can in used record stores.” (A similar rationale doubtless underlies my projected next novel, the epic Tacos Al Pastor.)

At some point in the course of my thrilling, exhaustive and necessarily prolonged research among the crates and cratediggers, I encountered Wax Poetics, the greatest magazine in Known Space (sorry, Atlantic). Beautiful, well-written, intensely curated, WP articulates a hip-hop based theory of the history of black music on vinyl, 1950-1980. Borges argued that every writer creates his or her own precursors, that a great writer like Kafka retrospectively alters the way we read his predecessors. This is the line taken by Wax Poetics toward postwar black popular music; as if hip-hop were the root, and soul the flower; hip-hop the constellating line that draws an animal in a scatter of stars.

"

— Michael Chabon discusses how, while researching “Telegraph Avenue,” he revisted music he hadn’t listened to in decades. (via theatlantic)

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i12bent:

Ursula K. Le Guin - the best living author of s-f and fantasy literature: b. Oct. 21, 1929…

Her credo: “The creative adult is the child who has survived.”

Appreciating Chuck

So I’m reading this Chuck Klosterman book Killing Yourself to Live because it came recommended to me. This is my first book by Chuck (I feel certain I should be on a first name basis with him - “Klosterman” doesn’t seem casual enough), but he’s been camping out at my Amazon wish list and been on my radar for some time. I am a Douglas Coupland fan, and I feel as though Chuck and Coupland (see what I did there?) are contemporaries, if not friends. How could I not like this book. 

And I am not saying it is true that I do not like this book. But how about this for honesty: One of my pervading thoughts is… “I could write this.” I’m not saying I am a world class writer, but then, Chuck’s not either. Killing Yourself to Live is a loose, conversational, meandering, anecdotal, semi-stream-of-consciousness essay/extended journal entry. I realize therein lies the charm. I get it. I just think I am maybe a smidgen let down because I think I could write like that too. 

Also, I’m an arrogant hypocrite. Because my next thought is that I realize my attitude here is pretty much an example of one of my serious pet peeves: namely, when you are in a museum with someone and you’re checking out a work of art that is NOT a photorealistic or renaissance or impressionist painting - think Rothko, Basquiat or Pollack - and the other person says “Pfft. I could do THAT.” Or “A second grader could do THAT.” I simply can’t stand it. Whoever says something like that is completely ignoring the context of the piece, both historically and artistically, they’re ignoring the artists’ intent, the message, the meaning, the symbolism, the restraint, the skill, and sometimes, the pure ballsiness of the given piece. But instead of saying those things, when someone says “I could do THAT,” I usually reply “Yeah, but you DIDN’T.”

So I am going to continue enjoying Killing Yourself to Live. I won’t make any more comments, at least until after I actually write a book. Except to say, hats off to Chuck.