Starting "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"

So, I'm currently slogging through the excellent but brittle The Bold Saboteurs. On long trips where I have things to go do, and since my limited method of "getting places" gives me reading time, I tend to spend that reading time not destroying my nice first edition Brossard novel with hand sweat and grease.

Somebody loaned me a rare copy of a new Chinese establishment-angering writer who goes by the moniker Murong. The novel will be available in a few months, which leaves me wondering how this pal of mine got his copy. It's called Leave Me Alone and subtitled A Novel of Chengdu. Chengdu is the fifth largest city in China, and the action follows the first-person narration of the philandering middle manager Chen Zong. It's angry and bureaucracy, but doesn't really try to rope the same sentiment that Mo Yan does.

Murong started publishing his fist novel (Leave Me Alone is his second) on a Chinese blog, and between that and his micro-blogging site, he grew to prominence. His characters are amoral guys who sleep around and mess with and get messed with the system, full of humor and sex and self loathing. It's good, but not as excellent as Mo Yan or Murakami.

But that book served well some of my traveling trips, as it could withstand my hands better than the older book. Then, the other day, I had another trip to take, and seeing as how neither Brossard's nor Murong's books had me in their throes, I realized I should just fucking go for it and grabbed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as my travelling book.

Norm, while reading 1Q84 do you expect to see Toru walking around? Reading this I find myself keeping an eye out for Tengo or Aomame. I see the shadow of nearly the same character between the teenager May in the first sixty-seventy pages here and Fuka-Eri from 1Q84, just without the mysticism or questions-without-question-marks way Fuka-Eri emotionlessly conducts herself.

I mean, both books cover the same time periods and even parts of the same neighborhoods around Tokyo (Koenji). Is the Ruke-Man forming a canon like Pynchon with the Bodines and the Traverses?

Left for the Good People at Joshua Tree

So, maybe the circle is a little too big, but, you get the idea...

Revolutionary at the Time

"He was bent on the most savage kind of self-destruction, and he regularly attacked himself with liquor with the demoniacal ferocity of dive bombers razing a city."

That quote comes from page 25---the first page of the second chapter of Chandler Brossard's The Bold Saboteurs. Take a look:

Underneath the tattered dust-jacket the design philosophy is found on the binding:

That description is from our first-person narrator and is used to describe his father, a violent alcoholic. It sounds like it could come from any vivid writing from recent times, but judging by the cover--which happens to be a first edition--it turns out to be much older.

Chandler Brossard was a writer from a Mormon family in Idaho, who's father was an alcoholic, and who's mom moved the family to Washington DC, after which Brossard headed to New York City. In DC, as a young writer, he got a job working for the Post. He moved to New York, lived a vagabond lifestyle in Greenwich Village, and was pushed to focus on fiction by the editor of The New Yorker.

That quote, and this book, was first published in 1953. It was Brossard's second novel, and is considered partly autobiographical, as the narrator, calling himself Yogi, is more of a disappointment to his enabling and overbearing mom, who favors his older brother. The father is mostly out of the picture, booted after a huge fight with the older brother, but I'm not all that far into the book.

Brossard, because of the fact he lived in Greenwich Village and wrote with a glaring brutality about petty thievery and a frank sexuality, is sometimes considered a Beat writer, actually, the oldest Beat writer. Ginsburg's Howl ('56), Kerouac's On the Road ('57) and Burrough's Naked Lunch ('59) came out close enough to Brossard's works, and they may have looked up to Chandler, but he personally scoffed at the idea he was a "Beat" writer. He didn't like the label, and felt his work had different aims and different methods.

Mostly because his works were so vivid and subject matter so dark (scary accurate talk about violent alcoholics in the early fifties?), his work wasn't as appreciated in the States as it should have been in its day, and now Brossard's less remembered than actual Beat writers. His works were very appreciated in France and Britain, and the French claimed him as a New Wave writer, a member of their avant-garde artistic movement.

That was a classification he didn't have a problem with. The people who thought he was a Beat writer felt his books were realistically written, but he says that the French knew better, that they recognized that his works were "a nightmare presented as flat documentary."

The first chapter of The Bold Saboteurs follows the 16 year old Yogi as he recounts how he got pinched by the cops for the first--and only--time. He was working a grift with this big dumbass Irish kid who had a fat nurse he wanted to nail. Yogi asks to see her jewelry, telling her he's studying the craft of making it. This is after the big Irish lout and her have done their thing (they sent Yogi out to get smokes--he walked around the block for a fifteen minutes). He spied where she returned the box, and returned the next day, flirting his way back in the apartment with a cleaning lady. The fat nurse would've ridden him that same night right after the Irish guy if he'd simple suggested it. He knew it and it made him sick to his stomach.

Well, after selling the jewelry he lied to the lout about it, telling him it wasn't worth anything and that he'd decided not to go back. He figured the Irish guy had turned him in after the nurse made a stink because he was pissed he'd been left out of the haul.

One cool aspect of the novel is Yogi's schizophrenic breaks with reality, as things go from tough, to gnarly, to bizarre, to a kind of absolute absurdity without warning.

Reading it is like reading The Catcher in the Rye mixed with a late-night lurid HBO castoff mixed with a fever dream.

I thought it was a nice discovery and break before going after Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I finished the fish book also, but my write up on that will be on the dad and Dan site.

"You're reading a fish book."

The name of this post, Norm, is based on one of the early lines in the Christopher Walken movie Suicide Kings. Denis Leary, as his driver, is showing off his boots to Charlie Barret/Carlo Bartolucci (Walken), and tells him they're made of sting ray. Walken says, "You're wearing fish boots."

That doesn't count as a segue, but whenever I pick up the book I'm reading that line passes through my brain. My dad suggested a book by a guy Richard Flanagan, who's Tasmanian. Now, my dad has a pretty good track record with his suggestions to me, like Haruki Murakami and Dennis Mitchell, who wrote the excellent Cloud Atlas. Flanagan was described as a read that would stretch your imagination, and I found a copy on Amazon.com for a penny plus shipping, so I picked it up. It arrived before I finished The Garlic Ballads, so I started it before The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

It's called Gould's Book of Fish:

I'll have a longer explanation in a bit, but it's almost like Flanagan has a streak of Pynchon in him, at least in some of the early nineteenth century sentence construction. It's good.

Christopher Walken's voice, though, going on in my head, "Your're reading a fish book."

Two Things from the "Chinese Murakami"

I finished the beat-down book, The Garlic Ballads, by Mo Yan. I wrote a post about it over on the OG site after having finished only half of it. Those impressions pretty much hold up; that almost every section contains an act of brutal violence upon another person is a valid observation. There are some scenes that don't revolve around violence of a physical kind, but they usually revolve around verbal abuse, or a kind of bureaucratic malfeasance that borders of abuse. This is a very angry book.

Calling Mo Yan the "Chinese Murakami" is not what I would do if, Norm, you and I were talking books over a cup of coffee. But I noticed in a conversation with a lady working at the grocers that I used Murakami in the same sentence, trying to shed light on the kind of hyper-kinetic feel the book elicits. Calling him a such probably does a disservice to both.

But, there were Two Things I wanted to mention after finishing the book:

The First is the Parakeet Battle.

The two main characters in the book are cousins, Gao Yang and Gao Ma. In Chinese, the family names (Western last names) come first, and, because the translations of "yang" is "sheep" and "ma" is "horse", our main characters would be called "Sheep Gao" and "Horse Gao".

Gao Yang and Gao Ma just sound better to me. In any case, Gao Yang is the pussy pushover who is forced to drink his own urine and gets a thorned branch shoved up his ass; and Gao Ma is a former soldier who's cynical and forward thinking--basically the hero. He represents human dignity and human rights progress, and he's beaten to within an inch of his life in almost every one of his sections. I shouldn't be so hard of Gao Yang, though. He represents the good people who are obedient and respectful, those who have faith in the System, and how that System fucks those people, while Gao Ma is the more Western-heroic archetype, the rabble-rousing rebel, and we all know how the System treats them.

At one point late in the book, Gao Ma sharpens his family's heirloom saber to air-slicing sharpness.

His next door neighbor's thousands of parakeets are always causing a chirpy ruckus, and on this day Gao Ma's past his point of chillness. And the parakeets are buzzing around inside his house and yard, fully out of their pens.

Gao Ma proceeds to battle the swarm of parakeets with his super-sharp saber, causing plumes of tiny colorful feathers like smoke to fill the air. He goes after them, and then they gang up on him, and he's fighting for his life. By the end, there are maybe six or seven sad and wailing parakeets left, and an angry, sword-wielding, parakeet-blood covered Gao Ma, standing over a pile of halved and twitching parakeet bodies.

It's the kind of thing the likes of which I've never read before.

The Second is part "1." of Chapter 17.

Those twelve pages could easily exist out of context. They star Gao Ma, but you don't need to know anything about the character...knowing what he's gone through by that time enhances the enjoyment, though. These are the kinds of pages that show how talented Mo Yan truly is.

He oscillates between an interrogation, a flashback, an anecdote/story during the flashback, while showing how the lesson learned from the story within the flashback has plenty of importance to his situation with the interrogators.

It's really fun to read and see how Mo Yan works it out with the words. I should make some photocopies; it could be a great teaching tool for young writers.

Upside-Down Bird Covers: Good Eye, Norm

Way to go eagle-eye Norm for the recognition of the birds. Here's the comparison:

I haven't read the Ruk-Man's book here, but it's on my list.

     So here I go, my first shot at a post.  I just wrapped The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  All I'm left with is, Wow.  What an intimate, amazing and encompassing story.  It was similar to the other Murakami works I've read in that it was many stories tied to a solid yet evolving  base.  Another thing I should note was the ability it had on me to produce tears.  Much the way A Wild Sheep Chase brought me to tears, the emotions that built their way to the end of the novel were overwhelming to me.

     I'm so drawn into this world that Murakami creates that I'm very tempted to start into IQ84.  I have it, and am ready to begin my ascent.  But here's the problem.  I still haven't started or tried starting Gravity's Rainbow.  I have that, thanks to you brother.  So a little help persuading me in the right direction would be appreciated  as you've read both.  And Mason and Dixon is out of the picture for now.  I'm waiting to grow some more brain cells back before I try that again.

     Another bizarre realization hit me with your post about Wallace.  The picture on the cover, the upside down Cockatiel, is very much like my cover of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I'll try to post it later.  Also, I'm tempted to try this box method of sleeping for Norman.  If I do, pictures will follow.

     Sorry for the lag, reading working and Fathering are a lot for a nut like me!!

Found at the Library

So, Norm, I was walking around the downtown branch of the Long Beach Public Library, and then turned a corner and saw:

Chilling on the shelf looks like a first edition of V.

Upon closer inspection, while the cover could be original, the book underneath has an "LBPL" stamp on the bottom of the binding, like these:

It seems like the book itself had been printed for libraries, and the stampings were added later.

On the other hand, this happens to be an actual first edition, but is pretty tattered.

Another Book...

It's easy to stay on top of books when you're recovering from a broken leg and have no go-to-and-work kind of a.job. And no kids.

So...I finished The Broom of the System, and it was a pretty cool first novel from a writer who died too early for some of us Post Modern literature fans.

I was looking through my library, Norm, for something else to read, and decided before getting into The Wind Up Bird Chronicles that I would work through a book that I started before, but eventually abandoned. This book I picked up for free one day coming home to Bed-Stuy. It was on a sheet labeled "Free Books".

This would be the first thing I've ever read by Faulkner, and when I finish it, I'll be adding it as an entry in my Library Blog. Maybe that should be if I finish it.

I know Faulkner is a master, or one of the American's from between the Wars who's literarily important. I know he worked in Hollywood for years to get bills paid. As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are the masterworks, I hear.

Allen Tate wrote an introduction to this edition, and he writes with much reverence that he places Sanctuary with those other two as a third masterwork. The first line written on the back-cover of this copy is a quote from William Faulkner himself, describing the genesis of the story: "The most horrific tale I could imagine".

This book is hard to get into. Nothing happens for the first forty pages. It's moody and atmospheric and kinda scary, but really, nothing happens. A guy is drinking from a spring in the backwoods of Mississippi and seems to be menaced by the spring's owner, the supposed main antagonist named Popeye. Then the spring-drinking guy gets led back to some old pre-Civil War house full of weirdos and whores, and a sleeping baby in a box. Yeah, a sleeping baby in a box; the box affords protection from rats, according to the mom who put him inside.

Then the spring-drinking guy is led to a truck, where he gets a ride to his sister's house, and he meets a guy who might be interested in his sister (who's a widower with a child), except he's got a date with a girl who'll be raped by Popeye, which is the main event of the book. Except that hasn't happened yet. Nothing's happened yet.

When Horace Benbow finally meets Gowan, and Gowan leaves to pick up Temple is where I am, and it's maybe forty pages in, and they're forty of some of the weirdest and slowest pages I've read.

I remember putting it down the first time through; when you're focusing on Pynchon and Denis Johnson and Politkovskaya and Bolanyo, Faulkner is like their stylistic grandfather, but this little book is unassumingly dense and less exciting to read than I'd hoped.

Now I'm slogging again, maybe to try and tackle Ulysses next.

A Title (and Author) for Norm

Just in case you weren't checking all of the various spots where I vomit words regularly, here's a link to my post-finishing Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It ended well, and I mention the link because I mentioned the book a few posts ago.

My next book, the one after the one I'm reading right now, will likely be The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, sometimes called Murakami's best, and is, if I remember correctly, your current material?

Now, though, I'm working on the first novel of one of the few guys I mentioned we'd be talking about in the first post:

This is one of the various editions of The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace.

Pynchon, Murakami, Wallace and Robbins, they seem to be the Core Four. Maybe my next one will be Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins (just found a 1st edition for a buck).

Okay, so, Norm, I know you've got very little time to do any reading. But, if there's anybody to get with after exhausting the formidable list of the Ruk-man's works would be the three--three--novels by Wallace. The first one is here, the second is the 1200+ page Infinite Jest , and the third was published posthumously, and called The Pale King.

This book truly belongs on the list we're building here. The main character is a young lady named Lenore Beadsman. For some reason her elderly great-grandmother (and some kind of mentor) has disappeared, which is kinda weird anyway, but the fact she needs to be in a sauna-like room at 98.6 degrees because she's turned cold-blooded makes it even more oddball. The action mostly takes place in and around Cleveland, and with a trip to Amherst. There's the G.O.D., or Great Ohio Desert, and a company that creates deserts; the Beadsman family is a giant in the baby-foods industry, and the name of the patriarch is Stonecipher. Other names that are Pynchonian: Mindy Metalman, Judith Prietht, and a great big fat-man trying to eat himself to an infinite weight named Bombardini, Lenore's older and jealous boyfriend named Rick Vigorous, and a narcissistic parrot named Vlad the Impaler, and I'm only halfway through.

It's been pretty wacky in a non-Murakami way.

Pynchonian Timeline

I'm planning on doing the Pynchon lady post, or posts, later. This idea had been kicking around in my head for a bit, and since I have these pictures, I thought now would be a good time start using them.

So, this isn't really an in-depth discussion of what we like about the books. Nah, this is likely much more boring. This is a preliminary discussion of the timeline for the seven Pynchon novels, and by that I mean just a quick rundown of the basic time-frames.

Here are the seven in chronological order by the time periods in the stories:

So, Norm, I had some internal debate about the last two, Vineland and Inherent Vice. Vineland's early part is in 1969, while Inherent Vice takes place spanning '69 and '70. But since Vineland starts in 1984, I decided to place it as the most current temporally. I generally like to think of Inherent Vice as a tale from the Zoyd and Frenesie LA hippie era, as a separate story in the canon.

The first book in that lineup is Mason & Dixon, taking place in England, the tiny island of St. Helena, and pre-revolution America. A Bodine makes an appearance, as does another Pynchon concept (however inaccurate): pizza. The colonies are a wonderland full of magic and resources and and endless wilderness, and the forming idea of America as a thing is starting to coalesce.

The next is Against the Day, spanning the World's fair in 1893 to just after the end of WWI. Another Bodine makes an appearance, I'm sure pizza's here, but I can't remember right away in which scene, Tesla also makes an appearance, and every character experiences the Tunguska Event. Anarchists abound, as do dynamite cowboys and the world was becoming enthralled with science, but what was science? The line today is marked pretty well, but not at the turn of the 20th century.

The next is Gravity's Rainbow, which takes place during the end and aftermath of WWII. There is a Bodine and pizza, and lots of, eh...stuff. This one is considered the first post-modern literature book, and one of the most important books in English since WWII, as well as an impenetrable mess of prose. I found it more rewarding than M&D, and maybe even easier.

Then we get V., Pynchon's first novel. Like Vineland, it bounced between the twenties and the fifties, with the main thrust being the late '50s. The malaise and restlessness of the youth that lived through the war but were to young to fight. Pig Bodine is a star, if not the main character. A chapter here can be found in Pynchon's collection of short stories in an earlier form, that is, the story from the collection was changed up and the characters made it into V.

The pre-LSD and weed '60s is seen in the small The Crying of Lot 49.

Candy-corn treats for the fans of his work, Inherent Vice is the detective novel, Pynchon-style. It takes place from the winter of 1969 to the summer of 1970.

And that leads us finally to Vineland. Split between 1969 and 1984, we get the sense an old hippie is trying to reconcile the failed hippie revolution and the ascension of Ronald Reagen.

So, does that establish context? Inter-textual context, anyway?

Current Reading Material

Right now, Norm, I'm nearly 800 pages into 1Q84, Murakami's newest, and by some critics' word, his magnum opus.

I hear that his level of involvement in the design of the look of the book was higher than normal, and the odd, wax-paper like dust jacket with the 1-Q-8-4 face cutout is inspired.

The name is to be pronounced like the year 1984, with the letter "Q" replacing the word/syllable "nine", so like "Q-teen-eighty-four". But this makes much more sense in Japanese, where "9" is transcribed as "kyu" and their transcription of the Latin alphabet letter "Q" is "kew"; seeing the title as "1Q84" makes much more sense to a normal Japanese person, and is an obvious (to them) play on George Orwell's 1984, a novel mentioned more than once in this book.

1Q84 was originally published as three separate books in Japan, with the first two on the same day, and the third months later. In the UK, the first English edition was published as three separate books, and staggered in release the same as the Japanese versions. In America it was initially published all together, but I've seen it since as three paperbacks packaged in a box that resembles in appearance the edition I have.

Below, the separations between books can be seen by the dark lines roughly trisecting the work:

It's definitely a Murakami work. He's moved onto the third person for this, and that seemed to have angered some of the few critics who disliked this novel. For the first two books, he cycles between two characters with even regularity as we grow to see how they must be connected, and with each new chapter a new level of the story unfolds, causing even more confusion and loose ends. You know...Murakami.

For the first two books it's like a hot-rod, getting out onto the road, pushing on the gas, then mashing it down with vigor, the throttle opening up, the excitement rising, how can this possibly work out, and Book Two ends with a ridiculous cliffhanging climax. I know I'd have been furious if I'd had to wait months for the last third to come out.

Now, some of the things that make us love the Ruk-man, as I like to call him, also lead to some of the unsightly literary things he's forced to do. You know what I mean: creating worlds so fantastical and bizarre forces him into the occasional pages of expository blank-filling-ins. That's to be excused (for the most part), because his stories are so full of fun and life and excitement and philosophy--we fans begrudge him that.

The first two books of 1Q84 are mostly devoid of that kind of exposition, which is a testament to his abilities as a writer.

Then Book Three starts. That revving, pedal-to-the-medal hot-rod seems to have found itself without fuel, sitting in a mud pit it can't get out of. It's a hard thing for the Ruk-man to get himself out of. He's added a third character to lead chapters, a character that had maybe fifteen to twenty pages of face-time in the first two books, and its through this third character that we're supposed to put togther different aspects of the story, using him as a marker, since we, as readers, know more of the story, we can follow his progress and try and "solve" it ourselves.

But the world he's given us doesn't really require solving as it were. And then we've got our two leads, who we've been following for nearly 600 pages. Murakami's stories always have such a kinetic flow, a vibrant feeling of life rushing through everything, and in Book Three, our two lead characters are relegated to literally sitting and waiting, for nearly a hundred-thirty pages of a the two-hundred I've read so far. The Ruk-man knows that this doesn't make exciting reading, and tries to spruce it up. The details of their situations might help the context, but there's only so much you can do with your stars literally sitting and waiting.

I still want to know how it ends, how it ties together, see it come together, for sure, but I can honestly say that I would've finished it weeks ago had that momentum been preserved going forward. My own urgency evaporated with the novel's.

I would still definitely recommend this work. Murakami spent two years writing it, and I think it does a fine job of illustrating how an artist can pin themselves, and hopefully figure out how to pull it together at the end. The first two books are some of the most exciting Murakami work I can remember. The looming threat isn't as intimidating as it is perplexing, but that shouldn't be a knock on the story. That's more of the complicated nature of the threat-as-plot-device, but that itself could be a problem.

But hey: literary frauds, assassin personal trainers, wealthy dowagers running a home for battered women, a gay bodyguard, anarchic religious communes, a wily yet fugly investigator, a math teacher who also writes fiction, two moons in the sky, and the bad guys known only as The Little People...it could be just vintage Murakami.

I was also thinking of starting my next Pynchon themed post: "Women in Pynchonian Novels: Besides Prairie, Are They All Whores?"

Where to Start, with Photos!

So there I was, screaming up the 101 on a photographic scavenger hunt. It was a Wednesday, an off day from the j-o-b, and I was out gathering data for a series of philosophical essays about how you can see the issues of America easily, with the right eyes anyway, right here in Los Angeles.

Well, that and getting these first two pictures.

The title of this blog is "Norm and Pat Talk Pynchon", and I know we're going to get all over the place pretty quick. There's a street in Northern LA, Vineland Ave, and after finding it on the map, I made it the last stop on my scavenger hunt.

There are, as of August 2012, seven novels written by Thomas Pynchon, and when suggesting a starter for someone uninitiated, most people suggest his shortest work, a work he himself considers not a novel but rather a short "story with a glandular problem", The Crying of Lot 49. Clocking in at less than 180 pages, Crying... has everything fans know and love: weird scenarios and a labyrinthine plot, and enough beautiful and intricate sentences to start a class.

But, even with it being as short as it is, I still think it's better for a second Pynchon book. The first, and the one I have suggested to people is Vineland. We had a talk about back in '09, Norm, about how this was probably a better starter novel.

Hence the photos.

Jamming up 101, out of downtown, and I realized I'd missed the first opportunity, and was scrambling for the camera. I almost wrecked my shit.

Just kidding. It just sounds better that way.

Vineland was greatly panned by the hardcore Pynchon supporters when it was first published because it didn't live up to their expectations. The last novel that Pynchon had written had been nearly twenty years before, Gravity's Rainbow, and a more haunting and impenetrable novel may not have been written in English since the end of WWII, and to those folks who expected the greatest work ever every time out, this would be disappointing. Not to say that I found it disappointing.

Vineland (1990) is split between the end of the sixties in LA, and the 1984, right before Reagan's reelection. 1969 and 1984. The sixties lifestyle and the ramifications that that lifestyle brought to our heroes in the book.

I realize the cover doesn't shout about the colorful characters and scenarios going on inside. After reading it you get the sens that Pynchon must have had a daughter in between writing two of his hardest novels, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the heir apparent to that dense novel, the one the critics had been expecting, Mason & Dixon (1996).

This book's main character, Zoyd Wheeler, jumps through windows in a dress for a living; pre-cogging The Bride, there's a sexy blond kick-ass ninja who rides a motorcycle; a badguy who goes by the name Brock Vond (such an awesome asshole/badguy name); and there's still time for the briefest discussion of a giant lizard footprint having destroyed part of a nuclear plant on the Japanese coast. If you know LA, you'll get it; if you know the rocky northern California coast, you'll get it; even if you know the stormy Oklahoma City autumn evenings, you'll get it.

Plus, you can be on page 200 of this 380-something book and still have barely any idea what's going on...enjoying the shit out of it, but still.

But, Norm, you know all this already. I figured, since we started a Pynchon blog, it would only be fitting to start off with Vineland. This isn't a review, by any means.

If you're not Norm and still reading, and not familiar with Pynchon (uhh, thanks for reading?), this is the book I would say is where you should start.

See You at the Blog

Oh boy!

Not that Thomas Pynchon's novels are going to be the only topics we'll be getting here, but I thought a title like that would set the tone for the ranting that'll take place in this forum.

The first Pynchon novel that both of us read was Against the Day, while the second for you was V. and my second was Gravity's Rainbow. For either of us, man, all I can say is, well, it's more of a sound, "Whaaaa...?"

I'm sure we both agree that we'd never attempt to introduce readers to Pynchon through any of these three books. I didn't know any of his other books while I was reading AtD; all I knew is that you'd love it.

After having chased down each of his novels and the short fiction collection, Against the Day remains my favorite. Nobody's quite like him. Some folks think that's a good thing.

Another cat, my Ruk-man, will get ample team here as well, Haruki Murakami. And probably David Foster Wallace, and maybe even Tom Robbins.

But that's just literature. I'm sure we'll be able to find other shit to discuss.

Fickt nicht mit dem Racketenmensch!