Ushikawa?

It's the funky looking, off-putting, chain smoking character that Murakami named "Bull-river," Ushikawa.

I got to page 426 in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and by 427 when the description comes in I remember thinking, This has to be Ushikawa, and then on 428 he introduces himself: "'The name is Ushikawa. That's ushi for "bull" and kawa for "river". Easy enough to remember, don't you think?'"

I mention it because, depending on how far along you've gotten in 1Q84, you'll have run into Ushikawa again.

This also highlights a few random thoughts I was having.

Like with Against the Day and Pynchon, this was another time of reading a later work before an earlier work. With Pynchon, I didn't know that Bodine was one of the recurring names of a set of characters.

With having read 1Q84 before The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which itself was written maybe a dozen years prior, this Ushikawa made his first impression on me in the newer story. Had I read Wind-Up... first, I believe that I surely would have recognized him in 1Q84 before his name came up, as did other Ruke-man fans.

Another thought I was having was the pace at which I'm making it through Wind-Up Bird...

I started it back in December when I was busing it to tutor sessions on the PV peninsula. It's not like the book is difficult and reading it is a slog (see Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon), and, for the record, nothing by the Ruke-man that I've found could ever really be considered a "slog."

Something about it though...it never gripped me, or at least hadn't as of the 420 pages. Maybe it is starting to now, at least, with  the random 3rd person breaks about the boy and the "newspaper articles" filling in some holes. (The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace also has a multi-pronged narrative approach with transcripts and articles and such...)

And it's not like I haven't had time to read. If that had been the case, like I imagine it is with my blog-mate, I could understand the lag better. When the Bleeding Edge comes out in September, what with my schedule being what it'll be, that could easily be the case at that time. But, while I've been reading this book by Murakami I've also read: Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman; half of a Tesla bio by Margaret Cheney; And Still We Rise by Miles Corwin; As They See 'Em by Bruce Weber; The Dinosaur Heresies by Dr. Bob Bakker; and The Tao of Baseball by a Canuck writer and thinker who goes by Go. The Goldman and Weber books were both gifts from Uncle Dan and Auntie Peg; and along with the Corwin book and Bakker book, everything is non-fiction, which is easier for me to breeze through on my LA Metro rides than even something as smooth as Murakami.

So...what...

Seeing Ushikawa in multiple spots is the same for me as seeing the Traverses in multiple spots, or even my own character Cooper. I have a character named Cooper who has bit roles in both my short The New American Patriot as well as in the current novel I'm working right now.

So, I was excited anyway. I've been busy with a different writing project lately; I'll go into it in detail a little later...

See you at the Birthday Party!

PIPD2013

Today marks Pynchon's birthday, and so (apparently) it's celebrated by Pynchonophiles as Pynchon In Public Day.

Scribble a muted horn on something; talk at a random stranger about the climbing a hemp plant like Jack on a beanstalk; imagine yourself crammed into a V2 or on an airship or throwing pies from a hot air balloon over the Alps.

Celebrate the Oeuvre!

2013 Shaping Up as Nice Year for New Books

Along with Bleeding Edge, we're also getting (maybe, depending on the translation) Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage from the Ruke-man himself, Haruki Murakami. I hadn't even heard about the book until today, even though it's selling a million copies a week since it was released in Japan in April.

Here's a link to an article about a rare public appearance and talk about the book's story.

I'm not sure if this means anything, but...

So, I know on this site there's been a certain focus on Pynchon (of course), as well as Murakami, and I've mentioned David Foster Wallace, Chandler Brossard, and Richard Flanagan on occasion as well. Flanagan wrote Gould's Book of Fish, and once I'd finished it, I  remember thinking that it had surpassed Mitchell's Cloud Atlas as my favorite non-Pynchon, non-Murakami novel.

Since then I think it may have crawled up the list, and rivals some of Murakami's best work. It's seriously good, and I've been thinking about getting a copy for you, Norm, but that's not relevant to this discussion. Before I got it I thought it was about a guy, or a family, fishing. I couldn't have been more misguided. Still, easily the best book I read in 2012.

In any case, there's a post here. I remembered the other night that Flanagan has his chapters each revolve around his main character's painting of a specific fish, about how that fish represents one of the weirdos he's met on his prison island, and about how he breaks down the sections of the chapters: he uses Roman numerals. That was the one thing I wanted to take another glance at: the Roman numeral breakdowns. I remembered that in my own book, Robot Crickets, in the last section I used Roman numerals as well for the sectional demarcations. It wasn't apparent at the time for me that it was in direct homage to Flanagan, but it would now be hard to argue that it wan't.

I noticed that I had used periods at the end of the numerals, and when I opened up Gould's... I saw he hadn't. But then I noticed something weird about the random pages that I opened each book to:

I'm not sure if it's easily seen here, but both pages have, on the left side, section VIII, and on the right side, section IX. In Gould's..., this is the page 200-01 spread, in chapter Leatherjacket (since each chapter is named for one of the twelve fish Gould paints, the numbers assigned to those chapters come from the reader, meaning this is chapter 5). In Robot Crickets, this is the page 82-3 spread, when the two tiny aliens Silde and Nafil and readying the meatball.

So, like the title of this post says, I'm not sure this means anything. Just one of those random moments...

I Missed this on the First Day it was up...

Straight gaffeled from GoodReads.com:

"
Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

"

Woo-hoo!

"Mathematical!"

So Norm, I started watching "Adventure Time" on Netflix. I remember you showing me that one episode with the dimensional bubble blower, and when I found the show deep in the innards of Netflix, I was like, Sweet! Even with only the first 26 episodes of the first season there, I figured I could get a good grasp of the pacing and the beats and the sens of humor, beyond my memories of that first episode you showed me.

So far I've watched maybe the first five or so episodes, and I like it. Jake and Finn crack me up, and their dynamic is fun. Finn reminds me another character I have discovered on another show that I've started watching, their connection being wearing an eared cap of sorts:

This is Louise Belcher, the youngest of the Belcher kids on Fox's animated series Bob's Burgers. I wanted to write a long post about the show, about how out of all of the animated shows on television now, Bob's Burgers is the only fitting heir apparent to the mantle that was created by the Simpsons in their first four seasons. This show is more realistic and honest than most live-action shows, just like the early Simpsons, and does things that the Simpsons of today can't do or achieve (and I still watch the Simpsons).

But Louise is nine years old, right between Bart and Lisa in age, and is the best thing about the show. She's a mix of Lisa and Eric Cartman, and is one of the main antagonists of the show. I recommend it, if you feel like another show to invest time into.

ALSO

I read that Bleeding Edge seems like it could be Pynchon's 9/11 book, as well as his Internet book. I read some commentary a while back that mentioned, accurately, that in all reality Gravity's Rainbow is his 9/11 book, and The Crying of Lot 49 is his Internet book, even if a facsimile of Arpanet made an appearance in Inherent Vice.

GR deals with the ramifications of a society that is in love with death; and Lot 49 deals with an underground non-postal service mail delivery system. Pynchon is just ahead of the curve.

Left for the Good People of Bed-Stuy

I found this picture in the other computer a few days ago and realized I needed to share it, the muted horn being a little more permanent:

This is from Macon Street, just off of Patchen, which was one of our cross streets, and Macon was just a single block down from Halsey, our street. Basically, this was super close to our place, somehow I made it early, and, stranger still, no one else dirtied up the drying concrete.

Interesting historical tidbit: Across the street are rowhouses, and, if one looks to the right and imagines more rowhouses, one would be looking at Chris Rock's childhood rowhouse. Chris Rock grew up on this exact block of Macon street, at least that's what the newspaper said. They gave the address of the house that his family owned and from which they rented rooms, like in the sit-com "Everybody Hates Chris", a good show, but filmed on the Universal set in Hollywood, and not in this neighborhood.

I noticed that the address was for Macon St, and that it must have been very close. That information came to me much later than this photo opportunity. I took picture of the house itself, but I haven't found them yet.