Chance and choice

From Ghostwritten by David Mitchell:

When I was younger I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD, or stage a coup d’état.

Advanced capitalism

From Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami:

I enjoy shopping at [the fancy-schmancy Kinokuniya supermarket]. You may not believe this, but the lettuce you buy there lasts longer than lettuce anywhere else. Don’t ask me why. Maybe they round up the lettuce after they close for the day and give them special training. It wouldn’t surprise me. This is advanced capitalism, after all.

Nearly all of my friends who have read Murakami say they dislike his books because they don’t like the narrator. Murakami’s narrators are similar in that they all seem to represent the postmodern everyman — detached, deadpan, resigned to the fact that the best of days have long passed. The big complaint is that this character is annoying because he is apathetic and you don’t wind up loving him or hating him enough to find him interesting. Dance Dance Dance is only the third Murakami novel I’ve read (the others being A Wild Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood) and I have to say that I find the narrators to be introspective and relatable, the perfect windows into Murakami’s surreal worlds. Very Nick Carraway-esque; I’m sane and everyone around me is crazy — or is it that I’m crazy and everyone else is sane?

On connoisseurship in general

From Joel Stein’s Awesome Column on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries in the November 16, 2009 issue of TIME Magazine:

Legitimizing pot hasn’t created more users; it has just produced more annoying ones, who now apply Whole Foods-ian levels of snobbiness to the differences between Hawaiian Sativa and Humboldt Indica.

Dull existence

From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers:

I pull up to a light, next to a bunch of young black kids. Maybe they’ll shoot me. I’m in the zone of all probability. I cannot be surprised. Earthquakes, locusts, poison rain would not impress me. Visits from God, unicorns, bat-people with torches and scepters–it’s all plausible. If these kids happen to be bad kids, and have guns, and want to shoot people like me, it will be me, the glass will break and the bullet will come through and I will not be surprised. With the bullet in my head, I will drive my car into a tree, and as I am waiting to be pulled from the wreck, nearly dead, I will not panic or yell. I will think only: Weird, this is exactly what I expected.

A very honest, accurately articulated voicing of what must go on in peoples’ heads all the time. Like in those instances when you feel like the only stationary entity as the world continues to move rapidly around you. (Special bonus: not-so-thinly-veiled racial prejudice.)

Kundera and the new media landscape

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:

[B]eauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise–the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music–we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

Seems like Kundera saw it coming back in 1979, pre-blogosphere. Gives more weight to that “unbearable lightness of being” he wrote about five years later doesn’t it?

Homodoption

From Findings section in February 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Givers and takers

From The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde:

Leviticus records the Lord’s instructions to Moses: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.” Likewise, we are sojourners with our gifts, not their owners; even our creations–especially our creations–do not belong to us. As Gary Snyder says, “You get a good poem and you don’t know where it came from. ‘Did I say that?’ And so all you feel is: you feel humility and you feel gratitude.” Spiritually, you can’t be much poorer than gifted.

Relevance made an impression

From “Reading Lost Illusions“ by Benjamin Kunkel at Salon.com:

When you’re a novelist, or want to be one, and instead of staying at home to nurture your genius, you’re chasing some romantic prospect, or drinking too much with your friends, or writing another book review, it’s never entirely clear whether you are wasting your time, or whether, in fact, you are investing in so many treasury bonds to be paid out in the form of mature works. It could be that ostensible distraction is really just a diversified portfolio of experience. A novelist has to write about humans, and it doesn’t much expand your knowledge of the human to do the things you should.

I look back on my first years in New York and wish I’d worked harder. I also look back and wish I’d gone out dancing far more often, and spent more money on concerts and plays.

I read articles like this, written by successful people like him, and it gives me a great excuse to party really hard. And then I check my bank account, dream forlornly about sushi dinners and vacations to Europe and end up sitting back on the couch.

About them

From Fake Empire:

“My name is Santiago.
Living in Buenos Aires, doing my absolute best to be happy.”

Two kinds of detachment

From “A kiss is still a kiss (even if the sex is postmodern and the romance problematic)” by Edwin Dobb in the February 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Reader of depressing blogs

Writer Tao Lin on Japan:

I like Japan. I don’t remember when I first felt that I liked Japan. Maybe when I first played Nintendo. Japan is maybe “by far” my favorite country. Japan seems to have a long life expectancy, a low obesity rate, and a social phenomenon that seems related to things I like to read or write about such as loneliness, depression, boredom, confusion, social anxiety, and meaninglessness.

Can’t seem to decide whether I “like” or “hate” this guy.
It’s kind of unsettling how much he creepily and accurately represents my rather privileged-yet-unfulfilled-due-to-illusions-of-entitlement-and-grandeur generation of young folk.