Book review: “Breakfast of Champions” Kurt Vonnegut (1973)

Reviewer: Tanaka see all my reviews

I finished “Breakfast of Champions” by Vonnegut yesterday. I enjoyed it immensely. Reading a masterpiece of this quality got me thinking about how much time I’ve spent so far reading novels that were not really worth reading, and that I should be more picky about which novels to read from now on so I won’t waste my time anymore reading awfully boring ones out there, churned out by a bunch of cheesy potboilers whose world-views based upon their narrow-mindedness and bigotry make me feel sick. They are very easy to identify from their characteristic stilted prose style, that are made even worse by their blatantly materialistic view of the world behind it. Their views are by the way in stark contrast to what you will easily see lurking beyond Vonnegut’s apparently erratic, even sometimes lousy, prose style.

Reading quality novels makes your life seem worth living, whereas reading tedious ones like I mentioned earlier makes your life seem not worth living and even makes you feel suicidal. Even if I quit reading novels altogether right now, I’ll inevitably stumble upon quite a few fictions on a day-to-day basis, in the form of TV dramas, movies, cartoons, manga, anime, videogames, whatever. This seems to suggest that how happily we can live our lives hinges in part on how often we will come across quality fictions or, for that matter, how well we can avoid winding up with the dull ones; after all, most of us often wind up reading, listening, or watching fictions against our will in our everyday life, in one way or the other, as when your older family member or your weirdo brother insists that you all watch a prime time samurai drama at the living room on Sunday night, or when we are bombarded with totally unfounded media concoction, especially in the disguise of authentic science or health columns, written by media people backed by profit-seeking publishers who know no better than us about those fields.

Having said that, all of this is none of my business, because I’ve never played RPGs nor do I watch anime or samurai dramas and most of my spare time is spent doing somersaults, or at least reading nonfictions, rather than reading fictions.

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Weekend viewing

I watched “In her shoes” on DVD this weekend. I think people will find it a very good movie. So do I. The reason I took this for my viewing this weekend, by the way, was that last week I watched “There’s something about Mary” once again. There was, however, a world of difference between the two movies. It seemed to be a kind of philosophical film, so to speak. On the bonus track of the DVD, the director was actually saying, “it’s all about the people and their characters that count and I saw the possibility of doing the kind of film that used to be a staple in Hollywood, etc.” I was thinking that they were just churning out the kind of film like “Die hard,” “collateral damage” and nothing else all along, and I have no idea which ones he was referring to by his remark. By the way, I didn’t expect to see Shirley MacLaine again. I thought she was on a one-way spiritual journey after her routine out-of-the-body experience. I believe the last time I saw her was on a film that starred Jack Lemon. Anyway she’s one of my all-time favorite actresses. So is the one on the film I saw this weekend.

How many times did you Google today?

Writing in a foreign language is such a daunting task, even with the help of the search engine(s).

In my previous post “Mother’s day,” I wrote “ruin the happy feelings associated with the day,” at the beginning. After Googling, I found much to my dismay that the only result that came out with this sequence of words as search keywords typed in the “exact phrase” field was exactly this site (on Google blog search). Oh.

The Google results regarding the sentence are:
ruin (the) feelings: 20/6
happy feelings: 107,000 (good!)
feelings associated with: 179,000 (good job!)

My conclusion is that the verb “ruin” combined with “feelings” might sound odd as English. And what is worse is that I’m completely clueless as to how weird this combination is.

Honestly, I was elated that I managed to write the whole manuscript of the post without turning to any search engine or dictionary, for the first time since I started this blog; I just jotted down the manuscript on a sheet of paper with a pencil while I was out. I just made a few Google checks afterwards to see if some of the expressions I was not so confident about were appropriate.

Turned out that what I was doing was just translating Japanese sentences in my brain directly into English. This process and the resulting weird English will only hamper not only the writer but readers, if any, from learning English.

As far as this post goes, I made as many Google checks as I did on the other posts. But even that doesn’t guarantee that I have made no terrible mistakes in here.

The part mentioned here as an example of terrible writing is going to be modified as soon as the writer figures out how it can be rewritten.

Today's quote

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"Reading is the foundation of all learning and when we give our children the love of learning it is a gift that will last a lifetime."

This week (part 2)

This is an additional note to the previous post, about the lengthy explanation I made about a scene in “Collateral Damage.” I remembered the conversation at the scene was between the hate-driven protagonist played by the incumbent Californian Governor who was acting a German engineer at the scene and the Latino guy. So the implication was that on hearing that he’s a German, the Latino guy capitalized on the occasion to give vent to his language-related frustrations a little bit by using slang and the kinds of words I mentioned earlier.

This week

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Until today, we have been on the longest string of holidays in the year, called “Golden Week,” here in Japan. But as far as I'm concerned, it made little difference. I spent the better part of it doing my thing as usual and the remaining two days were not long enough to do anything special, like going on a trip. The only choice available to me then was either studying English at home or going on a bender for days on end. So I did pretty much nothing. To put it more exactly, I watched some movies on DVD, had quite a fun reading a couple of books despite having said something disparaging about what would be best described as “paperbacks” in the previous post, had drinks at various places, planned on going to Ueno zoo next year, and so forth.

The DVDs I watched were “Collateral damage,” “Cat woman,” and some other stuff. With English subtitles on, I was intrigued that in the middle of “Co… Damage,” a glib Latino guy, who purports to have learned English in New York, speaks English in a rather different way from the other guys on it, his conversation being peppered with words we don’t learn at school in our country, like “raunchy," “marinate on,” and many other slang words that I had to look up in dictionaries afterwards, and that were in stark contrast to the wording of the other characters which basically consists of the words we learn in school, except that they combine those basic words in ways that are not so easy for us non-native speakers to follow despite all of them being so familiar to us.

Part of the reason for the speech of the guy being like that seemed to be that his character was set in such a way as to make him sound like he wants to show off that he knows English very well by using the kinds of words I mentioned. This is only my guess and I don’t know exactly what effect it will have on the intended audience, that is, the real native English speakers.

Quite obviously, listening to and/or reading DVDs is one of the best ways to learn English since it allows us to get into a learning process where we can associate words and phrases directly with images and situations they are spoken in, without the intervention of Japanese translation, that could make things complicated.

The rest of the time I had a wonderful time drinking at various locations. On my way back home, I ran into a homeless girl in her early 30s and ended up befriending her in a way. I was kind of surprised to hear her say pretty much the same thing as the heroin on the other DVD I'd just watched, like “I like to live an untamed life and freedom is the thing I value most,” etc.

Today's ramblings

May 02 in Japan time

Being online in an interactive fashion means, in most cases, I write something, anytime, anywhere. It seems that before the advent of the Internet, people used to have much fewer opportunities to write casually than they have now. Thanks to the optical cables across the oceans, these days it is even possible to write and post in foreign languages. As more and more Japanese are getting started on blogging in English, more and more people around the world who seem as committed to learning Japanese as we are to English seem to be starting blogging in Japanese, and so on, all made possible by the Internet and search engines that provide a seemingly infinite corpus of each and every language. There are also a whole lot of people out there who put the novels of their own online, some of them fairly lengthy ones. While it’s true that writing takes time and some getting used to, I sometimes find myself more engrossed in reading blogs or any other kind of writing on the net, created mostly by nonprofessionals, than I do in reading novels that I pay for. Seems like times have changed. I wonder if my time would be better spent entirely reading those finer works (so it seems to me) online than paying for the boring fictions out there and thus contributing to the depletion of forest resources.

It occurred to me that romanticizing what you’re going to narrate a little bit or putting a twist on it may not be something every writer or speaker, whether they be amateurs or semi-pros like experienced bloggers, should stay away from, but something they should spend their energy on. The point I want to make is, it seems to me that not only writing but every kind of language activity done casually on an everyday basis, like speaking with friends on the phone, writing email, chatting just for fun, can sometimes take on the feel of a novel. While it’s true that life is anything but novels, being able to handle language as well as some good novelists do seems to be something worth pursuing. This idea came to me while I was listening to my sister talking on the phone in her usual voluble and lively way of describing things, which by the way always leaves me with the impression that women generally are a little more adept at manipulating language than men. I know the part that sounds like a speech on feminism has little to do with the thing I meant to address.

For me to keep blogging is a huge challenge given my poor English, not to mention that it takes a tremendous amount of time that could otherwise be spent doing other more frivolous things. I'm not really sure which is more frivolous, though.