EWP 3

The breaking news we heard this week was that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. His late novel Jailbird, which I read only once and only in translation while I was in school, remains one of the best novels I've ever read. I don't have much to say about him because his only novel I read in English was Breakfast for Champions, which I got my hands on only last year. I read most of his novels in translation. They're all great. His style spawned a lot of followers, among them Murakami. Murakami's first novel reads just like Vonnegut. To say it's plagiarism is not enough. It's more than that, though his first and its sequel are the only ones I like of Murakami. His first novel was imbued with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor (though only superficially), which he obviously borrowed from Vonnegut. His other novels, none of which was in the style of Vonnegut, all seemed to me crappy. Because they seemed to me to be awfully lacking a sense of humor, which I think is one of the prerequisites for any great literary works. Norwegian wood is one of the crappiest novels I've ever read. But I digress. It's a shame that most Japanese seem to believe that Hemmingway and Steinbeck and Stephen King are the only great American novelists worth mentioning. I first got to know about Vonnegut via Kenzaburo Oe's essay, in which he raved about Vonnegut's sarcastic writing style and credited him as a successor of the great tradition of satire in the history of English literature dating back to the days of Jonathan Swift and the like. As it often happens, it looks like the Nobel prize went to the wrong person.

Beautiful Weather

When I started blogging last spring, I had an inkling that I would go insane this year. But fortunately it looks like I haven’t yet. I think I owe it in part to long spells of sunshine though meteorologists are saying that the sky is getting yellowish because of desert sand flying across the ocean from China. Actually I didn't notice that at all until I heard the story about it. Today I read the news that snow on mountain tops is getting pinkish because of that. I don’t understand what chemical reactions have turned them pink instead of yellow. I also think I owe it in part to my habit of taking green tea regularly. If I had taken coke instead of green tea every day, that would have made a big difference. Japan is famous for the ubiquitousness of beverage vending machines. They used to sell only heavily sweetened carbonated drinks and no green tea. Today every one of them seems to include more than two or three kinds of green tea as their vending items. That may be one of the key factors that have been contributing to me remaining sane, not to mention my good dental health. This is the season that makes me want to stay outside any minute of the day because breeze is so nice. The modern day myth has it that mad people go outside when spring comes. So will I.

Writing practice 4

I think I found out the main reason why my short-term memory is deteriorating. I got hideously drunk the other day and when I woke up the next morning, it took me more than fifteen minutes or so to recall what I had done and where I had been the night before. A friend of mine said he got drunk so bad the other day that only after he woke up the next morning did he find he'd broken his hand but had no idea whatsoever where and how. When you drink too much, maybe you won’t be aware of the fact that you’re dead already the next morning. It’s not a bad way to end your life.

Last week I finished “The world is flat.” It seemed to me that the only thing the author is yelling throughout every chapter is how gifted and talented people in India are. So it would be safe to say that the book is all about India, and its implications are that people with no degree in science will have no place to live in the industrialized world in the future, that what history tells us is Marxism has been right all along, that the author spent a whole lot of time studying Marxism at college, that there must be an awful lot of potential math geniuses among children in India who live on less than $1 a day, that they deserve to lead a much better life, while idiots living in the more developed world who enjoy a much better life like me just because they’re in the developed world should die fast, and so on. It made me feel alienated more than ever cause my low IQ prevented me from even dreaming of going to places where science or engineering is taught. So as far as I’m concerned, it was a depressing read and I’m feeling much better now cause I don’t have to read it anymore.
The only saving grace was that I got the hardcover version, which comes with a flimsy paper cover on it, something that paperback versions usually do not have; when inserted between pages the end of the cover served as a sort of bookmark, saving me the trouble of reading the same parts over and over again like I did with Apollo 13.