Galápagos (Excerpts)

I finished the second of the fifty-two books given to me by my generous coffee shop friend two months ago: Galápagos, by Kurt Vonnegut. This was the second of the two books that he most highly recommended during our brief conversation. I must admit I was nowhere near as big a fan of this book as I was Steppenwolf (excerpts), which I read first. I also did not enjoy this as much as Cat's Cradle, currently my favorite Vonnegut book, but quite a bit more than Slaughterhouse-Five. I really seem to be in the vast minority when it comes to Slaughterhouse-Five, but alas...

Here are a few choice bits.

(7)     It was late in the afternoon now, and hotter than the hinges of hell outside.

(41)   What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once, and switch from one opinion or subject to another one so quickly, that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates.

(112)   In all the encounters between Davids and Goliaths, was there ever a time when a Goliath won?

(138)   Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man.
           They don't make memories like that anymore.

(142)   And I pity him, because I can still remember what I was like when I was sixteen. It was hell to be that excited. Then as now, orgasms gave no relief. Ten minutes after an orgasm, guess what? Nothing would do but that you have another one. And there was homework besides!

(145)   There are all these people bragging about how they're survivors, as though that's something very special. But the only kind of person who can't say that is a corpse.

Steppenwolf (Excerpts)

I've just finished reading the first book of those given to me by the kindly stranger in the coffee shop a month ago. It took me a bit longer than I'd have liked, because I became quite busy in the meantime. I chose to read first the one book that my coffee-drinking, Vonnegut-appreciating friend recommended most highly: Steppenwolf. He urged me to read the author's preface (added in a 1960 reprinting) and cautioned me thoroughly against romanticizing the Steppenwolf's persona or lifestyle. I'm preparing in my mind a letter to write in response to him in which I set out to make the point that it's perhaps admissible to sympathize with the character, for all his similarity.

At any rate, as I've taken to doing with all books I read starting in January of this year, I kept a collection of favorite excerpts as I came across them. I began to worry by the third, fourth, or fifth excerpt if I might be better off just writing the entire story down and calling that my excerpt. Every turn of the page found another bit of exquisitely written narrative that left me no choice but to read it multiple times until I'd had my fill of it. There is no unifying element among the excerpts; some are profound, while others simple yet wonderfully written. If you have hopes of someday reading the book and are weary of my unintentionally revealing to you crucial plot points, then be assured that these excerpts do not explicitly reference the plot, although if you are clever enough you could perhaps deduce one thing or another.

A word of praise should also be said for the translator, Basil Creighton. I suppose that a portion of my enjoyment of the story's tone and style could be attributed to his pen, but on the whole I have to admit that at many times I forgot entirely that I was reading a story originally written in German.

(34) And this too was odd: that somewhere in a green valley vines were tended by good, strong fellows and the wine pressed so that here and there in the world, far away, a few disappointed, quietly drinking townsfolk and dispirited Steppenwolves could sip a little heart and courage from their glasses.

(35) Could I be altogether lost when that heavenly little melody had been secretly rooted within me and now put forth its lovely bloom with all its tender hues?

(36) Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival through the night!

(58-59) Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications—and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

(65) Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousands kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul.

(97) Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

(111-112) But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.

(128) Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been.

(143-144) Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing show, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

(164-165) As a marionette whose thread the operator has let go for a moment wakes to new life after a brief paralysis of death and coma and once more plays its lively part, so did I at this jerk of the magic thread throw myself with the elasticity and eagerness of youth into the tumult from which I had just retreated in the listlessness and weariness of elderly years. Never did sinner show more haste to get to hell.

This is an April Fools' Day joke

This entire post is a joke; it is being written in observation of April Fools' Day. Do not believe anything contained within.

Today is April 1, the day of merry pranks and jokes. To that end, I am posting this in the hopes of catching some of you unawares. A portion of you will read this and know that it is all a prank; you will have likely also read pranks and jokes on other websites. But chances are high that a majority of you will read through this entire post and not realize the irony or humor contained within, and you may even tell a few friends about it before you realize the error of your ways. At that point, you may feel slightly embarrassed. Don't worry, it's all in the nature of the joke.

I can't take all the credit for catching you unawares. I had ample help preparing for this deception. Several of my closest friends were indispensable in the labyrinthine planning stages of this elaborate spoof. We spent hours going over the details, and now that you have been sufficiently taken for a ride, I can safely admit their involvement. If some of you feel cheated or deceived, please take your frustrations out on me and not them, as they were kept mostly in the dark about the eventual purpose of their machinations.

To those who may suppose that posting such a farcical tale of whimsy as this would perhaps discredit future writings of a more serious nature, you need not worry. I assure you that this preposterous and comedic anecdote is the only one of its kind.

Fifty-Two Books

For those who are interested, here are the books that were sent to me. There are fifty-two in total.

A few notes about the list:

• P or H denotes paperback or hardcover
• Translation credit is included whenever possible and relevant
• Additional information is occasionally included when relevant

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, trans. Samuel Beckett, P
Bhagavadgita, trans. Sir Edwin Arnold, P
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs, H
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus, trans. Justin O'Brien, P
Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Lewis Carroll, facsimile of manuscript, P
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, P
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, P
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey, P
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle, P
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Puritan Sermons, Jonathan Edwards and Others, P
Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud, trans. Joan Riviere, P
The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, P
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. Catherine Hutter, P
Demian, Hermann Hesse, trans. Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck, P
Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, P
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse, trans. ?, P
Catch-22, Joseph Heller, P
Rhinoceros and Other Plays, Eugène Ionesco, trans. Derek Prouse, P
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, P
Selected Stories, Franz Kafka, trans. William and Edward Muir, P
On the Road, Jack Kerouac, P
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey, P
The Vonnegut Statement, Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer, P
Inherit the Wind, Lawrence Jerome and Robert E. Lee, P
Evangeline and Other Poems, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, P
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann, trans. Stanley Applebaum, P
The Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe, P
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore, P
The Misanthrope, Molière, trans. ?, P
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, P
The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Francis Golffing, P
The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, P
All Quiet on the Western Front¹, Erich Maria Remarque, trans. A. W. Wheen, H
Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, P
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger, H
The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare, P
The Essential Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, P
Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row, John Steinbeck, P
Travesties, Tom Stoppard, P
Candide, Voltaire, trans. anonymous, P
Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut, P
Deadeye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, P
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, P
Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut, P
Galápagos, Kurt Vonnegut, H
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut, P
Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut, P
Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut, P
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut, H
Oscar Wilde's Wit & Wisdom: A Book of Quotations, Oscar Wilde, P
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde, P
Native Son, Richard Wright, fantastic 1940 printing with handwritten dedication from wife to husband, H

¹ This is the only book from the list that I have already read, but I'll gladly reread it.

Resuscitation! Reinvigoration! Regurgitation!

First entry in over three years. This is an awkward transition, because in those three years I posted a hell of a lot of content on my MySpace blog. So it looks like I haven't written anything since I was a lowly intern at Echo Park Studios in Bloomington, but that's not the whole truth. I recently re-read some of those MySpace entries, and I'm pretty fond of them, so I recommend going to that blog and catching up, at least back through early 2008.

Actually, reading through all of these, I notice that 2008 seems to have been a pretty interesting and mostly good year, despite getting off to a rocky start. I recall fondly that I wrote quite a bit of music that year (even if not many of them turned into full songs, there are a lot of demos from that year that I still really enjoy), recorded even more of others' music, and I wrote a lot in that blog. So why was most of 2009 such a god damn train wreck? (That's not including the four-month layover in North Dakota, by the way.) Come to think of it, I wasn't too fond of 2007 either.

...Maybe it's something to do with odd-numbered years...

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. I mean, a lot. I have read seven books in the past month. They're mostly books whose names (or whose authors' names) I'm familiar with but had never read and just decided it was time that I did so. For example, Fight Club and Slaughterhouse-Five. I haven't read much in the past week or so, because my mind has been a little distracted. I decided for my latest round of choices I would revisit an old favorite: Tolkien. I'm currently halfway through The Hobbit, and I'm planning to enjoy The Lord of the Rings next. When I read, I often come across certain passages that strike me as particularly beautiful or moving, but I never write them down! I regret that. So I changed that very recently. I wish I had done it sooner, but what can you do. I'm now putting my favorite excerpts from books I read into my Facebook profile. Also, I've considered writing down my opinions on the books I read as I finish them to put online, but I haven't decided if the internet really needs any more opinions.

...Maybe it's because I was single for a majority of 2008...

The journey of teaching myself jazz guitar has also stalled momentarily. Again, it's mostly just because my mind has been distracted for about the last week. Up until this set in, I was making pretty good progress. The last thing I did was transcribe the first chorus of Wes Montgomery's solo in "West Coast Blues". That's about 30 seconds of music. It took me approximately four hours. I didn't realize before I started it that it's actually an incredibly popular solo, and that jazz guitarists frequently use it for audition material, and that ohmygodwhathaveigottenmyselfinto? I don't know that my playing and my ear are advanced enough yet to tackle this, but I'm going to stay on it for the time being. That is, once I pick up my guitar again.

...Maybe there's no connection to anything at all...

I'm actually going to stop this right here. I have a feeling that I could probably keep typing until, oh, the sun rises. And that might actually be a good thing, from a certain point of view. But if I slather my sloppy linguistic excrement all over the place tonight, there will be nothing to save for future updates, and you won't come back to read, and I won't be able to keep my sponsors happy, and they'll revoke sponsorship, and then I'll go broke, and then I'll have to sell my body for cocaine money.