i just listened to david sedaris again. this time, he talked a lot about his influences, and i jotted down a lot fo the authors that he considered to be "good." sometime, i'll make an effort to find their books and read them.
it's funny, it's actually somewhat rare for me to read a book in awe of the writing. i mean, i can appreciate things stylistically, but not much seems to resonate with me. i thought hemingway was a bit too sparse for my tastes... i'm not sure if his work would really work nowadays. i feel that we are a far more verbose culture (or at least we pretend to be), and that hemingway's writing (and i'm going primarily with "old man and the sea") is a bit too brutish. i liked dickens (again, i'm going by what i most recently read, which in this case was "a tale of two cities"), but his sort of ornate, baroque style of writing is far beyond me; maybe dickens, to me, is on the other side of the spectrum from hemingway. i think the scope of his plot is awesome, his mastery of so many characters... i don't think i could keep track of so many people and so many events... i got flustered even in plotting out minor things...
i'm also reading "catcher in the rye" for some reason. i guess like sedaris, i'm just cycling through some of the things i was supposed to have read in high school... and i did read "catcher in the rye," but for some reason, i don't remember a lot of the details. or maybe i didn't appreciate them as i do now, being an adult. as a teenager, and a pretty sheltered teenager at that, i didn't get a lot of the sexuality that abounds in the story (even though it is precisely about raging adolescent hormones). for some reason, my memory of "rye" ends somewhere near where the elevator guy/pimp snaps the protagonist in the penis. and in my memory, they weren't particularly oblique about it. i wonder if they'd changed the text since i read it in high school... anyway, i don't recall all these other episodes that i'm reading about... the sally hayes thing, about her dressing in some miniskirt so he could watch her ass as she skated... or meeting up with that sophisticate in the bar, and listening him talk (or not talk) about eastern philosophy and older women... don't remember much of that.
my opinion of salinger's work is that it- well, i know it was admired at one point- i recall attending some writing class where one of the students- a teenaged girl- was trying to write a continuation to "catcher in the rye." and trying to emulate that voice. that annoying voice. i understand it, but perhaps i'm at a different place in life, so i find that voice grating. i also don't find it particularly endearing when the author throws in references to his dead brother. it just seems too- i don't know- formulaic. it's almost like the author times it, so that once you get so sick of caulden and his melodrama, then he'll throw a bone about his little brother, so you instantly feel sorry for him all over again... it just stops working after like the tenth time or so. (btw, i find myself emulating that whiny voice just now. swear to god. :P ).
margaret atwood... she is a writer i admire. she writes in a pretty sparse way, but each detail packs such a punch. each detail is purposeful, and playful. she does a lot of little word plays... they are wicked and evocative. in many ways, i wish i could write like her...
anyway, i do have to read more. i think my regimen calls for only reading a chapter each time (i happen to read other books when i'm on the toilet... and for those books, the progress is- well, sporadic, just like my stools :P ). sometimes, with short-chaptered books, this tends to make the progression very slow. but at least i'm moving through stuff...
btw, forgot to mention haruki murakami. aside from "hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world," which was the first book i'd ever read by him, i don't really appreciate most of his work. i may have said this before, but some of his scenes are truly nightmare inducing. the one scene i always return to was when this japanese officer was slowly and methodically flayed alive by some mongolian. it was all the more horrific because, up until then, that officer was portrayed as some stoic, matter-of-fact, brave person. but under the hours-long methodical operation, he eventually is reduced to bouts of falling unconscious and screaming uncontrollably... until he is reduced to a pile of unbound flesh... i still shudder when i think about that scene... and the idea that there are many ways to die, and that you can seem brave when you choose a quick death... but torture... that's another thing entirely... to be pinned down and awake and aware of the incredible pain and the progressive destruction of what you had considered to be your sacred self... piece by piece... that is... i can't imagine it.
anyway, i digress. that scene was from "wind up bird chronicles," which, for some reason, i didn't really get. i mean, he always/often has these weird women. and i notice that in a couple of the stories, "wind up bird chronicles" and "norwegian wood," there's a kind of redemption found through this sort of waif like girl figure. something i found too strange and formulaic. but, yes, i sometimes think it would be great to be haruki, because he seems to "get around," at least in his stories...
"1q84", by the way, had so much more potential... it seemed to be a story that wasn't sure where it was going. and it ended in a very mundane way, to my thinking. i think there was so much more potential. especially as he seemed to be trying to make the association with 1984, well, then why didn't he help us to see the horror of that alternate world? instead, it was just some story about two plots gradually coalescing. a fucking love story. that wasn't really about love. (i mean the two characters were basically strangers, aside from one momentous occurrence when they were ten years old or something. it wasn't particularly convincing to me. but then again, i'm an anti-romantic.)
oh well. i'm feeling generally optimistic that something inside of me is melting. i will continue to work at my routines, and hopefully more and more of my past and me will come alive.
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