On the Subject of Disappearing Cats

     "I believe you are entering a phase in your life in which many different things will occur. The disappearance of your cat is only the beginning."
     "Different things," I said. "Good things or bad things?"
     She tilted her head in thought. "Good things and bad things. Bad things that seem good at first and good things that seem bad at first."
     "To me, that sounds very general," I said. "Don't you have any more concrete information?"
     "Yes, I suppose what I am saying does sound very general said Malta Kano. "But after all, Mr. Okada, when one is speaking of the essence of things , it often happens that one can only speak in generalities. Concrete things certainly do command attention, but they are often little more than trivia. Side trips. The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.
     I nodded silently--without the slightest inkling of what she was talking about.
     "Do I have permission to call you again?" she asked.
     "Sure," I said, though in fact I had no wish to be called by anyone. "Sure" was about the only answer I could give.
     She snatched her red vinyl hat from the table, took the handbag that had been hidden beneath it, and stood up. Uncertain as to how I should respond to this, I remained seated.
     "I do have one small bit of information that I can share with you," Malta Kano said, looking down at me, after she had put on her red hat.
     " You will find your polka-dot tie, but not in your house."

[From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle]

American Gods

I'm reading American Gods right now. It is pretty fantastical and wonderful. A battle is brewing between the ancient gods and our modern gods, full of myth and mysticism. Neil Gaiman blows my mind every time I read one of his stories. I recently finished "Fragile Things" which is a compilation of short stories, poems, and other little tidbits. It was beautiful.

He's working with Henry Selick, who did Nightmare before Christmas, on a new stop motion animation movie based on his book, Coraline. I'm super stoked on that one.


This could be useful information one day.

I heart Murakami.

I read Norwegian Wood recently, and now I'm reading Kafka on the Shore. Both of these have taken my mind on a very strange trip. They are novels by Haruki Murakami.

"Haruki Murakami is quite possibly the most successful and influential cult author in the world today. The 59-year-old sells millions of books in Japan. His fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, sold more than 3.5m copies in its first year and his work has been translated into 40 languages, in which he sells almost as well. Last year’s novella, After Dark, shifted more than 100,000 copies in English in its first three months. His books are like Japanese food — a mix of the delicate, the deliberately bland and the curiously exotic. Dreams, memory and reality swap places, all leavened with dry humour. His translator, Professor Jay Rubin, says reading Murakami changes your brain. His world-view has inspired Sofia Coppola, the author David Mitchell and American bands such as the Flaming Lips. He is a recipient of the Franz Kafka prize, has honorary degrees from Princeton and Liège, and is tipped for the Nobel prize for literature." -Stephen Armstrong from Times Online




His writing has this weird affect on me, like it starts to change the way my mind works when I'm in the middle of his novels. I guess I'm not the only one. I've read a lot of books, and his are just so magical compared to others. He takes you into his world, and its like he's aware that he can do that. He realizes as he's telling you this story that he is drawing you in and he talks to you. I think he is my new second favorite author. I still like Tom Robbins more. Maybe after I've read 10 Murakami books I'll like him more though. We'll see because I plan on reading everything he's ever written. Anything about dreams fascinates me completely. I might be egocentric in thinking this, but I feel like my dreams are more intense than the average person. They have an intense effect on my psyche. The characters in Murakami's writing are so rich, and a lot of them have very surreal, dream-like experiences.

Mindscape

Awesome new documentary: The Mindscape of Alan Moore, about his development as an artist and becoming a "magician."



If you don't like Alan Moore I don't want to be your friend. While your at it make sure you have read From Hell, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and Lost Girls.

Speak to Us of Freedom

"At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a car nor your nights without a want and a grief,
But rather when these things girdle your life, and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?
In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.
And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?
If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead.
You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them.
And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.
For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their won pride?
And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you.
And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.
Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.
These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.
And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.
And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

[From 'The Prophet' by Kahlil Gibran]

In which I ponder a few things but fail to get stuck in a tight spot.

I have this friend that I don't see much anymore. We ran into each other about a year ago and at some point in our conversation we realized we were both at that time reading 'A Confederacy of Dunces.' About a month ago, I ran into that same friend, and we realized we were both reading 'The Master and Margarita.' We don't talk much, so it was pretty coincidental. Obviously, we are attracted to the same things. It just struck me as odd.
I picked up 'A Confederacy of Dunces' purely by chance, browsing in a used book store. The cover intrigued me. As for 'The Master and Margarita' I was at Wickerman in PA, sitting on a covered wagon, watching fire spinners and listening to crazy techno in the middle of the woods, having a conversations about books with a new friend and he told me I must absolutely read this book. So the friend who keeps reading the same books as me, obviously our circumstances for finding them are different, but we keep stumbling across the same things.
So I watched 'Zeitgeist' the other night, which by the way is a german word which is pretty fantastic meaning the spirit of the times, which talks about a sort of collective consciousness... or is it subconscious?...and there are clips in 'Zeitgeist' from this movie 'Network' of which I had never heard or seen, but based on the clips I thought it sounded fantastic. What do you know, tonight a friend called and said "Hey...wanna watch this movie with me? It's called Network." So of course I watched it and it was pretty amazing.
Here is a little clip. Maybe you've seen it?

You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do. Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.

I don't think your life is meaningless...

"I don't think your life is meaningless."

"You don't?"

"No."


"But...listen, you've just been saying life is meaningless so how can..?"

"I changed my mind."

"But...Why?"

"Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomically they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing."

"And yet in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeeting; siring this precise son, that exact daughter..."

"...until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children copeting for fertilization, it was you, only you that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold...that is the crowning unlikelihood. The Thermodynamic miracle."

"But...if me, my birth, if thats a thermodynamic miracle...I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!"

"Yes. Anybody in the world."

"...But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget...I forget."

"We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away."

"Come...dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."

"Dry your eyes...and let's go home."

(From Watchmen: Alan Moore)