Saturday, January 7, 2012

Sultry Moon-Monsters Are Dissolving

Finished Murakami's 1Q84 and will be thinking about it for months if not until I reread it in two or three years - it's now in the reread rotation. I urge you to read it - it is an astonishing feat of imagination on multiple levels, some which I'm sure haven't dawned on me yet, some which I'm sure will kaboom me out of nowhere in the years to come, some which I'm sure will never dawn on me even after rereadings. My initial takeaway: in a book about a parallel world with two moons in which Little People march out of a dead ogre's mouth, the redemptive power of love that saves the world is what seems most far-fetched, and that's not an accident.










FABLIAU OF FLORIDA

Wallace Stevens

Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,

Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.

Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.

There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.


4 comments:

  1. (Not trying to persuade you, just saying because I can...) Debt doesn't really have that setup. Not really any intro or prologue, possibly the first chapter counts as one, but certainly not really any conclusion laid out in one place. Just lots of little connections and kabooms along the way.

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  2. I've recalled it (from a major asshole in Hilltop's Chicago School-style econ dept - yay!) and will give it another try. I should amend my statement slightly to say, at least I no longer *buy* non-fiction since odds are overwhelming I'll only read the intro and conclusion.

    I'll give it a shot and hope to surprise myself.

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  3. Everything is fiction. Yes, that's quite precisely how deep I am. Precisely.

    Also: Norwood is the Red Door Store, less than a mile from our pothead friends at the North Norwood Quaker Academy.

    Of course it's not a real place. That the JutP guy is so surprised by that is...unsurprising. But when I first saw the sign, I immediately thought of the Red Door Store and SSFS--I think you would've too, if you'd seen the sign before Dan Reed got snippy about it.

    The real answer is that going north on Layhill Road from the ICC gets you to about the fourth or fifth most nowhere place in MoCo, and certainly the most nowhere place east of Sundown.

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  4. If you're taking requests: Queen Bitch; Hang on to Yourself (like tigers on vaseline!); John I'm Only Dancing: Panic in Detroit. Just for starters.

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