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2002-10-25
Suckage, novels, and Sadako!

I suck.

Yeah, I stopped giving myself excuses for why I don't post. I could say that I was tired. I could say that I was busy. But I know I'd be lying to myself so, instead, all I can say is that I suck.

I mean, it's not like I don't update the livejournal several times each day. It's not like I don't update stuff on Dymphna.net regularly.

It's just this. I put it off and put it off and put it off and then I go "Oh, I'm too tired to even think about this!"

Ugh.

I just...I don't know. I have a lot on my mind and yet I don't. I'm just coming up with strange stuff in my head, but I'm never anywhere where I can write it.

Maybe it's the result of too many books. After I got all that Murakami, I started reading it, slowly but surely. I finished Sputnik Sweetheart pretty quickly, which was a good read, but got a bit frayed at the end...like I'm guessing it was supposed to. I started reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World, but I wasn't really in the mood for really out there postmodern stuff. It makes me feel like I should be wearing a black turtleneck and bleach my hair and read existentialist philosophy, and I'm really way too much of a shallow glittery creature for that.

And besides, I threw out most of my black turtlenecks.

So I started reading Fingersmith by Sarah Waters again -- the Booker Prize hype got to me and I figured I needed something light and dykeadelic. And it's a good read. Did I mention that it was a good read when I first got it? I probably did.

And I'm sure The Secret Life Of Pi is a good book, but the author's interview right after winning the Booker Prize was so extremely pretentious...ugh. I wanted to smack him and make him work in a fast food joint before he could even get close to a keyboard.

After this, I'll probably go back to Murakami. I read After The Quake, his most recent work, a collection of short stories that all take place right after the Kobe quake (but not actually involved with the quake at all), and that was really good. He has this way of taking the most basic things, the single tiny things that no one really notices, and subtly and carefully makes them the most important thing you can possibly think of.

Sometimes his work feels passionless -- people not really feeling, just thin plastic frames covering bags of air, but I got that from Banana Yoshimoto too, and I think it might be the fact that they're both in translation. Translation sucks spirit out of text. It hides it behind the grammar and the syllables, trying to get it to fit within a new structure.

Although I don't know. Machi Tawara's Salad Anniversary, which is a book that I will never ever find again, apparently, and I deeply regret ever letting someone else borrow it because they certainly never brought it back, worked really well in translation. But that could be because it was poetry, and the translator really had to try and keep the structure and style as it should be.

I don't know. It's something I think about.

But it also explains why I made the japanese literature diaryring.

Tomorrow, I get to go shopping by myself. The husband's come down with a cold, and in between tea and sympathy, I have to go out and buy my Halloween costume.

Hopefully, I'll find it for really cheap. I just need a long white dress and a long black wig. I'm going to try and find a wig where it'll be easy for me to drop it in front of my face, and then -- boom! I'm Sadako!

Okay, a heavyset white Sadako, but what the hell, it's enough.

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