As I mentioned yesterday, I read Murakami's After the Quake. It's a small collection of short stories. For those of you who don't know Murakami, he's written a number of pretty amazing books, including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Dance, Dance, Dance, Norwegian Wood, After Dark, and many, many, others (those are the one's I've read, or, in the case of Wood, the one I've started). I think he's billed as Japan's premier novelist or something, but, then again, that could just be this ignorent American's mistake.
All of the short stories in Quake are set, as you might imagine from the title, after the Kobe earthquake. Murikami almost always includes these empty, disaffected characters, some almost-unsolvable mystery, tangible manifestations of emotions and emotional manifestations of physical objects. The objects and happenings in his works are almost always unconnected, but there's an emotional logic or a gut-level connction between them that's hard to pin down. His stuff has the tendency to hit you later on: when you're trying to fall asleep or outside walking to dinner.
Check it out.
Lastly, I want to highlight another Oberlin blog: Tendencies by filmaker and generally rad dude, Jon C____.
You can find scripts he's written, brief write-ups of shit he likes, a lot of things that go over my head because I know shit about films and, apparently, have horrible taste in them (at least, that's what I hear from my friends who know what they're talking about, and, you know what, Sydney White is an exquisite film, and I don't care what you say, Cody). You'll also note some divisions on the blogroll. Not that you, my faithful reader(s) care. Enjoy, nonetheless.
Later on Oberliner, more Doom Patrol and the re-incarnation of a blog.
More will be revealed.
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