Haruki Murakami Memorial Footnote I

I gave this post a Roman Numeral because Mr. Murakami will be back. The Wind up Bird Chronicle has its main character living in a well looking for his lost wife for the good part of the book. How could I have a post like today's and not mention this book? I'm going to go climb in a metaphoric well now.

Paul Auster Memorial Footnote

Man in the Dark is my most recently completed novel. I loved the concept of an alternate universe in which the United States in 2007 is in the midst of a civil war(probably the result of being sucked through a black hole as his character wakes up in a literal black hole with bombs and gunfire overhead) . The novel also dealt with the dreaded "R" word -- "relationships."

Kobo Abe Memorial Footnote

I have a predliction for surrealistic Japanese fiction. The Woman in the Dunes is a good movie too. Anytime a guy gets tossed down a giant sand dune with a beautiful woman and he is left with nothing else to do but shovel sand and fuck a beautiful woman, you have the makings of a great novel.

Stephen Hawking Memorial Note

I saw Stephen Hawking once about fifteen years ago when I paid to go see him at the local university’s sports stadium (same place I saw the Dalai Llama, NCAA basketball and the Harlem Globetrotters). Given the cost of tickets, I opted for nose bleed seats. Hawking is the only physicist I know of that could fill a university basketball arena. He wheeled out on to the stage and his mechanical voice was broadcast over the basketball PA system as information about all the weirdness of modern physics filled the arena. There wasn’t much to his stage presence. Not to be crass about his disability, but it was a little bit like those old science fiction movies with the talking brains -- a disembodied voice, wildly intelligent with scientific theories that one hundred years ago only a mad man could spout. Even the title of his book suggests the mad scientist connotation: The Universe in a Nutshell.

Charles Dickens Memorial Footnote

I vaguely remember somewhere that Charles Dickens had a lot of kids. This means that he had at least some fucking in his life. I can’t vouch for the quality or quantity, just the fecundity. I can at least tell you that like Charles Dickens, I am utilizing the Victorian literary mechanism of naming my characters, "Bent" and "Vice" after both physical and mental traits of the characters if the cliffhanger has been too much for you.

Douglas Coupland Memorial Footnote

It didn’t start out this way, but it appears that I’m going to be doing memorial footnotes of footnotes to various authors. Unlike David Foster Wallace, Douglas Coupland, the author of the concept and the novel "Generation X", he is not dead yet. The idea that only 20% of the population understands irony was totally stolen by me from his novel, J-pod. It is true though. Really.

David Foster Wallace Memorial Blog Footnote

David Foster Wallace died last week of an apparent suicide, the ultimate footnote to his life. Live by the footnote, die as a footnote of a footnote. I mourned his passing because I’m a contemporary of his in age at least. I haven’t made my name in the field of sarcastic, post modern, hyper-ironic literary fiction quite yet, but barring the ingestion of copious amounts of narcotics or an errant bullet in my brain, I just may succeed in not dying quite as soon. So if I can live to the ripe old age of ninety, I have exactly the same amount of time as David Foster Wallace to make a literary name for myself before I die.