Convenience Store Woman – Sayuku Murata

Convenience Store Woman (Buurtsupermens) is about an Asperger-like girl in her thirties who works as a substitute worker in a typical small Japanese neighborhood supermarket from the age of 18.

She has excellent powers of observation.

The neighborhood supermarket is a place that is completely normalized, and recovery will soon come for you, too.

Life at the neighborhood supermarket is entirely predictable for Keiko, and she loves it. However, she meets deadbeat Shiraha, and he changes her life. Shiraha’s arrival throws her structured life into disarray and turns it into chaos.

Just in time, she realizes that she was born a Convenience Store Woman, and that is where she finds happiness.

It is a strange story about fitting into society by not fitting in, which seems to be a theme in Sayuku Murata’s work, as Earthlings (Aardbewoners) has a similar theme. However, that book is way more grim than the light-hearted style of Convenience Store Woman.

The Key – Junichiro Tanizaki

In Tanizaki’s The Key (Dutch: De sleutel), an elderly couple live somewhat detached lives from each other. Both keep a secret diary. They write about their lives from their perspectives, speculating about the other’s motivations. Both know from each other that the other keeps a diary. They both suspect each other of reading the other’s diary and leave messages in their diaries intended for the other to read. But both write they do not read each other’s diary. But only the reader knows that.

They lead a bizarre sex life with each other, with the man more or less voluntarily drugging the woman, and only in that situation can they genuinely make passionate love. After the man dies (during the act), the woman starts reading his diary (she writes in her diary). She continues her diary, and a bizarre spin ensues, where the truth turns out to be quite different.

The woman’s diary is reminiscent of Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book.

I am a Cat – Soseki Natsume

In I am a Cat (Ik ben een kat in Dutch), a rather headstrong and intelligent observant cat moves into a teacher’s home. The book follows the cat’s observations and interactions with the teacher and his circle of friends, providing an interesting perspective on human behavior.

Ik ben een kat - Soseki Natsume

The cat, with a critical eye, narrates his master’s inflated behavior, revealing the human tendency to feign superiority and the struggle between habits and customs. In a humorous twist, he exposes the triviality that surrounds his master.

Seth Godin – The Practice

Encouragement for the creative mind.

Reassurance is futile. Attitude is a skill. Produce with intent. The work is too important to be left to how we feel. Instead, trust the process and do the work.

Change your actions first. We become what we do.

Peculiar means specific. The standard narrative pushes us to fit in, but through specificity and peculiarity, we stand out. Change comes from idiosyncratic voices. Be more specific and less generic.

Attachment to status, outcome, and opinions brings nothing. There is no such thing as a foundation. The process of engaging with the genre, the audience, the change ís the foundation. Become unattached.

The practice is about doing it, more than once, regularly, until it becomes… practice.
Ship on a schedule.

Credentials are just a piece of paper. Instead, create a body of work that shows you have insight, experience, and concern.

The work is an infinite game. No winners, no losers. (The reward for work is more work, said Tom Sachs.)

Determination counts (versus inspiration).

Chop wood, carry water.

Mise en place is preparation. The muse shows up when we do the work.

Seek desirable difficulty to seek improvement. Be uncomfortable.

Genre states your idiosyncratic work. Generic is a trap. Learning a skill is attitude and cohort.

Constraints feed creativity.

Be paranoid about mediocrity.

Many, many quotable sentences. A companion to The War of Art and Do The Work.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, by Satoshi Yagisawa

Takako, a young woman from Tokyo, quits her office job and comes to live and work in the small second-hand bookstore of her uncle, Satoru, in a small provincial town.

In her life in Tokyo, she was indecisive, reserved, and treated like dirt by her boyfriend. After summoning the courage to confront her boyfriend and tell him the truth, Takako takes a decisive step forward, leaving behind the negativity and moving on with her life.

Her uncle’s wife suddenly reappears with her husband after years of absence. As if nothing had happened. With her aunt Momoko, she heads into the mountains for a weekend. Momoko turns out to have had an abortion years ago and then struggled with life. After the mountain outing, Momolo disappears again as shyly as she has returned. Takako breaks her vow of secrecy and informs her uncle Satoru of the secret his wife is carrying. He searches and finds his wife again, and they become closer than ever.

Secretive as a Murakami. With a fine list of quoted Japanese writers at the back of the book.

Werner Herzog – Every Man For Himself And God Against All

The memoirs of Werner Herzog.

Herzog tells us about his tough youth in Bavaria, factually, as if it were normal. His family is so poor that they can not afford to wear shoes and underwear in summer. He grows up in deep poverty in the almost fairy tale world of the Bavarian mountains—a hard life, his parents somewhat loveless. Herzog brings us from these archaic times into the internet age.

He jumps back to the chaotic times around the Second World War and the weird family situation. His parents are members of the Nazi party. His father is a wild man who married three times—a good-for-nothing, selfish klaploper. Herzog moves around and does not belong anywhere. He lives in the German post-war rubble.

The story jumps back and forth in time and tells about crazy accidents, catastrophes, wounds, illnesses, and crashes. Throughout the book, Herzog speaks about the challenges he takes on without explicitly mentioning them. He seems to have a preference for the risky and weird, which is reflected in the extraordinary topics of his films.

His diary notes under the title Ballad of the Little Soldier are terrible stories about child soldiers. He films people on death row.

He has worked on several films with the crazy and genius actor Klaus Kinsky. From the stories, Kinsky emerges even more disturbed than what we already knew about him.

Herzog’s writing style is entertaining. He starts a story, jumps back in time, returns to the story, jumps forward, and so on. Which feels very natural.

Can’t summarize. A relentless man is probably the best summary.

Norwegian Wood the movie

Yesterday, I re-watched an episode of Twin Peaks, which remains a fantastic David Lynch classic. Being somewhat low-energy, I scrolled through my Justwatch list to see if any other exciting films were available. There, I found Norwegian Wood.

Recently, I reread Haruki Murakami’s book. I still liked it very much. (I rarely reread a single book, with exceptions being Haruki Murakami, Gerrit Krol, Douglas Coupland, Derek Sivers and Seth Godin)
The movie Norwegian Wood has a very similar atmosphere to the book. The film has the typical Murakami-like alienation from the world.

“Of course.”

“Is that a catchphrase of yours?”

I found this again in “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” (in Dutch – De stad en zijn onvaste muren).

→ The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Demon Copperhead

I finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. A very good book that reminds me of multiple books for multiple reasons: Nick Cave’s The Ass Saw the Angel (alcoholic boy and the atmosphere) and Salingers Catcher in the Rye (a dive into the adolescent mind), for example.

Demon is the son of a junky mother and a father that died when Demon was still young.

The boy ends up in child care and lives with foster parents who are only interested in the allowance that comes with the care. He finds his loving grandmother, who finds a better home for him. The boy is talented in sports and drawing. He has some luck but makes the wrong decisions and ends up addicted to pills himself and with a girlfriend who is addicted to any substance, including heroin.

Will-power and friends try to drag him out of a downward spiral.

My, what a read!

One dystopia the other – Neil Postman

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman compares George Orwell’s dystopian worldview in 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s in Brave New World.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Postman argues that Huxley’s dystopia might be closer to reality. Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. The situation in the Western world, and especially the United States, is indeed terrifyingly even more spot on than in 1985. In today’s China, and even more so in Russia, Orwell’s reality, where Big Brother watches over the people, seems to be the state of affairs.

How astonishingly farsighted were Huxly and Orwell in 1932 resp 1949.

Remarkable mathematical truths

Deductive systems are either incomplete or inconsistent. Meaning

  • Inconsistent: they contain contradictions. Statements can be true and false in the same deductive system.
  • Incomplete: Statements can be found that can not be proven to be true or false.

Gödel proved this for us.

Wittgenstein formulated something similar:

The truth is built of true facts and untrue facts: facts that are not based on a system of observation yet are true anyway. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein seems to disagree with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Food for a lasting scientific debate. Anyway, Wittgenstein was looking at language and philosophy, not at mathematics.

Final remarkable mathematical truth for now from Cantor.

Cantor proved that one infinity is not the same as the other infinity. He developed a way to compare infinite sets and describe how infinite sets with different characteristics exist.

As an example, Cantor proved that real numbers are more numerous than the set of natural numbers. While both are infinite. He also invented a way to operate on infinite sets.

Cantor ended up in a mental hospital, which seems to be viewed as as heroic achievement among mathematicians—an opinion I do not share.

I recall reading The Mystery of the Aleph by Amir D. Aczel about Cantor. Unfortunately, I have lost my notes and the book. This book was very accessible, I do recall that.