Haruki Murakami, Rich Boucher. Inspiration!

My Internet has been down for two and a half days.  It is up now!  What a time for it to be down… I had to take my son to a restaurant with Wi-Fi to get some work done.  Talk about dedication!  He was good for about 45 minutes.  I was thankful for that.

I picked up the September 5 issue of The New Yorker (an illusive market for small-timers like myself) because it has a story in it by Murakami.  He’s one of many authors I’ve been wanting to read more of.  His story, “Town of Cats” is so unbelievably good.  Please go read it!  It’s like a wave that looks non-threatening:  you have no idea of its lethality until it gets within a few feet of your face and then you’re reeling back.  Wow.  I am in utter awe of writers who can in so few words so deftly paint a portrait of an ever-changing, overly-complex relationship.  In this case, it is the relationship between Tengo and his father, who is never given a name (kind of like Roth’s Everyman).  In fact, no one has a name but Tengo.  The title comes from the name of a story read by Tengo to himself first, and then he reads it to his father.  So not only do we benefit from the introspection of this allusion, but the characters themselves are aware of a deeper meaning inherent  in that story-within-a-story… I’m not sure if this story Tengo reads is real – I tried to Google it, but came up short (I didn’t try that hard).  In either case, I found the story-within-a-story as compelling as the story itself.  Please, go read it!

On Tuesday night, I attended an Adobe Walls poetry open-mic to see Rich Boucher in action.  He’s a slam/performance poet.  I’ve met him before, and I’ve heard how wonderful his poetry is.  I had to check it out.  Wow.  Not only is his delivery stellar, but his poetry is so absurd to the point where it’s like art mocking art.  I normally am not a laugh out loud person at these kinds of things, but I was nearly doubled over in laughter.  I love when there’s so much self-deprecation in art.  Rich does such a poignant job of tamping something that most consider high-brow (poetry) and creating something low-brow and accessible – something that is uniquely his own.  I loved it.

Rejections: only two.  One from Boulevard, which was generic and the same as the one I got from them before, and another from Camera Obscura, which was the higher up rejection, but still the same as before.  No new publications to note, unfortunately.