Twin Breakfasts

Reminding me of Infinite Jest is one thing. Bringing Twin Peaks to mind is something completely different.

Yet, Rabo Karabekian's speech about his abstract painting shares a tone and purpose with Albert Rosenfield's explanation to Sheriff Truman about being a man of peace. Both are delivered to an antagonistic audience, spoken by someone defending a higher ground, and come across as perfectly sensible though outside of what might seem like common sense.

A yellow piece of tape on a canvas painted green being about the divinity of awareness is, after all, definitely outside of common sense's perception of such a thing. And Karabekian's calling the rest of the human person nothing more than a meat machine drives home his no-nonsense, I'm-saying-something-very-important tone.

And it feeds into the book's true climax. Not to mention affects the author himself, who just so happens to be present for Karabekian's speech.

Yeah, Breakfast of Champions is that kind of book. And I'm loving it.

A new post for a new book

If Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town is indicative of Jaw Bone Press's usual practices, they make very blocky books. And on a peculiarly stiff paper stock. Each page feels weirdly solid, as if it's a couple of more standard pages pressed together.

As a whole, this 272 page book feels unwieldy. Especially if you're holding it while reading and trying to not bend its spine.

Thankfully, this is a book about David Bowie.

Specifically, how his time spent in Berlin changed his career for the better. At least, that's the sense that I'm getting from the opening 40 pages. So far I've read about Bowie's becoming deeply addicted to cocaine, his growing obsession with the occult, and what sounds like a mental break from reality that resulted from the combination of the two.

Thomas Jerome Seabrook keeps foreshadowing what's to come, though. Things like why Iggy Pop didn't return to Hollywood's Oz Studio after one day of recording with Bowie in 1975, and what makes Bowie's Berlin Trilogy of albums such a critical success.

Much has been promised, and it's looking like Seabrook will deliver.

At the very least, Bowie's crazed obsession with the occult does help explain just what he was doing in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Even if that movie appearance was nearly 20 years later.

More pre-plot (P.P.) Infinite Jest (I.J.)

So now I know the story of Orin Incandenza. I know just how he fared as a junior tennis player, why he made the switch to football, and what became of him while his lady love was intercepted by his dad's obsession with film. It feels like I've just ingested a chunk of information broken off of an underground vein, like I've just taken in an entire pink salt sheet's worth of information.

And still the plot's obscured. Locked behind not a wall of ice that could easily melt, but a wall of salt that has to be licked away, stroke by stroke.

It's a shame, too, since the end of the last chapter, chronicling the antics and relations had on the bus ride back to E.T.A. from the tournament Hal and co. were attending was genuinely entertaining. Particularly in the same way that Ben Horne is entertained in the second season of Twin Peaks by old home movies; Wallace captures the feel of the teenage field trip bus ride excellently. And he's also not too far off the mark, when writing that grad school is a delay of the real world and an elongation of adolescence in an endnote (#94).

If only there were more references to people doing Pierre Trudeau impressions (pages 282-83), pre-plot Infinite Jest would be a more even read.

A Community of Stories

The Spoon River Anthology sounds like a fascinating read. It's definitely apparent that Hollander has a great deal of enthusiasm for the now nearly 100 year old collection of epitaphs, but that enthusiasm proves infectious.

Plus, as a sketch of a small town drawn in lines of character interaction definitely does seem quintessentially American. A group of people working together for some common purpose. Perhaps that purpose is a story, since all of the collection's characters are dead and so they can't exactly march in any activist cause.

More so, it's things like the Spoon River Anthology (based on Hollander's description of it as a collection of overlapping and interlocking stories) that laid the ground work for TV shows like Twin Peaks. After all, what is the oddity at the center of Twin Peaks if not the co-existence of so many varied and unique individuals that nonetheless form together into a mysterious town full of secrets?

The Sheep Revealed

If A Wild Sheep Chase is ever made into a movie, David Lynch has to direct the scene where the main character and his girlfriend go into the Dolphin Hotel. It's so much like the bank scene in the last episode of Twin Peaks. At the very least he should be consulted.

Fan-crew making aside, our lead characters next find some information to move forward on.

His girlfriend's ears are getting no secret messages, but it turns out that the Dolphin Hotel is home to a resource library about sheep, and the owner's eccentric father is the local authority on all things ovine. When the two go up to see him they learn the truth, and we as readers, learn that this sheep is some sort of bizarre spiritual force that has some sort of grand plan for the whole of humanity. As readers, we also no doubt guess that by the end of the book one or the other of the lead characters is going to be possessed by it. Maybe then we'll get a name, which might be pretty good.

Murakami's delivery of the history of Junitaki-cho (where their search has lead our heroes) as a narrative broken up by what the main actor does and observes between his own reading sessions is an excellent bit of first person expression. We're still firmly in this guy's head, even if we aren't quite privy to every last little thought of his. It's also interesting how the Ainu, the native people of Japan, are brought into the story through the relation of Junitaki-cho's history. The way the town's life-long Ainu resident's life is described makes me wonder if perhaps he had been possessed by the sheep-spirit-being.

At any rate, the story progresses and Murakami's power over written images is proven yet again when he compares the look and flight of a moth to a crumpled up piece of paper. Saying that the lead lady of the story looked older after the moth in question flew off of her is also curious, since it brings up ideas of time travel, but Murakami's clearly got enough going on in this book already.

Moments of Crisis

Okay, so the shit's really hit the fan at this point in Neuropath.

Thomas' son Frankie's been taken by Neil and as a nice little "fuck you" Neil killed the dog on his way out (or so I believe, since it's not yet been confirmed). Also, Nora's told Sam that she and Tom fucked a week earlier, and so Tom's relationship with Sam has been thrown up in the air as well. When asked by Atta and Gerard (the other two agents on the Neil case), Tom has described Neil's motive as going through and methodically showing how the brain constructs those concepts that people consider essential to and characteristic of humanity: pleasure, will/responsibility, spirituality, and love (so far, I've yet to find out if Neil gets around to any more).

Just as when any madman is figured out - or, when the one doing the figuring has figured said madman out as much as his capacity allows him to - it causes the figurer to break down. Thomas is no exception, as things begin to very quickly accumulate for him.

Plus, chapter 12 is the first and only one to be presented without a date and time attached. It stands alone in a crowd, a halo of emptiness around it, making it different, yet limited. Thomas' mental breakdown in this chapter reminds me of Harry Truman's in Twin Peaks, after the death of Josie.

Of course, Thomas is the grief stricken parent rather than the grief stricken lover, but for me the comparison stands. These two positions are comparable in my mind because they are both reactions to a deep loss, and in the terms that the book itself sets out, both are related to reproduction and the carrying on of genes, the mourning and grieving that go on in both situations are all about conditioned responses and impulses in the brain.

Still, I wonder if we'll get anything else from Frankie's perspective. He's been taken and Neil apparently put something in his brain that has his fear responses on loop. After this gets cleared up (assuming, of course, that it does) I'll be curious to see if Frankie's perspective on life has changed, or if Bakker reveals what I suspect - that Frankie is in fact Neil's own son.

While thinking about why Nora cheated on him even before their marriage, all I could think of was Jon Arryn's dying words: "The seed is strong." I'm waiting on the twist that all the book's blurbs rave about with great anticipation, and here I was worried that I'd see it coming!