“The only way to get out of that worm universe is to dream another symbolic dream.” – Haruki Murakami, ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’
All I really mean by that title is that I saw Sheep Detectives this weekend. It’s impossible for me to objective about a movie I’ve seen in the theater with my seven-year-old while said seven-year-old was having a good time. If you, like me, love movie theaters and want to pass that love along to your under-10 children, go see Sheep Detectives. It’s no Babe, but it’s a cozy British murder-mystery with sheep that talk to each other (the humans can’t hear them tho).
Anyway, we got a new Lazy & Entitled Podcast this week! I interviewed Tom Urwin from Chicago noisepunk band Weaklung, Brendan and I talk about things we see on the sidewalk that make us happy, and there’s a reading from Studs Terkel. Apple | Spotty | SoundCloud
What I’ve Been Reading Lately
A book that also posits that there is more to sheep than meets the eye. A book that breezes by while also managing to have depth. A book that I was reminded was really good when Sean deLone blogged about it a few months back. A book that’s been sitting on my shelf at least 17 years, and finally got its first re-read. I love re-reading good books. I’m talking, of course, about A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami: the second Murakami I ever read, some 16 years ago. I’ve only done this one, After The Quake, and Kafka On The Shore. Why haven’t I read more Murakami? I think the length of some of those novels put me off. It’s been so long that this was almost entirely new to me, and boy was it a delight. It does all the good noir things: aimless, sort-of-lost-everything-but-still-fine protagonist, shadowy crime syndicates, mysteriously cool women, long-lost friendships (not unlike The Third Man), but then it adds in a dash of the magical. Are people possessed by sheep in this novel? What exactly do we make of The Sheep Man? But I get ahead of myself. The thrust is this: our narrator works at an advertising agency. His best friend, whom he hasn’t seen in years, sends him a letter with a picture of a sheep pasture. He uses it in a print ad, and it attracts the attention of a crime syndicate. In the sheep pasture, you see, is a sheep with a star pattern on its wool. The right wing head of the crime organization wants that sheep. They had a prior relationship, this right winger crimelord and the star sheep. And so it is demanded that the narrator find the sheep. There’s also, for the record, some interesting stuff about the history of sheep-raising in Japan.
There is a sense of the otherworldly, especially since the course of the novel takes us away from Tokyo and into the frigid mountains of Hokkaido. Not a lot of people are named. Our narrator has an ex-wife, an business partner he breaks up with, an old friend known only as “The Rat,” a new girlfriend with beautiful ears, and a hometown bartender known as J. It’s not hard to see why 20-year-old me loved this—that sense of living in spite of impending likely doom, with a healthy helping of whiskey as both an aid and the thing that keeps me from seeing exactly what the threat is. Either I forgot or it didn’t register that the shadowy cabal threatening the narrator was specifically right wing, with their tentacles already covering all of civic life before the good people had a chance to get their shoes on. What do you do in a world like that? Romantically, a lot—fight, resist, save someone, whatever. Practically? Sometimes you just do whatever the right winger threatening you makes you do. You don’t learn much, but you do change.
Either this book fizzles at the end, or I finished it on a Sunday night. The narrator’s girlfriend got a raw deal, I hope she’s doing okay. Then again, it’s possible that a good noir is most exciting when the mystery is still in the air, when the inevitably hollowed-by-capitalism center is revealed. Famously, no one can explain The Big Sleep, not even Raymond Chandler. I watched The Maltese Falcon with my parents one time and they felt deflated by the end. I said something like “I think the point is that ‘stuff that dreams are made of’ line” and I don’t think that interpretation did much for them. The end of Under The Silver Lake, a movie that I love, makes me feel about as hollow and hopeless as anything I’ve ever seen. It’s not the biggest tragedy, life can move on, but you feel like you’ve taken a few body blows from the world. So me dragging through the ending because I wanted better for a couple characters feels like it’s a pretty successful noir. I want to read Wind/Pinball and Dance Dance Dance soon, too.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? How about some Weaklung? After all, one of their guitarists is on the podcast this week.
- This week in ICE: Unauthorized ICE ‘wellness checks’ by police at Ohio schools draw outrage by Stephen Starr in The Guardian, Tortured In El Salvador. Detained For Over A Year. Then Deported Anyway by Rachel Hinton in Block Club, Feds “conducting surveillance” at domestic violence courthouse, internal documents show by Dave Byrnes in Unraveled, ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir by Joseph Cox in 404.
- Really enjoyed the homie Juan Martinez’s defense of “trashy” horror, the offbeat stuff, the weirdo shit, the one-sentence long horror novels that win Pulitzer Prizes for Evanston-based authors. Look, I figure I’ll always be on the margins, as a poet who writes horror. That’s fine. It’s nice to see Daniel Kraus get rewarded, though. I could envision awards in Juan’s future, too.
- My yearly concerted effort to watch some WNBA games and definitely take my son to one starts here, with Maitreyi Anantharaman’s WNBA preview on Defector
- Will Lesbians and Gambling Save the American Sports Bar? by Amy McCarthy in Ravenous. May I tease you with the kicker: “There’s always some folks trying to make the world a better place, and they’re always working in opposition to those who are looking to make a quick buck.” Ravenous is a new subscription-based, worker-owned food website. I read this piece in Defector
- She’s right to say it: Melissa Barrera Thinks The Cast of Scream 7 Are ‘Scabs’ by Germain Lussier in Gizmodo. Like Scream but don’t care about Scream 7? Check out our second-most recent L&E Podcast episode Apple | Spotty | SoundCloud
What’re you still doing here? Summer’s coming, have you listened to tide/edit yet?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Hey, if anyone swings by your bar asking about sheep with stars on their backs? Help them out. They’re in deeper trouble than you realize.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris