Reading and Thoughts as of Now - Alanis

 Hi all,

Thanks to me working full-time and being stressed out, this post is late. Great. Just great.

But anyway, going back to commenting on everything we have done in class so far. I wanted to begin with my impressions of the readings. For today we had to read 2 stories about spaghetti, and first off, they made me a little hungry thinking about it. These stories both talk about spaghetti, but in different ways. I find it interesting how Murakami is not a big fan of lists even when it is convenient to use them. In The Year of Spaghetti, when talking about where he got his ingredients, he uses the paragraph form to talk about where he got his spices, the cookbook, tomatoes, and his other ingredients, whereas the other story of spaghetti outright lists all of the ingredients that will be used to make spaghetti - a very big difference between the two works.  Also, I like seeing how Murakami takes the style of other authors and makes it something of his own. Thinking about that in the context of intertextuality, I still think originality is possible, and as someone mentioned in our discussion, one can have “inspiration” from other sources and end up making a product of their own. I don’t see any harm in inspiration from others.

I also wanted to take a moment to state my opinions on Chandler and comment a little bit on Murakami’s relationship with Chandler’s work as a way to influence his own. My takeaway from Chandler (jokingly) is that sometimes faking your death and starting a new life could be as cool as it sounds in the movies, but doing that in real life is near impossible. Cool thought, though, and that definitely was not an ending I was expecting. As I said in class, I finished the book and said “What did I just read?” out loud. I can see why Murakami and many other authors took inspiration from Chandler. I mean, Philip Marlowe is full of himself, but not really, but it’s shown to us that he’s prone to failure and distractions even if he never really admits to it. It really makes him seem human in some ways and a stranger in others, but still a cool character nonetheless. The narrator in A Wild Sheep Chase seems to mirror the qualities of Philip Marlowe, but I think that Boku is even more nonchalant about many things than Marlowe is. 

All in all, I’m having fun reading everything so far and it’s a lot of information. I hope I retain it.