I am curious about Vonnegut’s view of religion having read it – some quick research (and much of his novels) suggests he was an atheist, but I can’t see a definitive answer. His characters appear to knowingly participate in grand cosmic jokes – whether objectively they are intended to have meaning in the context of the novel is, perhaps intentionally, hard to ascertain.

Where’s the cat? Where’s the cradle?

Along with the wonderful V, I am reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.  So far, I am hard pressed to think of a novel I have enjoyed less.

The novel apparently examines “identities and personal relationships in a multicultural society” and “taps into universal tensions and dilemmas around family life and child-rearing”.  So far, though, I have found the ‘multicultural society’ to be utterly contrived (roll call: indian, greek, anglo saxon, aboriginal, jewish, christian, muslim, working class, young, old, feminist, sexist, etc etc etc) and the ‘tensions’ and ‘dilemmas’ to be predominantly the product of characters who come across as fundamentally unpleasant, selfish, self-obsessed people with few, if any redeeming characteristics.  I remain hopeful that the next chapter will contain a bus crash which finishes the lot of them off.

If this is contemporary, multicultural Australia then I want out.

I am thoroughly enjoying V by Thomas Pynchon so far.

The novel is roughly divided between the listless drifting of post WWII New York City, the byzantine European intrigues of pre-WWI Florence and the surreal horrors late 19th Century/early 20th Century German colonial Africa.  As well as being a fascinating read in its own right it presages the event’s of the wonderful Gravity’s Rainbow via certain characters and events, such as the extermination of the Herero tribe by the Germans and the character of Kurt Mondaugen.

Many of the themes are typically Pynchon-esque, such as the theory of dentists as the natural replacement for psychiatrists and the notion of a plastic surgeon who regards surgery as a means of revealing the authentic nature of his patients rather than hiding it.  At its heart is the quest for the unknown (and perhaps unknowable) ‘V’ – a city, a woman, or something else.

Needless to say, it’s a fascinating insight into a strange American era.  The book is filled with tension between the sudden possibilities of life in the postwar United States – the trajectory hinted at in the Great Gatsby followed through to its logical conclusion where cars, sex, alcohol, divorce, travel and the wild, strange sound of jazz are unexpectedly available – and the purposeless drifting and nihlism of living without any great force of history or pre-determined role or destiny to drive one along.  The 1960s were about to shake American society to its core, and the real life characters portrayed by Kerouac hum with the barely contained energy of the coming explosion.

In San Francisco we stopped in at Vesuvio for a beer – a bar visited by Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac:

I have never read any Cormac McCarthy before.  This is grim, raw, intermittently violent, and relentlessly dark.  The style, which grated slightly at first due to its wilful simplicity (no ‘distracting’ punctuation and the like and very Hemingwayish) has grown on me, and despite conveying a bleak and difficult world the prose flies by.

The story is of a father who is travelling across a ruined world after some ill-defined post-apocalyptic event (which seems to me almost certain to be nuclear war, but is alleged in some quarters to be the Biblical end-times) where the majority of humanity has disappeared and of the survivors, most have been reduced to animalistic behaviour and outright brutal savagery.  The commentary on humanity and the notion of a completely hopeless world are sharp and stay with you after you stop reading.  Not recommended for the middle of the night or people who have problems with frank depictions of cannibalism.

This is soon to be a film starring Viggo Mortenson, which seems like perfect casting to me: The Road trailer.

Totally fascinating.  Written by Mervyn Peake who was himself quite fascinating: a brilliant writer and artist who died prematurely of Parkinson’s disease, with many ideas yet to be reduced to written form.  So far the book is something akin to what you would get if Dickens wrote a fantasy novel.

So far so good.  I’ve read The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night which I very much enjoyed, and this seems equally good.

Poor farming practices, drought and wind combined to strip the land of its topsoil and blanket everything in endless dust for several years.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons).

Rather ponderously paced, but an interesting insight into the drastic effect the corporatisation of farming had in the U.S. The theme of vast, anonymous commercial organisations arbitrarily destroying productive industries and lives certainly resonates in 2009.

On the whole, the higher end of the scale matches with my personal tastes (Dylan, Ben Folds, Pink Floyd, Radiohead), so I think we can safely conclude that this is 100% accurate and totally scientifically valid.  One thing I did find surprising was that jazz falls somewhere in the lower-middle region of the scale, given that most jazz people seem to me to be highly skilled musicians and often very knowledgable about not only music but many other aspects of culture.  On reflection, though, it occurs to me that my jazz playing/listening friends and acquaintances tend to struggle in structured environments (e.g. the final year of high school) and also tend to vigorously pursue, er, alternative studies, such as the study of drug and alcohol abuse through first hand experience, to perfect their art.

“Books that Make You Dumb” is also interesting, although it lacks the pretty coloured graphs of the musical variant.  Dan Brown and The Holy Bible both appear at the end of the spectrum you would expect, although I was very surprised to see “The Alchemist” in the top 10, a novel I found trite, preachy and simplistic in every respect.