Sometimes this stuff works to great effect, and sometimes it merely comes off as super-pretentious. But even when dude’s at his worst, I just like the way he puts words together; for whatever reason, on a sentence-to-sentence level, he can kind of get into my head in a way that not many other writers can.

I guess his shtick is similar to Pynchon’s, although the Pynchon I’ve read (which isn’t a lot – the Crying of Lot 49 and like half of Gravity’s Rainbow) strikes me as blatantly, gratingly masturbatory. I guess that’s unfair. I should read more of his stuff.

I liked Murakami a lot in high school, but the more I read him, the more vapid his stuff seems. Especially, like, his short stories: they used to seem really profound and quasi-poetic but when I reread them now they’re fucking sterile and kind of pointless.

And yeah, PKD’s science fiction is fucking great. I think there’s an irony in that a lot of the vividness of his best work comes from the way he powered through writing it, without getting all bogged down in self-consciously trying to write “well” or trying to be “literary.”

Even when his prose got sloppy (I seem to remember this (unintentionally hilarious) line in Do Androids Dream of Etc where he actually uses the word “friendlily”), I get the impression that it’s just because dude was “overflowing” “with” “ideas.” Or whatever.

I guess to its credit, the show is sort of self-aware as far as that goes, but that self-awareness is never particularly obvious until maybe the finale, or until Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I think is a legitimately great show, largely because it loses the uncomfortably smug condescension that Seinfeld (both the show and the guy) had.

I remember that I used to quote Seinfeld all the time with this dick that I’d later get into a fistfight with back in high school. That guy was serious clown shoes. He’d always quote Seinfeld or the Simpsons at every other moment. When he tried to act cool in front of the other kids, he’d try to apply a line from Seinfeld to whatever lame high school drama our class was going through. None of my classmates watched Seinfeld and wouldn’t get it if they did. Seventy-five percent of my class didn’t speak English very well and even if they could understand that the language, they weren’t familiar with the context of that New York Jewish middlebrow intellectual comedy thing that Seinfeld was going for.

When his jokes would fall flat, he’d translate them into Russian. Kids would then tell him to shut the fuck up or they’d call him a faggot. That guy got a lot of abuse in high school and he was one of the few people that deserved all of it and more. I’m not going to mention what he did that got him so hated, but it was pretty low, even lower than I’d ever sink.

I also used to watch Friends and not be immediately disgusted with it. I rather even liked certain portions of it. That alone should render any aesthetic judgment that I make pointless. It makes me hang my head in shape. I couldn’t help it though. Friends had people that lived in their own apartments and had sex. Since I had yet to experience either of those things, I assumed that that was just how twenty-somethings lived. Having no lived in my own apartment and had sex, I can say that I’ve been ripped off by a bunch of hack TV writers.

It seems to me that the shows that seem most worthy of veneration now were the Simpsons and Married with Children. Now that shit had class.

I’ve never been a fan of Delillo. He struck me as pulp fiction for academics back when I was a bitter undergrad. There was something of a douchebag in him, I felt. I got the same feeling from reading Pynchon, Murakami and Stephenson. I may be wrong, though. I think I’ll give him another shot one of these days.

I actually looked up Delillo on wiki right now and found out that we graduated from the same faculty at the same university. He and I took classes in the same rooms, some forty years apart.

What does this mean? It doesn’t mean shit.

About those dreams of being a famous fiction writer. Let me tell you a nice little story. Philip K. Dick spent a good chunk of his life dreaming of being a respected writer of “serious” fiction. He wrote at least six “mainstream” novels that were all rejected back in their day. He thought he was doing this sci-fi paperback shit for money, which wasn’t even good money. I remember him saying that all the years he put into researching and writing the Man in the High Castle brought him in about 800 bucks.

And, well, Dick never got a chance to enjoy money or any lasting fame during his lifetime. He was pretty well-known during the seventies, but he only experienced decent money a few months before he died.

The point is, many authors aren’t aware of their real strengths. Dick’s mainstream fiction wasn’t even all that great, while his sci-fi grows more profound and farseeing with each day.

Today was a little better than yesterday, at least. Maybe the hardest part is just establishing that initial routine that at least puts me in the right environment to get shit done.

So happy I don’t have to memorize much for school…