Random Notes to Self

I finished Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood yesterday, and now I’m reading Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy. I liked Murakami’s book a lot and somehow it led me to read Kureishi’s next.

Yesterday while vacuuming I listened to Four Tet’s Rounds. Kieran Hebden, who is Four Tet, apparently collects sounds on his laptop, then assembles songs from them. I thought about recreating his songs by trying to find similar sounds. I guess that would be the only possible way of doing covers of his music.

I listened again to Daniel Libeskind’s Proms lecture, in which he mentions Orpheus and Amphion, about which there are stories of how they played their lyres and cities appeared around them – in the case of Amphion it was Thebes, but I haven’t been able to found anything on Orpheus causing a city to be built.

Speaking of Greek plays, the following passage in Norwegian Wood stayed with me. Toru Watanabe, the protagonist, talks to his friend Midori’s father, who has cancer and is lying on his deathbed:

“What marks [Euripides’s] plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. [...] A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple – a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ’You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.’ There’s almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides [...]”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how ideas can be explored by writing novels. It’s not as if I have thought that non-fiction is freer than fiction, but I haven’t considered the richness of exploring ideas in fiction form; non-fiction now seems very constrained. If you know of any good examples of books that explore particular ideas in fiction form, please drop me a note.