I really tried. No more of this presing the limits of sleep deprivation.

I put myself to bed at a reasonable hour last night, and finished reading two books I had only a couple of chapters left with. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami and the old classic Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth. I have slowly been making my way through Murakami's published works. He's an absorbing writer even though after a while all his plots and characters start to ring the same. He has these preoccupations with wells and water and the underground/underworld and birds and Western music and conspiracy theories. Not to mention, unapologetically sexual women paired up with a passive everyman. In fact, his work is so cryptically archetypal and mythological that it oftens comes across as highly manic/depressive. In spite of or maybe because of these factors, I will continue to read all and any Murakami that comes my way. I recently enoyed his non-fiction exploration, Underground, of the 1995 Aum sarin gas attacks in Japan's subways. A fascinating read. Murakami is in the unique position of being part of and yet removed enough from Japanese culture to really examine it. Anyway, in short his books only stoke the fires of my itch (?) to travel in the Far East.

Portnoy's Complaint is a very different piece of work. I remember reading it in elementary school/junior high (I was a precocious reader, ok?) and not really relating to it. At Bookshop Santa Cruz (love, love, love this store) last week it was on the sale desk for $4.99, and I figured why not? This book just set the literary scene on fire when it came out in the late 60's. Roth is kind of like the male counterpart of Erica Jong (I wonder if they ever 'made it'? Oh no, I forgot Jewish women make Roth impotent) of the guilt-ridden-sexually-fucked-up-but-exceedingly-experimental East Coast Jew in post-traditional, post-Leave it to Beaverstein America. But anyway, lots of other writers have been doing the same thing now for a long time; Bellow, Chabon et al. Some parts of it were a hoot, some of it were painfully close to home, mostly very well-written, though some parts were whiny and draggy. There are several mentions of Union, New Jersey, a town quite close to my heart. Certain parts did make me horny. The picture of Roth on the back cover was a major, major turn off. Roth has ridden the wave of this scandalous novel for the past 30 years. He still gets to come off as frank and dirty and raw and racy. I read a snippet of his latest book -- the title escapes me -- which was excerpted in The New Yorker last year. Just because it had an unnamed narrator (which Jeanette Winterson had already done 10 years ago in Written on the Body) it got all this crazy acclaim. As a younger generation, and therefore more cynical, reader, believe me -- skip it, it has the same tired old formula going.

So, I read these two books until 11:30 and then found that all the Swedish fish I had been eating all day long wouldn't let me get to sleep. I tossed and turned and annoyed Sam for an hour before I went and got some dipenhydramine (my dirty little secret) and conked myself out.

For the third day straight, my alarm failed to go off. (I swear I tested it last night before I went to bed!) Luckily, I sat straight up at 7:10 and got Sam to drive me to work.

Now, I'm procrastinating and not doing any of my own writing.