I, like many Americans (I haven't followed this too closely, as is my promise, as always, to half-ass my interaction with anything as popular as television--though with the upcoming conversion from analogue transmission to digital, I should be losing my reception entirely in a matter of days), tuned in to most of Conan O'Brien's first week of hosting the Tonight Show. Out of curiosity, I suppose, and some loyalty to the years of my life where I was something of a Conan devotee (usual only bursts of devoutness a few months in length, correlated to a combination of TV-having and availability at the time slot in question). More loyalty to Conan the Simpsons writer, though, since the episodes that most obviously bear his mark are some of the greatest Simpsons episodes of all. Which is to say, I tuned in not necessarily hoping that it be all that funny, and mostly to see Conan sell out to old people demographics and not be nearly funny enough.
It's been okay, I guess. I've always thought the dude was a pretty good interviewer, and that seems to still be the case, and likely to hold the show together while the rest of the shit shores itself up. The only particularly disconcerting aspect to me has been Conan's habit of shouting excitingly after the crappy rock bands on his show play their crappy songs. If I was an old person, I'd never want to hear that kind of shouting.
Watching Conan, I also realized that I'd never bothered to watch Jimmy Fallon as his replacement on Late Night, so after Conan's first show I went ahead and "stuck around" to see what that shit was like. Having The Roots as his "house band," gains him some points, but Fallon is remarkably similar in my mind to Carson Daly; that is, I have no empathy with the kind of idiots and jocks or whoever that actually think the guy is funny or an appealing host. But I was watching it, figured I'd stick it out for at least the whole episode. I thought I would anyway, until Fallon got to his desk, said a special "hello" to hold-over viewers from Conan that had never seen the show before, then proceeded to pull out a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice and say that the night's show was sponsored by said beverage, then continued to have a conversation with his announcer about how good the stuff was. I realize that all television is advertising, but that's a bit much, isn't it? Turned the thing off. Disinterest has become boycott.
Really, though, I can't get myself all that worked up about talk shows.
Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #3: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
This book is a couple decades younger than the first couple entries of the Pete Can't Believe! books, having first appeared in English in 1997 (or maybe '96), but qualifies nonetheless because of the splash that it made almost immediately. This is another example of my predisposition away from popular things: just because the book immediately garnered all this acclaim and then more or less stayed around as a known good, that didn't mean that I should read it. Or, no, I'm being to hard on myself, I'd only really barely heard of it (I Can Believe It!), and am happy to finally have read it.
It's a mythic quest starring a hapless 30 year old who starts the book unemployed and steadily becoming estranged from his wife of several years. I'll give this as advice to any book readers out there: finding books accidentally where some piece of the protagonist's life matches yours always makes for better reading. For my own well-not-quite-thirty-really but very much jobless summer, the match was great, since the passages where the narrator reports reading a book, then taking a nap, and going to the store for a small number of groceries after that struck quite close to home.
I have some sense that there were a lot of references, or homage, or outright adaptation of older Japanese tropes and mores involved in the construction of the book, but they don't necessarily distract from the book in English read by a non-expert, since the dreamlike quality of the plot carries a lot of weight on its own (I don't have any particular desire to go into any kind of cross-cultural comparisons here, at all, with do nods to all the post-colonialists out there, but I would go far as to say that I do reckon that I, in reading this, read a different novel than someone more schooled in the roots of its mystical aspects).
The protagonist is also one of those hero types that does very little. He mostly does what other people tell him to do. That's part of his problem, I suppose. What he succeeds at doing best is clubbing a guy (maybe two) with a baseball bat. Which is actually pretty cool in its own right. But since he's kind of carried along in the plot by the various characters that are introduced and help him, it strengthens that bond between reader and action, as any reader (even in Choose Your Own Adventure books) is always carried along by the plot of what they're reading (I reckon this is why so many literary theorist's want to empower readers, since all readers are ultimately powerless to words of the text they're reading).
Or maybe I just think that under the influence of entry #2 of this reading sequence, associating If on a winter night a traveler's reader-protagonist with all other readers and protagonists. Nah... the parallel is there.
For July 6th: Sharp Teeth
For August 3rd: Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road
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