SUPER SAD, PROBABLY TRUE

the first several pages had me already suspicious that i’d missed the boat, but of course the boat was full anyway, as the american repatriation authority constantly reminds immigrants in the book and as its author is constantly intimating about the real life (as in outside his book) accessibility of lifestyle hub new york. all of the important media bits on super sad true love story (i.e. the ones that had any chance of getting noticed) went up or out last year (and the originators of the unnoticeable ones that circulated at the same time could console themselves that they’d been involved in the moment, if however insignificantly). but there are those people occupying [ref. my hesitation to put that in quotes] wall street and the streets of all those other cities in the states to protest the corporate ownership of the united states government; and maybe that means the beginning of a real life rupture, that we’re finally at a tipping point -- and maybe the spoils will topple down on the side of the low net worth individuals (unlike in the book), since (unlike in the book) they were the instigators of the conflict when things came to blows. dunno. i’m not there. for richer or poorer, i’ve put myself on another boat.

but, last week, super sad true love story was the only book left in the apartment in a language that i could read, in other words the last book immediately available to me that i wouldn’t have to pay for; the last book aside from that one on the development of the japanese new wave and the birth of the art theater guild by toshio matsumoto that i should have passed on to someone who would have read it after nearly a year of letting it sit face down, open to page three on the filing cabinet that was my nightstand at the apartment in the old country. the idea, however, of reading a book in japanese that described the histories of the french and italian new waves at a beach on the coast of spain -- and the idea of being able to talk about that idea -- was enough for me to accept the extra weight in my suitcase. it was enough, even for knowing beyond most foreseeable doubts that the book would probably stay unread, and that if the computer somehow found its way to the beach that there probably wouldn’t be a wireless signal for gloating. but i could still gloat at being in possession of such an erudite “media artifact” as the one(s) i had, and for that i could also sympathize with lenny abramov’s anachronistic fondness for his books in super sad true love story.

of course, super sad true love story, as a depiction of a near future (credit score and streaming media driven) dystopia, is supposed to make you smile and nod at how similar (if in some cases farcically so) the lives of its characters are to your own. (the copy i read went to italy early this morning, but i think i remember something on the jacket positioning the book as if nabokov had written 1984.) the problem is that the future gets old, or any one future does, as soon as the future comes to take its place, and once that happens (and i feared within the first several pages of super sad true love story that it might already have) a book like this one can’t hold on to its urgency and, without its timeliness, loses itself until the discussion on it is reopened a decade and a half later as a way of understanding the intellectual history of the past (which is actually how the unnecessarily sentimental epilogue to super sad true love story positions the story of the book). the future gets old, and the future gets old at the same speed as we canonize a fancifully nostalgic image of the past.

and so I put myself on that beach in hindsight, and it was a greater moment even that it ever could have been in anticipation. the protagonist of (the other) murakami’s almost transparent blue gets things on in that book with an american named lily, the woman who writes the protagonist the letter that comprises the final text of the novel. lily has gone off, and there’s something in her letter about a beach, or at least there’s something suggested in reference to something from earlier in the book, and that’s why murakami’s second novel is loosely considered a sequel to his first, because it begins with a description of a woman on a beach, a redhead like lily who’se thinking or reading or doing something pensive like lily would probably do (and i’m sure that there’s something more concrete to the connection, but neither of the books came with me, and we’re going to go with that there isn’t a wireless signal at the beach). but the exact connection isn’t all that important, because the woman at the beach isn’t all that important to the book except that hers is the perspective and imagination from which things start happening across the ocean in front of which she’s sitting. and there i was at the beach, a detached and pensive secondary character in my own story, reading my book on the japanese new wave and watching a war break out across the ocean (the title of murakami’s second book) just like lily had, in my case a rupture similar to the one in super sad true love story.

and from there? in murakami’s book, the perspective on the action jumps its way around to finally find lily back at the beach, which is where it finds us -- i suppose we never left me there -- still thinking about how to talk about a book that probably isn’t worth talking about anymore. except (except!) for about that yearning nostalgia for an intelligent america in which reading was valued and new york city was an unassailable beacon of honest ambition. even i shed a tear for that place i visited that one time only for how i imagine myself to have been feeling at the time that was that one only time. but who was i to judge, sitting on that spanish beach pondering the value of literary fiction for the here and now in the ugly -- and lengthening -- shadow of gertrude stein and ernest hemmingway.

so away from the beach. but there isn’t an open internet signal here at the metropol parasol in the plaza de la encarnacion either, and, as one of the self-inflicted casualties of the rupture in super sad true love story writes in his suicide note, without connectivity we’re stuck with just “walls and thoughts and faces.” lenny abramov tells his diary about the honest sympathy he felt for that sentiment, even as (or because of being?) a lover of introspection and media artifacts. too bad the feel good sentiments of the epilogue, which takes place after lenny’s diary has been published, have to rob that sympathy of its vulnerable dignity. or something like that, stark and poignant like the end of super sad true love story isn’t. but then who cares? that boat was already full, and i’d long since missed it anyway. better not to draw attention to my lateness in coming. better next time just to buy what i’d prefer to read, timely or not and shut up about it. so i take my headphones out of my ears to be able to put the computer in my bag with my notebooks and things (but not the copy of super sad true love story that i read, because it went to italy this morning). and i fucking shit you not: in the plaza, bruce springstein is singing “born in the u.s.a.”