The end of snark

I have always been a hard core fan of La Paglia Divina. And I never, ever, liked David Letterman:

I despise snark.  Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since. I think it’s horrible for young people!   And this kind of snark atheism–let’s just invent that term right now–is stupid, and people who act like that are stupid. Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great” was a travesty. He sold that book on the basis of the brilliant chapter titles. If he had actually done the research and the work, where each chapter had the substance of those wonderful chapter titles, then that would have been a permanent book. Instead, he sold the book and then didn’t write one–he talked it. It was an appalling performance, demonstrating that that man was an absolute fraud to be talking about religion.  He appears to have done very little scholarly study.  Hitchens didn’t even know Judeo-Christianity well, much less the other world religions.  He had that glib Oxbridge debater style in person, but you’re remembered by your written work, and Hitchens’ written work was weak and won’t last.

Dawkins also seems to be an obsessive on some sort of personal vendetta, and again, he’s someone who has never taken the time to do the necessary research into religion. Now my entire career has been based on the pre-Christian religions.  My first book, “Sexual Personae,” was about the pagan cults that still influence us, and it began with the earliest religious artifacts, like the Venus of Willendorf in 35,000 B.C. In the last few years, I’ve been studying Native American culture, in particular the Paleo-Indian period at the close of the Ice Age.  In the early 1990s, when I first arrived on the scene, I got several letters from Native Americans saying my view of religion, women, and sexuality resembled the traditional Native American view. I’m not surprised, because my orientation is so fixed in the pre-Christian era.

You mentioned Jon Stewart, who leaves the “Daily Show” in two weeks. There’s handwringing from folks who think that he elevated or even transcended snark, that he utilized irony very effectively during the Bush years. And that he did the work of critiquing and fact-checking Fox and others on the right who helped create this debased media culture? What’s your sense of his influence?

I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark.

The end of the public school

I tend to agree. As state and local money gets tighter, something is going to give. And one of those things is going to be the public schools, because kids don’t vote and elderly Boomers are much more concerned about keeping the public money flowing in their direction than they are about the future:

Public education is losing ground. It is being undermined at every turn. This is due to more than the Christian contingent. People everywhere are taking control of their children’s education. The Internet is making this possible. As time marches on, tools and information will be even more accessible. This trend will not be reversed.

Why not? Funding. The system takes gobs of money. Gobs. It inhales taxpayer money and then wastes it like any other bureaucratic welfare-state system does.

Resources flee over time from those individuals and institutions that misallocate capital. Competition eats them alive. Resources also flee over time from individuals and institutions that break God’s law. By giving the state jurisdiction over the education of our children, this is exactly what we have done over the last 300 years. We have already paid for that choice. We have more to pay. In the meantime, the institution is coming to an end.

Sometimes, good things happen for bad reasons. The end of the 18th century indoctrination system imported from Germany is an idea whose time has long past. Technology and economics are in the process of killing it.

The missed opportunity

An influential GamerGater, The Ralph Retort, supports Milo’s point about the conservative media completely missing the opportunity presented by #GamerGate:

At the beginning of GamerGate, I was still a card-carrying liberal.
Even though I had become disillusioned with my party, I had yet to
switch my official affiliation. It’s not that I’ve changed all my
positions or radically departed from my past. I just feel like my own
party’s thought leaders have left me behind in a very real way. I was
being called right-wing by people who had never done any real activism
or volunteering at all. They sat on Twitter and spammed #killallmen
constantly, so that made them good leftists. Fuck that shit and fuck
anyone who subscribes to it. I don’t have to toe their line, and I
won’t.

Don’t get me wrong: rank-and-file Democrats still disagree with these
people on radical feminism. I was just personally tired of being called
out over PC concerns and feminist bullshit. Plus, both parties are so
fucking corrupt that I don’t see a point in giving either one my vote
automatically. So, that’s why I personally switched. Even from the
start, though, I was willing to put any kind of political affiliation to
the side in order to fight SJWs. I saw Milo’s very first thread
on 4chan. Some people were up in arms that we were going to be
identified as a conservative movement. What these dopes failed to
realize was, we were always going to be labeled as right-wing by the
media. I already knew it simply because I had been experiencing it for
years, like I just told you.

This whole time, I kept waiting for the conservative media to jump
in, en masse. It never really happened. I guess some of them were too
cowardly to go up against the feminists. Maybe they were afraid to be
falsely labeled as harassers. I don’t know what the problem was, but I
know we were waiting for their support and it never materialized. Where
was Fox News, for fuck’s sake? Talk radio? They left us out on the
battlefield by ourselves with Milo, Based Mom, Cathy Young, R.S. McCain (great column by him here) and a couple others. Mike Cernovich
stepped up as well, although I wouldn’t really call him establishment.
He’s been taking great glee at shitting on those guys all week. While I
like Ms. Young, I can certainly understand his frustration over some
things. I have it too.

There’s still time for them to jump in, but it does feel like they missed the boat last fall.

I really thought that once anti-GamerGate managed to get Anita Sarkeesian in TIME and have GG pilloried in televised dramas as well as in the Washington Post, Fox News was going to recognize it as a story and jump in. But for some reason, they never did. Nor, as Ralph observes, did any of the major talkers or columnists, not even any of the younger ones that you would expect to be at least somewhat conversant with games.

I suspect that there were multiple reasons for this, generational, political, and tonal.

I’m about as old as a gamer in the media gets. There is a very clear divide between people who are only one or two years older than I am and everyone younger. The conservative media is pretty old, and many of the younger media figures are female. So, I strongly suspect that most of the conservative media figures who were peripherally aware of #GamerGate simply couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. And, as we’ve seen with “cuckservative”, they are really uncomfortable with the vulgar way that gamers, especially channers, communicate.

On the political side, conservatives are almost as afraid of being accused of being sexist as racist. So, the fact that the media so readily swallowed and pushed the “gamers are harassing poor defenseless women” pretty much guaranteed that the conservative media would be about as likely to get on board with GamerGate as with ISIS. And, as we’ve seen with “cuckservative”, about all that is needed to keep the conservative media away is to cry raciss.

And then there is the tonal aspect. The conservative media, for all its pretensions, is moderate at heart. They spend as much time tone-policing and denouncing the “extremists” on the right as they do attacking the left. Since the GamerGate tone is cheerfully extremist, the conservative media was always more likely to take shots at it than support it.

Granted, the success that both GamerGate and the Puppies have had is causing some in the conservative media to come around a little. That, and the fact that the mainstream organizations they follow, such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal, are paying attention, albeit negative, to GG and the Puppies, has caused them to take another look. But given their reaction to “cuckservative” and Trump, I expect most of them to continue to largely ignore GamerGate until the next big success or two.

At that point, no doubt we’ll see books like The GamerGate Manifesto and The New Puppy Order being written by people who have never had anything to do with either GamerGate or the Puppies and published by Regnery. It’s not until the coopters and self-seekers and parade-leaders show up that one knows a movement has truly broken through to the mainstream.

And I think the shills will be very surprised to learn what sort of reception they’ll get. GG ain’t no tea party and Rabid Puppies won’t hesitate to tear off the hand that tries to put the leash on.

Police vs media SJW

It’s hard to know who to believe when you’re dealing with two sets of known liars. But the fact that the police were simply able to produce the recording is sufficient evidence of Ted Rall having exaggerated his experience with the LAPD without even needing to listen to it. As we all know, if the police had done anything wrong, the cameras wouldn’t have worked, the tape would have been lost, and the digital recording accidentally erased:

In a May 11 post on The Times’ OpinionLA blog, Ted Rall — a freelance cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Times — described an incident in which he was stopped for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue in 2001. Rall said he was thrown up against a wall, handcuffed and roughed up by an LAPD motorcycle policeman who also threw his driver’s license into the sewer. Rall also wrote that dozens of onlookers shouted in protest at the officer’s conduct.

Since then, the Los Angeles Police Department has provided records about the incident, including a complaint Rall filed at the time. An audiotape of the encounter recorded by the police officer does not back up Rall’s assertions; it gives no indication that there was physical violence of any sort by the policeman or that Rall’s license was thrown into the sewer or that he was handcuffed. Nor is there any evidence on the recording of a crowd of shouting onlookers.

In Rall’s initial complaint to the LAPD, he describes the incident without mentioning any physical violence or handcuffing but says that the police officer was “belligerent and hostile” and that he threw Rall’s license into the “gutter.” The tape depicts a polite interaction.

In addition, Rall wrote in his blog post that the LAPD dismissed his complaint without ever contacting him. Department records show that internal affairs investigators made repeated attempts to contact Rall, without success.Asked to explain these inconsistencies, Rall said he stands by his blog post.

As to why he didn’t mention any physical abuse in his letter to the LAPD in 2001, Rall said he didn’t want to make an enemy of the department, in part because he hosted a local radio talk show at the time. After listening to the tape, Rall noted that it was of poor quality and contained inaudible segments.

However, the recording and other evidence provided by the LAPD raise serious questions about the accuracy of Rall’s blog post. Based on this, the piece should not have been published.

Rall’s future work will not appear in The Times.

That’s a surprisingly harsh standard, though. If the mainstream media is really going to stop publishing journalists and contributors who lie in their articles, it won’t be long before the average newspaper consists of nothing but sports scores and classifieds.

The etymology of “cuckservative”

Nero explains it. TL;DR: think 4chan, not Stormfront:

As the leading conservative authority on interracial intercourse, I therefore feel compelled to set the record straight on the so-called racial origin and dimensions of this insult.

Here’s my verdict: all the writers above are wrong. As someone who’s been covering web culture and online memes for years and who has a great deal of respect for how well many right-wingers have taken to internet culture, I’m slightly embarrassed by my fellow conservatives’ inability to understand a term that returned to popular use not on white power websites, but on 4chan.

Before it became a 4chan meme, “cuckold” was a common term of abuse in mediaeval times and through the Renaissance. Shakespeare plays are replete with the word — that’s where I learned it, anyway, where it’s used as a byword for an emasculated male….

On 4chan, “cuck” is used as a general term of abuse, to describe
someone who caves in, surrenders, or sells out his core supporters. (His
base, in political parlance.) 4chan’s founder Christopher Poole, for
example, is called a “cuck,” not for any racially-charged reason, but
because he capitulated to outside pressure to ban controversial
discussion topics on the website. And because he was allegedly cuckolded
in real life – but not by a black man.

It’s easy to see why “cuck” makes such a good insult. It’s a byword
for needlessly relinquished manliness, for selling out and caving in.
The original metaphor of watching your partner getting slammed by
another dude now simply means abandoned principles and a lack of
backbone. It’s a byword for beta male or coward….

Indeed, the suspicion of many is that this is another case of virtue
signalling from mainstream conservatives, rather proving the point of
the hashtag and demonstrating it better than any gloss yet published. A
sort of meta-definition in action, since it demonstrates supposed
conservatives using precisely the “slander and move on” tactic so
beloved of liberals.

And I think it should be very clear that any cuckservative who would disagree with the leading conservative authority on interracial relations can only be doing so because he is a racist homophobe.

Since, you know, they don’t appear to be hypersensitive to being called names or anything like that.

When fraud becomes fiction

It appears the global warming charlatans are getting desperate:

The measured US temperature data from USHCN shows that the US is on a long-term cooling trend. But the reported temperatures from NOAA show a strong warming trend. They accomplish this through a spectacular hockey stick of data tampering, which corrupts the US temperature trend by almost two degrees. The biggest component of this fraud is making up data. Almost half of all reported US temperature data is now fake. They fill in missing rural data with urban data to create the appearance of non-existent US warming.

It’s been interesting. We’ve actually had a rather hot summer over here in Europe, and yet none of the usual suspects have tried to connect it to global warming. That tells me that they know the jig is up, and it’s only a matter of time before even the die-hards like NOAA stop lying about it.

And presumably it won’t be long after that before they’ll be shrieking about the coming Ice Age and how that means we must accept global government. They’re kind of one-trick ponies, aren’t they.

The joke ain’t over

Ed Driscoll laughs at progressives:

A decade ago, while reflecting back on his seminal “Radical Chic” article in New York magazine in 1970, Tom Wolfe said, “I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that [Leonard Bernstein,] living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, ‘We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,’ which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.”

But then 45 years later, the self-styled “Progressives” at PBS still don’t get that the joke is on them — not the least of which because their worldview has been updated in nearly half a century.

It’s a bit ironic that a conservative would laugh at Leonard Bernstein for failing to understand that the Black Panthers would take everything away from him if given the chance, considering how often conservatives tend to wax emotional about the myriad ways in which the mass movement of peoples is enriching America.

Then again, we often see the absurdity in others much more clearly than we do in ourselves. But unlike the progressives, I expect that 45 years from now, any cuckservatives still surviving will understand that the joke, such as it was, was on them.

I expect them to plead “we didn’t know it would turn out like that!” And that, I think, one can accept. People are wrong. But what will not be forgiven is the way they viciously attacked those who have been warning them about the house burning down since it was little more an obvious electrical fault. Now the fire is not only burning, but engulfing entire rooms, and the cuckservatives are still sitting on the coach in the living room, watching television, insisting that nothing is wrong.

No one likes SJWs

Not even artists on the Left. Alan Moore, the creator of Watchmen, announces that he will henceforth avoid the media rather than put up with incessant thought-policing by the SJWs:

Comics god Alan Moore has issued a comprehensive sign-off from public life after shooting down accusations that his stories feature racist characters and an excessive amount of sexual violence towards women….

The award-winning Moore used the interview to address criticism over his inclusion of the Galley-Wag character –  based on Florence Upton’s 1895 Golliwogg creation – in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, saying that “it was our belief that the character could be handled in such a way as to return to him the sterling qualities of Upton’s creation, while stripping him of the racial connotations that had been grafted onto the Golliwog figure by those who had misappropriated and wilfully misinterpreted her work”.

And he rebutted the suggestion that it was “not the place of two white men to try to ‘reclaim’ a character like the golliwogg”, telling Ó Méalóid that this idea “would appear to be predicated upon an assumption that no author or artist should presume to use characters who are of a different race to themselves”.

“Since I can think of no obvious reason why this principle should only relate to the issue of race – and specifically to black people and white people – then I assume it must be extended to characters of different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, religions, political persuasions and, possibly most uncomfortably of all for many people considering these issues, social classes … If this restriction were universally adopted, we would have had no authors from middle-class backgrounds who were able to write about the situation of the lower classes, which would have effectively ruled out almost all authors since William Shakespeare.”

Moore also defended himself against the claim that his work was characterised by “the prevalence of sexual violence towards women, with a number of instances of rape or attempted rape in [his] stories”, saying that “there is a far greater prevalence of consensual and relatively joyous sexual relationships in my work than there are instances of sexual violence”, and that “there is clearly a lot more non-sexual violence in my work that there is violence of the sexual variety”.

In the real world there are, Moore tells his interviewer, “relatively few murders in relation to the staggering number of rapes and other crimes of sexual or gender-related violence”, but this is “almost a complete reversal of the way that the world is represented in its movies, television shows, literature or comic-book material”.

“Why should murder be so over-represented in our popular fiction, and crimes of a sexual nature so under-represented?” he asks. “Surely it cannot be because rape is worse than murder, and is thus deserving of a special unmentionable status. Surely, the last people to suggest that rape was worse than murder were the sensitively reared classes of the Victorian era … And yet, while it is perfectly acceptable (not to say almost mandatory) to depict violent and lethal incidents in lurid and gloating high-definition detail, this is somehow regarded as healthy and perfectly normal, and it is the considered depiction of sexual crimes that will inevitably attract uproars of the current variety.”

Moore ended by telling Ó Méalóid that his lengthy responses to questions, written over Christmas, should indicate to fans that he has no intention of “doing this or anything remotely like it ever again”.

“While many of you have been justifiably relaxing with your families or loved ones, I have been answering allegations about my obsession with rape, and re-answering several-year-old questions with regard to my perceived racism,” he said. “If my comments or opinions are going to provoke such storms of upset, then considering that I myself am looking to severely constrain the amount of time I spend with interviews and my already very occasional appearances, it would logically be better for everyone concerned, not least myself, if I were to stop issuing those comments and opinions. Better that I let my work speak for me, which is all I’ve truthfully ever wanted or expected, both as a writer and as a reader of other authors’ work.”

After completing his current commitments, Moore said he will “more or less curtail speaking engagements and non-performance appearances”.

Seriously, who wants to deal with them. We’re seeing a lot of this in the game industry as well. The more that the game journos have tried to thought-police the developers, the less inclined the developers are to talk to them. Many designers and developers alike avoid the press because they know they won’t be asked questions about the actual game and its development, but rather about tangential political issues in which they have absolutely no interest. Some companies won’t even permit their developers to speak directly to the media any more as a result; all interviews have to be cleared through the PR people first.

SJW-driven journalism in the arts increasingly resembles prosecution or interrogation rather than an effort to either advertise or understand the art or the artist. It’s no wonder that successful artists like Alan Moore are increasingly reluctant to permit themselves to be interviewed.

But no fear. There will always be plenty of fame whores like the Kardashians around who will be more than happy to speak to anyone with a microphone.

Those clever cuckservatives

They must think conservatives are mind-bogglingly stupid. Hot Air defends cuckservatives by claiming that trying to appeal to black voters is an effective long term strategy for Republicans:

This is horrifically shortsighted. It was amazing, yet unsurprising, how much agreement there was between FreedomWorks and Center for American Progress representatives during their joint summit on justice reform in DC. This wasn’t talking government spending, it was talking freedom, liberty, and getting the government out of things they shouldn’t be involved in. Rand Paul speaks at Bowie State and Howard universities and gets people nodding their heads in agreement. He’s discussing the importance of government getting out of the lives of others, not placating them or speaking about reparations. Paul is thinking long term and hopes to eventually get more conservative and libertarian African-Americans, instead of the current crop of leftists. It may take 30 to 50 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.

Well, if people are nodding their heads, clearly that must trump 50 years of electoral voting patterns! What are demographics in comparison with a single politician’s hopes?

1960 presidential election
White percentage of population: 85.4
Black vote: 68 percent Democrat.

1984 presidential election
White percentage of population: 75.6
Black: 10 percent of voters. 91 percent Democrat.
Hispanic: 3 percent of voters. 66 percent Democrat

2012 presidential election
White percentage of population: 63.7
Black: 13 percent of voters. 93 percent Democrat
Hispanic: 10 percent of voters. 71 percent Democrat

At this rate of progression, in 30 years the white percentage of the population will be 53.7, blacks will be voting 95 percent Democrat and Hispanics will be voting 76 percent Democrat. All of the Republican outreach efforts over the last 30 years have only made matters worse, and in the meantime, over 20 million new Democrats entered the country via post-1986 immigration. Another 30 to 50 years means another 30 to 50 million immigrants, less than 25 percent of whom will be inclined to vote for smaller government. It is obviously and observably the cuckservatives whose strategy is horrifically shortsighted.

The demographic implications are perfectly clear. Either the Republican Party moves considerably to the Left or it becomes the White Party. Those are its only two viable options. It is obvious which of those two options are preferred by cuckservatives, the only question will be whether they can retain their control of the Republican Party or not.

That being said, I happen to think the question is largely irrelevant. The current American political system doesn’t have 30 years. It doesn’t even have 20 left to it. As I have long predicted, I think the decline element of decline-and-fall will be complete by 2033.

Hateful Heretic’s response to the Hot Air piece is straightforward and powerful:

Most of us really like capitalism, meritocracy, property rights, and the rule of law. Unlike you we recognize that the left’s program of demographic replacement will destroy those things forever, and that those values, as “universally good” as they may be, are largely only attractive to persons of Anglo-European heritage….

You know what’s short-sighted? Displacement-level immigration. Hispanics are not going to vote for freedom and capitalism. They don’t vote for it in Mexico, they don’t vote for it in Venezuela, they don’t vote for it in Colombia, they don’t vote for it in Bolivia, they don’t vote for it in Argentina, they don’t vote for it in Brazil, they don’t vote for it in Chile, they don’t vote for it in Guatemala, and they’re not going to vote for it here.

He’s right. Each successive wave of immigration, dating back to those coming from Europe, have pushed the USA further from its concept of liberty, limited government, and “the Rights of Englishmen”. And on a related note, Mike Cernovich explains why he, and others on the alt-Right, have no qualms about dismissing and disregarding these theoretical “conservative” allies:

Cuckservatives control the right-wing airwaves. Have any of them reached out to me – someone who objectively speaking has a far greater reach and sells more books than the usual talking heads – to discuss men’s issues? No. The right has ignored me and other men – even more palatable men like the A Voice for Men Camp – for years. They choose to ignore out concerns and refused to give us a platform.

When Gawker and MSNBC attacked me, where were these so-called “allies” on the right? 

When the only time they bother to notice you is to join the Left in attacking you, then they aren’t an ally. Regardless of what they claim to believe. Also, and more importantly, the cuckservatives are on the wrong side of all three of the only three issues that really matter: national sovereignty, immigration, and the Federal Reserve. They might not be Leftists, but for all practical intents and purposes, they may as well be.

Considering how many of them have come out recently and endorsed gay “marriage”, it appears that they’re little more interested in conserving anything about traditional America than the neocons are. But conservatives don’t agree with their cuckservative would-be leaders.

Big majority of GOP voters favors mass deportation, poll finds

The great ones know

A fascinating article by the great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami about when he decided to become a novelist and how he developed his unique style:

To tell the truth, although I was reading all kinds of stuff, my
favourites being 19th-century Russian novels and American hard-boiled
detective stories, I had never taken a serious look at contemporary
Japanese fiction. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese novels were
being read at the time, or how I should write fiction in the Japanese
language.

For several months, I operated on pure guesswork,
adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it. When I
read through the result, though, I was far from impressed. It seemed to
fulfil the formal requirements of a novel, but it was somewhat boring,
and the book as a whole left me cold. If that’s the way the author
feels, I thought, a reader’s reaction will probably be even more
negative. Looks like I just don’t have what it takes, I thought
dejectedly. Under normal circumstances, it would have ended there – I
would have walked away. But the epiphany I had received on Jingu
Stadium’s grassy slope was still clearly etched in my mind.

In
retrospect, it was only natural that I was unable to produce a good
novel. It was a big mistake to assume that a guy like me who had never
written anything in his life could spin something brilliant right off
the bat. I was trying to accomplish the impossible. Give up trying to
write something sophisticated, I told myself. Forget all those
prescriptive ideas about “the novel” and “literature” and set down your
feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you
like.

While it was easy to talk about setting down one’s impressions freely, doing it wasn’t all that simple. For a sheer beginner like myself it was especially hard. To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature”. In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot?

Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head might be, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.

Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed. Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle. It also led me to discover that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skilful manner. To sum up, I learnt that there was no need for a lot of difficult words – I didn’t have to try to impress people with beautiful turns of phrase.

I found this fascinating, because as you may recall, I studied Japanese, and although I don’t speak it anymore, I retain enough of a sense of it that Murakami’s writing has never struck me as “translated” in the same sense that other Japanese writers do. I’d always just assumed that he had a better translator, but apparently it is the English structural influence that he imposes on his Japanese style that creates that effect.

One Murakami fan has observed: “When you read Murakami in Japanese, it’s almost like he’s translating his own writing from English.”

In any event, if you haven’t read Murakami, he’s well worth reading. He tends to stick to the same themes and Japanese fatalism runs through all of his works, but he always presents an interesting variation on those themes. My favorite Murakami novel is A Wild Sheep Chase. And I found it unsurprising to observe that the great ones usually recognize their own talent before others do:

That’s when it hit me. I was going to win the prize. And I was going to
go on to become a novelist who would enjoy some degree of success. It
was an audacious presumption, but I was sure at that moment that it
would happen. Completely sure. Not in a theoretical way but directly and
intuitively.

That’s why I always laugh at those who claim that if someone openly states that they are X, it should be taken as evidence to the contrary. That’s totally false. From Ruth to Jordan, from Tolstoy to Murakami, the great ones always know it and they are not at all surprised by their own success. They expect it.