SIVACRACY.NET

Thanks to the New Yorker for posting Haruki Marakami's newest contribution, The Year of Spaghetti for free on the website. Murakami's work is always worth reading, particularly his sprawling, messy, utterly compelling novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. For a lovely introduction to his work, try his story "Honey Pie," which is part of his heartbreaking collection After the Quake. I found the full text online here. Google indicates that "Honey Pie" is still available on the New Yorker site here, though I'm getting a "Not Found" message. But the page still shows up in Google's cache.

Part of the reason I was so happy to find Murakami online was that I had just plowed through the leaden prose of Bob Woodward's statement -- really, the right word in this case, given the stiff form of every declarative sentence -- about his role in the Plame case. Bob, please, I'm begging you: team up with Carl Bernstein again. You need a writing partner.

Incidentally, this page's definition of "declarative sentence" is actually an eerily close imitation of Woodward's writing style, needing only the words "Cheney" and "Chalabi" to make the illusion really stick.