My opinion about reader accessibility is quite different than Mr. Joyce's. The Vonnegut Synchronicity and the Earth Mother is full of allusions to literature, movies, pop culture, Buddhism, and punk rock. I think a lot of readers will get many of the references, but I don't know if anyone will be able to get all of them. As such, I'm currently working on this chapter-by-chapter reference guide so that anyone who is curious will be able to get in on all the jokes.
Page 6
--"Los venerables Don Nestor y Don Guimel"
Translated into English, "The venerable Don Nestor and Don Guimel."
Don is a Spanish title conferring high respect, traditionally reserved for someone
wealthy or powerful. Here it is used ironically.
--"Gringo"
Informal Spanish word for "foreigner." On the streets of Cuzco, you hear "gringo"
a lot more than you hear the more respectful term for foreigner, "extranjero."
--"How real are any of us or the dreams we call memories?"
This line is a central theme of the book. The idea comes from Buddhism.
Pages 7-8
This warning is candid. The book was a passion project meant for a niche audience,
and it is just not going to appeal to a lot of readers, even among my
own close friends and family.
Page 9
"Utter crap..."
This line comes from Blackadder's Christmas Carol.
The main character, Ebenezer Blackadder begins as
the nicest man in London. He is visited by 3
ghosts who show him visions of the evil schemes of his ancestors
and of his future. He decides that "bad guys have all the fun" and
changes his ways accordingly. The quote is the complement he pays
to carolers who come to sing for him.
Pages 9-11
Note how the author separates himself from the narrator.
This distinction will come back in the last chapter.
The direct, boring reason I went with self-publication
is because I imagined that if I were an editor looking at my manuscript,
I would think that I would have a hard time selling this book, even if I
thought it were funny, clever, and interesting.
It would be a lot easier to edit, publish, and sell a straightforward genre novel.
Through that lens, it just made more sense for me to self-publish.
Page 13
--Marco Polo and Vonnegut Quotes
These quotes were juxtaposed to contradict each other.
Part of the fun of the book is that it repeatedly questions how much truth
is in the narrative. The height of narrative questioning comes in Chapter 6.
--Synchronicity definition, comment on the use of AI, and how I got my cover image
A few quotes from AI are explicitly marked as coming from AI.
Chapter 20 is a dialogue between the narrator and an AI therapist.
Otherwise, I did not use AI to write any of the narrative in the book.
The practical reason was that I strongly prefer my own voice over the AI's voice.
While AI can produce competent nonfiction prose, I find its ability to
write narrative is marginal at best. The ideological reason was that I
wanted to prove to myself that I could write a book. Using AI would have
been cheating.
I did use AI for the cover design because it was the most practical
and efficient way to do it. Still, I fought with ChatGPT Image Generator for
a good while during the process. It produced several images that all fell short of
what I was looking for. Eventually, I uploaded it several chapters from the book
to put into the design, and it finally gave me a decent book cover. If I had it
to do over again, I would probably consider contracting an artist, if only
because of industry bias against using AI for book covers.
--"Sing, of the foolhardy adventures of our narrator..."
This invocation of the muse is a parody of the invocation of the muse
from the beginning of Homer's Iliad. The quote from the Iliad is:
"Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought
countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send
hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs
and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on
which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first
fell out with one another."
page 14
--"...like part of me became Baron Munchausen himself."
The part of the narrator that became Baron Munchausen becomes a
central character in the story in Chapter 4. The line serves as foreshadowing.
I first learned about the character Baron Munchausen from the 1988 Terry Gilliam movie
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Apart from that movie, the Baron's
most other notable cultural impact has been in the field of
mental health, as "Munchausen Syndrome" and "Munchausen by proxy" bear his name.
He is also referenced in descriptions of pseudologia fantastica, which is an
elegant way to describe a tendency to tell elaborate self-aggrandizing lies.
(You could even directly translate pseudologia fantastica as "false, fanciful words.")
--"...thought led by the thread of causality to attempt to plunder the
furthest reaches of the abyss."
This is an allusion to a quote by the German philosopher Nietzsche. I think it
came from Twilight of the Idols, but I very well may be wrong, as I read
this a long time ago when I was in my early twenties. A Google search tells me that
the internet seems to have forgotten this quote, and is instead showing me
multiple references to Nietzsche's more famous quote, "Whoever fights monsters
should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
In any case, one can see that the quote I was butchering in my book was more
about the limits of reason than the mutability of identity. More importantly, note
that Nietzsche was a master of aphorisms. "Aphorism" is the term that
college professors like to use for "good one-liner."**
Curious readers should start with "Thus Spake Zarathustra," as it is known for being his easiest read.
**(Humorless definition of aphorism: an expressive observation that contains a
general truth, or at least seems to contain a truth. 'If it ain't broke,
don't fix it.')
page 15
--"...Buddhist god realms where unhappy people have unlimited means to entertain
themselves."
In Buddhist cosmology, the god realms, or deva realms, are part of samasara
where heavenly beings don't need to work and are able to enjoy earthly pleasures,
leading to attachment. As the realms are full of diversions, there is less
opportunity and motivation for spiritual growth. When I compare America in 2025 to a
Buddhist god realm, it's the kind of joke that contains a lot of truth.
Beings are reborn into the god realms from the accumulation of good karma,
but the realm itself has features that encourage attachment and negative karma,
hence the joke about getting reincarnated back in the shithole.
--"samsara"
More Buddhism. Samsara is the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The
goal of Buddhist practice is to attain enlightenment and find Nirvana,
the perfect peace and happiness that comes from freeing oneself of desire.
--"capital gains tax"
It really does come back to bite one in the ass come tax season.
--"Quechua"
One of the indigenous languages of Peru. During my first trip
to Peru almost 20 years ago, Quechua was much more common in rural areas.
A lot of the kids growing up in the country these days don't learn it like
their parents did. Instead, they grow up speaking only Spanish.
page 17-18
--recurrent grad school drop out dreams
Those dreams were from my real life. They stopped shortly after I
started writing the book, and they haven't come back.
--page 20
--"...indulgences had found a round about way to sneak back into his brand of Protestantism."
Indulgences were the Catholic Church's old tradition of forgiving sin
in exchange for a cash donation. They were one of the 95 reasons Martin Luther
and his followers started to break away from the Catholic Church in 1517.
In my book, I am joking, but a lot of people died quarreling over this subject.
--"reborn as a lion"
note that lions will come up again in Chapter 5
--"dial up BBS message boards"
A BBS was a computer bulletin board system.
In many ways, they were the precursor to our modern internet.
An old computer gadget called a modem would plug into one of the
phone jacks used for your home landline. The computer would dial a number to the BBS,
and then you would connect to the BBS server, which was just any random
person's home computer they had set up to run BBS software. An old BBS would
typically have a message board with messages organized into groups,
and the graphics, if any, would be made out of ASCII characters. Many would also
have text games that users could play asynchronously.
If you can imagine a caveman version of reddit with only 10-15 people using it
regularly, then you get the picture.