Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Page 160 – 251, begins “1:30 A.M.”
Conclusions/Book as a whole

So, that chart. A measure of Op Oloops' vitality? The elevation (or plummeting) of his spirit?

Unfortunately, one of the most interesting parts of the graph -- around 4pm -- occurs in a period of time that the text glosses over.

I wondered about the graph as well. It must be something like well-being, vitality etc. Of course it plummets near the end which I'm assuming means death but I haven't actually finished yet - about 40 pages to go.

I remember Vonnegut created graphs of a character's happiness (or similar) and said most novel's graphs would be more or less the same; Kafka being a noted exception.

Mkfs wrote: "So, that chart. A measure of Op Oloops' vitality? The elevation (or plummeting) of his spirit?

Unfortunately, one of the most interesting parts of the graph -- around 4pm -- occurs in a period of ..."

Or maybe his fading in and out of euphoria, post-head injury...

After experiencing Optimus's strange behaviour throughout the book it's difficult to believe that he'd been living a highly regulated life. His dinner guests only seem a little surprised by his behaviour; one would have thought they'd be totally amazed with the way he was acting.

Was it ever established what the dinner party was for? Was it to celebrate his 1000th prostitute or his marriage?

I was a little confused with Optimus's last entry. He wrote down '0 0 0 0' then 'OP OLOOP' and notices that the four Os of his name lined up with the four zeros. But why did he write four zeros? Surely he should have written '1000'. Am I missing something? Am I being dumb?

He did not have sex with the thousandth prostitute. Therefore, in the non-narrative columns (which he told the dinner guests to ignore when viewing his logbook), he entered all zeroes. These metrics may have included duration of the lovemaking, number of orgasms, thrusts per minute, etc. We know that one of them wasn't price, because he had to fork over money for the encounter (though he may not have been aware of it).

Mkfs wrote: "He did not have sex with the thousandth prostitute. Therefore, in the non-narrative columns (which he told the dinner guests to ignore when viewing his logbook), he entered all zeroes. These metric..."

Oh, right, thanks. But the entries on pp180-1 didn't have any statistics after the notes. From the conversation that follows this Optimus suggests that he has amassed a lot more information besides.

Jonathan wrote: "But the entries on pp180-1 didn't have any statistics after the notes."

Yeah, I kind of inferred their existence -- when he told the others to ignore the columns, and then read entries aloud, I assumed that he was reading the columns he hadn't told them to ignore. Meaning that anything could follow the data he read out.

That brings something to mind about the novel. I found that the dialogue was a lot like that of a play. Especially an older play, where the diaglogue is used to encode stage directions ("Ah! I die!"). In other words, I couldn't rely on descriptive text to tell me what was going on or who was speaking, and ended up having to imagine what version of a scene would make the most sense given the dialog.

So, what would Dr Freud have made of good ol' Op Oloop?

Aside from the usual "castration anxiety", I mean.

There's clearly some repression going on, and the freakouts tend to involve people that he doesn't consider to be following the rules. So we have some obsessive-compulsive behavior, no surprise, combined with a repression of the Id by the SuperEgo, maybe? A touch of schizophrenia also, if the astral projection bit is anything to go by.