My friend Chris, who has been mentioned oh once or twice here, finished Cloud Atlas last night. He liked it. (Understatement.) So, if you haven't read it yet because you don't trust the critics, and you got put off of it because you dislike me as a person, at least now you can say you have to read it, because you can trust Chris, that mystery friend of the guy with the crappy Internet site.
In daily TDAOC Steve Erickson news: I picked up his first three novels from the library today--and yes I know I know I should be buying everything and supporting the business of writing and etc and etc but I am poor and Cleveland's libraries are totally sweet and the two just feed off each other so well, and anyways I know I'll wind up buying them all eventually for underlining and note-taking purposes but right now I just need and there's no time to waste on Amazonian free shipping speeds--along with another book by another writer I'll maybe have the heart to read once I get done with the Steve Erickson oeuvre. I made sure to grab the books today because I figured I might need them this weekend once I finish Arc d'X. Which I did begin reading tonight after work--I got about 50 or 60 pages or so into it, and for those of you who have read it, the transition? Uh, yeah. Could this guy just stop surprising me and amazing me for a while? I mean, I knew that it was coming, I've read some stuff and I know a thing or two about how Erickson's books work by now, but holy hell cow in heat, that was one seriously stupendous page. Gosh. Pit Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Workshop against each other in a dazzling battle to the death and neither of them could have come up with a scene transition so totally that. (I mean, it was mega.) All of which is to say that, yes, I remain obsessed, and probably will remain obsessed until I read the last word of his first novel. And then for a while after that. (I've decided, arbitrarily, to save his heavy-emphasis-on-the-quotes "non-fiction" books for a rainy day, for those of you keeping score at home.) I feel like when I'm done I'm going to want to write this big huge draft of an essay of a paper about the works of Erickson and fill it with every thought he's plopped into my poor, inferior, mush brain (including the fact that I think I've definitively solved the question of "What genre are these books?" by appropriating a genre-name from the music world), but then I think I'm mostly just going to collapse and point at the books and grunt and cower for a while and hope the spectacle will convince a few other people to read some of his stuff, or at the very least that the spectacle won't scare all the people away from me forever. That'd be sad.
Enthusiasm, at least, seems to be infectious here in the literary quarter of Cleveland, the quarter I have loosely defined as "me, my girlfriend, and Chris". (There is of course totally more than us three here who read books--David Sedaris packed the house the other night with 700 people, or so the count went--but I neither make friends easily, being of a class of old-school Internet people who got into the computer-net scene due to shyness, nor do I get out very much.) The GF promises me she'll read Cloud Atlas someday, which is cool; because, she is cool, and because she trusts the opinions of the mysterious friend of that guy with the crappy Internet site. And Chris, who read the Mitchell book shortly after reading Ulysses, is all about the experimental literature right now, so he's mentioned his desire to pick up Our Ecstatic Days. (Well, specifically, he's expressed some hesitant interest in reading some Erickson, and I immediately renewed my library copy of OED and said I'd superglue it to his hands ASAP. I was going to tell him to go read some other stuff and come back to me with reports of its goodness or badness so I might have things to look into after I finish with Erickson, but dammit, I like being a pusher too much; if you need me on Sunday, I'll be down on the corner selling copies of OED to the neighborhood children out of my trenchcoat.) I'm kind of hoping someday I'll find a book to love which Chris will hate so I can invite him aboard to do a guest post in which he can offer up a withering, vicious critique of my pretentious claims of so-called "literary taste", in which post he can call me all the bad names in the world; just so long as he doesn't disagree with my assessment of Our Ecstatic Days because then I'd be forced to replace all instances of his name on this blog with the words "blundering doodoo head", if you get my drift, know what I mean, and etc and etc. (I kid, of course. Except, not really. Well, okay. Really.)
In any case. I might take off from Erickson for the weekend--somehow, "three day weekend" translates into "let's plan six days worth of activities" so reading time might scarcify itself for a while. Which means I probably won't post rambling three word posts about how great Erickson is for at least like 72 hours. Hopefully you'll use the time you'd usually devote to reading this blog to enjoy some food cooked on a grill along with a nice glass of iced tea or what have you. Me, I'm going to inadvertently sleep through everything I've planned on doing this weekend, and then grumble about it a lot. Then I'm going to watch some fireworks, because I do oh so love me some fireworks. America might be a pretty screwed up place sometimes but sometimes we can still make with the damn fine pretty.
Oh! But before I go. Speaking of my friend Chris, and speaking of my crappy Internet site, Chris informed me of something a while back, a something I've meant to mention here since, but have forgotten to do so each time I've meant to do so: he mentioned to me in an e-mail that, in that e-mail, when he'd typed "TDAOC", the spell-checker flagged that as a mis-spelling. He then mentioned that the spell-checker suggested that the possible correct spelling might be "Taco". I think this means that someday, we're all destined to get together and enjoy yummy Mexican food as one big happy crappy Internet site writing and reading family. Or maybe it just means that stoners subconsciously equate my blog with a sating of the munchies. You make the call.
Update: The Blogger spell-checker wants to replace "TDAOC" with..."teats". I will, for once, graciously shut up and leave the remainder of this joke as an excercise to the reader.
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