Mike > Recent Status Updates

Might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm digging this a little more than what I've read of Claremont's run. Maybe 90s X-Men is more my speed.

This novel is 30 years old. It's probably the most common compliment to pay Gibson, but it's uncanny how similar the world of the novel feels to the one we live in today. Beyond that, this is so far easily the most fun I've had with one of his books.

"The climate," I said.
"The climate."
"The asteroid," I said.
"The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?"
"Famine, worldwide."
"Famine," he said. "What else?"
"Give me a minute."
"Never mind. Because this isn't interesting to me. I have no use for this. We need to think beyond this."
I didn't want him to stop. We sat drinking quietly and I tried to think of further workable prospects for the end of human life on earth.

The guard faced the edge of the screen but was looking nowhere, looking at whatever museum guards look at when a room stands empty.

"It's not that guy, is it?" Mary gestured with her thumb to the patrol car behind them.

"No," Sunny said. "It's somebody else. But it's over. I'm not going to see him again."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"Well, then you will."

"I'm so used to that look-alike crap that I was starting to think speed tasted like coffee."

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles...

Read the first chapter this morning, then tried to guess the publication date. Got it in one. Now it's possible that I had looked it up before and the year was still lodged in my subconscious, but also possible that this just has the most '78 vibes you can imagine. Panoramic LA novel with multiple characters drawn together by the antics of a mad freeway sniper. Pretty cool so far.

Read the first chapter this morning, then tried to guess the publication date. Got it one. Now it's possible that I had looked it up before and the year was still lodged in my subconscious, but also possible that this just has the most '78 vibes you can imagine. Panoramic LA novel with multiple characters drawn together by the antics of a mad freeway sniper. Pretty cool so far.

Read the first chapter this morning, then tried to guess the publication date. Got it one. Now it's possible that I had looked it up before and the year was still lodged in my subconscious, but also possible that this just has the most '78 vibes you can imagine. Panoramic LA novel with multiple characters drawn together by the antics of a mad freeway sniper. Pretty cool so far.

I tried to say "Thanks for bringing me home," but I sounded like a lobotomized parrot speaking Yiddish.

He said [over the phone], "There's a reward for not being a pain in the rectum. It's called breathing. You got the early Sun-Times?"

"No."

"Get one. Read page eighteen."

(I'm enjoying this, but I think Cormany missed a chance for a good smart-ass reply from our private-investigator protagonist: "What, you want me to read Ebert's latest pan?")

This may look like an ordinary late-80s neo-noir mass-market paperback. Maybe it is. But the spirit of the times is contained within. The Cubs eternally cursed. Baseball on the radio. Young people on the run. Characters who casually become cops, then musicians, then detectives. Black Beauty speed and '73 Skylarks. Nights at home when the only options for company were the telephone or dreams.

The Chicago Cubs being cursed for all eternity seems a significant, if outdated, undercurrent in the story. The main character is a Sox fan however, and listens to their games on the radio. Baseball on the radio...it was a different time. "After Memorial Day, Sox fans clean up on the Cubbies; sometimes it's so easy it isn't even much fun."

The Chicago Cubs being cursed for all eternity seems a significant, if outdated, undercurrent in the story. The main character is a Sox fan however, and listens to their games on the radio. Baseball on the radio...it was a different time. "After Memorial Day, Sox fans clean up on the Cubbies; sometimes it's so easy it isn't even much fun."

I read and enjoyed the first 60 or so pages of this in the middle of a night before a snow day back in February. Been sitting on my desk ever since. That's the kind of reading year it's been. But getting back into it, it feels like a punkier 80s update on Night Moves, one of my favorite movies. "I'm 35 and all I really want to do is sit in bed and play guitar. Can't find anybody to pay me for that, though."

"I kicked with the power and precision of a tubercular wino."

"It's always kind of consciencesome triflin' with another man's wife, y'know, and it ain't ever been healthy in Texas."

Red would never be a drunk. She enjoyed life too much. She was too honest with herself, too clear of conscience.

One could not, he came to realize, approach every person and situation with a view to immediate gain. Interest and curiosity were not traits to be turned off and on at will. Nothing was ever lost. Knowledge gained at one time could be used at another.

Except perhaps for Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Texas was the only remaining pasture for the big time gambler's grazing. Here alone was there always another metropolis to move on to, lush with the long-green and stubbornly resistant to the blight of credit cards...here they liked the feel of money. Here were people who'd gambled their very existence for what they'd got, and who stood ready to gamble again.

One of the world's worst trains- the absolute worst, according to many- runs from Oklahoma City to Memphis. It has no diner. Its cars are of pre-WWI vintage, without air-conditioning or other common comforts. The many and prolonged delays are variously attributed to such causes as holdups by Jesse James, impromptu hunting & fishing parties by the crew, and funerals for passengers who have died en route of old age.

Once, even with the best of surgeons, the scalpel may slip. Once the most skilled of knife-throwers may throw a little too close. Once- only once- the high-wire walker may misstep to eternity. So with the dice handler.

"The fox-fire glowed in field and bog, and unknown waters spewed a fog whose curling talons mocked the thought that I had ever known this spot."

Even in a Carver-esque exercise in New Yorker-style short stories that build to subtle emotional climaxes, Ellis can't help himself with the vampires. That's okay- I dig vampires, too.

"I keep feeling that people are becoming less human and more animalistic. They seem to think less and feel less so that everyone is operating on a primitive level. I wonder what you and I will see in our lifetimes (I told you I was becoming more philosophical lately)."