Erickson, Steve
Average customer rating:
- And If You Think The Book Is Great....
- Buy it...
- Terror we're still just able to bear
- Overwhelming
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Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
Zak Smith
Manufacturer: Tin House Books
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0977312798 |
Book Description
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), set in an alternative-universe version of World War II, has been called a modern Finnegan’s Wake for its challenging language, wild anachronisms, hallucinatory happenings, and fever-dream imagery. With Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, artist Zak Smith at once eases and expands readers’ experience of the book. A leading exponent of punk-based, DIY art, Smith here presents his most ambitious project to date — an art book exactly as long as the work it’s interpreting: 760 drawings, paintings, photos, and less definable images in 760 pages. Extraordinary tableaux of the detritus of war — a burned-out Königstiger tank, a melted machine gun — coexist alongside such phantasmagoric Pynchon inventions as the “stumbling bird” and “Girgori the octopus.” Smith has stated his aim to be “as literal as possible” in interpreting Gravity’s Rainbow, but his images are as imaginative and powerfully unique as the prose they honor.
Customer Reviews:
And If You Think The Book Is Great...........2007-06-05
If you live anywhere near Minneapolis get yourself over to the Walker Art Center, where every single one of Zak Smith's drawings/paintings/sculptures (yes, some are three dimensional) for this project are displayed on one wall. (All are in the permanent collection of the Walker.) How do I know it's all 750+ artworks? Because I counted. 45 columns by 17 rows. You could spend hours staring at them and not exhaust this monumental project. I'm not sure how long they'll remain on display so don't put it off.
Buy it..........2007-03-28
Zak Smith a genious, and this book the best.
if you like concept ilustration, you'll love it...
and the prize it's great!
Terror we're still just able to bear.......2007-01-21
Zak Smith has lived with a mad obsession... which is something many fans of Thomas Pynchon's 1973 masterpiece can relate to. Still, when I first heard that an artist had drawn a picture for each page of "Gravity's Rainbow", I felt a kind of terror: The prospect of seeing my favorite American novel, my own obsession, appropriated by an artist who had set out to do this mad thing, this impossible and irresponsible thing, sent darts of panic into my heart... But as Rilke reminds us in the first of his Duino Elegies (poems explicitly important in GR), "Each single angel is terrible". And, "Beauty's nothing," we're instructed, "but the beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us."
If Zak Smith has produced something not exactly serene, it is quite beautiful - and if it disdains to destroy us, or our love for Pynchon's novel, it's some measure of the success it achieves as visual art responding to literary art.
Unlike the website where I first saw these drawings, Smith's published project is wisely unaccompanied by the lines of text they reference. Seeing these unmediated drawings is a kind of dreaming of the novel. For anyone very familiar with GR, pouring over these images clarifies what's stunning about Smith's accomplishment: scenes, characters, impressions and sensations are recalled as from a vast shared memory, or maybe the Collective Unconscious of Gravity's Rainbow...
Readers will have their own favorites here; a few of mine are: westwardman Crutchfield of page 68; Reg Le Froyd and Constable Stuggles, page 73; the juxtaposition of pages 84 and 85 (Infant Tyrone across from Slothrop's map, with Smith's inspired common grid; Mrs. Quod's jar of jellied candies on page 118; the stunning abstractions of pgs. 224-225; the little girl of page 557, "tottering under an enormous pile of contraband fur coats"; the relatively long passage of images, begun on page 567 of Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero; Takeshi and Ichizo, the Komical Kamikazes of page 690... but to choose any favorites is to leave out others...
It's worth mentioning here that you'll want to have a copy of the novel with its original page numbering. Be advised that recent editions have reset the text, so the page numbers will not always correlate with Smith's.
The paper quality, printing and binding are excellent, although the slipcase isn't as sturdy as it might've been (mine was broken-on-arrival, and needed careful repair). The book has heft, feels vital, smells like a drug and throbs with creative energy. With its crafty range of styles and the choices of content Smith has made - in some cases an appropriate anti-content! - these drawings always manage to feel companionable to Pynchon's irreplaceable novel... A-and that's saying something, Jackson.
Overwhelming .......2007-01-18
I am at a loss for words.
It's one of the most beautiful things i've seen in years.
Average customer rating:
- I dreamed that this volume didn't exist in the series...
- An Excellent Introduction to Comics' Greatest Series
- A different way to enjoy an excellent series
- The best example of contemporary literature
- Double filler
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The Sandman Vol. 3: Dream Country
Neil Gaiman , Malcolm Jones III , Charles Vess , and Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: Vertigo
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ASIN: 156389016X |
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The third book of the Sandman collection is a series of four short comic book stories. What's remarkable here (considering the publisher and the time that this was originally published) is that the main character of the book--the Sandman, King of Dreams--serves only as a minor character in each of these otherwise unrelated stories. (Actually, he's not even in the last story.) This signaled a couple of important things in the development of what is considered one of the great comics of the second half of the century. First, it marked a distinct move away from the horror genre and into a more fantasy-rich, classical mythology-laden environment. And secondly, it solidly cemented Neil Gaiman as a storyteller. One of the stories here, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," took home the World Fantasy Award for best short story--the first time a comic was given that honor. But for my money, another story in Dream Country has it beat hands down. "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" has such hope, beauty, and good old-fashioned chills that rereading it becomes a welcome pleasure. --Jim Pascoe
Customer Reviews:
I dreamed that this volume didn't exist in the series..........2006-10-20
When one walks into a movie theater, they expect to see a movie. When one walks into a pizzeria, they expect to be served pizza. When one plays paintball, you should expect to be hit by at least one paintball. So, one could draw the conclusion that when one reads any of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, you should expect to be pulled into a bizarre world where your heroine (or dark figure leading the show) happens to be the actual Sandman ... right? Apparently, the answer is closer towards the "no" theory than one could expect. I understand the concept of building a stage and allowing readers to see the entire universe, and not just one small figure, but that isn't why I purchased this series. I purchased it for the sole reason that I enjoyed the first two in this collective series. I find the character of the Sandman to be one of the greatest literary figures in graphic novels today. His words will entice, his patience will amaze, and his strength will force you to think of Superman as the weakest man alive. The Sandman is intelligence, boldness, and heroics all boiled together into one shaded character. He is the epitome of "cool", if one were to phrase it that way. Yet, why would anyone who loves this series think that without the main character, the central focus of the show, would a series be able to survive? If I had started with this collection, I don't believe I would have gone any further.
I know, I seem to be an odd voice in this collection that seems to have garnered award after award for possibly the dullest story ever dreamed by Gaiman. For those fan boys out there that are drooling over the ingenuity of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", I would say - not rudely - but get over it. Sure, there were moments of fun and inspiration, but for the most part this story seemed to go on longer than needed and gave this avid Sandman reader a chance to catch up on some well deserved rest. I had seen Gaiman twist the story of Shakespeare earlier in one of the early collections (I think it was when the Sandman was talking with his "friend", Hob Gadling), but I didn't think he would dedicate half a collection to the birth of an idea. Again, I am not knocking the creativity of the piece, because I saw the premise well, it just felt overly-dramatic coupled with an overall sense of "blah". It was too much for this reader to enjoy. I wanted the fantastical coupled with sinister, and before you say it, this just didn't have it. Sure, there were creatures, but they did not come anywhere close to what I witnessed in the first two collections. I just missed the tone that Gaiman had captured with his creation in the first two collections; obviously this was a completely different step.
How did I enjoy the other stories? I thought that "A Dream of A Thousand Cats" was decent, but again lacking that panache that lingered from the first two books. "Facades" was utterly fun, but diabolically confusing. Who remembers Element Girl? To me, it just seemed too outdated for the rest of the series. My personal favorite was "Calliope", a truly frightening tale of imagination that reminded me of why I am such a big Gaiman fan. It was dark and spooky all at the same time. It was the epitome of what the Sandman represents, then we are left with nothing more a ramshackle of other stories that don't fit the bill. They were a hit or miss with me, as I have read, it seems to be the case with other Gaiman fans. I wanted, and desperately needed, more Sandman. I wanted my character back. I wanted something to breathe life back into this short collection. For those of you wondering where most of the pages remain, there is a huge development of the "Calliope" story at the end which nearly takes up 20 pages. This was a waste of time and space. Obviously, this was the weakest link pertaining to the series.
Overall, I cannot suggest this book to friends or family. If one asks which collection they should start learning about our heroine, the Sandman, in Gaiman's eyes, I would tell them to stay clear of this collection. Dream Country may be giving us a hit of what is to come, but for me it felt tired, bored, and over inflated. While "Calliope" will pull you in, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" will confuse you to the point of insanity, or at least give you a good nights rest. Dream Country was weak, and it is obvious with the fact that there was what I like to call "filler" at the end of the collection. If one doesn't have anything worth saying, don't waste my time. This collection will anger any fans of the series that loved the first two. Read through this one quickly, and get to the next. I promise ... it will only get better from here.
Grade: ** out of *****
An Excellent Introduction to Comics' Greatest Series.......2006-10-17
Let me just say that I have kids. They do things that kids are wont to do; make noise, make messes and generally prevent me from reading, my favorite pleasure. So I made a compromise; I wanted to read, but I couldn't get into a book, then I decided to get back into comics. Needless to say, I am a long time comic reader. Superhero stuff mainly. Characters from the DC universe (Batman is my favorite) and Kurt Busiek's Astro City were pretty much it for me.
But I got restless. I needed a change. Not that I've quit reading about superheroes, but I needed to broaden my outlook.
I've long known about Gaiman's classic Sandman series, but at the time, it just didn't seem interesting to me. But I asked a young woman who worked in a comic book store about it. She praised it and recommended the series. Since I didn't know anything about Morpheus or any of his siblings in the endless, she suggested starting off with Dream Country, in what is the third volume of the series.
To veteran Sandman readers, it's a brief collection of four short stories and the shortest book of the lot. But for the novice, it's a superb introduction to Neil Gaiman's brilliant storytelling and a nice way to ease into his fantastic world. I read the collection in a day. I then got the rest of the series. If you like good stories well told, superb characters you want to feel for and a taste for the different, look no further.
I would recommend Sandman to even the most jaded reader. I'd be genuinely shocked of they weren't won over.
A different way to enjoy an excellent series.......2006-04-02
Neil Gaiman's great strength as a storyteller is how he weaves intricate plotlines into satisfying conclusions, and future setups. So it may seem unusual at first blush, to experience this collection of short Sandman stories instead of Gaiman's long story arcs. Yet, Dream Country invites us to come along on an enjoyable ride, as Gaiman explores his smaller side ideas. More a collection of "what if" supernatural scenarios, than a part of the Sandman saga...it is still very much uniquely Sandman. The stories revolve around the complex character of Morpheus (even when he is removed from center stage)...and Death's tale truly begins once she appears. Dream Country doesn't advance the larger Sandman plot, but even casual readers will still find it satisfying.
The best example of contemporary literature.......2006-02-03
Of all the Sandman books, I'd have to say this is one of my personal favorites. The individual short stories, may not have a lot to do with the overall Sandman storyline but are each emotionally powerful in their own right.
Besides the Shakespearen classic A Mid-Summer Night Dream, I'd had have to say that the best stories are a Dream of a Thousand Cats and Facade. The thousand cats storyline deals with a cat preacher who tries to convince her followers that if a thousand of them would dream of a better life (a life where cats rule humans) then their dreams would come true. While it proves to be a little hokey in concept, the story does have a powerful element of truth in how dreamers change the world.
The story Facade in my mind brings to light the painful truth, of what it is like to be a superhero in modern day society. I thought Alan Moore was good at humanizing his characters but this one really hits home in terms of what it's like to be alienated and alone. In it, Element Girl (A former superhero known as Urania Blackwell) lives a meager existence in a run down apartment building, afraid of going anywhere in public or doing anything. It shows us what it is like to be so different from her fellow human beings that she can no longer exist among them. I praise this story for piercing the naive fantasy children have when dreaming of superheros. Usually they think about how good it would be to jump buildings, to fly and have laser vision. But for Urania this is a nightmare. There are some particularily moving moments in this story, particularly when her former best friend, being unaware of her condition, calls a girl born with no legs a freak. Each night, she dreams of a better life, one where she is normal and very happy only to wake up crying to find out things are not so. This is something everyone can identify with and relate to.
Double filler.......2005-12-29
Others have written enough about the story content, so I just want to add an additional annoyance with this volume: the last 40 pages (out of 160) are just for the script of 'Calliope'. All text. No pictures... The book was already short enough compared to the others. And that script took even more away from it...
Average customer rating:
- Best Book I've read in 3 years
- A delirious dream of the end of the world
- If a dream is a memory of the future...
- What is The Sea?
- So good itýs scary
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The Sea Came in at Midnight
Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: William Morrow & Company
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0380977664 |
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God invented millennia for writers like Steve Erickson. Erickson's previous books have buried L.A.'s freeways in sand, set bonfires in Paris streets, and hitched along for the 1996 presidential campaign. In terms of madness, doom, and sheer human folly, what could possibly be left? Plenty, as it turns out. As The Sea Came in at Midnight opens, 17-year-old Kristin works in a Japanese "memory hotel," where despite her so-so looks she's in high demand. As an American, "Kristin represents the Western annihilation of ancient Japanese memory and therefore its master and possessor, a red bomb in one hand, a red bottle of soda pop in the other." After one of her best clients expires in the booth, she finally tells him her own story--which turns out to be quite a tale, involving escape from a millennial suicide cult and nude solitary confinement at the behest of a man known only as the Occupant. Add in the novel's other threads, which span 40 years and include a dream cartographer, a chaos-based calendar, time capsules, and both real and faked snuff films, and you have a heady mixture indeed. Fans of Erickson's unsettling, dreamlike style are legion, and they won't be disappointed in his latest take on the End Time, Blade Runner-style. But in a way, the millennium is beside the point; with a plot like this one, a mere flipping of digits seems so much apocalyptic icing on the cake. Combing a lyrical surrealism with a jittery, jump-cut technique, Erickson writes like the 21st-century heir of Pynchon and DeLillo. --Chloe Byrne
Book Description
Steve Erickson is a visionary novelist whose time has come. Considered by many the secret heir to Pynchon and DeLillo, he has steadily acquired a passionate following of readers over the course of five previous novels. Now, with The Sea Came at Midnight, Erickson delivers a masterwork of intense feeling, scope and power--an intimate epic of late twentieth-century civilization in free fall, an unforgettable young woman's revelation amid the ruins.
In the final seconds of the old millennium, 1,999 women and children march off the edge of a cliff in Northern California, urged on by a cult of silent men in white robes. Kristin was meant to be the two-thousandth to fall. But when at the last moment she flees, she exchanges one dark destiny for a future that will unravel the present.
Answering a cryptic personals ad for a woman "at the end of her rope," Kristin finds temporary haven in the Hollywood Hills with an older, unnamed man as obsessed as he is spiritually ravaged. In a locked room at the bottom of his house, he labors over his life's work: a massive blue calendar the size of a tsunami that measures modern time by the events of chaos and pinpoints the true beginning of the new millenium as not midnight December 31, 1999, but the early hours of one May morning in 1968. This calendar is shot through with the threads of other lives-those searching for a small measure of redemption and an answer to the question, "What's missing from the world?"
From a ritual sacrifice in the name of salvation to a ritual sacrifice in the name of pleasure, from an ancient haunted Celtic tower in Brittany to the revolving memory hotels of Tokyo, from a cinematic hoax in Manhattan that costs five women their lives to a mysterious bloodstained set of coordinates tacked to the wall of an abandoned San Francisco penthouse, The Sea Came at Midnight is a breathtaking literary dance of fate and coincidence. And, unknown even to her, at the center of that dance is the seventeen-year-old.
Customer Reviews:
Best Book I've read in 3 years.......2007-01-10
It is a shock that the name Steve Erickson is not well known. His books sit comfortably alongside books by DeLillo, Pynchon, Margaret Atwood. If you like any one of those three, then you owe it to yourself to try Erickson. Personally I think he's more enjoyable -- and this book is his best. It is a tour de force of characters who are all prisoners of something -- each other, their own past, the future. It's funny, moving, and complex.
A delirious dream of the end of the world.......2006-03-23
We are all our own private millineum, walking through the world, our own apocalypse (or apocalapse), our own world of chaos tucked just under the skin. It could start with a gunshot in May of '68, or sometime much later. You will live and think the world means something and then one day you will wake up and it will not mean anything and you will join the countless others who are living in time void of meaning.
I can't say more about this book. His ideas are stunning. I'm enraptured.
If a dream is a memory of the future..........2003-01-23
A sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing "memior of the future", this novel contains plot twists that in themselves are nothing short of amazing. The books many protagonists live as if in a surreal dreamworld of cultural movements, apocolyptic fear, horrific urban legends and even worse histories of the last century. The writing is very lyrical, but the narrative also has a frenetic science-fiction like pace that keeps you turning the pages with each cosmic coincidence. Very much like Delillo in delivery and Pynchonian in plot.
What is The Sea?.......2001-02-13
The three nights I spent reading Erickson's "The Sea Came at Midnight" were both riveting and disturbing. Rarely do I dream, but Erickson's fantasy gave my nights urgent and almost panicked visions. In retrospect I fancy my mind unable to process the wild implications and subconscious import driven to point by only the experiences of his few characters. "The Sea Came at Midnight" is not only beautifully written and well-composed, but it is also ominous... Like all significant works of writing it leaves you hungrier than sated, straining to bring into focus the looming world you know lays waiting behind the words -- A world that is more your own than Erickson's, because he has only given you a fleeting, piercing glimpse at all you refuse to perceive about humanity.
So good itýs scary.......2001-02-06
`The Sea Came in at Midnight' is so good it's scary. I'm worried that it will be a long time before I read another novel that is so accomplished and successful in its intent. Maybe I shouldn't worry...maybe I only have to wait until I read another of Erickson's novels before I encounter such mastery again.
For me, the most enjoyable aspect of this novel was the elliptical paths the characters took. The way they crossed and re-crossed paths, never knowing the significance of the other in the way their lives have been shaped. Erickson manages this without forcing the relationships or situations in an artificial way.
The story itself, though, is artificial and contrived - but I mean that in a positive way! Erickson's settings, the novels events and the characters motivations are grandiose and on an epic scale. He wants you to be confronted by his themes - the decay of society, the power of redemption and self-belief - so they are enlarged and made more bold by their scale. `The Sea Came in at Midnight' is a novel that trades in challenging the reader and the reader's perceptions. You will never forget the desperation of some characters and the despair of others. Never forget the hyper-realistic imagery - Tokyo memory hotels, the mass suicide, the shattered aquarium. And finally, never forget that you have been privileged to read a novel of truly stunning accomplishment.
Average customer rating:
- deeply concerned with the moral crisis in America
- just another logic-less leftist defence of Bill Clinton.
- Interesting, but horribly flawed
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American Nomad
Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Co
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0805051554 |
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This is the first non-fiction effort from novelist Erickson. It started as an assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the 1996 presidential election from start to finish but became something else when Erickson was fired by Jann Wenner after the New Hampshire primary. Erickson kept going, turning his on-the-road reportage into a vehicle for addressing--dare we say it?--his fear and loathing on the campaign trail of what the country was becoming. With Thompsonesque doses of hyperbole, rock music, painkillers, and booze, Erickson paints a picture of a nation on the brink of breaking away from its special heritage of law, fairness, and freedom.
Customer Reviews:
deeply concerned with the moral crisis in America.......2000-11-23
Just as Richard Ben Cramer managed to produce one of the great campaign books of all time, What It Takes : The Way to the White House, largely by ignoring the 1988 Presidential Campaign and focussing instead on the candidates themselves, Steve Erickson has written the best book on the 1996 campaign by focussing on the cultural moment in which it occurred, rather than on the tactical minutiae of the campaign itself. There are actually at least three books lurking between the covers of American Nomad. First, there is the extremely funny tale of how he came to write the book, which initially started out as an assignment for Rolling Stone. Second, there are extended riffs on topics that range from the novels of Philip K. Dick, to Olivers Stone's movies, to Bruce Springsteen and Frank Sinatra, to a long bizarre comparison of Richard Nixon and the Mike Hammer of Kiss Me Deadly. Finally, there is the aforementioned discussion of the state of the Nation circa 1996, a time when we had come to almost casually accept such previously unthinkable events and conditions as the OJ verdict, abortion clinic bombings, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympic Park bombing, the repeated Unabomber attacks, a divided government led by the morally bankrupt Bill Clinton on one side and the equally corrupt Newt Gingrich on the other, and the approach of the millennium--all of them seeming to somehow indicate a country so deeply divided that the various sides were actually willing to go to war with one another. In Erickson's eyes these are all potential signs of the apocalyptic collapse of democracy.
The story of his work for Rolling Stone is a genuine hoot. The Californian Erickson, a successful young author in the Thomas Pynchon mold, was originally hired because, as the features editor told him, "What we want is a novelist who will write about the 1996 presidential campaign as though it were a novel." But even in his first meetings with the magazine's editor, Jann Wenner, he realized that he was expected to compete with the New York Times, despite the fact that he was not a professional reporter. The collision of his own and Wenner's expectations led to a series of amusing misunderstandings and confrontations over the ensuing months, with the author covering the interesting fringes of the Republican race and the fascinating but doomed candidates, while the magazine pushed for strategy, tactics, scoops and straightforward coverage of the Dole campaign. Erickson's account of these battles basically adds up to a drive by shooting in which his target is Wenner and the publisher's grandiose pretensions and limited understanding of politics. Meanwhile, Erickson had really vested himself in the story and when he was finally fired, simply decided:
...I would just go right on covering the campaign. I would get in my car with my bogus press badge and my bogus business cards and I would start driving, a bogus correspondent without portfolio, and I would write the story of the campaign the way I had wanted to in the beginning, and the way I had foolishly supposed in the beginning that I was being hired to do, but now armed with moonshine credentials and a surreptitious itinerary of my own making. And I would keep on driving out past L.A. and back into America and into the last years of the Twentieth Century, on one last rampage through the national asylum just to make one last observation, one last comment, or even to tell just one last lie, just as long as no one expected from me one last answer.
So, unemployed, uncredentialed, his marriage seemingly crumbling, Erickson continued along his own gonzo path.
Freed from the constraints and delusions of the Rolling Stone editors, Erickson liberally sprinkles this book with long digressive expositions on popular culture. Often they are really interesting and insightful, like the ones on Springsteen and Oliver Stone. Sometimes they are just as bewildering as they are fascinating, like imagining Richard Nixon as Mike Hammer. And sometimes they simply don't work at all, like an imagined world where the hostage rescue worked and Jimmy Carter won a second term. But, on balance, they do enliven the book and add more than they detract.
The real core of the book though is Erickson's attempt to understand what was happening in America at that moment, how the country had become so divided, with minorities--racial, religious, political, or whatever--questioning not just the ideas but the very legitimacy of their opponents. He correctly identifies, but I think fails to understand, the fundamental schizophrenia that had beset the American people : the sort of self-loathing that leads the electorate to demand the truth from candidates and then punish them when they give it (a la Bob Dole in '88 or Tsongas in '92); that takes a hostile view of all special interest groups, except for those that each of us belong to; that rages against duplicitous politicians--like Clinton--then turns around and elects them. Here Erickson's strongly stated but weakly held liberal viewpoint betrays him somewhat. He is unable to dot the final 'i' and cross the final 't'. The problem with modern America is that we continue to believe in our Founding myths--rugged individualism, self-reliance, democracy, freedom, etc.--but have become a country of dependents, relying on government programs that range from farm subsidies to welfare to school loans to social security. The dissonance that Erickson correctly perceives arises from the battle between American ideals and desires. Thus in a moment of almost insane idealism the electorate chose a Republican Congress in 1994, hell bent on reducing government. But as soon as Democrats demagogued a few middle class entitlement cuts, that some electorate turned on Congress with a vengeance and embraced Bill Clinton, defender of the welfare state. It is not that our original ideals are somehow bankrupt, as Erickson intimates, but rather that they have been temporarily (one hopes) swamped by selfishness and greed. The 20th Century legacy of Depression, World War, Cold War, and inflation left behind them a people who were understandably a little shaken up and unfortunately too willing to draw their renewed confidence from government. We must inevitably disappoint ourselves when we continue to believe in a free society, but increasingly accept the controls and strictures of big government. How can the public help but loathe the politicians who keep buying their votes with ever greater social spending bribes? How can the public help but hate itself for being bought? The dichotomy Erickson discerns will continue until we actually return to first principles and return to the minimalist government which has been a historic norm. The author comes close to nailing this idea, but somehow misses, presumably for ideological reasons.
On the other hand, Erickson is excellent when he's most honest with himself and with the reader, even at the risk of offending his political fellow travelers and his own sense of himself as a liberal. For instance, he does little to hide his contempt for Bill Clinton. He finds partial birth abortion repellent. He writes compellingly about the debasing of American culture and about the hypocrisy of a generation that maintained that Rock and Roll would change the world, now arguing that pop culture has no effect on kids' moral development. He provides wonderful portraits of the men he met whose intellectual honesty and whose true convictions impressed him--Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan and Gary Bauer. All of this seems to reflect a man who is much more ambivalent about his own professed liberalism than even he realizes.
At one point, Bauer says that he'd even vote for Erickson over Clinton and the author hastens to assures him that would be a mistake, as if he would make Clinton look like a conservative. But, in fact, over the course of the book the author emerges as someone who is deeply concerned with the moral crisis in America and as someone who has considered most issues before adopting positions on them. I, for one, would prefer to see someone like him, someone who actually has some core values and beliefs, run for president, than many of the poll driven, risk averse, weasly twerps who run now. He makes for an engaging and often funny guide to an election that ultimately left a bitter taste in everyone's' mouth and which did nothing to resolve the divergence between our dreams of freedom and our dependence on handouts. We can only hope that an equally agreeable observer is chronicling this election and that this time the story will have a happier ending.
GRADE: A
just another logic-less leftist defence of Bill Clinton........1999-02-16
AHA! Another 'before the impeachment' analysis of the Clinton administration. I am always amazed by anachronisms such as the tenacious 60's cocktail-party intellectualism that still ostentaciously flaunts itself while this man remains in power. It was interesting that Mr. Ericsson reveals he hesitated voting for Clinton for a brief moment because of the possibility of throwing the nation in to another Nixonesque crisis of Constitutional proportions. I'd be curious to read his thoughts now, post-impeachment. My impression,by reading his book, is that Mr. Ericsson is obviously vieing for an apologist position somewhere on the fringe (since he seems to have been excluded from the outer-wings let alone the inner circle) of the Democratic party apparatus. So I would assume he is well versed in the 'Big Lie' that it was 'only about sex'...and that the rule of law is merely a tool to be discarded when it interferes with the goals and ideology of the 'mendacious left'. All in all, there is not much new or interesting here (actually, this material became quite dated the day after the 1996 election), except for true political 'nomads' like myself...who, I might add, by definition, would never identify with ANY political party, let alone become a drooling minion of the 'Cult of Clinton'.
Interesting, but horribly flawed.......1998-01-23
I like Steve Erickson -- I've read at least two of his novels and some of his magazine writing -- but American Nomad left me cold.
While Erickson is better than almost anyone at conveying the soul-searching impotence of being alive in the 1990's, this book is surprisingly thin gruel. Witness, for example, how interchangeable section of the book are. Flip it open anywhere and you could be anywhere, the same somewhat overwrought Ericksonian prose, full of loss and pain and anguish, but surprisingly ... well, boring.
Erickson's book is too precious by far. It takes the worst parts of his style, on display in any of his novels, this sort of aimless, high-style, like Cheech Marin after a few semesters at Juilliard. But in its manneredness it becomes frustrating, and then plain annoying.
To be honest, I think Wenner did the right thing. Canning Erickson wasn't a bad decision, despite the wails of the artistes out there. This simply wasn't interesting campaign coverage, novelist or no novelist.
Read Michael Lewis's "Trail Fever" on the 1996 elections, or read the bravura "What it Takes" on the 1988 elections, or, if you're so inclined, go right back to Hunter Thompson "Fear and Loathing '72" or even White's books from the 1960's.
But Erickson's book is just mannered writing by an uninvolved novelist-cum-journalist who here writes like one of those disturbingly self-obsessed characters you see dressed in back and loitering in the Starbucks of your choice.
P.
Average customer rating:
- Erickson is a mad genius.
- The Room of Lost Creativity
- Sparkling imagery, powerful emotions.
- Haunted and haunting
- Best Contemporary Fiction Writer Alive
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Our Ecstatic Days: A Novel
Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Contemporary
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Similar Items:
- The Sea Came in at Midnight
- Days Between Stations: A Novel
- Tours of the Black Clock: A Novel
- Arc D'X
- Amnesiascope: A Novel
ASIN: 074326472X |
Customer Reviews:
Erickson is a mad genius........2007-04-04
Just finished Our Ecstatic Days, and it has my head spinning. The separate narratives, the fact that he even has a page-to-page trailing, separate narrative interrupting the main text, the fact that he makes them actually, coherently MEET UP?!
I loved the ride, Mr. Erickson. Saw and heard you read from this one in Berkeley and finally had the chance to sit down and read it.
The Room of Lost Creativity.......2006-09-12
Having read all of Erickson's novels, I would rate this one somewhere in the middle. Having said that, I still think he is the best contemporary author we have. With the exception of the brilliant segment of the Rooms of Lost something or others, I felt this book was a rehash of his past works. But I honestly did not see how he could improve on "The Sea came in at Midnight", so i wasn't let down. If you've never read Erickson, this book might be a good introduction, though i recommend starting with "Days Between Stations" and read them all. Thank you Steve Erickson!!!!!!!!
Sparkling imagery, powerful emotions. .......2006-07-13
Last July, while supervising my department's move into a new building on a scorching Saturday afternoon, I began reading Steve Erickson's book "The Sea Came in at Midnight". It was a luminous, hypnotic novel, full of fantastic imagery and strange logic. I thought, this is my kind of writer.
So I finally got around to reading a second book by Erickson, and it's "Our Ecstatic Days" -- which, it turns out, is kind of a sequel to the previous book, picking up more or less where that one left off. If there's a protagonist of either story, it's Kristin Blumenthal, former cult member, concubine, memory girl, and now mother of three-year-old Kierkegaard (called Kirk). Kristin, who used to be fearless to the point of recklessness, has been reduced to a sniveling mass of fear and paranoia simply by giving birth.
Kirk is a strange little child, demanding and controlling, making odd pronouncements such as "I am a Bright Light." But if the boy is strange, the events that surround him are even stranger. As Kristin and Kirk try to make a comfortable, safe life at the top of a hotel, a lake suddenly springs up in the center of Los Angeles. It grows larger and deeper by the day, swallowing up streets and buildings, inching ever closer to the Blumenthals' hotel room. Kristin, convinced that the lake wants to take Kirk from her, decides to confront the lake at its source. She and Kirk row out to the center of the lake, and she jumps in. When she resurfaces, Kirk is gone.
He has been snatched away by owls.
The delight of Erickson's writing is in stumbling around the corner to discover an unexpected turn of phrase or a fascinatingly nonsensical plot point (the color blue completely vanishes from the earth, for example). Keeping up with the plot -- such as it is -- is hard work, but this isn't the kind of story you should endeavor to understand. On the contrary, it's the kind of story you absorb, like David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten". It's almost like poetry.
That's not to say that it's perfect. Erickson returns again and again to some really awkward metaphors about motherhood and reproductive anatomy (for example, Kristin becomes a dominatrix who tells fortunes by reading the patterns of her menstrual blood in the toilet. Eew!). But as an abstract, very surreal depiction of what loss -- and the fear of loss -- feels like, Erickson mostly succeeds.
"The Sea Came in at Midnight" is a better book, and I'd urge anyone to read it before trying to read this one. But "Our Ecstatic Days" is a more than worthy follow-up, and I recommend it to the initiated or the brave.
Haunted and haunting.......2005-07-26
I had never read nor heard of Steve Erickson until Simon and Schuster asked for permission to use the lyrics for my song "Opal Moon" in his book. Before I gave permission, I requested a copy of a book so I could see what the writing was like. They sent me "Rubicon Beach" -- which I thought was strange and beautiful. Upon reading "Our Esctatic Days", I found that these two books might be companion books (in fact, one chapter is the beginning excerpt from "Rubicon Beach"), both living in the same world. I found the book compelling to read, and for those who have suffered a loss in their life, it will resonate.
Best Contemporary Fiction Writer Alive.......2005-06-25
Erickson is unparalleled in my mind as the greatest contemporary writer alive. As a voracious reader, I am in bookstores frequently. It is a rare visit where I don't check the "E" section of the fiction shelf to see if Erickson's got a new book out. The six year wait between "The Sea Came in at Midnight" and "Our Ecstatic Days" was torture.
I imagine that Erickson's books have a special appeal to those of us who like to think of ourselves as more dialed-in to the vibrations of collective memory than others, but I would be hesitant to categorize his books into a specific genre (e.g. "post-apocolyptic surrealism"). What resonates with me personally about Erickson's books in general, and this one specifically, is their ability to replicate the lucid dream state- where things are both more real and unreal than in waking life. I'm sure the themes mean different things to different people; for me, they represent the possiblities of parallel lives, which is as comforting as it is disconcerting.
Average customer rating:
- Entertaining Mind Games
- When's the movie coming out??
- Hauntingly beautiful, written beyond time and space
- A book of visions
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Rubicon Beach
Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: Quartet Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
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Similar Items:
- Arc D'X
- Amnesiascope: A Novel
- Tours of the Black Clock: A Novel
- Our Ecstatic Days: A Novel
- The Sea Came in at Midnight
ASIN: 0704380552 |
Customer Reviews:
Entertaining Mind Games.......2000-08-28
This book is two parts Kafka to one part Matrix. It starts out in some futuristic dream world and the reader is drawn in immediately. I found this book addictive and could not put it down as Erickson led me from the dream world to more reality based (or were they) worlds in which the initial dreams kept cropping up. It's a fascinating book by a talented author and I cannot believe it is out of print. Read it if you can find it.
When's the movie coming out??.......1997-09-24
A very ethereal and dreamlike book, it would make an amazing movie, probably directed by Ridley Scott or Wim Wenders. A journey into our minds, into America and into the spirit of Los Angeles. Having just moved to LA recently, I have been experiencing the surreal, alien nature of this city and Rubicon Beach expressed it perfectly.
Hauntingly beautiful, written beyond time and space.......1997-07-23
I cannot possibly recommend this book enough. One could spend a decade reading this book with a shovel and still not find all the levels underneath. Erickson's gorgeous prose has gorgeous ideas to back it up. This book is about everything and everywhere, from the country of America and what lies to the West, to one little girl beautiful beyond compare with eyes that are blades of light. I do not have the word capacity to fully describe this book. But it is not for the weak. Ignore logic and physical time or space before you dare attempt it. Erickson fightened and delighted me. There cannot possibly be another book like it
A book of visions.......1996-12-14
Steve Erickson doesn't write novels; he chronicles dreams. Set in a futurtist LA, where water floods the streets, the narrator goes about a mysterious quest. This is a book of shadow and light, enigma and truth. It will frustrate and amaze you at the same time. It is a rare book that looks to your intuition, rather than your mind, to decipher. Gorgeous and unsettling, like the best of Dali
Average customer rating:
- Paradise, sacrifice, mortality, reality.
- Recipe for a Steve Erickson novel
- Surreal
- a whirlwind of truth
- a whirlwind of truth
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Arc D'X
Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: Owlet
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0805048820 |
Customer Reviews:
Paradise, sacrifice, mortality, reality........2005-12-10
A previous reviewer ventured the bold opinion that Steve Erickson cannot write.
This authority has a point. Steve Erickson cannot write in the same way that Bob Dylan cannot sing.
If you care to be somewhat challenged (Mr. Erickson has a reputation as one of those difficult writers, but he's not really that difficult, if you're in the habit of paying attention to the book that you're reading), and you ache to understand both your nation and your soul, I suggest that you read this book. It will lead you down a path you do not expect.
Perhaps the most profound American novel of the 20th century.
Recipe for a Steve Erickson novel.......2005-02-09
Half a dozen books in, and the pattern is going strong:
1. One (1) mysterious, sexually-charged, rather mute young woman.
2. Up to Three (3) tortured men (all haunted by lots of ghosts from their pasts).
3. Several stylized sex scenes, in all of which the woman should exercise her blase magic.
4. Travel, but it must be to someplace in the very near, very erotic future: post-nuke Tokyo, post-apocalyptic L.A., &c.
5. Some sort of natural disaster: fire in L.A., tidal wave across Japan, lake in L.A. (as I believe the new novel, "Our Ecstatic Days," has opted for), etc.
Half-bake until prose reaches the proper level of bloated "lyricism."
Steve Erickson writes puerile, sex-obsessed pulp for readers who don't like to read, a la Chuck Palahniuk or Sylvia Plath. Since the late '80s he's been coasting on a few jacket blurbs from Thomas Pynchon and Tom Robbins (Erickson's publishers keep recycling quotes regarding his first two novels; no one seems to still be reading him). Apparently nobody has told him that having your heroine stare fiercely or brandish a knife or treat coldly her clientele at the strip club does not necessarily make for a novel about sexual liberation.
His stuff is what a highly-intelligent college freshman who REALLY wants to get laid and has some Anais Nin under his/her belt might write. Don't give him your money (SuicideGirls.com subscriptions just keep getting more expensive, you know, so you've got to budget).
Surreal.......2001-04-12
Very surreal, with a lot of sex (but most of it used for atmosphere) and a continuously changing narrator that sometimes left me lost. But I loved it. My biggest piece of advice is that if you get bored in the middle, keep reading. Erickson ties everything up in the last 100 pages rather spectacularly.
Don't expect everything to make a lot of sense in this book. People suddenly end up in different times and different places just by walking down a hallway or into a field, characters are found dead in the middle of the novel and then show up in the end as a kind of flashback. Like I said, very surreal and dreamlike. It's not really sci-fi although some of it is set in a somewhat futuristic, noir dystopia.
a whirlwind of truth.......2000-02-24
This is a creative work than spawns further than the imagination will typically allow. This is an exuberant blend of creativity to come to the truth about the soul, and the reality of that wich posseses it, or vice versa. A must read, if your willing to be exposed to the insane chaos it may reveal. 5+
a whirlwind of truth.......2000-02-24
This is a creative work than spawns further than the imagination will typically allow. This is an exuberant blend of creativity to come to the truth about the soul, and the reality of that wich posseses it, or vice versa. A must read, if your willing to be exposed to the insane chaos it may reveal. 5+
Average customer rating:
- a seductive insomniac nightmare
- One of the most inventive novels of the past decade
- Roaming the cityscape of the future
- surreal
- Moving and deliciously strange
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Amnesiascope: A Novel
Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Contemporary
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General
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Similar Items:
- Arc D'X
- Our Ecstatic Days: A Novel
- The Sea Came in at Midnight
- Days Between Stations: A Novel
- Tours of the Black Clock: A Novel
ASIN: 0805035036 |
Customer Reviews:
a seductive insomniac nightmare.......2004-08-31
Existential entropy is the dominant theme of Steve Erickson's sixth book, a meditation on the persistence of memory, the disappearance of the real, and the no-man's-land between fact and imagination.
With limber, hypnotic prose and vivid imagery, the nameless narrator leads us through a landscape of paranoia, sex, and decay. Though this no-man's-land takes the shape of L.A. early in the next century, the novel's axes are psychology and identity, not society and technology.
One of the narrator's obsessions is what he calls the Cinema of Hysteria: "movies that make no sense at all - and we understand them completely." Similarly, this tale seems plotless; but, as in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the arbitrary oddities slowly coalesce into a haunting whole. Erickson has spun a cunning web - less a book of laughter and forgetting than a seductive insomniac nightmare of hysteria and amnesia.
One of the most inventive novels of the past decade.......2002-09-22
It is a shame that this book is out of print, because it is one of those books that I would love to recommend to friends to read. The book is many things at once: provocative, sexy, imaginative, fun, sad. The back cover features a blurb comparing him to Pynchon, Nabokov, and DeLillo. Although I don't see the comparison to Nabokov, I would add my own comparisons: J. G. Ballard (especially books like CRASH and VERMILLION SANDS), William S. Burroughs, and even Neal Stephenson. The authors mentioned would prepare a would-be reader for the unexpected and the unusual; it might not prepare the reader for the beauty of his prose.
I fully expect this book to be in print again in the near future. Until then, I would urge any fan of literature to search this book out and read it. It is often beautiful, frequently haunting, and always original.
Roaming the cityscape of the future.......2001-12-31
I've heard some folks say that Erickson's Amnesiascope is one of his lesser works, but in my view it is head and shoulders above his other novels. "Amnesiascope" is an apocalyptic prose-poem about life in L.A., and where "Rubicon Beach" dragged with long, tedious dream-sequences, "Amnesiascope" soars by providing enough humor, detail, and vividly-imagined cityscapes to keep you fascinated by every page. As I read it, I occasionally thought to myself, "This reads like Henry Miller." Later, in an interview with Erickson, he mentioned that Miller was an inspiration for this novel.
surreal.......2001-12-28
this is a good book i cannot believe that it is out of print! I lent a copy to a friend and have never had it returned.
I read this before i ever visited L.A. but having been there now, you can see the jumps in imagination that he makes about a possible near future for the place. Dingy hotels and fires in the streets, subversive writers and strange and exotic grrls who just seem to turn up and then vanish. He describes a place that made me think of cities in warzones, in movies like Full Metal Jacket and The Killing Fields. What is so good is that the story veers between fiction and what sounds like autobiography a lot and so constantly keeps you on your toes and just a little off-balance in this dream-like world.
L.A. just before the end of the world, or maybe just after?
Moving and deliciously strange.......2001-02-01
Erickson's dark, quirkily romantic future L.A. has the resonance of one of J.G. Ballard's apocalyptic landscapes. Like voyeurs, we're ushered into a world of flickering volcanic fires, leaking hotels and anxiety-run-rampant in the tradition of DeLillo's "White Noise" and Pynchon's "Vineland."
"Amnesiascope" is far more than a meditation on nightlife. Erickson's meticulously wrought characters are what propels this odd, gorgeous book. At once experimental and character-driven, "Amnesiacope" succeeds in its well-honed balance between landscape and psyche, empathy and urban detachment. There wasn't a moment I didn't like; "Amnesiacope" stands as one of the most moving near-future novels to have graced the genre.
Average customer rating:
- Prose or fiction?
- Lost on the Tour
- Twilight trip to an alternative version of the 20th Century
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Tours of the Black Clock: A Novel
Steve Erickson
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
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| Literature & Fiction
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Similar Items:
- Our Ecstatic Days: A Novel
- Days Between Stations: A Novel
- The Sea Came in at Midnight
- Arc D'X
- Amnesiascope: A Novel
ASIN: 074326570X |
Book Description
Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront its shocked and secret conscience. One of Steve Erickson's most acclaimed novels, Tours of the Black Clock crosses the intersections of passion and power and gazes into a clock with no face, where memory is the gravity of time and all the numbers fall like rain.
Customer Reviews:
Prose or fiction?.......2002-09-19
As a poet Steve Erickson was transformational for me. There are chapters in this book that compare, for me, to some of the greatest poetry ever written. This fact alone makes this book well worth reading, but the story itself merits a second glance as well. Reality is layered, overlapping, runs paralell, perpendicular, through time, through fantasy. There are few fiction writers brave enough to make so tangible and palpable their characters turmoil, being too anchored to what they feel is real. But writing fiction opens up possibilities that even fewer writers truly ever tap. Steve Erickson has done just that. And does it magnificently time and again. As magnificent as Arc d'X is I would have to call this book, Tours of the Black Clock, Erickson seminal work.
Lost on the Tour.......2000-03-31
Ocassionally confusing but full of profound ideas. The alternate, parallel history plays like a dream. A fully layered but ultimately flawed book, with breaths of the brilliance Erickson will display later.
Twilight trip to an alternative version of the 20th Century.......1998-07-31
Steve Erickson claims kinship with authors Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, and its easily to see why. Like those authors, he subtly twists the nature of reality and history until it resembles the inner (both philosophical and pyschological) landscapes of his characters. This novel is about white-haired Marc and his mother, who live on a small island in the middle of a fog-shrouded river in the Pacific Northwest. They have an estranged relationship with each other, stemming from the fact that Marc doesn't know who his father is, and his mother will not speak to him about her past. One day, he comes home and finds her with a dead man at her feet. The image so disturbs him that he will not set foot on the island for about 20 years. He takes over the ferry that shuttles tourists back and forth. He finally goes back to the hotel where his mother lives, in search of a mysterious girl who has not stepped back onto the return ferry to the mainland, and runs into his m! other. The ghost of the dead man is still at her feet, and he tells both mother and son of his strange history. Banning Jainlight was the bastard son of a farmer and his Native American slave mistress in the earlier part of the century. He ends up burning down the farm, killing one of his half-brothers, and crippling both his father and his step-mother for the cruelty they inflicted on him. He runs away to New York City, and several years later, ends up in Vienna, Austria, where he writes pornography for a powerful client in the newly ascendant Nazi Regime. He bases his writings on the strange, surreal sexual encounters he has with a young woman who lives across the street from him. In his writings, he transforms her features and her name to resemble those of the client's -- who is, of course, Hitler -- long lost love. Bear in mind, that this is just a brief description of this novel. Jainlight's story sparks off the no-less compelling story of Marc's mother, that mov! es from pre-Revolutionary Russia, sub-Saharan Africa, and P! ost-war New York City. Moving across dreams and reality, fantasy and history, this dense novel weaves together such unlikely themes as relationships between lovers and parents; the nature of good and evil; and the quest for identity. The images and instance in this novel are numerous and unforgettable: a woman who can kill men with the wild beauty of her dancing and menstruates flower petals; a city that's in the middle of a lagoon, and covered by blue tarps; a burial ceremony where the dead are hung upside-down on trees until they can speak their names; a herd of silver buffalo who run through the plains of Africa and North America. The writing is lovely and lyrical. This is a great novel!
Authors:
- Ernaux, Annie
- Espriu, Salvador
- Esquivel, Laura
- Etherege, George
- Ettinger, Nancy
- Euclid
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- Evanovich, Janet
- Katherine Everard
- Eady, Cornelius
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