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mallorys_cameraDreamed about a demonic artist who tattooed Chinese pictographs on the backs of people's necks where they could never see them. These people hoped the pictographs stood for sentiments like "Happiness" or "Good Fortune" or "Hi Mom," but really they didn't 'cause the artist didn't know shit about Chinese calligraphy plus the tattoos were done with this kind of fluorescent psychotropic ink that beamed their bearers' psychic transmissions back to a laboratory in central China.
Some kind of narrative superimposed on top of this set-up – a train ride at night; a plaza – also at night – with intense floodlights illuminating an empty, upraised stage. But somewhere outside the dream, my cat was meowing loudly. I got up. I staggered to the door. I let her in. After that, I had to pee. Then, it was two o'clock in the morning.
Hmmm, thought I to myself. That was a really interesting dream. But if I wake myself up enough to write it down, I won't be able to go back to sleep and I'll have to spend the night watching old Eddie Murphy In Concert performances on Spike TV. Eddie Murphy is funny, I'll grant you. But he's not that funny.
Coleridge really had an advantage, not having to deal with cable TV and all.
###
Santa Cruz really knows how to do up a holiday weekend right! A Blues Festival, a Mexican Music Festival, a beach volleyball tournament, the hundredth anniversary of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
Monterey, on the other hand, has the aquarium! Oh, and scenic beauty, and the cool acoustic stylings of Bozo, everybody's favorite Kenny G wannabe.
Ben called me Friday from the Boardwalk where he'd gone to pick up Robin's lost cell phone. "There must be a hundred thousand people here. Literally."
"Great!" I said. "Well, at least we know why they're not here."
I wouldn't say Memorial Day weekend has been a bust. For one thing, it's not quite over yet. For another, we did a huge number of sales both yesterday and the day before, plus yesterday we did more Internet sales in a single day than we have since I started the business. Internet sales accounted for fully 20% of all store sales! This was a real milestone: given the rising cost of gas and the dwindling number of tourists, the Internet is the most obvious growth frontier for the Little Store.
But I noticed an odd pattern: people bought single items. One bottle of hot sauce. One jar of habanero mustard. One chili-pepper dishtowel. One "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Taste buds" B. Traven homage teeshirt. You gotta sell a helluva lot of single items to make the nut. And that can be tiring.
At around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the Little Store hit a lull. I wandered outside to look at the water. The sky was overcast all along the rim where the bay meets the Pacific but on the inland side of the harbor, about half a mile from where I stood, I could see bright sunlight pouring down – the effect was a little like being trapped in a snow dome.
When I walked back to the store, a woman had stopped in front of Homer.
She was pushing a shopping cart.
Homer was performing The Rapper's Delight.
When Homer was done, the woman guffawed loudly and clapped her hands. (You're right – I have always wanted to use the word "guffaw" in a sentence, and now I have so I never have to use it again!)
The woman wasn't hurting anyone and she wasn't drunk. Or at least not that noticeably.
A squeaky clean nuclear family was watching her too. They halted dead fifteen feet from the Little Store's door. "Don't go over there, Madison," Mom warned the daughter who was looking longingly at Homer. "Do you hear me? Just. Don't."
"In fact, let's just get out of here," said Dad firmly to his brood.
Now, maybe they meant to come into the Little Store and were deterred by the presence of a homeless woman. And maybe they didn't.
Either way, I was not gonna let my leftist, liberal, Buddhistic leanings get in the way with earning a buck.
I marched up to the woman with the shopping cart. "You're gonna have to leave."
"He's funny, huh?" she said. "Is he motion-activated? Where's the sensor?"
"You have to leave now," I said, folding my arms.
Her face went through twenty different permutations of shock, defiance, humiliation and sadness in the course of half that many seconds. I just kept staring at her as neutrally as possible. I would have said, It's nothing personal, but I was afraid she'd hit me up for money.
Finally she turned around and left.
###
So I'm just about finished with Generation Loss. It turns out to be a serial killer novel which for some reason I didn't quite realize when I started reading it. This is a Good Thing. I love serial killer novels.
I've written about Elizabeth Hand before. When I have any kind of budget at all for little luxuries – which I don't right now – I buy everything she writes. In hardcover even!
My pal Lucius sent me this one.
It's an interesting book. It works quite well on some levels. Intensely atmospheric – if for some reason you have a hankering to see Maine in low winter but can't afford the plane ticket or the time, read this book. It's as good as being there. Better, really, because you won't risk frostbite. Hand is an extraordinarily talented writer when it comes to evoking atmosphere and sense of place.
The actual serial murders themselves are pretty fucking grisly too in a creative, inventive way.
So, set-up: A+.
The plot itself, though. There's absolutely no suspense. This is Not Good in a serial killer novel.
Finally, the real reason to write any kind of crime book is to invent a kinky and yet engaging protagonist who will leave your readers begging for more. Hand's protagonist in Generation Loss, though, is absolutely repulsive. She stalks people. She plunders their drug cabinets. She enters their rooms, lays down on their beds and masturbates. Ick! We don't care that she's a brilliant photographer. We don't care that she knows who Richard Hell is. We care that she's a one-woman Chlamydia epidemic even now tearing through the Motel 6 chain. We never want to read another book in which she plays Girl Detective to the stars ever, ever again and this means that Hand has blown her chance for a nice, cushy three-book 300 K advance Cass Neary contract.
Some kind of narrative superimposed on top of this set-up – a train ride at night; a plaza – also at night – with intense floodlights illuminating an empty, upraised stage. But somewhere outside the dream, my cat was meowing loudly. I got up. I staggered to the door. I let her in. After that, I had to pee. Then, it was two o'clock in the morning.
Hmmm, thought I to myself. That was a really interesting dream. But if I wake myself up enough to write it down, I won't be able to go back to sleep and I'll have to spend the night watching old Eddie Murphy In Concert performances on Spike TV. Eddie Murphy is funny, I'll grant you. But he's not that funny.
Coleridge really had an advantage, not having to deal with cable TV and all.
Santa Cruz really knows how to do up a holiday weekend right! A Blues Festival, a Mexican Music Festival, a beach volleyball tournament, the hundredth anniversary of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
Monterey, on the other hand, has the aquarium! Oh, and scenic beauty, and the cool acoustic stylings of Bozo, everybody's favorite Kenny G wannabe.
Ben called me Friday from the Boardwalk where he'd gone to pick up Robin's lost cell phone. "There must be a hundred thousand people here. Literally."
"Great!" I said. "Well, at least we know why they're not here."
I wouldn't say Memorial Day weekend has been a bust. For one thing, it's not quite over yet. For another, we did a huge number of sales both yesterday and the day before, plus yesterday we did more Internet sales in a single day than we have since I started the business. Internet sales accounted for fully 20% of all store sales! This was a real milestone: given the rising cost of gas and the dwindling number of tourists, the Internet is the most obvious growth frontier for the Little Store.
But I noticed an odd pattern: people bought single items. One bottle of hot sauce. One jar of habanero mustard. One chili-pepper dishtowel. One "We Don't Need No Stinkin' Taste buds" B. Traven homage teeshirt. You gotta sell a helluva lot of single items to make the nut. And that can be tiring.
At around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the Little Store hit a lull. I wandered outside to look at the water. The sky was overcast all along the rim where the bay meets the Pacific but on the inland side of the harbor, about half a mile from where I stood, I could see bright sunlight pouring down – the effect was a little like being trapped in a snow dome.
When I walked back to the store, a woman had stopped in front of Homer.
She was pushing a shopping cart.
Homer was performing The Rapper's Delight.
When Homer was done, the woman guffawed loudly and clapped her hands. (You're right – I have always wanted to use the word "guffaw" in a sentence, and now I have so I never have to use it again!)
The woman wasn't hurting anyone and she wasn't drunk. Or at least not that noticeably.
A squeaky clean nuclear family was watching her too. They halted dead fifteen feet from the Little Store's door. "Don't go over there, Madison," Mom warned the daughter who was looking longingly at Homer. "Do you hear me? Just. Don't."
"In fact, let's just get out of here," said Dad firmly to his brood.
Now, maybe they meant to come into the Little Store and were deterred by the presence of a homeless woman. And maybe they didn't.
Either way, I was not gonna let my leftist, liberal, Buddhistic leanings get in the way with earning a buck.
I marched up to the woman with the shopping cart. "You're gonna have to leave."
"He's funny, huh?" she said. "Is he motion-activated? Where's the sensor?"
"You have to leave now," I said, folding my arms.
Her face went through twenty different permutations of shock, defiance, humiliation and sadness in the course of half that many seconds. I just kept staring at her as neutrally as possible. I would have said, It's nothing personal, but I was afraid she'd hit me up for money.
Finally she turned around and left.
So I'm just about finished with Generation Loss. It turns out to be a serial killer novel which for some reason I didn't quite realize when I started reading it. This is a Good Thing. I love serial killer novels.
I've written about Elizabeth Hand before. When I have any kind of budget at all for little luxuries – which I don't right now – I buy everything she writes. In hardcover even!
My pal Lucius sent me this one.
It's an interesting book. It works quite well on some levels. Intensely atmospheric – if for some reason you have a hankering to see Maine in low winter but can't afford the plane ticket or the time, read this book. It's as good as being there. Better, really, because you won't risk frostbite. Hand is an extraordinarily talented writer when it comes to evoking atmosphere and sense of place.
The actual serial murders themselves are pretty fucking grisly too in a creative, inventive way.
So, set-up: A+.
The plot itself, though. There's absolutely no suspense. This is Not Good in a serial killer novel.
Finally, the real reason to write any kind of crime book is to invent a kinky and yet engaging protagonist who will leave your readers begging for more. Hand's protagonist in Generation Loss, though, is absolutely repulsive. She stalks people. She plunders their drug cabinets. She enters their rooms, lays down on their beds and masturbates. Ick! We don't care that she's a brilliant photographer. We don't care that she knows who Richard Hell is. We care that she's a one-woman Chlamydia epidemic even now tearing through the Motel 6 chain. We never want to read another book in which she plays Girl Detective to the stars ever, ever again and this means that Hand has blown her chance for a nice, cushy three-book 300 K advance Cass Neary contract.
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yes! a guffaw a day keep the chortles away.
Date: 2007-05-29 02:52 am (UTC)i think with your medical background, you ought to hang a shingle in the hottest of the hot shelf and call it "the burn ward"
and sell hot sausilito magnets
and got a bee in your scotch bonnet?
who's the hottest female tv detective? pepper anderson
- the above are all reasons why i would have gone out of business in a month.
Re: yes! a guffaw a day keep the chortles away.
Date: 2007-05-29 01:39 pm (UTC)Re: yes! a guffaw a day keep the chortles away.
Date: 2007-05-29 05:44 pm (UTC)elizabeth hand
Date: 2007-05-29 05:56 am (UTC)Re: elizabeth hand
Date: 2007-05-29 01:38 pm (UTC)