I just wrote a poem about a man with Tourette's. The poem is eighty-nine lines long. All the lines rhyme, because every line ends with the word "blanket".
I didn't really write a poem. Not like that. I don't even know anyone who has Tourette's. And, by the way, why is it always the guy that has Tourette's? Where are the girls in the popular picture? I'm thinking of that guy in Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, the crazy man Nikolai Levin in Anna Karenina, that writer guy André Malraux, heck, even Neve Campbell's brother turns out to be a guy. Inquiries, commence. Aside, be ended.
The Historian is part of the collective Tourette's Syndrome. I'm not saying this bitterly, I'm not saying this with favour, I'm just saying, is all. The facts of the case are simple and easy to blanket. The novel turns out to be yet another cycle through vampire mythology (lore? legend? urban myth? urblore? mythurblore? blanket?). There's garlic, and silver, mist of a mistness, bleeding necks, Transylvania, multiple narrators, death and dragons, and rich rich prose. All the usual blanket. Give me a cameo from Anne Rice (suitably phrased in the "erotic" prose she's awkwardly ripped from Dorian Gray) and every hallmark of Your Modern Vampire Novel will be stamped on the bottom of the blanket. I'm only half-blanket through this blanket blanket but I blanket I know how it blank.
Etblank.
EtblanketblanketblanketblanketblanketblanketBLANKET!!!
Reading: Let's face it, not only is The Historian a repetitive novel in its subject matter, but (forgive me) it's practically TS in phrasing and layout as well. Does that make it a bad novel? Ill-scribed? I'm not so sure. I'm still reading it, after all. But listen, EK, please, next time, a little less on the backstory to the backstory to the backstory. Why play Calvino? He was a cool writer, yeah, but he never tried to moderate action-adventure born of Victorian sensationalism, did he? Anyway, this isn't a criticism proper, more like a wistful awareness of the faults of my own writing. Is all. I am sadly ("sadly" because I'm lazy and use hack emotional description, instead of writerly skill, to make actions seem interesting) only two hundred and a little-bit-more post-modern pages into The Historian + Elizabeth Kostova
Listening: My ears got cut off. KIDDING! But seriously, my ears were cut off. Ha, still kidding! Love it. But, really, I actually can't hear anything, never mind music. What happened was this: I was carelessly fiddling with a jammy new eraser, one of those beige ones you can buy in the art stores, I know you've seen them. The erasers, I mean. Whatev. SO I absent-mindedly scratched my ear while holding the eraser, and wiped off half my earlobe, and nicked the eardrum, too! My eardrum! Because I'm a pencil outline, you see, and I can't hide that anymore. I'm two-dimensional, and my one ear is gone. They're calling me Vincent around here, but I just want to get back to Family Circle.
[Edit (regular font): My eyes are very grey, sometimes they turn blue (but only for you), and, the thing is, they work fine. So I used them to watch the latest Kutcher kick, Guess Who. Who else thought that when his character was getting blackballed ("blackballed"? seriously? no, no, I can't go to the club tonight, Jeeves, I'm blackballed!), who else thought that the murky rumours of bad credit swirling around Ashton's name would naturally and inadvertently have been started by the prospective father-in-law using his job as a loan officer to investigate Ashton? And who else was disappointed to see that path lead NOWHERE! I hate bad writers.
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