Dad, The Moon Is Alphane Again!

Novel + blog + girlfriend (Happy Birthday, Crystal! Happy Birthday Month!) + 50 000 novel + school + essays/assignments + job + damn emails keep piling up + Arcade Fire/Corb Lund/Metric?/Feist + that cd I owe Kyle + wouldn't it be nice to get that Myspace thing running? + untogetherness of self = AAAGGGHHH!!! Godsake, imagine if I had a real life, with real problems. K, time for some Doritos.

Reading: Cinderella's ugly step-sisters cleavered off their heels trying to cram those size twelve horse-hoofed digits into the crystal size five slipper. Blood everywhere, you can't even imagine, and the painfulness, too. What a mess. But a very entertaining mess, I'll give the uglies that, bloody but entertaining. See, every day I go to the fifth floor of Rutherford and read, for twenty-five minutes, a little red hardcover called Clans Of The Alphane Moon. Now, you've probably seen those skeleton shirts, right, the ones that have white ribcages printed on the black cloth? The kind which become popular around Halloween? Kate Winslett wore one in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, a film which, the discerning reader will already have noted, I referenced in my last post, because it's the only movie I've ever seen. I have no knowledge of film outside that movie. Back to the discerning reader, Clans Of The Alphane Moon is not for him. COTAM is for me, the guy who, sure, likes his soft-cover Thomas Pynchon, but will probably finish the lusciously tacky (there's that first-year Fine Arts vocabulary) Frazetti-covered Tarzan At The Earth's Core a lot faster than The Crying Of Lot 49. What I'm saying is, COTAM isn't a book, it's bare plot, a shiningly skeletal what-comes-next teetering in delicate slippers of conceptual prose. And the thing about those shirts, if you'll let me return to a digression, is that you haven't really got the whole skeleton there, have you? The rib cage, a flash of collarbone, maybe, perhaps even a small green lizard furled cartoonishly around one of the ribs, but that's quality, and you don't see too much of that, now do you? The point is, Mr. Bones isn't all there. And neither is this novel. The author has had to slice off too many elements of the novel in order to concentrate on his main concept, which is this: the inmates are running the asylum. Years ago, Earth outright defeated the Alphans. Then, cleverly exploiting their victory, the human race banished all their mentally unstable bits to the Alphan moon. These bits have formed new societies along heavily biased and paranoid lines. Earth wants the moon back, now, and complications ensue. Look, this novel sucks. The concept isn't enough. But I'm still reading it. The characters are all wading around in the shallow end, there's intricate convoluted labyrinthine plot-beasts chewing up the pages, and I swear half the novel is padding (and not just in the holding cells), but I'm still reading it. Because this novel is by Philip K. Dick, and let's face it, his junk should be most people's treasure. You should look for some buried treasure yourself. Try on some new shoes. Maybe look, with me, in Clans Of The Alphane Moon + Philip K. Dick

Listening: Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! Arcade Fire! I love this here interwebbery. I love bootlegged videos. I love David Bowie singing with Arcade Fire. I LOVE DAVID BOWIE SINGING WITH ARCADE FIRE! I also love Arcade Fire on Letterman, but the video is terrible, and the sound blows. But look at the guy (William Butler, I think) beating that drum, going AC/DC on the floor!