Your Sparkle Cavalcade....
Robert Shiarella was kind enough to leave an entry in my guest book. He is the author of Your Sparkle Cavalcade of Death, one of the books on my sorely neglected 100 books list, and a friend of the writer William Kotzwinkle, who wrote The Fan Man and Dr. Rat, two of the great, and with Shiarella's Sparkle Cavalcade, three of the great satiric works of the 70's. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Southern's The Blood of a Wig also come to mind.
Really? asks self. The greatest? No small amount of hyperbole here, I think.
Well, Terry Southern wrote Blood of a Wig in the sixties, so I suppose it doesn't count. Still, good, better, whatever, they were books that gave me the old shot between the eyes, although I think neither one of them received the recognition they both deserved. Kotzwinkle has written many excellent books over these many years, where, to my knowledge, Shiarella wrote just the one, but both, I think, have in their own way received less recognition than they should. Perhaps these particular books simply happen to match my own quirky tastes, a recognition of mastery in a style that doesn't have the broader and more universal audience that others enjoy, a Steven King or a Danielle Steel, the Anti-Christ and Christess of books. Hi, ho. Books, markets, submarkets, readers, bleeders, what does any of it mean anyway in television time?
Interesting election results. I assume Gore must pull out if the vote total tomorrow still shows Bush
ahead. These things can't go on forever, although what happens if the margin narrows and there are still a few thousand overseas absentee ballots to be counted? Or, perhaps more interesting, Gore now leads by, say 200 votes? The absentee ballots are said to favor Bush, primarily overseas military absentee ballots, but what if they don't? This could all be extremely interesting. I'm not sure you want your elections to be extremely interesting, but whatever comes out of this, if Bush is the president and he's not able to put it together quickly when this is over, it may well be an extremely contentious next four years.
The margin doesn't mean very much if the man elected has the ability, as dub-ya has so often said, to lead the country. (That always made me nervous, "lead" the country. He was ready to "lead" the country. What does that mean, exactly? Gave me visions of Al Haig, running around after Reagan was shot, saying to anyone who would listen that someone, presumably he, was in charge.) We may wish we'd never heard of Florida. Or Texas. Or Tennessee. Then again, upset as I may seem over dub-ya, I also know that I could easily be wrong and he could end up becoming a swell president. He could. Really.
I picked up the rest of my company picnic photos, by the way. Not so hot. I don't see a great future in company picnic photography.
BACK TO THE:
