Author / DrMabuse

by DrMabuse

The Voice of a Generation

We are, of course, beyond grateful that someone out there has seen fit to provide indelible evidence demonstrating just how malleable Mr. Lipsyte is in a supine position. Forget prose, plot, character, exposition, and a dependable collection of laughs. Hero worship is, after all, the m.o. behind any breakthrough novel.

These days, Mr. Lipsyte is more popular than Jesus. He is so hot that Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney are now leaving long voicemails on Mr. Lipsyte’s machine, wondering if Stolid Sam might have any “leftover groupies” that might remind them of the glory days. Mr. Lipsyte, to his considerable credit, has vowed that he won’t be reduced to lecturing about wine in ten years. To which we offer him considerable props. Nor will he be languishing in Hollywood banging out novels revisiting the same territory explored in Home Land.

While this is the kind of tricky situation that might tarnish a one-trick pony, in Mr. Lipsyte’s case, it has worked out quite well. Because Mr. Lipsyte also has a short story collection to back up his streetcred.

So we’re exceedingly grateful to everyone promoting the current efforts. We were beginning to think that we were the only ones out here who read Home Land with a roll of toilet paper within arm’s reach. Splashy debut novels often have that effect on us. We reacted the exact same way when reading Revolutionary Road and Tender is the Night. In Mr. Lipsyte’s case, as we read the book, we laughed like a dormouse pondering the ineffectual cheese traps devised by pesky homo sapiens. Home Land: funny shit, yo. Pass it on. Pay it forward.

But (with all due respect, of course) wait for Novel #2 before declaring Sam the voice of a new generation. That’s all we have to say on the matter.

Incidentally, we’re back. The indignant Indians have fled the coop. We have a redesign in the works. We could offer a lengthy tale about our momentary bout with the flu and the fact that our computer died, but we’re just damn happy to be alive and well. Hoping you are the same.

[UPDATE: As Maud was kind enough to point out, Home Land is Novel #2. To prevent any future mishaps, we’ve enrolled in a six-week counting class that starts next week, discovered in our local extended education catalog.]

by DrMabuse

MP3s Removed

Because of bandwidth I cannot afford, I have had to remove all MP3 files. If you’re looking for the Star & Buc Wild file (or any of the other MP3s generated), you’ll have to go elsewhere.

This site itself may have to disappear for several months. Thank you, India Times.

by DrMabuse

Ain’t No Room for Culture in the New I-Rack

The United States is now rivaling those who burned the Great Library of Alexandria as cultural destroyers. Having deliberately built a base upon Babylon, a new report from the British Museum notes:

  • damage to the dragons decorating the Ishtar Gate, one of the world’s most famous monuments, from attempts to prise out the relief-moulded bricks
  • broken bricks inscribed with the name of Nebuchadnezzar lying in spoil heaps
  • the original brick surface of the great processional route through the gate crushed by military vehicles
  • fuel seeping from tanks into archaeological layers
  • acres of the site levelled, covered with imported gravel – which Dr Curtis said would be impossible to remove without causing further damage – and sprayed with chemicals which are also seeping into the unexcavated buried deposits
  • thousands of tonnes of archaeological material used to fill sandbags and mesh crates, and equally damaging, when that practice stopped, thousands more tonnes of material imported from outside the site, contaminating the site for archaeologists forever.

Dr. John Curtis, the writer of the report, noted that his charges “should not be seen as exhaustive, but is indicative of the types of damage caused.”

by DrMabuse

In Defense of Conversational Adverbs

Apparently, some folks are taking offense to using “actually” in conversation. Actually, there’s something very nice about using adverbs in regular conversation. Realistically, it beats the tongue-tied swagger or the awkward pauses because, actually, the brain gets an extra second as the beads of sweat form hideous spoors on your forehead while hot lights, cameras and an audience are upon you and you hope to hell that you’re coming across as articulately as the perfectionist producers demand (yes, even on CSPAN!). Actually, it’s not quite like that at all. But having been on camera, it’s close. Inadvertently, in print, adverbs stick out long sore thumbs but, actually, adverbs announce a moment of discovery, a sense that one is discovering a point or a thesis in the process of response and, actually, if someone has a problem with this, well then we suspect that they may not have many ideas to contribute to the world, save complaints over very minute things. Actually.