Read Online Amnesiascope: A Novel by Steve Erickson - Free Book Online
Authors: Steve Erickson
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one of those simpatico literary tête-à-têtes that aspiring big-shot authors always imagine having with other authors, I envying his phenomenal reputation and staggering success and religiously devout world-wide readership and him envying … well, I don’t know what he was envying of mine, but I think he was feeling frustrated at having become hopelessly mired in the science-fiction genre, and if there was one thing I could take solace in, it was that I wasn’t hopelessly mired in the science-fiction genre. Anyway I fully expected he would be the events main focus of interest, which he was, though I suppose I didn’t need to have it so emphatically reinforced by the write-up in the local paper where, after several hundred words about him, my own presence was acknowledged in as cursory a fashion as possible. I also assumed that, as the bottom of the bill, I would read first. But backstage the publicist for the science-fiction author argued with the program director that his guy should go on first “because everyone wants to leave early.” Since I was only two feet away when he said this, it seemed obvious he just didn’t realize who I was, so I thought I should try and make my presence known, clearing my throat, shuffling my feet, yawning lustily, humming obnoxiously, moving furniture, rattling dishes, blowing my nose and waving my book in the air, all to no avail.
When all was said and done, however, I wound up going on first. I had given readings before but never like this: outdoors, in the dark, on a high stage with lights shining in my eyes so that I was reading to blackness, without a clue whether two people were in front of me or two hundred or two thousand. Every once in a while from out of the black, but as though from far, far away, would come a response of some kind, a titter of laughter for instance at a line which I may or may not have intended to be funny. But otherwise there was only the stillness of what I liked to believe was rapt attention, though it might as easily have been the stillness of empty seats. Then, at a crucial moment in the narrative, exactly half way through, all the lights suddenly went out.
I stood in the dark, waiting for them to come back on. The minutes ticked by, everyone silently sitting in the darkness, waiting. Finally, all I could say was, “I’d go on, but I can’t see.”
Well, I suppose it served me right for ever having thought that writing novels was a “career” in the first place. Reviewing movies, on the other hand, now there’s a career, and when I started at the newspaper I suppose I was almost passionate about it. For whatever reason, I made it my particular specialty to defend those movies about which the critical establishment had already put out the dreary word, movies where some poor deluded filmmaker tried to reach for something the cultural mavens could have told him was far beyond his grasp. In fact, I quickly came to have little use for any movie that didn’t completely embarrass itself. For a while I got something out of this, extravagantly championing displays of incompetent audacity; but enough time has gone by now for the culture to bleach out any embarrassments of real consequence, which is to say the sort that actually disturb anyone, and Shale has recently hinted that I’ve gone off-track. Lately it’s all I can do to write anything at all. I’ve taken to just staring out my apartment window at night watching the helicopters drift in and out of the plumes of smoke, listening to Now, Voyager and Marrakesh drums on Station 3 and wondering what failed third career awaits the failure of my second. …
At first it was simple. There was only one rule you had to know about being a critic, which was that everything that isn’t underrated is overrated. You can plug into this equation any movie or director or actor and stake out a position accordingly, taking into account of course that something is underrated right up to the moment it becomes
When all was said and done, however, I wound up going on first. I had given readings before but never like this: outdoors, in the dark, on a high stage with lights shining in my eyes so that I was reading to blackness, without a clue whether two people were in front of me or two hundred or two thousand. Every once in a while from out of the black, but as though from far, far away, would come a response of some kind, a titter of laughter for instance at a line which I may or may not have intended to be funny. But otherwise there was only the stillness of what I liked to believe was rapt attention, though it might as easily have been the stillness of empty seats. Then, at a crucial moment in the narrative, exactly half way through, all the lights suddenly went out.
I stood in the dark, waiting for them to come back on. The minutes ticked by, everyone silently sitting in the darkness, waiting. Finally, all I could say was, “I’d go on, but I can’t see.”
Well, I suppose it served me right for ever having thought that writing novels was a “career” in the first place. Reviewing movies, on the other hand, now there’s a career, and when I started at the newspaper I suppose I was almost passionate about it. For whatever reason, I made it my particular specialty to defend those movies about which the critical establishment had already put out the dreary word, movies where some poor deluded filmmaker tried to reach for something the cultural mavens could have told him was far beyond his grasp. In fact, I quickly came to have little use for any movie that didn’t completely embarrass itself. For a while I got something out of this, extravagantly championing displays of incompetent audacity; but enough time has gone by now for the culture to bleach out any embarrassments of real consequence, which is to say the sort that actually disturb anyone, and Shale has recently hinted that I’ve gone off-track. Lately it’s all I can do to write anything at all. I’ve taken to just staring out my apartment window at night watching the helicopters drift in and out of the plumes of smoke, listening to Now, Voyager and Marrakesh drums on Station 3 and wondering what failed third career awaits the failure of my second. …
At first it was simple. There was only one rule you had to know about being a critic, which was that everything that isn’t underrated is overrated. You can plug into this equation any movie or director or actor and stake out a position accordingly, taking into account of course that something is underrated right up to the moment it becomes
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