LA WEEKLY

[Nicholas Peter Spencer]

On the subject of Erickson: of course Pynchon writes the blurb for Tours 
of the Black Clock and Arc d'X; Ruibcon Beach is probably his best, 
published by Vintage Contemporaries; as somebody mentioned, Leap Year is 
a pot-boiler for Arc d'X in its treatment of Jefferson and his 
slave Sally Hemmings.  Erickson tarts this historical titbit up into a 
meditation on how love and freedom have always been at odds in American 
politics.  Kinda weird how that hokey film Jefferson in Paris, dealing 
with the same material, came out not too long afterwards: is there some 
kind of Sally Hemmings strange attractor at work?  Leap Year also makes 
an instructive comparison with Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago: 
it's amazing how bland and nondescript American politics became in 
less than twenty years.  Erickson also says that Atlanta has the most 
uninteresting downtown in the whole of the United States - and boy is he 
right!

If anybody's at all interested, I'm giving a conference paper entitled 
'The Nuclear Imaginary in Steve Erickson's Leap year and Pat Robertson's 
The New World Order' at the Discerning the Right Conference, Astor Hotel, 
Milwaukee, Saturday March 9 1.30pm.  If you're in the neighborhood, come 
say howdy!

Arc d'X is sort of interesting because it does funny hypetextual-type 
things, much like the hypertextual-esque passages of GR: Byron the Bulb, 
Great Pinball Difficulty etc.

Nick Spencer