Computer has been having fits lately, randomly opening windows and crashing. Cured by pulling mouse plug and reinserting, but it's a pain. Google is remarkably unhelpful on that score. And dammit, I don't feel like buying a new OS just because the mouse is acting up. Screw you, Gates, and your planned obsolescence.
Reading Looking for Jake. Still waiting for the baroque prose, which I think isn't going to happen, but no matter. The man has one of my sure-fire hooks- a sense of place. That's London, yes, that's the physical and psychic London I remember- cold and horrible and *all wrong* in the most everyday undistinguished of ways. No need for Lovecraftian excess in the prose. One can be as plain and flat-footed as one likes because the yucks are that way too, rooted in the grimy accumulation of centuries of grimy living. I find his stories revolting in all the best ways. These wouldn't work for me if set on this continent, even if the place was quite as solid and seedy as London, because no cities here have the same feel of accreted daily misery to them. They're often tawdry and insubstantial to my eye, but not sinking into psychic ooze the way Venice sinks into the sea.
