Are we glad things are on fire?
I have to admire the absolute proprietary certainty with which Martin Lewis discusses slipstream in this rather negative review of Feeling Very Strange — which oddly enough I was just leafing through again the other day — with his talk of “quintessential” slipstream writers, “core texts” ignored, and (in subsidiary and related posts) the “evolution” of slipstream in the decades since CATSCAN 5. I don’t know that I agree any more with anything he says about slipstream than I do with what Kelly and Kessel said, but again, I admire the way he seems to be writing from an alternate universe where we all know, and agree upon, what slipstream is and has been.
(I was going to say I wouldn’t expect to agree on anything with somebody who doesn’t like “The Specialist’s Hat”, but then I find him praising Zeitgeist — which you philistines continue to ignore even though it’s the greatest twentieth-century novel of the twentieth century [repetition intended], yes you know who you are — so he can’t be all bad.)
(Via Jay.)
October 27th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I will continue to believe that what I think of as slipstream is the one true slipstream until someone convinces me otherwise. Kelly and Kessel failed to do this.
Regarding the “quintessential” Erickson I will own up to proprietary certainty but then again it is my blog and I even add a caveat that this is just my personal view, something I wouldn’t usually bother to do on my own blog. With Lanark though I feel I am on fairly safe ground; it is there in Sterling’s original list of texts, it is there in the slipstream canon that Kessel contributed to, it is one of the books that comes up again and again when slipstream is mentioned, I would even agree it has inspired other slipstream texts. That sounds like a core text to me, although I guess you could say that the whole idea of core texts is antithetical to the concept of slipstream.
And you are not the first person to tell me I am a big wronghead about ‘The Specialist’s Hat’ so I will have to give it a re-read soon.
Happy krushing.
October 31st, 2008 at 7:53 pm
It seems that I’m a big wronghead, too, because I enjoyed several — at least five? — of the stories in Stranger Things Happen more than “The Specialist’s Hat.” Being in the vast minority on this, I presume that I am Missing Something Obvious.