(no subject)
Apr. 24th, 2004 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbI'm sitting in cafes and restaurants and public libraries alternating between two books: The X President, by Philip Baruth, and A. M. Homes's Los Angeles. A little too on the nose, as they say.
I habitually read multiple books at once because, well, short attention span, but also because I like finding unanticipated connections between them. But this week is getting weird, and I'm constantly forgetting which of these multiple worlds I'm inhabiting.
So I look up from Homes's exploration of the character of this city, and it takes me a moment to figure out that, yes, I'm in Los Angeles, but I'm not in A. M. Homes's Los Angeles. I have never seen the La Brea tar pits or the Chateau Marmont. These are all things that happened to someone else, not me.
Baruth's book is a dystopian satire about the aftermath of an American president who is almost, but not quite, Bill Clinton. The gradual militarization of society, the exchange of freedom and openness for the promise of security, have been going on for another fifty years in the novel, but I can still see them when I look around.
And yesterday afternoon I got to the part where it's disclosed (but only to characters with top secret clearance) that the train crash early in the novel might have been an enemy attack, not an accident as previously claimed on the news. A little while later I listened to NPR tell me the North Korean government's explanation of the strange railroad malfunction that caused tremendous damage shortly after an important official passed through on a different train.
I keep expecting Homes's interviews of L.A. residents to be interrupted by shadowy government agents who draft her in the name of national security.
I habitually read multiple books at once because, well, short attention span, but also because I like finding unanticipated connections between them. But this week is getting weird, and I'm constantly forgetting which of these multiple worlds I'm inhabiting.
So I look up from Homes's exploration of the character of this city, and it takes me a moment to figure out that, yes, I'm in Los Angeles, but I'm not in A. M. Homes's Los Angeles. I have never seen the La Brea tar pits or the Chateau Marmont. These are all things that happened to someone else, not me.
Baruth's book is a dystopian satire about the aftermath of an American president who is almost, but not quite, Bill Clinton. The gradual militarization of society, the exchange of freedom and openness for the promise of security, have been going on for another fifty years in the novel, but I can still see them when I look around.
And yesterday afternoon I got to the part where it's disclosed (but only to characters with top secret clearance) that the train crash early in the novel might have been an enemy attack, not an accident as previously claimed on the news. A little while later I listened to NPR tell me the North Korean government's explanation of the strange railroad malfunction that caused tremendous damage shortly after an important official passed through on a different train.
I keep expecting Homes's interviews of L.A. residents to be interrupted by shadowy government agents who draft her in the name of national security.
