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Special to greyaenigma: When the 1966 nuclear strike on London sets off a corresponding volcanic eruption, George and the machine are encased in hardened magma. It takes some hundreds of thousands of years for erosion to wear down the rock, and then he just sort of keeps going for a while, staring at the scenery.

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On further consideration, I realized that even though the new song I started yesterday only has one verse and a chorus, it pretty much says all I want it to say, so I declared it done and played it to close the open mike tonight. I think it might make a nice album closer.

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I've just finished a book which is good and strange: Radiance, by Carter Scholz. It's a nightmarish story about politics and science in an unnamed DOE lab in the mid-90s, about the methods used by the defense industry to assure survival after the cold war, and about at least one character's psychological meltdown under pressure.

The most striking thing about the book is probably its prose style, a sort of stream-of-perception approach where every half-heard sentence fragment, every road sign or paperback novel that comes to the protagonist's attention is catalogued, interrupted sporadically by lyrical description. Part II of the novel begins:

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Not all the sentences are that long (the opening sentence: "Quine approached the Lab on a road that led nowhere else."), but some of them are. At first it's hard to follow, but eventually you can just immerse yourself in the flow of it.

Here's a Salon review, which compares Scholz to Pynchon and Ballard; he reminds me somewhat of Michael Tolkin, and an Amazon customer review says his style is lifted directly from William Gaddis. I haven't read Gaddis, but Scholz wrote his obituary for Salon, so that's probably the best reference point.

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Roger Ebert has a review up of Stone Reader, previously mentioned in these pages and still one of my favorite films this year. It's currently playing in Cambridge and elsewhere, and continuing to make its way slowly around the country.