Steve Erickson Novel Coming

LONGTIME Los Angeles writer Steve Erickson will have a new novel next year, These Dreams of You, his publisher, Europa Editions, just announced. 


Erickson is the writer I point to first when I'm arguing about a difference in East Coast and West Coast literary sensibility. He grew up in a Granada Hills neighborhood wiped out for the freeway, and that sense of spatial dislocation and a disappearing past -- central to life in the Southland -- runs through all his work. He was hot to Garcia Marquez and Philip K. Dick before they were cool.

HERE is my profile of Erickson on the publication of his last novel, Zeroville. That struck me as a real return to form, with a new note: The book was accessible but didn't give up any of the old Erickson weirdness. (His interest in experimental fiction is expressed in the Cal Arts journal he edits, Black Clock.)


"It's not a Hollywood novel," Erickson said of the book set among, kind of, the '70s generation of maverick filmmakers. "Those tend to be about how movies get made. I wanted to write about how movies have become part of the modern nervous system, the dream language we all converse in from time to time."


For what it's worth, I began reading Steve's work as a teenager back east, and it both puzzled and fascinated me. Some of the specifically Californian tone makes more sense to me now, after 14 years in LA, but the sense of things not being quite what they seem remains: I'd say his work continues to puzzle and fascinate me.


The new novel's title, presumably, comes from one of Van Morrison's best songs. In any case, always a pleasure to get a new novel by Erickson.

Happy Birthday to Philip K. Dick

This blog has drifted into Africa and Italy recently, so let me return for a moment to our West Coast home ground: Today would be the birthday of one of America's most intriguing, frustrating and brilliant writers -- Philip K. Dick.

It's hard to know where to start on a figure like this, but let me defer to David Gill, a Bay Area lecturer who runs the clever and instructive Total Dick-head site. Check out his new posts.

Most of you need no introduction to PKD (who lived, sometimes erratically, primarily in the Bay Area and Orange County) or his body of work -- novels like "The Man in the High Castle," "Ubik," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and movies like "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and "A Scanner Darkly." He was an important inspiration for everything from "Brazil" to "The Matrix" to "Being John Malkovich." And the careers of many important novelists of my generation -- Jonathan Lethem is the clearest case -- were shaped profoundly by him.

Even the mighty Thomas Pynchon bears his stamp.

These days I am reading and rereading a lot of the work of this author who LA's Steve Erickson helped save from obscurity, Art Spiegelman called the Kafka of the late 20th c., and who Ursula Le Guin called "our own homegrown Borges." So I'll leave the rest of my thoughts to a piece I think will drop next month -- which I hope will be the first of several.

I read some of Dick's work as an SF-loving teenager. Not all the stuff I read then stands up -- Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" seems to wrap a wonderful premise around endless libertarian rants, and the characters in Asimov's Foundation books seem even flatter than than were when I was 13 -- but Dick's work, for all its flaws, has only grown in my estimation. (I won't quite class him with Beethoven, but enjoy the coincidence that the composer and this dedicated fan of Austro-German classical music were both born on Dec. 16.)

On what would be PKD's 81st birthday, I'm struck, as is everybody else, by how clearly he seemed to get where our culture was going -- in books written as early as the early '60s. I'm not talking about literal prediction (of, say, technological gadgets) but a broader understanding of human nature and society and religion that makes his vision far more prescient than that of the more optimistic, often militaristic Golden Age writers who preceded him.

For now, I'll leave my readers with a wonderful piece by Laura Miller with the title "It's Philip Dick's World, We Only Live in It." For better and worse, that is.

Steve Erickson's West Coast Dreams

THE recent release of "a new literary history of america," has gotten me thinking again about longtime LA writer steve erickson. this fascinating volume, edited by greil marcus and werner sollors, includes a brilliantly counter-intuitive essay by erickson, which manages to wrap thomas jefferson and john adams around the songs of stephen foster. (he was born on the day in 1826 on which those two died.)

here is my profile of erickson, around the publication of his novel "zeroville." the book is one of my favorites of his -- set around the time of the manson killings and the emergence of the "easy riders, raging bulls" generation of american filmmakers, and both captures and undermines the myth of the 1960s and '70s.

as a novelist, of course, erickson is often likened to thomas pynchon, tho his work is more obviously anti-realistic. he was drawing from some of the techniques of magical realism before that style became overexposed, and he was an early champion of philip k. dick.

erickson tells me he is hoping to finish his next novel in 2010.

the question of why erickson is not better known outside california has interested me for two decades. his work may simply be too rooted in the clash of reality and surrealism, the confusions of artifice and a disappearing past, that baffles the rest of the world but that we angelenos take for granted.