02.14.04


we must begin with raucous birthday wishes for leroy king, an upstanding and consistently well-dressed man who reaches the ripe old age of eleventy one today. leroy, i envy you almost as much as i envy deborah and her halloween birthday. i got stuck with columbus day, and who wants that?


i purchased bret easton ellis's the rules of attraction yesterday. i know it won't teach me new things about the world - american psycho convinced me years ago that all things bret easton ellis should be eaten, burned, or shot from a cannon into shark-infested waters - but the summary seized me:
Lauren changes boyfriends every time she changes majors and still pines for Victor, who split for Europe months ago, and she might or might not be writing anonymous love letters to ambivalent, hard-drinking Sean, a hopeless romantic who only has eyes for Lauren, even if he ends up in bed with half the campus and with Paul, Lauren's ex, who is forthrightly bisexual and whose passion masks a shrewd pragmatism.
this is the same gimmick that got me into terry brooks's forgettable elfstones of shannara - the first of ten or fifteen thousand pulp fantasy novels i ended up reading in junior high - as lauren the male elf seemed destined, in the intro, for great things. he was devoured without ceremony on page 12.




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