It’s been 15 years since Randy Pan the Goat Boy shuffled off forever. This Friday, the mother of the late, great, criminally unrecognized Bill Hicks will appear on Letterman, apparently to discuss her son’s career and legacy. More importantly, the show will finally be airing Hicks’ 1993 Late Show performance, which the powers that be deemed unsuitable for broadcast and completely cut. This remains the only time a comedian’s entire routine has ever been nixed from the show. Unfortunately, Bill died of pancreatic cancer a few months later.
The letter Hicks wrote to the New Yorker’s John Lahr, including a partial transcript of his cut set can be found here.
The fourth in the Inspector Rebus series, 
is, so far, the most clever and most satisfying. This one finds Rebus investigating the circumstances surrounding the local MP, who is caught in a brothel raid, and the later death of that MP’s wife. Rankin is a master and is appearing to get better with each successive novel. What makes Rankin’s novels even more enjoyable is that they also serve as a travelogue for Edinburgh and rural Scotland. Perhaps this is why similar
. If you want to remember Updike, this is a great place to start.
I started reading Rankin’s Rebus novels late last year, far later than I should have. Having worked in bookstores for years, I can assure you…you can judge a book by it’s cover. There was something about Rankin that I sensed was good. Then came a connection….I found out that Rankin and I 
is the third in Rankin’s Rebus series. Like the first two in the series, it is funny and literate, not your typical mass-market fare. I’ve still got another 15 or so Rebus novels in front of me, and for that, I am thankful. 
isn’t quite my first encounter with Roberto Bolaño (I’ve just started slowly going through 
as well) but it is the first book of his that I have finished. Set against the backdrop of the Pinochet regime, it involves the unraveling of the mystery of Carlos Weider, who is actually first seen here as an aspiring poet who goes by the name Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. As Ruiz-Tagle’s star begins to rise in the local poetry workshops, the interest in his circumstances and background does as well. When the poet, as well as some of the other participants of the poetry workshops, disappear, we have a full-fledged mystery on our hands.
My first experience with Charles Portis came years ago, seeing him mentioned in some article or another in the same breath as Thomas Pynchon. Whether it was the fact that they were both reclusive or it was “the deep longing, the profound, wistful desperation in the American collective unconscious, to believe that somehow things do make some kind of sense … that there is an answer even if it’s locked in a trunk somewhere and we’ve lost the key,” (
. At the end of the 90’s, various articles by Rosenbaum led to a reprinting of Portis’ slim oeuvre. Still, I was a long time coming to Portis. It wasn’t until last spring that I read the first of the reprinted volumes, 
, a catastrophic, yet comic, road trip novel.
, Portis’ first novel, is not quite so catastrophic, but it does share the same comic elements as The Dog Of The South. 
If ever there was a book that deserved the moniker “The Great American Novel,” it’s Cormac McCarthy’s 
. To call the book epic would be a severe understatement. The novel tells the story of The Kid, a teenage runaway from Tennessee, as he travels through Mexico and the American Southwest in the 1850’s after he hooks up with the Glanton gang. What follows is a fever dream of violence and gore. And this too is a severe understatement.
, fits with the plot of that book, the semi-archaic, Melvillian prose of Blood Meridian augments the power of the tale. It’s often anddemanding, but ultimately rewarding and unique literary experience.
, 
) and produced by Scott Rudin (whose previous productions have included McCarthy’s 
and 
).
(over 1400 pages), so give me some slack. But more tomorrow, because this year starts with a bang.
