Monday is shaping up as a total career-ending clusterfarg or an enjoyable once-in-a-lifetime experience. Either or both. We’re shooting what I call the Star Wars Holiday Special at the Mall of America. Don’t know what more I can say now, except this: if anyone had told me when I got into newspapers that I’d be doing this down the road, I would be as delighted as I am surprised. Starts the week with a bang, it does, and if there’s anything this week needs it’s a loud noisy takeoff, right?

I love Thanksgiving, but I always feel useless. The womenfolk do all the cooking; the kitchen is a hen party non pariel, and the menfolk just wander at the margins like beaten wolves skulking at the perimeter of the campfire. I don’t watch football anymore, so I don’t have the option of sitting in front of the TV and watching big guys run into each other. But I still like football, if need be, so if I have to join in the reindeer games, I will.

Seems soon. Seems as if the holiday season, as it’s called for non-sectarian / commercial purposes, arrived ahead of schedule. It’s been warm, and without a week of skin-cracking wind and low temps and blowing snow that gets down your collar and makes you curse and think four more months of this idiocy, at least, it’s not November. I was looking at some video from a few months ago, and was shocked to see how green everything was. Bare and brown is the norm now; bare looks familiar. Bare looks right. Which is so wrong.

Nigh-perfect weekend. Laid out a ton of sites for ’10. I’m going to finish up most of the 30s site additions, then go on to the other decades. Yes: 20s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. They’ll be the repositories for all the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Few updates this week. since it’s a holiday, but a big surprise on Wednesday.

Watched “Star Trek” again. Obligatory DVD-release reviewing. Same impression: good, funny, taut, mushy plot in spots, and Spock needs Poligrip. I still think Engineering is ridiculous, and needs to look like a Starship instead of a factory in Seattle.

I did errands on Saturday, my mood unaccountably buoyed by a special-delivery package that arrived around noon: why, it’s a check from the agent. I’ll be switched.

Not all of it, but some of it. If you’re wondering, well, don’t you wish you’d said something earlier? No. Wanted to let everything work through the process we’d set up, and when that went south, I still debated.

Now let’s see if it clears.

Finished “Blood’s A Rover,” the latest Ellroy novel. Longtime patrons of the site know I’m a big Ellroy fan, but man, this was an unrewarding book. There were long, long sections where I wanted to say “that’s not writing, dear boy. That’s storyboarding.” Main problems: two of the three main characters are indistinguishable. They have slightly different attributes, but attributes are not personalties. People speak in dialogue that’s indistinguishable from the narrative only because it’s put in quotation marks, or written down in diary form. There’s just too much of everything – it’s like sitting next to a guy at a coffee shop counter at 3 AM, and he won’t stop going on in a speed-freak rap about Nixon and Kennedy and the CIA, and while it’s interesting as a study in madness, you wish he’d take a breath.

I’m serious: every 40 pages, someone in the book takes a lot of speed and reads THE FILES. FILES about the crime. FILES about the connections. FILES about the characters and their crimes and the connections between their crimes and THE CRIME. This is described in the mannered be-bop prose: he fixed on the connection. He re-fixed on the connections and re-wired. Joan Klein / Celia Bupkis / Ruth Buzzai, in Vegas 12/7/67. He focused and felt the connection slip. He re-refocused and got a soft click. He unwired and thought: Reginald Leander Jackson Hazard – now, which indistinguishable plot-puppet was he again?

There’s a great crime story buried in the book, but when I say buried I mean 100 feet down. It doesn’t resurface until the end, and when it does, well, who the hell is this guy who’s fingered for the murder at the house? Another interchangeable guy from the long list of early-middle-aged private detectives, bug men, fixers, operatives, and LA demi-monde slime-time players. Eh. The crime story – or, as the book would have it, THE STORY, is lost in fog of hallucinatory Central American escapades. I think I speak for many when I say I’d rather read Ellroy talking about restaurant menus in LA in the 50s than writing about, oh, the Dominican Republic.

The period. I would have been content if the tale ended with “The Cold Six Thousand,” because more Hoover, more CIA, more fer-cripes-sake CUBA obsession is just not what I’m in the mood to rehash.

The women. The central motivating figure in the book is a Communist activist, and supposedly she inspires obsessive devotion in All Who Meet Her. One reviewer called her Ellroy’s “most realized female creation to date.”

There is no evidence presented for this assertion in the book.

I’ve read everything he’s done. This was like chewing through a cement pillow, with occasional pockets of Alka-Seltzer. Most of the reviews are laudatory, so perhaps it’s just me; perhaps I lacked the discipline or time or inclination to inhabit its rhythms. It’s not as though he’s lost it – he did a four-part piece on his life with women for Playboy, and it was much more harrowing than anything in this novel. It also pointed out what makes the book so odd: in his memoir, he describes his salvation in a relationship with a woman who has the same first name as the Red Queen, and notes that she was a left-winger, he was a right-winger. He describes his motivation: so women will love me. The most pitiful character in the novel says the exact same thing, and he’s meant as a stand-in for the author.

The matchbook will be late, but it will arrive. See you soon.

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