A couple days ago, I mentioned that the novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a wisecrack about my hometown of Salt Lake City. (Actually, I guess SLC is better described as the urban core of my home region, as opposed to my actual hometown, which is a little burg called Riverton several miles to the south of SLC proper. But I digress. As usual.) I was pretty sure I remembered the generalities of the joke well, but because I’m essentially an insecure and obsessive-compulsive wreck, I had to spend part of my day off today rummaging in the basement for my copy of the book in order to prove a point to myself. I am delighted to report that my memory had not failed me, even though it’s been years — not since high school, now that I think about it — since I read Dirk Gently. Here’s the exact quote:

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

 

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

As I said the other day, I thought this was incredibly funny when I was a teenager. Seeing it again, I think much of its impact derived from it being the first time I ever saw Salt Lake mentioned in a book published for a wide (i.e., non-Utah-specific) audience, amplified by the fact that the novelist was from the UK. That a British man had even heard of Salt Lake — a British man I already idolized for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — was mind-blowing. That he correctly identified one of the most distinguishing characteristics of your average Utahn — our sweet gullibility — and so blithely poked fun at it… well, I’ve remembered this joke for over 20 years, haven’t I? Simply incredible.

Yeah. Dirk Gently. I probably ought to re-read that one of these days…

A number of my regular blog-reads have been playing this week with a little doodad that analyzes a sample of your writing and determines which famous writer your style most resembles. Or something. (I cynically suspect it just grabs well-known names at random from a list. But maybe not. What do I know?)

Anyhow, I can’t resist trying these things out for myself, so I plugged in my angry “Synchcronicity II” blog entry from a couple weeks ago and this is what I got:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

And you know what? That’s fine by me. In fact, it’s awesome. I’ve never felt like I had a “favorite author” the way many people espouse, no one whom I’ve felt compelled to study and memorize and read every single work by that person, but if I’m forced to pick someone, King is usually my answer. He’s vulgar, yes, and frequently self-indulgent, and when he’s off his game, he really stinks up the place. But when he’s good — and he is good more often than his detractors would have you believe — he’s brutally effective in taking readers where he wants them to go. I admire his plain-spoken prose style, his grasp of real-life detail, his ability to make the most outlandish threats seem immediate and real (at least as long as you’re under his spell), and of course his deep understanding of and empathy for lower-middle-class and working-class Americans, a demographic that’s rarely handled with a fair hand, in my opinion.

No other author makes me want to write fiction of my own the way I do after I read something of King’s (although my recent discovery Charlaine Harris comes close).

When I was in San Francisco last year, I did what every tourist with the slightest literary pretension does in that town: I stopped by the famed City Lights Bookstore and bought a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It’s one of those classics I’ve always heard the cool kids talking about and meant to read myself, but somehow never quite got around to it. Not until last winter, anyhow.

My plan to blog my reactions to the book that defined an influential subculture never quite materialized, naturally, and given how mushy my memory seems to have become lately, I no longer recall many specifics about it. I do remember liking it in general, although Kerouac’s style gave me some problems. The narrative occasionally slips into stream-of-consciousness — never a technique I’ve liked very much — and the beatnik slang peppered throughout is sometimes, well, laughable. (I recognize, of course, that this is an unfortunate result of time, and that when On the Road was originally published in 1957, the language must’ve been fresh and exciting. Sadly, though, it’s been so parodied over the past 50 years that it’s nearly impossible to encounter it today without thinking of silly stereotypes like Maynard G. Krebs — the “G” is for “Walter” — or a hundred cartoons featuring skinny men in black turtlenecks, sunglasses, and berets who snap their fingers a lot.) On the positive side, however, the book has a genuine verisimilitude, and the reader gets the sense of being privileged to experience an unknown subculture through the eyes of an insider, without any filters or censorship. And Kerouac really captures the restless, hungry-to-see-and-do-it-all energy that consumes many (if not all) young people.

Anyway, I bring this up now because I was sifting through a stack of junk on my desk this afternoon, came across my copy of On the Road (which has been sitting there since, oh, February or thereabouts), and saw that it still had all the sticky-tabs I’d placed on passages I found particularly striking. I thought I’d post some of them here, for my own amusement if no one else’s…

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