You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverbladden. Welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Steve Erickson, the author of Arc Dex.

It's published by Poseidon Press, and he's the author as well of Leap Year, Tours of the Black Clock, Rubicon Beach, and Days Between Stations, as well as being the film critic for the LA Weekly.

Well, I thought I'd begin by asking.

Each of these last three books has been presided over by a tutelary political figure, Jefferson here in Arche, Hitler in Tours of the Black Clock,

the presidential campaign, and it makes for a very unusual mix, because to some extent,

these are experimental novels,

and you always end up associating these things with art for art's sake,

and yet they have, it seems, icons that they begin with.

Could you talk a bit about that?

Well, I think that my books have grown progressively political from the first one.

In days between stations, if there's any politics at all, it's removed by metaphysics gone crazy in the world, and social anarchy is expressed

that way. And in Rubicon Beach, although he doesn't have the presence that Hitler does in Tours or that Jefferson does in this book,

Robert Kennedy and his assassination is an event that casts a shadow across what's going on in the rest of the book.

I think that it's probably typical in some way I can't explain of my view of politics in fiction that Hitler, for instance, is never named in tours of the

Black Clock, and Jefferson is referred to as Thomas in architects.

Because I wanted to make these men my characters, and because I didn't want them to necessarily be

confused for the real people. I wanted them to be part of the world of the book that I was creating.

...