sharks have several rows of teeth

i just picked up the book the raw shark texts by steven hall from the library a day or so ago and i'm already 1/3 through. i'd been stalking it at my school's book store all year, but the $32 price scared me away. i hate buying books if they tunr out to be shitty. therefore, the ibrary is a wonderful thing! anyway, so far i think the book is pretty neat. kind of a philosophical/fantasy/sci-fi/fiction book. hmm lets try that again, i'm pretty horrible at describing books so with amazon.com's help:

"Eric Sanderson has lost his memory, his girl, his life as he once knew it. His pre-amnesiac self is sending him letters, a sort of correspondence course on how to be Eric Sanderson. Unfortunately, this previous self didn't really have it all together either. This is too bad, because the source of all the trouble is a conceptual shark, a Ludovician shark, no less. Soon Eric is on the run, trying to piece it all together and find true love before his mind gets wiped by the shark for the twelfth and probably final time.

Steven Hall is an inventive, funny and extremely smart writer. I am a letterpress printer and a typophile, and I was drawn to his book because of the typography: The Raw Shark Texts is riddled with typographic games, codes, a flip book, and a boatload of very elegant plot devices that hinge on collisions between the Information Age and the imagination. At one point Eric and Scout, his guide/love interest, are speeding away from the conceptual shark on a motorbike. Scout eludes the shark by exploding a letter bomb, a bomb made out of old metal type; the type diverts the shark into a stream of random letterforms. At this I practically fell off the couch with admiration.

There's plenty to groove on in The Raw Sharks Texts even if you're not a type maven. There's echoes of Cyberpunk, Borges, Auster; there is adventure on the high seas, lost love, an exploration of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. The Raw Sharks Texts is huge fun, and I gleefully recommend it."

i normally don't like reccomending books before i finish them in case they, you know, turn into awful messes of babble. but hey, i'm going to be a little wild and say go ahead and give it a try. i'll give my opinion when i finish it if you don't feel like being adventurous.



on a side note:

last night i went to transformers with some friends and it was pretty awesome. i'm exhausted today though. i danced for five hours straight. i liked the atmosphere because everyone was so caught up in themseleves, you could litrally dance/dress/etc any way you wanted and it just fit.

another side note:

i was looking through old pictures, and its crazy how much a person can change (i'm talking about the exterior not in interior). like this one guy i know, i barely recognize him! i was showing a friend who had just met him recently a picture of the guy from a year ago, they almost didn't believe me it was the same person. weird.

which brings my train of thought to this (not saying the guy above is one of these people, but just saying kind of randomly i suppose):

you know when your driving or walking in a sketchy area of town and someone scary lookin walks by and you lock your doors? i always feel bad, caz like what if they hear the doors lock and they're just like "shit, really? i'm one of those people you lock the doors when you see?". :( buuuut i'm a wuss, so even though i feel bad, i'm still gonna lock my doors. any of you who have seen me trying to fight (well, play fight, i don't fight), you know what i'm talking about.