Captain Maximus

(1)  Found it.

(2)  I've got to read this book again...I wonder whether it's as great as I remember it, or if I was just excited because it was out of print.  I know that at least some of Airships was totally amazing.  And I remember that in this one somebody shoots a rich kid in a boat with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with whaleshit, which is probably worth the price of admission in itself.

(3)  Pretty sure Barry Hannah's a racist, though.  Libel?  Something about the way and the frequency with which the word nigger pops up in his stories.  Flannery O'Connor, too.  I could be way wrong on this one.

(4)  And anyway you can still appreciate an artist's work even if the artist himself is morally problematic.

(5)  Captain Maximus has one of the worst-ever blurbs on the back: The New York Times Book Review sez, "Anything written by Mr. Hannah is well worth having."  Good for Mr. Hannah, not so promising for Captain Maximus.  Isn't it in effect saying, "This book is just about the worst thing he's ever written, but"?  Reminds me of a blurb I saw on the back of a Philip K. Dick novel: "Dick is a poor man's Pynchon."  Did the publisher not know that "poor man's [blank]" is not a compliment?  Regardless, it provided my friend the doctor with the opportunity to make a joke: "Does that make Pynchon a rich man's Dick?"  (The double-entendre is funnier, of course, when it's entendu.)

(6)  What a cover.