This week's reading

luka

Well-known member
Clarification. We are not saying its bad entertainment we are saying its bad literature
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was totally sucked in and sucked off by Blood Meridian

I don't think I was even aware of what he was doing re: the old testament stuff.

I also liked the constant savage violence.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
There was a passage from _All the Pretty Horses_ which I thought magnificently over-the-top when I first read it:

"The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he'd been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been."

It's totally ludicrous, but the way he reins it in at the end is very satisfying.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
"set forth to wander" is hokey, but it's hokey in that drawling-cowboy-narrator way that The Big Lebowski has such fun with. I have to believe McCarthy knows exactly what he's doing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I feel like with McCarthy you've got to suspend your sense of ridiculousness

There's no humour to be found in that arid land
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Everything's very fated. And yes, the real art is to keep camp at bay - one tiny slip and you're in a Monty Python sketch (or maybe Jabberwocky) where the cowboy drawl has been replaced by an exaggerated Yorkshire accent.
 

droid

Well-known member
“The tinker in his burial tree was a wonder to the birds. The vultures that came by day to nose with their hooked beaks among his buttons and pockets like outrageous pets soon left him naked of his rags and flesh alike. Black mandrake sprang beneath the tree as it will where the seed of the hanged falls and in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonnière perennial beneath his yellow grin. He took the sparse winter snows upon what thatch of hair still clung to his dried skull and hunters that passed that way never chanced to see him brooding among his barren limbs. Until wind had tolled the thinker's bones and seasons loosed them one by one to the ground below and his bleached and weathered brisket hung in that lonesome wood like a bone birdcage.”
 

droid

Well-known member
And

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There is a suspension of disbelief or something similar that is required. Particularly in All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing (I haven't read the third one in fact) in which the protagonists who are all effectively children are somehow unbelievably skilled horsemen and hunters and able to speak Spanish and savvy enough to understand criminal minds and so on when they are in danger or whatever, and also everyone they meet, whether a beggar or a cowboy or whatever turns out to be some kind of savant who spills out their theory of life or the universe in beautifully poetic language without any prompting. Does that make it hokey? I don't think it does, it makes it unrealistic but I don't think that automatically means anything more than that it is unrealistic.
Also, all good/different/risky things are easier to parody than normal, safe things - taking a sentence in isolation and laughing at it doesn't really mean anything on the whole. Although I'm not gonna totally defend him on everything, I found The Crossing irritating in some respects, just not those mentioned above.
 

luka

Well-known member
I mean I don't really care I just every so often bring this up to aggravate droid. Just pulling his pigtails in a loving and brotherly way out of boredom.
 

luka

Well-known member
I'll read McCarthy at some point, but the complete lack of humour mixed with that sort of overwrought prose is really off-putting and like something you'd find in a Warhammer novel.

Just saving this sick burn for posterity before version deletes it
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Show me a Warhammer novel as well written as blood meridian and I'll be up it like a drainpipe

I was actually recently thinking about Shakespeare, how he turned trash into gold, and if modern writers should be trying the same thing, don't you think?

Like an absolute genius writing a Warhammer novel.
 

droid

Well-known member
Suttree has some funny moments, as does child of god, even blood meridian.

We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneading the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and working up the great mass in a foul black dough, a devil’s batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself.
 

luka

Well-known member
You know about the nephilim in wider conspiracy theory though right?


The Winged People
Killah Priest
Do you really know? Or were you taught what you know?
Do you believe or do you know?
Is your faith blind?
Or is it bright as the sun?
They were here before Adam, descendants of Anu/
Took on mortal fashion, built them selves statues/
In the image of themselves, to worship themselves/
Built towers to themselves, to remind them where they fell/
They came from a station in space, an angelical race/
Giant in stature, helmet and cape, that they wore/
Visited this planet to explore, long journeys from they own because their race had war/
It's said they called their planet Nibiru, and that they were fallen heroes/
They saw gold, saw tree's and life more liberal/
Astronauts with afro and locks, jet beamed into a ziggurat and crashed on rocks/
1.21 jigawatts, some passed over crops/
In tablet legends, they said they opened the flood gates of heaven/
Describing their monstrous brethren, chopping up their grandparents into seven/
Pieces, now they looking for a region, they travel eastern/
Found a garden called Eden, they saw a being/
Force to bow before Baal, Or be exiled with a tribe of reptiles now called Rothschilds' and X-Files
Life begins breathing hydrogen inside of high winds, milky way, violins/
Heard by the wisemen, observed in Orion/
The windows with no end, the black glass and a sea that extends/
Within that sea exists carbohydrate's, these gods were hybrids/
That went back and forth until they mixed with star bred/
In the foods of thought, with proteins, protons and atoms produced the whole theme/
To infinity to density, the matter, the Adam, the cell, to organisms and metamorphism/
The waters of the living, to bodies and back to godly
 
Top