TBF though, when you have been at war almost constantly since 1811 and for 92% of your existence, when you have an economy inextricably interwoven with war and violence and have created systems that can surveill and catalogue virtually everything down to the atomic level, when you have created weapons that could literally destroy all life on earth and then used them... I think you could lay a pretty good claim to being the greatest. After all having better tools for killing is arguably what defines the greatness of empire.
Blood Meridian
- Thread starter Murphy
- Start date
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
ofc I agree the Judge has everything to do with the context of mid-1800s America and by extension that entire history of colonial violence etc
but I also think you could put the Judge in early 1940s Eastern Europe or ca. 1220 Khwarezmia. that's kind of the point of the Judge.
but I also think you could put the Judge in early 1940s Eastern Europe or ca. 1220 Khwarezmia. that's kind of the point of the Judge.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
if previous empires had access to those tools they very likely would not have hesitated to use them
I would modify that to "better tools for killing than your contemporary peers"
this is kind of a tangent from Blood Meridian itself tho
Ha, yes ofc, this isn't a moral point, its a practical one, the culmination is in terms of ability, not intent (though one might make that argument).
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
The scene that really stuck with me was the momentary pause in the violence when The Kid and all the animals gather round the burning tree,
"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before the torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
Someone apparently worked out this takes place on Christmas Day.
"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before the torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
Someone apparently worked out this takes place on Christmas Day.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
Pynchon's on about this in Mason & Dixon too. There's a war going on between the Chinese and the Jesuits and a Chinese geomancer pops up stating his opposition to the surveyors carving their lines into the American landscape, claiming they're " . . . scars upon the Flesh of the dragon of Sha,"
“Earth, withal, is a Body, like our own, with its network of Points, dispos'd along its Meridians,— much as our medicine in China has identified, upon the Human body, a like set of Lines invisible, upon which, bead wise, are strung Points, where the Flow of Chee may be beneficially strengthen'd by insertions of Gold Needles.”
. . . “To rule forever,” continues the Chinaman, later, “it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,— to create thus a Distinction betwixt ’em,— ’tis the first stroke.— All else will follow as if predestin’d, unto War and Devastation.”
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
Hollywood's trying to adapt it again. This time with the guy who directed The Road and The Proposition.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
jenks
thread death
Just saw the news. Think there’s a string of great novels - I just looked up his bibliography and I hadn’t read his first or last stuff but everything else in between and I think there’s not a lot of filler in there. Pretty Horses, Child of God, Blood Meridian - probably the last of a certain kind of writer? That Faulkner/Hemingway axis, pre po-mo and the crippling self ironising strand of US fiction.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
I ordered a volume of all three Border trilogy novels a few years back, but it never arrived. Should get round to reading some of the others. Apparently Suttree's really good. BM's the only one I've read atm. I liked The Counselor and the film of No Country for Old Men too.
mind_philip
saw the light
Probably the last of those stentorian, oracular American novelists, who all grew up in a less teeming world where it still seemed possible to sum things up.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
Just seen Luka's tribute on Twitter.
"One of many great moments from one of the greatest. See you out on the range, storyteller."
"One of many great moments from one of the greatest. See you out on the range, storyteller."
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
He was supposed to be working on the BM screenplay himself. Wonder whether he managed to finish it.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
Yeah, I think it'd be tough for a younger writer to pull off McCarthy's sort of thing. It could feel too studied, too much of a pose. I had this thought watching Hell or High Water the other night. Enjoyed it, but there was something ridiculous about it. A seriousness about the way it adhered to well worn tropes; gruff, masculine men offering each other beers, slouching on the porch. You can't completely buy into it anymore.
