It’s a genre that, in its family-friendly, bloodless and often comically caricatured incarnation, has the unique and powerful ability to bore me to absolute tears. It has two main points of appeal; The romanticism of old America, and the brutal desolation of its landscapes and culture (or lack thereof). The former is a divisive enough topic, and the latter is rarely given real exposure. This is perhaps understandable; It’s not a common desire to want expletives yelled in ones face before it is brutally shoved in the dirt.

Yet it’s the parallel threads of romance and staggering violence and desolation that has kindled my interest in westerns. It probably stems from my infatuation with the post apocalyptic sci-fi genre, and particularly the Fallout series of video games, which revel in the hopelessness for darkly comic effect. After having spent over 90 hours playing Fallout 3, immersing myself in the wasteland, the open anarchistic prairie of Rockstar’s western adventure “Red Dead Redemption” could not be more appealing.
RDR did not disappoint, and it is a game that knows it is an adult title, and as such exposes you readily to the sheer beauty of the landscape, juxtaposed with blind, screaming violence.

Coming out of Red Dead Redemption and Fallout 3, and having recently enjoyed films based on McCarthy’s books “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men”, Blood Meridian looked incredibly appealing when I found a copy. Having read about it briefly, all I knew was that it was a western featuring “shocking violence”, concerned with the exploits of the Glanton gang of scalp hunters, which I’d previously stumbled across on Wikipedia.

Literally within the first page I knew this book was perfect for me. The language is pure and gorgeous, the images conjured were brilliant in my mind and it sucked me right into its bleak nothingness. It was nearly impossible for me to put down, and I lost many nights of sleep to either reading on, or lying awake meditating on what I’d read.

I read a lot, and always have since a very young age. Blood Meridian is my favorite book of all time.

I’ll quote the opening page verbatim, and I hope you’ll see the rhythm and imagery I fell in love with, a rhythm that remained brilliant throughout.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost.
The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

McCarthy doesn’t waste our time on silly constructed language. Dialog has no apostrophes, and his rhythm is always free and demanding. It’s a tough book to read, because it never stops, and McCarthy assumes you are there. McCarthy trusts that you are paying absolute, rapt attention, and the reward is a narrative that flows uninterrupted and white hot, where every page has some line that makes the Lovecraft fanboy in me want to laugh with joy. Linguistically it is one of the most beautiful books I have ever had the pleasure of reading, easily level with classics such as Moby Dick or in some ways Paradise Lost, books to which Blood Meridian owes an obvious yet somehow inevitable debt. McCarthy himself states:

The ugly fact is that books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.

Sidenote: This is from an interview. The man just up and said that. Wow.

Blood Meridian revolves around the experiences of a teenage runaway with an innate ability for violence as he drifts to Mexico and becomes involved with a gang of scalp hunters led by historical figure John Joel Glanton. This gang, while led by Glanton, also has a spiritual guide in the form of the terrifying Judge Holden, a huge, hairless albino with an apparently endless range of abilities and knowledge, who also happens to be the most sadistic murderer of them all. It is revealed that the gang first met Holden as they were out of ammunition, chased without hope through the desert by a large group of indians. Hope greeted them naked, sitting on a rock, as though he was expecting them. He promptly takes them to a volcano, and in one of the novel’s striking scenes of juxtaposed beauty and dirty violence instructs them on the creation of gunpowder, saving their lives.

As the gang carries out their scalp hunting trade they are initially treated as war heroes by the Mexicans, but soon they cease hunting for indians and commence scalping anyone they see. The book becomes a blur of holistic meditations by the Judge and scenes of absolutely horrific violence, the graphic abruptness of which is likely to turn many off the book. Off hand, the book describes the kid passing a tree hung with the corpses of many infants. In another, the brutal decapitation of a gang member is treated with seeming indifference by the other members of the gang. Death is close and constant, and as such is treated as a simple state of affairs, level with the Judge’s obsessive observation of plant and animal life through his travels. As a reader, I was for the most part desensitized by the frequent atrocities, though McCarthy is perfectly able to navigate the peaks and valleys of his narrative, and there would always pop up some new godawful scene to up the ante.

But to talk about the details of the violence is to miss the point, I think. I must admit the book is humbling in the extreme, and just writing this post is difficult for me. It is dense and complex, yet pure in its subject; It is a journey along the surface of the earth during which a lot of people die and a lot of thoughts are provoked by the Judge’s nihilistic sermons on the nature of man. The Judge is wholly dedicated to war and the “sanctity of blood”. The purity of its finality. In one of many genuinely enlightening segments he states the following.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at least a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

I’ve read McCarthy’s Judge Holden compared to John Milton’s Satan, and it rings true. Both are truly evil characters, yet they are written as incredibly compelling and charismatic characters. Every time the novel pauses to let the Judge speak, it becomes a memorable event. Among the illiterate murderers he travels with he is by far the most civilized, yet he is also the most fundamentally evil, a child killing psychopath with little clemency for any man. He is a modern paradox, and he is the driving force that makes the novel’s otherwise thin plot palatable: Blood Meridian is not a particularly dense story, but it is a very dense meditation, and reading it is a visceral and tasty experience. Its sense of flavor, weight and texture likens it more strongly to the most complex meal I ever enjoyed, rather than an epic story.

To finish up, I can’t say much other than that Blood Meridian is a uniquely powerful work on man and man’s nature, and man’s place in the universe, narrated breathlessly with great vigor, involving characters unlike any I have ever read about before. And in its closing pages, I sat in an airplane with absolute chills.

I can not recommend it enough, western or not. It’s a momentous achievement of a novel.

Lovely looking book so far. It’s a thorough beginner’s introduction to the Unity editor and its unique concepts, and contains enough references to Flash to be a real asset to the Flash designer/developer wanting to test the Unity waters. When I’m done with it, being a wonderful man, I’ll do the right thing and tell you if it’s worth your time

13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990

Happy Roald Dahl day everyone! I’m celebrating it by re-reading The Twits, The Enormous Crocodile and The Fantastic Mr Fox!

His books really shaped my childhood. Every child deserves to read as good and imaginative an author.

If you get the chance, please read the book. It’s one of the bleakest, most unpleasant things i’ve read in a long time, but somehow comes out poignant and sometimes.. sweet?

Highly recommended. I can’t wait to see the movie.

Ever since i heard their rendition of At the mountains of madness, i’ve been craving more of it. And now they’ve gone and done The Dunwich Horror, which is currently downloading (slowly, argh). I feel like a kid at christmas eve!

I’ll do a review once i’ve listened through it.

“usefull start borrow
by reply type
somewhere put work
use look buy
Be sleep reply
him sing cancel
must want cough
must wakeup watch
sleep travel hear
An make finish
open think rain”

Now how does something like that occur

It’s almost poetry isn’t it

“Sperm@m@x is your key to @mazing chicks.
When you cum with Spermamax, your bed looks
11ke a little is1and drowning in the 0cean 0f your sperm.
You want a girl, then try Spermamax.
You want a boy, then try Spermamax,
you want twins, then try Spermamax.”

I dunno about you, but i’m definitely getting Spermamax.

http://shishaldin.com/video.htm

Isidore Ducasse is one of my favorite authors, in spite of only having written one true piece. Fantastic surrealism imbued with viciously attentive freedom philosophy, Les chants de Maldoror is a core piece of literature. And now this immature disrespectful bitch of an “artist” invokes some absurd french law that allows her to posthumously marry the man. I’ll liken this to rape of a memory, and it sullies his purity and the otherness that makes him such a strong historic character.

Fuck the french, fuck Shishaldin. If the chance pops by she’ll get a swift backhand to the facial region. Audacity is not a right, and fucking over a man’s undying memory is the best reason i’ve ever heard to beat the living shit out of a person.

What the hell is wrong with artists that think audacity and counterproductivity is a measure of art? Fuck you guys! You can’t create, so you destroy as an expression? Leeches, you get exactly what’s coming to you.

I thought the Crimson King’s demise was incredibly underwhelming, so was that of Mordred and of Marten. For all of King’s preaching of how it’s the journey that matters and not the end, i would consider besting the 3 major villains of a 7-book story part of the journey. Book 1 begins with Marten as the major villain, who has done rather nasty things to Roland. To see him almost forgotten in the latter segments of the story is a little bewildering.

To elaborate, part of what, for me, has made the Dark Tower series so great, has been about its tale of great warriors. From book 1, King has described warriors of incredible skill besting villains of incredible evil. There is a very base, almost primordial truth to this alignment. A form of vicious purity versus a pure viciousness. Roland is the consumate badass from page 1, even in Book 4 where he was scarcely more than 17, he was a royal badass. He is the linchpin on which the secondary characters spin and eventually learn his brand of wicked badassedness. He is the guarantee that things will work out, he is in fact a form of deus ex machina put center stage.
When we follow this guy around, we want to watch his fantastic ability to solve problems and best the odds. We wish we could do the things he can, but have to make do with watching him work, and for the most part it’s a work of beauty.

King excels at describing raw, vicious battles.
I can almost imagine him plotting the battles on a piece of paper, describing visually to himself how units would move and interact. There is a cohesion to the battles and a glee in the display of destructive hardware that you simply don’t find with contemporary writers of the same skill.
These battles drive the story in much the same way the interludes do, because they give the readers affirmation of the characters’ part in the world. We follow them to see them best evil. This is really the core of the story. The fact that Eddie loves Susannah is fine, and Jake and Oy are fun and cute and ruff etc. This isnt why we watch them and love them. We watch them and love them because they are fighting for our cause. What gives them depth is their dualistic nature as lovers and coldblooded warriors, and their constant struggle to balance the two. Without the battles, they are flat. Troubled but flat.

So it hurts the story a good bit when the battles are downplayed and the characters’ weaknesses are emphasized. The conclusion is completely up to King, i thank him for finishing at all, but the weakness in Book 7 stems from rushing the final battles, which i consider part of the journey.

Anyone out of the loop here wanting a look, do begin at Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger. Work your way through it. Its a long, winded and complex series but i heartily recommend it even after its conclusion.