In America, bad-ass trumps everything.

Meanwhile, oh lord it's a bad sign when a nonfiction writer uses a quote from All the Pretty Horses as an epigraph to his nonfiction book(brand new, from a major publisher, but I will not name the book) about the Iraq War. A very, very bad sign. And sure enough:

[p. 3] The marines were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to unfold. [Does dialogue actually unfold?] It was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes and rockets were sailing [sailing?] on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the mosques, rising above the thundery [thundery!] guns [Guns?! What kind of guns? Can you be more specific?].

"The Americans are here!" howled [you can't really howl these words in English, but perhaps in Arabic?] a voice from a loudspeaker in a minaret. "The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of Mosques!" [This sounds like bad movie dialogue unfolding.]

Bullets poured without direction and without end [classic hyperbolic McCarthy horseshit]. No one lifted his head.

[...]

And then, as if from the depths [the depths? of the desert? of the buildings?], came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja's northern edge. A group of Marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.

It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds [violent, menacing, dire, unbridled; now we're in horsey romance novel territory]. I recognized the song immediately: "Hells Bells," the band's celebration of satanic power, had come to us [yes, reader, via the Marines, through a speaker] on the battlefield. Behind the strains of its guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times. [The church bell has guitars? And why thirteen? And how long did the thirteen tollings take to unfold?]

I give up.

R+B: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen; D: Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald

Man, I am counting down the days until this movie comes out. I just hope that I don't build up too much in my head to the point that the actual movie disappoints. I did that with Brokeback Mountain.

I am going to give my top ten most anticipated movies for Fall 2008, and my reasons for the anticipation. I will also include some films that premiere later in the season, because I can.

1. Burn After Reading: September 12th

     Reason for Anticipation: While part of me worries that the Coen bros. rushed through production to follow up their amazing No Country for Old Men and this will turn out to be another Ladykillers, another part of me thinks that the Coen's are riding on a wave of genius and they can't fall off their board. With an all star cast, and an intriguing story, Reading could be the new Big Lebowski.

2. Changeling: October 31st

     Reason for Anticipation: While I heart Clint Eastwood the actor, I love Clint Eastwood the director. Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby are superbly crafted films. I do worry that this whole child kidnapped story is just common ground for the ol' salty dog.

3. The Road: November 26th

     Reason for Anticipation: My favorite book of all time is being adapted into a movie, anticipation definitely rose when I heard John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition would helm this dark tale. Early production photos look promising and I've always really like Viggo Mortensen so his role should be pleasing. However, like all adaptations, there is the chance for it to fall flat.

4. Quantum of Solace: November 14th

    Reason for Anticipation: Do I really need to tell you why?

5. Australia: November 26th

    Reason for Anticipation: Baz Luhrman's tale of a female Ranch owner and one of the workers during pre WWII Australia looks epic in scale, that and it looks gorgeous. While Moulin Rouge was not a great effort, it did look really really good, and I hope to see those amazing Australian landscapes shot just as well.

6. Zack and Miri make a Porno: October 31st

    Reason for Anticipation: This is my fingers crossed movie of the entire year. I am a Kevin Smith apologist, many people don't enjoy a lot of his films, but I've always found them to be well written and very original. I just viewed the Red Band trailer for this over at Slashfilm and it looks hysterical.

7. Milk: December 5th

     Reason for Anticipation: A controversial subject matter tackled by a controversial Director may make one great film. Gus Van Sant may not be the most popular of directors but his films are always rather intriguing and very well crafted look for this one after its wide release date.

8. Defiance: December 12th

    Reason for Anticipation: This is a later one, and I have to say pre-release buzz is sounding pretty good. Jaime Bell is a great actor (if your basing your opinions of capabilities off Jumper go see Billy Elliot) and Daniel Craig is beyond good (Layer Cake). It's story is really promising as well, so thumbs up for both an excellent cast and a great stories, more so than not these days that is a hard find.

9. Body of Lies: October 10th

    Reason for Anticipation: Ridley Scott. Russel Crowe. Leonardo Dicaprio. Story of one CIA agent fucking over another CIA agent. I'm in.

10. W.: October 17th

      Reason for Anticipation: Why not? I mean, its got Josh Brolin, and it's about a president who is about to leave office, and it's by Oliver Scott (not a fan of all his work, in fact he is quite overrated but many of his films are decent).

That wraps it up into one tightly wound burrito of fall movie goodness and sour cream.

There is no doubt that McCarthy is an excellent writer and thinker. He has oft been compared to Faulkner, I suppose for his awareness of the bleak and lonely world, the individual wandering phantasmically through it. I'd say that the closest analogy to his fiction is a drunken round of Russian Roulette between Wallace Stegner, Stephen King, and Nietzsche. His world as shaped by the terrain (both its physical and metaphysical aspects) is vivid but formless, and his characters react fluidly to everything but violence, which is the lone truth of his world.

Take, for example, the she-wolf who gets Billy Parham into his ghastly back-and-forth over the U.S.-Mexico border: he is confounded by her itineracy until finally catching her, and then he decides that she belongs in her rightful home, which is a place he cannot find or at least reach. When she is taken from him and exploited for show, he finds himself as stranded as she, and, in something of a John Galt moment, finds the most resolute solution is to fire a rifle bullet through her brain and bury her in the desert.

To carry my initial metaphor to its trite and tattered conclusion, I'd say I am scarcely venturing upward before discovering that I am unprepared and ill-equipped to summit said sonofabitch. If violence alone is articulated with any definition in Dimension McCarthy, then it makes sense that violence should be meticulously defined in the narrative. And it is. In particular, there is a story-within-the-story passage about a man who goes blind after a German (of course, right?) army officer sucks the eyeballs out of his head. In a brief but lucid passage, McCarthy details the outpopping of the eyeballs, the vision conveyed by them (presented, unavoidable, including of the ground and the man's own mouth), the attempts to put them back in place with such things as metal spoons, the (you can imagine) pain, and the dangling by the optic nerve until eyeballs and cords go numb, dry, wither, ostensibly fall off.

The internal story, like a few others in the book, is a captivating parable that frees McCarthy to explore certain philosophical ancillaries of his landscape that would be otherwise untenable within the framework of his Spartan narrative. A man gone blind begins to see the world as it is, for he no longer can discriminate amongst what to see. Great. But I find myself wondering why, out of all the means to blindness, he had to lose his sight by having his eyes hoovered out of his skull to flippity-flop around for several days, grindcore style, before rotting off of his wretched face. I understand the utility of morbid idiosyncrasy to keeping your reader engaged--hell, in a story for a college workshop I once put a bullet through the head of a schizophrenic father to be nestled within the brain of his infant son sleeping soundly on the floor upstairs--but did he have to go and pick such a squirm-inducing episode? Now whenever I pick up the book--and I'm one hundred pages past that scene--I am hauntingly aware of the back of my eye and the juicy sinews that tether it to my brain, and I can't help but feel them extended and exposed and slowly withering away.

Thus my reticence to summit Mt. McCarthy. Shortly after dry-heaving through this passage, I was informed of better treasures yet in his earlier, supposedly more essential works. I get the creeps just thinking about that. McCarthy writes with the delicate touch of a true master, and this story has a presence that is both infectious and close to one's own soul. But, like many men too smart for the collective good, he likes to serve his insight with a shot of sadism.

The logical response to this aversion, however, is that his treatment of violence is not sadistic but honest and straightforward in a vicious way. Man is a cruel animal, capable of brutality in both evil and benevolent contexts, and if my sissified manner of reading is incongruous with the truth, well then maybe I ought to stick with the caricatured humanity of Dr. Seuss.

Violence is integral to all great literature. I don't feel like I even have to support this claim. But I will: Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Cervantes, Rabelais, Goethe, Defoe, Scott, Melville, Twain, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Dickens, Mann, Faulkner, Elliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Grass, Bellow, Coatzee, The Fucking Bible. One interesting thing about this list: all men.

Okay.

Bleecker, Stowe, Dickinson, Plath, Walker, Lee, Lessing, Morrison, Picoult, Pessl. (Forgive me, please, for my unfamiliarity with this half of the canon; I am a recovering misogynist.) One might suggest that the aforementioned woman authors tended toward violence of the subjugating variety, rather than the competitive variety championed by their brutish male counterparts. This is true, but in the end, is not competitive violence a quest for subjugation, and therefore hardly variant from preexisting dominance? In fact, one might say that the violence expressed by these female authors is even more brutal than that of the men, because it very clearly spells out a victim and precludes mercy or empathy.

I can think of few great texts which do not feature some form of violence. Most contemporary children's lit does not, but, then again, the old stuff, the really good stuff--Grimm and Grimm, Andersen, Disney, Pretty Much Every Folk Tale Ever Recorded-- does.

We get it, right? Violence is well documented in literature, which is itself a reflection of the human condition (I won't even bother to support this one). In an interview with the New York Times, McCarthy himself confided that he dismissed authors who did not "'deal with issues of life and death." Of Henry James and Marcel Proust he remarked, "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

So then maybe I am just another weak-assed romantic, a reader more at home with the purple ramblings of Wilde and Rimbaud and other effeminate men who were--shit!--brutalized for their lack of violent literature.

In the end, however, few of these writers whom I name-drop articulate the sort of graphic savagery of my subject (with the possible exception of Stowe, who had a pretty distinct political purpose in mind, which McCarthy does not). But that does not preclude the necessity of his correspondence, since that kind of force does exist in the world. If anything, McCarthy's explicit rendition of the abject proves his talent, since he is able to maintain the integrity of his art while simultaneously revolting his audience (whereas the lofty writer of cruelty--Dostoevski, say--couches it in innuendo and implication; and the genre hack--Lovecraft, Romero, Zombie--uses it descriptively but only to titillate).

There is no insignificant truth to McCarthy's understanding of violence as a force that communicates universally. And there is no lack of nobility in his attempt to define it. Candidly, so that the rest of us may learn a lesson that our murderous progenitors did not. We may not like to think about what they did, but all the more reason that we do--unless we unforeseeably commit it ourselves.

And yet after all this thinking through I can't stop conceptualizing the exposed rears of my eyeballs. I will continue to try out McCarthy, but slowly--I can direct my neuroses at only one organ at a time.

Jesse Waite

Washington State University

20^th Century Humanities

March 2008

Better Places, Better Ways:

Rendering Space into Place in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West

"To the outsider, McCarthy's people and their world may seem culturally retarded and primitive.  Perhaps they are-by national norms.  But such people provide a more striking mirror in which we can see our own imperfections all the more clearly."

-Wade Hall (55)

"...they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles.  For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last fire ever to be." (Blood Meridian 244)

In Cormac Mccarthy's novel Blood Meridian, the author presents his audience with the antagonist many rank among the most evil characters in modern literature.  Referred to only as "the Judge," his character is a hairless colossus of Victorian-age genius, a saintly abomination of the idealistic, rational philosophies of his age.  Throughout the book the Judge acts with radically wider agency than the novel's presumed protagonist, a character addressed only as "the kid," although the kid is anything but protagonistic except for his narrative placement opposite the Judge.  Amidst this opposition, the author looses a collection of characters whose moral range lies between the sociopathic Judge and an oppositional character, the kid, whose actions cannot truly be redeemed by the imposition of any "moral" template.  It is arguable as to whether or not any classical protagonists exist in the book as the author wishes to reveal to us, such that the character landscape is but a macabre cosmos of antagonists, antiheroes, and their multitude of victims.  The novel itself and the author's configuration of these characters onto a disinherited, depraved plane, prepare a world in which any sense of essential "goodness" or morality is negated by the folly of its realistic inequalities.

On the surface of its story, the book represents the negation of all that is ideal and mythical about the American West as a historicized memory in the modern American subconscious.  As Dana Phillips synthesizes other critical views of the book, "To them, the novel seemed a blend of Heironymous Bosch and Sam Peckinpah; of Salvador Dali, Shakespeare and the Bible; of Faulkner and Fellini; of Gustave Dore, Louis L'Amour, Dante, and Goya; of cowboys and nothingness; of Texas and Vietnam" (434).  Its characters bear resemblance with those of many other Western novels and media, yet their heroism is shown lacking a referent; there are no white women to occasion their heroic rescue.  Instead, the theme of "heroism" is shown to be an absurd veil for what really happened when set loose to claim the "other" of the land during the era of American westward expansion and manifest destiny.

Yet, as a text of historical revisionism, McCarthy's book possesses a deeper layer of complexity in that the narrative itself is ahistorical.  Though analogous to characters from other American-Western myths, McCarthy's characters do not develop under the symmetrical design of a mythical, heroic, or universal state of being.  Rather, they develop within a bare phenomenal presence in which their surrounding world is either indifferent to their existence or inexistence, or when this world speaks its spare words insist on one's subordination to the natural laws supplied by our own violent history.  They move displaced in a void of unlimited space and time, imposing violence as the last figurative recourse allowed by McCarthy's narrative voice.  As this narrator characterizes two Native Americans of the Glanton gang pursuing the bear that stole away their brother in its jaws,

The bear had carried off their kinsmen like some fabled storybook beast and the land had swallowed them up beyond all ransom or reprieve...If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts. (138)

Further, as an example of historical revisionism, the comparison is made that the text is allegorical for contemporary events and history in an increasingly flattened reality of television, school shootings, and mass violence--prevailing desensitization in the nation of plenty.  As John Cant describes, "It is commonplace of interpretation that 'historical' novels refer as much to the period in which they are written as to the past in which they are set and I have suggested that Blood Meridian reflects the angst of America's experience of violence, both at home and in Vietnam, during the period of the book's gestation" (174).  McCarthy constructs this inversion through a portrayal of humans' presence and being in the world as lost and indeterminate; items purely contingent to a violent natural world, and ultimately insignificant on a greater scale of time.  And he ornaments these aspects with stark, objective language, using language to reduce human articles to incommunicable "others."  In these ways, the book denies the act of historicizing the American West as an antinomian allegory for qualifying modern times as an exceptional or ideal age.  Rather, it seems to posit that the current age is an allegory for the depraved reality of the American West, a reality possessing the same inevitability of war, violence, and human conflict.

The novel artfully resists reduction into easy conclusions, yet the underlying dialogue of the author may be modeled by the opposition of Judge Holden and the kid.  An internal character analysis of either would necessitate pages, the irony of which is that their ambiguity as characters may not lead to holistic assertions about their place in the novel, nor as allegorical figures from contemporary society.  However, the darkest aspect is that the Judge and his partner, John Glanton, are based on historical figures from the American West, whose real actions are said to have been even more horrifying than their fictional portrayal (Rothfork).  The two compose the bulk of the book's theatrical action as they travel throughout the southwest-kid in tow and gang abiding-massacring Native Americans for their scalps and exchanging this commodity for its neatly-determined price.  The first settlers of the outermost frontier, they lay waste to entire villages and peoples.  At one point they even kill the soldiers and citizens of the Mexican governor with whom they contract their bounty of the flesh, selling the governor the scalps of his own people unbeknownst, culminating in an alcohol-fueled, orgiastic celebration back in the good old, pastoral West.  Such plots multiply as the novel wears on, plots in which flesh is converted into economic commodity by a system that is autonomous to humanity and yet its own collective product, situating those with the greatest degree of savagery a totalitarian dominion over the land and its inhabitants.  Enter Judge, the character who assumes the ultimate position of power afforded by such an arrangement of affairs in this transient warrior society, re-unified only by his repeated assertion, "War is god."

The Judge's entrance in the story is as enigmatic as his exit, never addressing him with more than the partial identifier "Holden."  He is held more as an abstract entity, deifying him through the motifs by which he is constructed, and paralleling the motifs of the novel's beginning with the actions that they portend of the end.  What is said of the Judge in the beginning binds with what is said later, as found in ex-priest Tobin's description of how the Glanton gang first encounters him with some strangely cosmic sense of anticipation, with a nod toward the novel's title,

...about the meridian of the day we come upon the judge on this rock in that wilderness by his single self.  Aye and there was no rock, just the one.  Irving said he'd brung it with him...And there he set.  No horse.  Just him and his legs crossed, smilin as we rode up.  Like he'd been expectin us. (125)

Later the Judge, relating his character-central views of war, parallels Tobin's statements, thereby fusing the Judge with both war and godly attributes,

...war is the truest form of divination.  It is the testing of one's will and that of another within that larger will which because it binds them is forced to select.  War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.  War is god... It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge.  War endures.  As well ask men what they think of stone.  War was always there.  Before man was, war waited for him.  The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.  That is the way it was and will be.  That way and not some other way...Men of god and men of war have strange affinities. (249)

McCarthy's motifs of a deity in a world devoid of a benevolent agency arc toward the Judge, who assumes the power and role of god via man's relationship with an unspeaking natural world; a world in which man's individual or moral views are subsumed by an unknowable will exterior to their subjective awareness, and which can only be unified and brought to substance in violence and war.

Yet the Judge may also be viewed from within subscription to the ambiguous philosophizing to which he subjects the gang.  In this way, he is more of an allegorical cultural essence; an integration of Nietzsche's will to power, the Faustian desire for apotheosis through absolute knowledge, Hegel's absolutist views of history, and Oswald Spengler's ideas of the historical rise and fall of civilizations as guided by a well-defined schematic.  Everything the Judge sees, including human beings, he sketches or records in a ledger before destroying the real article.  Upon inquiry he relates the purpose of this book, and its careful records and drawings, as the endeavor for absolute knowledge,

What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein its writ.  How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all. (141)

And later he elucidates the totalitarian politics of his endeavor, politics which might well be intended to represent the impulses of American Expansionism,

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent....This [the Earth] is my claim, he said.  And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life.  Autonomous.  In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. (198-9)

Further, in all things he possesses both an insight into their origins as well as their indeterminacy, yet he maintains the absolute that the indeterminacy of an open universe is reconciled by the deification of war, as reflected in a commentary laced with characteristically Freudian and Surrealist aspects,

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 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 what exists 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 the others. (245)

In this way the Judge comes to embody the idea of history as a teleological absolute, such that purely through empirical inquiry one can obtain absolute knowledge and power over the chaos of existence.  By recording phenomena in his book, he gathers their essence and destroys the object recorded or sketched-artifact, beast, or human-substituting the unknown-ness of the thing-itself with his own closed, subjective rendering of it.  He frames a totality of knowledge, and the idea that books, as hosts of language, may absolutely and essentially replace the unknowable otherness of the world.

If the judge allegorically symbolizes the more horrifying events and aspirations of the twentieth century, his presence in the settlement of the American West should be even more horrifying for fastening one's national origins to such a symbol.  McCarthy establishes the Judge's doctrine as the superior and more successful overcomer of the "other" of the land during westward expansion, and thereby the foundation upon which our own roots may be traced in the American West without exception, through the atrocity, genocide, theft, and violence that occurred on lands once vacant of the modern historical delusions by which the American West is reconstructed in an aesthetically self-assuring manner.  The Declaration of Independence, the original positioning statement of our national politics, obtained its ultimate goal of natural equality and the right to rebel simply from the circular assertion that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."  It is this kind of rational, Enlightenment thinking of teleological self-evidence which the Judge embodies as a character attempting to construct a totalizing tradition of knowledge and power.  Critic John Cant comments on this aspect:

"What McCarthy attacks in Blood Meridian is gnosis, the faith in systems of knowledge and belief that claim a validity that cannot ever exist...the notion that the intellectual grids, including language itself, that we deploy in order to mediate our experience of the world are incomplete, provisional, mythic, distinct from the world that they purport to define." (171)

The Judge's megalomaniacal rhetoric obscures the border between language and acts of violence, both mechanisms by which to render his dominion over the unknowable aspects of the naturalistic setting inhabited by himself and his train.  It is a mechanism for subduing the non-essentiality between sign and signifier, object and referential subject, a failure John Rothfork describes: "Without words to transform perceptions and control what they mean, violence seeks to erase perceptions in order to remain in a dream world it can control."  In these ways the Judge patterns the notion of violence as a social and historical mechanism of control, a mechanism for systematizing the unknown-ness of the world into subordinate forms.

The kid, on the other hand, assumes his own role in this cosmological range of characters as the passive everyman, the only character with which we may take the slightest comfort, albeit a dim one.  But in his nameless silence he is yet an ambiguous character.  He is sometimes related in terms of his "spark" of personal conscience, though this spark is often extinguished when mediated by cultural conditioning.  He abstains from killing when given the liberty to do so, while other times he kills or acts violently on social impulse, in service to the Judge's will.  As the final, premeditated victim of the Judge, his condition is enunciated by Cant:

...it is quite in keeping with the judge's previous conduct to assume the kid is both raped and murdered...The point is that we are not shown this...since its full meaning is metaphorical...His fate has been to have his experience mediated by a culture that feeds the very impulses it should restrain and feeds them by denying their existence. (173)

In this way, the kid, though silent, is a metaphor for the meek of Biblical humanity; yet in this world the meek are revealed anything but the inheritors.  His condition is that he exists only in a passive state of nature, such that the violence he commits never exceeds that to which he has been subject or witness.  Yet he is no innocent character in the few moments of moral liberty he is given to act, but instead he equivocates between right and wrong.  The irony and the fulfillment of the metaphor between the Judge and the kid as counterpoles of human morality and immorality, is that the kid had an opportunity to kill the Judge, urged to do so even by Tobin the ex-priest, but this casts him into an epistemological dilemma.  Killing the Judge rationally serves the greater good, but subverts his own system of morality, as primitive as this system may be.  This is analogous to the moral crisis of capital punishment, the paradoxical question: can "the good" execute criminals without suspending the principles by which they are known by themselves and others as "the good"?  This dilemma seals the kid's fate, identifying him much less as a definable, Christ-symbolizing counterpole to the Judge (as some critics have attempted to identify with him), but rather as somewhere in the middle of the moral continuum, nearer the imperfect human condition and the fleeting visage of lasting human goodness.  Tragically, the "good" of the kid's moral system is insufficient to contend with the nihilism of the Judge without subscribing to the Judge's terms, pessimistically realized in the inscription of the Judge's gun, the forge of his philosophy and all men's destinies within his sphere, "Et in Arcadia Ego," or, in reference to death, "Even in Arcadia, there am I" (Daugherty 28).

However, the complexity of the novel exceeds the imposition of a single "moral" template over its allegorical superfice, and in this way the events of the novel possess a deeper level of complexity in its character oppositions, its violent realism, and the mythical vapors which permeate and infuse this ironic realism.  The story is a surface narrative of historical events, but also a meta-story about stories and their relationship with language.  McCarthy's language averts placement of the narrative within the exclusive realm of either historical realism or mythic universality.  It contains the Biblical language of polysyndetonic syntax, stringing together unpunctuated sentences with the oft-repeated "and" weaving together objective happenings without flattering readers with a digestive moment of romantic organization.  If anything, his language contradicts the organizing constructs of his readership, not allowing them a moment's digestion, playing with their role in the story as part of its discourse community and participants in its metaphysical kind of violence, an inclusion acknowledged by the Judge's more abstract constructs:

As the dance [i.e., of war, of death] is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well.  In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. (329)

The Judge utilizes the Existential notion that existence precedes essence to subjugate human epistemological limits to his last, nihilistically essential truth, the purely anthropocentric truth of death.  This truth, the Judge conveys, is a practical substitution for the essential truths that are absent in the world, a negatively essential truth which also plays to the Judge's seeming immortality.  In this way, the dancers, participants in the his cosmological order, may only unconsciously engage with his final essential truth of death, but that is sufficient for the cause of creating an absolute, eschatological ordering of the universe through death, violence, and their attendant language.  In other words, participation in the Judge's order transcends consciousness, much like the regular German citizen's unconscious participation in the Holocaust.  And yet, the act of writing about such abstract notions spells out the Judge's point.  This paper, in all its revisions and invisible electronic formattings, is intended to appear as a totality, a prior script inscribed somewhere within its author's neurons, though merely a clever covering-up of its own contrivance encoded within the intersubjective software of English of what would otherwise be opaque figures on a sheet of paper.  This, rather than a cumulative and transparent process of investigation, realization, and (possibly) an escape from the ignorance inherent in human epistemological limits; a process of elusive becoming rather than absolute, totalized being.

Yet, as McCarthy carries us from one epistemological revelation to the next, "They rode on."  This is the most abundant motif used throughout the novel, illustrating the non-essential passage from one situation of experience into the next, in spite of the often beautiful language of the scenery and events.  Lacking any final, essential, or deductive connection between scenes, the characters move across a void in a state of personal and collective displacement, lacking a sense of time by which to measure their biographical or narrative progress in space.  Their being is atemporal in so far as it cannot be brought to final structural reckoning by culture conditioning, violence, primal urges, nor even quantification through the commoditization of flesh.  And they ride on,

Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augured the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang.  Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish may rage, but rage at what? (111)

And similarly,

They rode on in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god. (139)

The latter passage completes the metaphor of human autonomy as absolute and independent of any final authority, as possessing no measure of constraint without it except stone and flesh, for good or for evil.  It is a neo-Übermensch degree of freedom of which they need not be conscious in order to fulfill its potential in violence and war.  In time they are no more than "stenciled" across the incommunicable stone, the unifying symbol of the "otherness" framing their passage and determining their fate without referent to any plan, moral or otherwise.  And without such a referent, the characters possess individual ways of measuring time.  For the Judge, it is the immortal dance of warfare and violence which reconciles all such measurements and makes them universal.  For John Glanton and the rest of the gang, it is by reducing and racializing "inferior" human beings to economic commodity, amassing a fortune which is ultimately meaningless and of only manufactured worth as they are ultimately murdered by the savages they hunt in some comical repetition hinted at as they watch the fire into which they have thrown the bodies and riches of the gang, "watching the skulls incandesce among the coals as prefigurations of their own end."  The kid, in his state of nature, does not adequately possess language to construct his own being in time, and seems to exist altogether fleetingly without time.

McCarthy frames these issues of liminal space early in the book, prefiguring the kid's fate in the world to come amidst his conversation with an ex-slave merchant who offers him shelter from a storm:

...God made this world, but he didn't make it to suit everbody, did he?

I don't believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man.  But where does a man come by his notions.  What world's he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be.

No.

No.  It's a mystery.  A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.  He can know his heart, but he don't want to.  Rightly so.  Best not to look in there.  It ain't the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it...A creature that can do anything.  Make a machine.  And a machine to make the machine.  And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. (19)

The hermit's definition of an innate evil in humanity's radically unconstrained will makes way for the introduction of the Judge and his symbol as close to a unifying, social-Darwinian product of human evil, a horrifyingly independent predator born of humanity's predatory origins.  In a profound way, the hermit also points out the limited nature of humans' awareness, such that the mind may not know itself from within itself, nor for that reason may it know anything of an unmediated absolute in the world through its repetitive interpretive circle.  Quite parallel, the judge appends to the idea of other possible worlds after explaining the "temporal immensities" of a dinosaur femur, a bone of predators passed, much as their own,

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery.  The mystery is that there is no mystery. (252)

The world merely is as it is, opaque to reason.  And in a world where anything is possible, there is no prior thought, action, or will to create another world which is not derivative of the anthropocentric, absolute cosmos of the Judge.  In McCarthy's world, developing a sense of rational relationship between a God or the creation of myth does nothing to overcome the prior limits of knowledge.  Firstly, because one cannot absolve one's inability to absolutely know oneself from within oneself; and secondly, that due to this incommunicability between the self and surrounding existence, one cannot know the world apart from its objective, malevolent factness.  In such a way, the author places no theistic or teleological constraint within the design of his setting or his plot, portraying somewhat acutely the counterpoles of the mysteries of human nature: the virtually unlimited capacity of our actions and the epistemological limits which prevent us from knowing or qualifying an essential, moral good without falling into the Judge's nihilistic eschatological plan, the dance of eternal warfare and destruction:

If God had meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?  Wolves cull themselves, man.  What other creature could?  And is the race of man not more predacious yet?  The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night.  His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement.  His meridian is at once the darkening and the evening of his day. (146)

The fragmentary architecture of the story actuates the movement of the plot, which alas is an exploration of the means by which humans are left to justify an arbitrary existence through language, collectively and subjectively.  McCarthy's characters are left fatally without any plan save that of the multi-lingual Judge, and they must absurdly create a language that only incongruously coincides with the non-linguistic "other" of the natural world by raciallizing or otherwise reducing it to blind meridians.  And yet this language achieves only a tenuous relationship between subject and object, more often reducing humans to objects for the sake of expediency in the Judge's plan.  They are a primitive band of racists, Biblical dogmatists, sociopaths; and yet no further from ourselves as their fate is the production of myth, a narrative which cannot overcome its situational relativity to secure a final sense of place.  The kid's own desire for morality meets only with indeterminacy and failure.  In his later wanderings he encounters a group parodying modern religious asceticism, a sect re-enacting Christ's sufferings upon their own flesh, martyring themselves across the desert.  Their fate in the later part of the story seems all but inevitable, as the kid re-encounters them shortly after they have been gruesomely slaughtered by Apaches.  He finds an old woman to whom he tells his story and offers help.  He then discovers the woman he addresses is dead and mummified, for "She was just a dried shell and had been dead in that place for years" (315).  The fate of the religious cult parallels that of the kid, pointing to an artificial futility and asymmetry of moral actions, reinforced by the characterization of humans as a chance fact without a referent consciousness in reality.  As brilliantly elaborated in a prior passage,

They rode on.  The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained.  In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence.  The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships. (247)

In narrative terms, McCarthy poses the problem of postmodern epistemology, such that in a world derivative of no natural moral laws the only post-relative collective truth is the Judge's anthropomorphic eschatology, the onward dance of violence and war.  In response the kid, as he is being pursued by the Judge, cries out,  "Will it not stop?"  It is as much a question as a lament, a self-conscious realization that indeed it will not stop, himself not fit to stop it if he would.  The perpetual narrative of war is the only inherent human essence, and he merely a "false moneyer" of "coinage for a dawn that would not be" (310).  He cannot stand against the Judge, who is man's anthropological destiny:

Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there any system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go.  Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millenia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. (310)

McCarthy then seals off the eternal nature of the Judge with his murder of the kid in the final act, vindicating the Judge's view that finally there may be no narrative other than war which is not a false one.

However, in creating a world in which any sense of moral order is negated begs a certain question of the readers' relationship with the text as bearing a significant portion of the meaning of the text itself.  As Leo Daugherty comments, McCarthy's epilogue¹ to the novel frames his own role as an author, thereby positioning an outside presence within the narrative itself,

"...the man [of the epilogue] provides a 'structural' element which is absolutely necessary to the novel's Gnostic world-view, but which is nowhere to be found in the characters who figure in its primary story: he is a revealer or 'revelator' of the divine, working to free spirit from matter-the pneumatic (albeit corporeal) messenger in possession of gnosis, who is in service to the good 'alien god.'"

Taking a historical perspective, Jay Ellis describes the figurative process of the man in the epilogue as the epistemological process of rendering the infinite "space" of the West into knowable dimensions of "place," but with its paradoxical means of genocide, extinction of entire species, and "the realization (in mechanical enlightenment terms) of a geographic abstraction" (170).  One may go further in saying that the epilogue frames the role of the author as the figurative force for those in train, and that this role intricately weaves the narratives of the kid, the Judge, and the audience as one and the same discourse community, metaphorically and historically.  The narrative world is one which lends no referent to some external moral force, deity, or human figure, nor even to man's existence itself except as another arbitrary object in the weave of matter.  But this dystopian arc is not nihilistic, as McCarthy's final words in the epilogue lend themselves to a Jungian inner figurative consciousness (the man striking the fire from stone) which is just as untraceable in origin as the Judge, and no less real for its remoteness.  Thereby McCarthy reconciles a figurative, moralizing (if purely abstract) capacity into the situation of postmodern epistemological constraints, in which knowledge is situational, limited, collective, and thoroughly linguistic.

Critical evaluations of the book are mixed, and often misleadingly attempt to impose a moral or political structure upon the narrative of the book when its structural lack of essentiality might be central to something other than a neo-Romantic "moral."  Most often this was caused by a failure to interpret the meaning of the book in terms of its relation with its audience, in order to avert the impact of the book's passive objectivity.  Some missed the point that the violence of the book, and its setting within the total negation of a morally-guided world, may exist to beg the question of how humans can do otherwise than dance the Judge's dance, and to find a narrative which does not adhere to violence as its underlying reflex.  As James Bowers remarks,

"many readers and critics do question McCarthy's reliance on unremitting violence, narrative strategy, the lack of depth to key characters, and the effectiveness of the final episodes...Many critics note that McCarthy's strategy of presenting nearly all incidents from the same narrative distance diminishes the novel's moral and intellectual dimensions" (56).

These views misinterpret that the author's distance is exactly the point, which is a critical dimension in understanding the meaning of the novel.  In an over-censored age, should we not be exposed to the very acts of violence we nationally condone as long as they are far away and the only way we permit their factuality is through the flattening, voyeuristic buffer of the television screen?  McCarthy's stance throughout the book explicitly positions itself against the modern antinomian politics by which we rationalize violence and excuse ourselves from the discourse of violence in which we are full participants, whether only aversively, unconsciously, or otherwise.  There is an inverted kind of irony to the complaint about the novel's violence, when its realistic depiction is an allegorical pronouncement against violence as a social or national utility.  What seems to be difficult for these critics is the fact that McCarthy's violence is so anti-aesthetic, contrary to an age in which violence is aestheticized rather than finally renounced.  The irony, however, is that a book which abides in criticisms of totalized knowledge becomes so frighteningly totalized; not only when it gives equal cosmological and graphic description to calamitous battles as it does to the unseen spark of a firing pin igniting the powder of an executioner's bullet, but also when it abducts the audience's narrative into this structure of events, using their narrative to imbue the book's violence with a significant portion of its seeming inevitability.

In these ways, McCarthy's novel is a story about language and the historical tension between myth and fact, space and metaphysical place.  In the tradition of Voltaire's Candide the novel performs a folly-laden anti-theodicy in which evil is left unexplained, but preserved, and ultimately vindicated, thus revealing the irreconcilable disparity between rational philosophies of a national myth of creation and actual, phenomenal experience.  As Caryn James reviews, "while Cormac McCarthy's fifth novel is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore...'Blood Meridian' makes it clear that all along Mr. McCarthy has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality."  Jay Ellis makes the assertion that Blood Meridian, as with much of McCarthy's literature, examines the problematic rendering of space into place, where the realization of place (the creation of a national myth) bears a problematic responsibility for the violent, antinomian means by which this is accomplished (170).  Problematizing things further, Ellis reminds us that we may not externalize many of the Judge's positions:

[Judge] Holden's claims should not be too readily discounted as inaccurate.  Morality may be something conjured up, like a trick, by human beings living in a nonmoral universe.  Morality may be inevitably medial, with no connection up or down.  Our feelings of connection below, to animals and the natural world, proves to be no more than our inability to evolve out of anthropocentric habits of epistemology.  So, too, our feelings of connection above, to the larger universe: these may only be an unkillable figment of the emphatic systems our brains have evolved for our life as social creatures.  Just as we are good (and terrible) at imagining what someone else is thinking and feeling, we might simply have the habit of projecting a god onto a universe that has none. (246)

Regardless of our feelings one way or another, or yet how our own moral views pass tender in such a universe, Ellis' points reveal the discourse that shores out McCarthy's novel.  The final conclusion of the book vindicates the Judge, not nihilistically but rather to challenge the strength of our ability to perform roles other than as his dancers in an age when personal accountability is becoming moreso the dilluted exception than the rule itself.  After all, to not ask such questions possesses the greatest degree of nihilism, by taking the anthropocentric turn and assuming moral abstractions for self-evident structures in the world.  Yet, as the kid reminds us, it is not the physical matter of place that constitutes morality.  In the desert, the kid's criminal companion, Toadvine, says he cannot join the kid in flight from the Judge because he is subject to arrest where they are headed, comments to which the kid responds with startling awareness:

Arrest ye?

Toadvine didnt answer [...]

You wouldn't think that a man would run plumb out of country out here, would ye?

The kid rose [...]  It aint country you've run out of, he said.  (285)

The kid's narrative-as it is woven into an allegory of American exceptionalism, of space and place-reminds us that even the language of myth-making is ultimately insufficient for rendering a moral abstraction into a substantial thing.  For the course of such an endeavor is wrought with provisionality, paradox, and dilemma.  Epistemological constructs lend us only a provisional, liminal space within with much of our awareness, moral or otherwise, is informed by social and cultural constructs.  But paradoxically-just as Heidegger asserted the human condition as being cast into time-we must reconcile our sense of place, personal or national, with the geographic inheritance of violence upon which it was and is constructed.  Thus, we must justify ourselves at the same moment we cannot.  And in light of the Judge's dichotomy of dancers and heretical non-dancers, we are put into the human dilemma of having only all-or-nothing options when making moral choices.  Whereas our circumstances are purely contingent, our choices remain absolute, and so too is our liability.  We bear individual responsibility for our epistemological condition, yet we are at odds to escape responsibility by the illusory advantages offered by society and its perennial, if not perpetual violence.  All the while the Judge reminds us that self-implication is heresy in the orthodoxy of war--subversion to the cause of his inevitable advance through time.

Formally the meaning of the book's title seems open to interpretation, but as Jay Ellis comments, its lack of prescriptive but only descriptive meaning may be the point.  As he evaluates, a meridian in astronomical terms is only an arbitrary demarcation or point of reference that is ultimately subjective and particular to the position of the perceiver (189).  He elaborates further:

This [astronomical relativity to the observer] is a fit metaphor for a book whose wide-open spaces ultimately lead to rape, murder, and possibly cannibalism in an outhouse, a book whose presiding judicial authority prosecutes the protagonist for not fulfilling a spiritual calling to war, and a book whose dancing survivor's mortal identity expands into the immortality of the dance...  Indifferent to the concerns of the relatively brief moment of all human history, the sun [the judge] will have its movements and the earth [the kid] will obey the larger body's gravity.  What, from this point of view, could the death of thousands, even millions, matter?  McCarthy taunts the reader with this possibility, by collapsing imagery of an astronomical point of reference into the liquid vital not to the universe, but only to humans and other animals: blood.  This is a human meridian indeed, drawn in blood. (189)

In succinct terms, Ellis enunciates the meridian of the violence within the book as the arbitrary points of reference to which we become psychically affixed to obtain an order that is nowhere evident in the world.  But we see that it is not only a spatial meridian as Ellis describes, but its larger dimensions are temporal.  The word "meridian" is used in only two other instances thoughout the novel, denoting meridians seen from different perspectives: the first is when Tobin describes how the gang meets the Judge at the meridian of the day sitting alone on a rock in a vast wilderness otherwise devoid of rock, the second is when the Judge describes the highest point of man's being as the parabolic singularity when he is neither ascending nor descending, yet in that infinitely small moment he begins his decline.  One meridian is external, the other is internal; yet each is so minute as to be rendered non-existent in time, describing the enactment of such non-existent "meridians" as the origin of violence which a species perpetuates upon itself as an attempt to overcome the unknowable aspects of its existence, in futility to overcome time.

John Cant comments that biographically Blood Meridian may represent the passing of a crisis in the author's personal life (175).  But here we see that due to its allegorical structure this crisis is universal: historically in terms of the American West, and presently in terms of the ways that we have inherited the antinomian structures which allowed us (or may not after all) to render unlimited space into a sense of domestic, national place.  We see the same processes occurring in the unilateralism of an unsurprisingly pseudo-cowboy presidential administration in their attempt to render the new frontier of Iraq into a proto-American proxy government, completely against the grain of the social and historical make-up of the country's inhabitants, and quite obviously for the sake of the 21^st century's decided resource of conflict, oil.  We act first, we justify later; retroactive rationalizations which by their fluid abundance also credit their complete invalidity.  In light of the insurgent resistance this has created, we seem to be headed for the realization that our epistemological mechanisms for rendering space into place through language may be perilously defunct-if any such perfunctory mechanisms existed at all, or if we merely took them for granted as internal to the eternally upward arc of American idealism.  Meanwhile the forward momentum of social competition forces one's attendance in human conflict.  In many quarters since, 'liberal' and 'conservative' alike, it seems to be accepted with a cynical nostalgia that these mechanisms have failed and that the overzealous rendering of space into place has fragmented into the subjective political lenses of blue and red, denying any sense of plurality beyond such binary meridians.  One party's mechanism for the place/space transformation is the domestic, egalitarian myth of American civility, whereas that of the contrary party is the myth of post-World War II American military-industrial superiority and the paranoiacally desperate projection of the shadowy, free-agent other of the Cold War.  In both cases they appeal-as all dancers must-to the project of rendering space into place.  But, as evidenced by the vitriolic climate of our national discourse, they have since turned on one another and even themselves, predator upon predator, forestalling any national discussion not related to war or the state of the economy which funds it.  As we now advance over much broader and more unstable frontiers, who knows what Judges lie in the path ahead, patiently awaiting our arrival amidst the evening redness in the West.  McCarthy reminds us that the human story will only worsen before it ever learns to improve anything but its mechanisms of violence, lest we find better ways, but without promise that such ways may be.  So is McCain bald yet?  Or will Hillary beat him to it?

Works Cited

Bowers, James.  Reading Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian".  Boise: Boise State

University, 1999.

Cant, John.  Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism.  New York:

Routledge, 2008.

Chamberlain, Samuel.  My Confession.  New York, Harper & Brothers, 1956.

Daugherty, Leo.  "Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy."

Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia:

Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. 23-36.

Hall, Wade.  "The Human Comedy of Cormac McCarthy."  Modern Critical Views:

Cormac McCarthy.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers,

2002. 53-64.

James, Caryn.  "Is Everybody Dead Around Here?"  The New York Times Book Review.

28 April, 1985. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E7DB1F3

8F93BA15757C0A963948260>

Kim, Grace.  "'Then They All Move on Again': Knowledge and the Individual in Judge

Holden's Doctrine of War."  Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. 169-184.

McCarthy, Cormac.  Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West.  New York:

Vintage International, 1985.

Phillips, Dana.  "History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian'."

American Literature 68.2 (Jun., 1996); 433-460.  Durham: Duke

University Press, 1996.  (Accessed via JSTOR, 5 April, 2008).

Rothfork, John.  Language and the Dance of Time in Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood

Meridian.  Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff.  30 March, 2008. <http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/Mccarthy_blood.htm>

¹Epilogue

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.

¹(337)

Bah, tive a oportunidade de ler trechos do senhor em questão, tenho a dizer que desde J. D. Salinger, este modelo de ver e narrar andava muito raro, inexistente talvez. Mas eis que surge este monstro do realismo fantástico...só lendo pra entender, assino em baixo e aposto meus culhões em McCarthy!

confiram o breve trecho de A Estrada, ultimo romance publicado pelo autor;

Lembranças do apocalipse

Atravessaram a cidade ao meio-dia. Estava quase toda queimada. Nenhum sinal de vida. Carros na rua incrustada de cinzas, tudo coberto de cinza e poeira. Rastros fósseis na lama seca. Um cadáver na soleira de uma porta seco feito couro. Arreganhando os dentes para o dia. Ele puxou o menino mais para perto. Apenas se lembre que as coisas que você põe na cabeça ficam lá para sempre, falou.

Você se esquece de algumas coisas, não se esquece?

Sim. Você se esquece do que quer lembrar e se lembra do que quer esquecer.

sacou, chapinha?

quer mais, tem aqui ó:

A Estrada

Blood Meridian has been the third novel by Cormac McMarthy I've read so far. I was deeply moved and at the same time appalled by his Pulitzer Price winning The Road and I also liked No Country For Old Men a lot. My English tutor recommended Blood Meridian to me and so I visited one of my favorite bookstores and ordered it right away.

While talking about a Cormac McCarthy novel you can't say that the story "circles around" a character because that's not how McCarthy writes. So let's say that most of the time the focus of Blood Meridian lies on "the kid", a runaway teenager from Tennessee. The story is set in the years 1849/1850 and takes place around the border between Mexico and the western territories of the USA. In a nutshell Blood Meridian is about the kid as a member of Captain Glanton's gang of scalp hunters bringing chaos and death to Indians and Mexicans in the Wild West.

It took me about four weeks to read this novel of 337 pages. The reason for this slow reading progress is that I'm in the middle of a drought right now because I haven't read anything awesome during the last few months. This also means that Blood Meridian didn't end this drought. Quite the contrary. It was a tough read. Basically the entire novel is about insane men riding around somewhere in the west, slaying different kinds of people. The endless bloodbath is only interrupted by some philosophic talking. In the course of reading Blood Meridian I was reminded of Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and the movie Apocalypse Now based on that novella. While Heart Of Darkness / Apocalypse Now is about a journey to the dark, barbaric and savagery side of mankind Blood Meridian is kind of (Colonel) Kurtz's Mayham-Tour through the west - "Bringing horror and pain to a settlement near you!".

Still there has to be something to Blood Meridian. Otherwise it wouldn't have been ranked #3 on the New York Times list of the most important works of American fiction in the last 25 years... Guess some time in the future I'll have to read some of them literary articles on Blood Meridian and than re-read it. Btw there will be a movie based on McCarthy's novel. Due 2009. I'll be watching it. On the screen this story has the potential to be a hard boiled western.

*Mashups: Jay-Z vs. Oasis again; this time in the form of a mashup (by Cookin' Soul), rather than a beef. Personally, I enjoy beef. [listening post]

*Concerts: Greg Gillis of Girl Talk says "I'm waiting for someone to 69 on stage." Also, he says a lot of other stuff.

*Interviews: Paste magazine interviews Calexico: The band really digs Cormac McCarthy. [music slut]

*Obit: Steve Foley, the drummer for the Replacements, died this weekend of an accidental prescription pill overdose at the age of 49. [rolling stone]

*Guns: Read an excerpt from "Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses." [fimoculous] Also: The dude who leaked those Chinese Democracy songs has been arrested. At the behest of Dr. Pepper's lawyers?

*Religion: Guitar Praise is like Guitar Hero, but with Jesus. And, probably, Moses. [best week ever]

*P2P: The legit wing of the LimeWire store is expanding; they've added The Orchard's music catalog. [hypebot]

*Smoking: I don't know why you would want to have a pack of cigarettes stuck to the side of your head, but if you would, you can buy a telephone headset that looks like an open pack of heaters. And then you can wear it. [shinyshiny]

Without going into a lot of detail, I double up when I get it all in with a straight-flush draw and improve on the river to send a guy who flopped top two pair packing. I'm now sitting on a little more than 6K. Not long after that I pick up Aces and two other players fall in love with their medium pocket pairs preflop (lots of re-raising), and a 2-3-5 rainbow flop convinces them both they're good. They both get it all in. I send them to the rail and increase my stack to 14K. Prior to that, the chip lead was 9K, and the average stack was about 4K. I'm looking good so far.

Then, the power went out, and with it the cable modem. Seems the heavy rain played havoc with a local power distribution device. I was not pleased. I read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian by candlelight while waiting for the power to return, hoping it would come back before the tournament was over. Alas, I went to bed in a completely dark house wondering how far my dead stack would take me.

At least I now know that if I ever play online poker for any kind of real money (which isn't likely), I'll make sure I have all kinds of backup systems in place to keep me online when situations like this arise.

Funny sidenote: I made back almost half my buyin with the 3 bounties I collected. Apparently in my absence I eliminated another player. I logged in this morning to find that my account has $.50 more than my records indicate. I must have been the big blind, and the small blind (or somebody) was unable to complete the blind but went all-in. Nobody else called, and my hand (whatever it was) held up. That had to sting just a little...

It's unrelated but has the same bleak tone and dark theme about a fallen world and the end of humanity.

It seems McCarthy is heavily influenced by John's book of Revelations which talks about end times except that McCarthy reveals how it would REALLY be like if it happens in our lifetime, if what John said came true and what would be the signs.

The ROAD has a very simple plot which is actually not a plot.

'The man' and 'the boy' both remain nameless are traveling down the road south to run away from the winter in a world that is best described as postatomic apocalypse BUT there is actually no backstory told as to how the world got so bleak. It could be war, it could be natural disaster, disease or just God's intervention.

Only that there was a flash of light and minor quakes and then the earth was covered with ashes and everything burned (fire rained from the sky?)

Imagine if everything in the world came to a sudden stop and you were still alive after a few years.

Into this scenario, McCarthy cleverly weaves a hypnotic and haunting story of a man with morals - he's not sure he believes in God anymore, or even luck but still its an unstated believe that God has a plan and it is his job to follow out his mission.

He kills and even steals and beats up other men to survive the road BUT as he assures THE BOY - they are the good guys - and we believe him given the state of the world and what demons and monsters now exists out there. He's a good guy because he has a mission.

What is his mission?

Part of the story is told in flashbacks.

Well, when the end of the world ended, there were three - THE MAN, his WIFE and THE BOY. They wondered why they were left on earth.

They had a gun with two bullets - not enough to kill three of them and the man believed that there must be a reason they lived on.

He is truly a survivor as any God-fearing man is.

Arguably, Biblical themes plays a big part in McCarthy's story (as it did in 'No Country for Old Men') although McCarthy is never outwardly preachy.

The dilemma of the three survivors arise because if they commit suicide they believe they will go to a dark place - as the bible says so.

BUt is that dark place worse than what they are experiencing at the end of the world? Maybe this is McCarthy's impression of purgatory, neither heaven nor hell... yet.

The wife thinks so - and because THE MAN will not kill her with the last bullets as she requested she leaves and assumingly kills herself.

She leaves the MAN with THE BOY because she knows, having to take care of the boy will keep him alive and give him a mission - a Godly mission. That sets up the rest of the story.

And so -  the book tells the survival story as the man journeys in search of scarce food, fight off cannibals, look for shelter and encounter a fallen world on their way to avoid the ashes, falling  burnt trees and heavy snow blanketed by ashes while trekking south. The father also plays his role as a teacher, tries to keep the boy from growing up too fast and also to teach him about a world now gone for sure, except in his memory. Can he trust his memory?

In a poignant moment, the father shares a can of coca cola with the son - a forgotten pleasure now a treasure.

The Road as the title implies is actually a stretch of  grey highway that leads to where who can tell?

There is no DESTINATION, no place to arrive at the end because this is the end times as McCarthy so vividly paints it that you must keep on reading in the hope that THE MAN and THE BOY will make it.  But make it to where ?  there is no refuge, there is no safety, there is no possible antidote - death is the only reward when the end time comes.

and yet, if there is a message in the book it is that DEATH must be earned.

And in a way, the ROAD - which won the pulitzer prize for 2007 and a lot and lots of other awards - is actually about LIFE, and that's why it is such a touching masterpiece of a story.

All of us have to choose to stay on the road, no matter how bleak, how futile, how unclear the future may be. And it is ironically, the journey to the death (for we are dying from the day we were born) that helps us define a LIFE lived.

I personally found it a very positive, life-reaffirming book, eventhough it left me feeling sad and horrified as it was supposed to.

Stay on the road.

The road may be far from pretty and can be very difficult to traverse BUT it has something to teach us yet.

=================================================================================================================

Read the reviews at  > METACRITIC < if you are unconvinced that this is one of the best books ever written. Its the third highest rated book in recent times.

I myself have not recently read a better book than this.

A movie is also due to hit the screens soon but I doubt it will do the book justice.

Watch Oprah's very rare interview with Cormac McCarthy on youtube.

There are several parts - follow the links to parts 2,4,5,6,7.

Here's the first:

]]> http://asincronos.wordpress.com/?p=6 Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:51:13 +0000 padawan http://asincronos.wordpress.com/?p=6 [/caption]

El verano es una época a la que mucha gente suele identificar con la lectura de best-sellers, grandes volúmenes que destacan en cualquier centro comercial, en sus estanterías de "Los más vendidos". Desde Asíncronos queremos hacer una campaña para la diversificación de la lectura, y, aunque sea tarde para remediar esos viajes a la playa cargando con las últimas 600 páginas de John Grisham, estos últimos días de agosto pueden servir para cambiar el rumbo lector. Y, como sabemos que esto de los best-sellers funciona por el boca a boca, vamos a proponer algo revolucionario: no dejarse llevar por las modas, si no iniciar una. Para ello, no vamos a hablar de un escritor completamente desconocido, pero sí de uno que no disfruta de excesiva fama en nuestro país: Cormac McCarthy, autor, entre otras novelas, de la recientemente adaptada al cine "No es país para viejos" y otra novela en proceso de adaptación cinematográfica, "La Carretera".

No te conformes con volver al trabajo y oír a todos tus compañeros comentar algún libro de Ken Follet. Ve a la librería o biblioteca más cercana, coge cualquiera de las novelas de este hombre y disfruta de sus historias, duras, descarnadas. Tanto el western tardío que es "No es país para viejos", con el inquietante personaje de Chirguh recorriendo el sur más profundo, como el más clásico "Meridiano de sangre", donde la dureza y el cinismo de Peckimpah se quedan muy cortos ante la violencia desatada por McCarthy, donde no hay casi rincón para la esperanza en el ser humano, o, incluso, su incursión en el género post-apocalíptico de "La Carretera", un retrato brutal de la caída de la humanidad, y del terror de los supervivientes.

Si quieres conocer a uno de los más interesantes autores actuales, no lo dudes.

Links:

Página oficial de Cormac McCarthy (inglés)

The Road, en imdb, y más información (inglés)

[...]
NERO: E in cosa credi?
BIANCO: In un sacco di cose.
[...]
NERO: Va bene, quali cose?
BIANCO: Probabilmente non credo più in una serie di cose in cui credevo una volta, ma questo non significa che non creda più in niente.
NERO: Be', fammi un sempio.
BIANCO: Più che altro, credo nel valore delle cose.
NERO: Nel valore delle cose.
BIANCO: Sì.
NERO: Ok. Di quali cose?
BIANCO: Di un sacco di cose. Le cose culturali, per esempio. I libri, la musica, l'arte. Cose di questo genere.
NERO: Va bene.
BIANCO: Queste sono le cose che per me hanno un valore. Sono la base della civiltà. O quantomeno, un tempo avevano valore. Probabilmente oggi non ne hanno più così tanto.
NERO: E cosa gli è successo, a quelle cose?
BIANCO: La gente ha smesso di dar loro valore. Io ho smesso di dar loro valore. Entro un certo limite. Non saprei neanche piegarle bene perché. Quel mondo è in gran parte scomparso. E fra poco lo sarà del tutto.
NERO: Non so se riesco a seguirti, professore.
BIANCO: Non c'è niente da seguire. Va bene così. Le cose che amavo un tempo erano molto fragili. Molto delicate. Ma io non lo sapevo. Pensavo che fossere indistruttibili. E mi sbagliavo.
[...]

Mi colpisce la lealtà dell'autore, attraverso le parole del bianco, rispetto alle cose. In queste poche parole è descritta l'esperienza che facciamo, presto o tardi, tutti. Le cose non hanno altro destino che la fine. Anche lo cose sulle quali si basano le civiltà.

Occorre arrivare alla fine delle cose per trovarne il vero valore, la loro origine, altrimenti tutto è destinato a crollare miseramente sotto i nostri occhi.

Richard Brautigan - 1957

By 1956, Brautigan had settled in San Francisco, California. There he sought to establish himself as a writer, was known for handing out his poetry on street corners, and often participated in "Blabbermouth Night" readings at The Place, a popular gathering spot for artists and poets. His first published "book" was The Return of the Rivers (1957), a single poem, followed by two collections of poetry: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958), Lay the Marble Tea (1959).

Emily Bronte - 1840

In 1837 she became a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, where she spent six months. Emily worked at Miss Patchet's shdoll - according to Charlotte - "from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between" and called it slavery. To facilitate their plan to keep school for girls, Emily and Charlotte Brontë went in 1842 to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily returned on the same year to Haworth. In 1842 Aunt Branwell died. When she was no longer taking care of the house and her brother-in-law, Emily agreed to stay with her father.

Robert Creeley - 1946

A year with the American Field Service in India and Burma (1944/5) interrupted his time at Harvard; on his return he married, left Harvard without graduating, and, in 1948, went to New Hampshire to try subsistence farming. His attempt two years later to launch his own magazine failed, but prompted a long correspondence with Charles Olson and provided material for Cid Corman's journal, Origin.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 1843

Dostoevsky was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in 1842 and next years he graduated as a War Ministry draftsman. He had no interest in military engineering but at the academy he could also study Russian and French literature.

Dostoevsky's father Mikhail Andreevich died in 1839, probably of apoplexy, but there was strong rumors that he was murdered by his own serfs in a quarrel. With the help of a small income from the estate, he resigned in 1844 his commission to devote himself to writing.

Gustave Flaubert - 1843

In the 1840s Flaubert studied law at Paris, a brief episode in his life, and in 1844 he had a nervous attack. "I was cowardly in my youth," Flaubert wrote once to George Sand. "I was afraid of life." He recognized from suffering a nervous disease, although it could have been epilepsy. However, the diagnosis changed Flaubert's life. He failed his law exams and decided to devote himself to literature. In this Flaubert was helped by his father who bought him a house at Croisset, on the River Seine between Paris and Rouen.

James Joyce - 1904

He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid (they married in 1931), staying in Pola, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste, which was the world’s seventh busiest port. Joyce gave English lessons and talked about setting up an agency to sell Irish tweed. Refused a post teaching Italian literature in Dublin, he continued to live abroad.

Franz Kafka - 1905

In 1901 he entered Ferdinand-Karls University, where he studied law and received a doctorate in 1906. During these years Kafka became a member of a circle of intellectuals, which included Franz Werfel, Oskar Baum and Max Brod, whom Kafka met in 1902. About 1904 Kafka began writing, making reports on industrial accidents and health hazard in the office by day, and writing stories by night. His profession marked the formal, legalistic language of his stories which avoided all sentimentality and moral interpretations - all conclusions are left to the reader.

D. H. Lawerence - 1907

He worked as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory and then four years as a pupil-teacher. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence received his teaching certificate at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career at Davidson Road School in Croydon in South London (1908-1911). Lawrence's mother died in 1910 - he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine.

Federico Garcia Lorca - 1920

 García Lorca first read law at the University of Granada, but later entered the University of Madrid. At the same time he also studied music. In the 1920s García Lorca collaborated with Manuel de Falla, becoming an expert pianist and guitar player. In 1919 he moved to Madrid, where he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the intellectual center of the town. His friends included the writers Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pablo Neruda.

Thomas Mann - 1897

Mann was educated at the Lübeck gymnasium and he also spent some time at the University of Munich. He then worked for the south German Fire Insurance Company for a short period. Mann's career as a writer started in the magazine Simplicissimus. Mann's first book, DER KLEINE HERR FRIEDMANN, was published in 1898.

While at university, Mann became immersed in the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in the music of composer Richard Wagner. In Buddenbrooks, Mann's early masterpiece, he used the technique of the leitmotif, which he adapted from Wagner. Mann had started the book in 1897 as a small story about one member of the family. However, the "protracted finger practice with no ulterior advantages" enlarged into a saga of a wealthy Hanseatic family, which declines from strength to decadence. The last Buddenbrook, the musically gifted young Hanno who dies of a typhoid infection; he is the first of many similar, often morally suspect aesthetes in Mann's novels, continuing in Tonio Kröger, Gustav Aschenbach, Felix Krull, and Adrian Lewerkühn.

Vladimir Mayakovsky - 1905

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Kutais region (subsequently Mayakovski), Georgia. He was of Russian and Cossack descent on his father's side and Ukrainian on his mother's. At home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school Mayakovky used Georgian. His father, who was a forest ranger, died in 1906 of septicemia, and left the family penniless.

Mayakovsky attended the gymnasium at Kutais (1902-06) and a school in Moscow (1906-08), where the family had moved after selling all their movable property.

Cormac McCarthy - 1955

Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He attended Catholic High School in Knoxville, then went to the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. His major: liberal arts. McCarthy joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953; he served four years, spending two of them stationed in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show.

Henry Miller - 1916

From 1909 to 1924 he tried different jobs, including working for a cement company, assisting his father at a tailor shop, and sorting mail for the Post Office. While in the messenger department of Western Union, he started writing a novel.

Vladimir Nabokov - 1921

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy, aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal politician, lawyer, and journalist. The household was Anglophile - Nabokov spoke Russian and English, and at the age of five he learned French. Nabokov received his education at the Tenishev, St. Petersburg's most innovative school. At 16 he inherited a large estate from his father's brother, but he did not have much time to enjoy his wealth. During the Russian Revolution his father was briefly arrested. The family emigrated to Berlin and Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1923. Vladimir Dimitrievich was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian monarchist.

Anais Nin - 1925

In New York Nin studied art, and married in 1923 the banker and artist Hugh Guiler. Later known also as an engraver and filmmaker, he illustrated her books under the pseudonym Ian Hugo. When she started writing fiction, Nin moved in 1924 with Guiler to Paris, France, where she associated with the villa Seurat group.

Frank O'Hara - 1948

Frank (Francis Russell) O'Hara was born on June 27, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O'Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

Following the war, O'Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.

Charles Olson - 1932

Charles Olson, the son of Karl Joseph Olson, a postman, and Mary Hines, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University. Olson taught English for two years at Clark University then entered Harvard University in 1936, where he completed coursework for a Ph.D. in American civilization.

Kenneth Patchen - 1933

In 1911, Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. His lifelong romance with writing commenced at age twelve, when he took up keeping a diary and reading the works of famous writers. His first published work was in his high school newspaper. After working for two years with his father, Patchen when on to college in Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College for one year, and then to the University of Wisconsin. He grew bored of his studies, and began to wander around the US. He continued his writing, and in 1934, he married Miriam Oikemus.

Ezra Pound - 1907

From 1903 to 1906 Pound studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at Hamilton College. In 1907 his teaching career was cut short at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, when he had entertained an actress in his room.

Kenneth Rexroth - 1927

Rexroth and his first wife, the painter Andrée Shafer, moved to San Francisco in 1927. There he published his first poems in a variety of small magazines, while also pursuing an interest in eastern mysticism and leftist politics. He kept company with like-minded left-wing poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky, and with them aimed to rescue poetry from its supposed downslide into formalist sentimentality. They organized clubs to support struggling writers and artists.

Arthur Schopenhauer - 1810

With the inheritance Schopenhauer received, he was able devote himself entirely to intellectual pursuits. In 1809 Schopenhauer entered the University of Göttingen as a student in medicine and received later the degree of doctor of philosophy from the University of Jena in 1813. During this period he fell in love with Karoline Jagermann, the mistress of the duke of Weimar. She did not respond to his feelings.

John Steinbeck - 1924

Steinbeck attended the local high school and worked on farms and ranches during his vacations. To finance his education, he held many jobs and sometimes dropped out of college for whole quarters. Between 1920 and 1926, he studied marine biology at Stanford University, but did not take a degree-he always planned to be a writer. Several of his early poems and short stories appeared in university publications.

Kurt Vonnegut - 1944

Vonnegut was sent to Europe. He was taken as a prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. After being transported to Dresden, an old cultural town, he worked there making a diet supplement for pregnant women. Between February 13 and 14 the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force made heavy raids on Dresden. At that time Vonnegut was a prisoner in a meat-locker under a slaughterhouse, and was among the few people to survive the total destruction of the city. Later he was employed by the Germans to dig out corpses. Dresden was occupied in 1945 by Soviet troops and Vonnegut was repatriated to the United States.

After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at Chicago University from 1944 to 1947, but his M.A. thesis 'Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales' was rejected.

John Wieners - 1956

Weiners was the founder of Boston's MEASURE magazine in the 50's, a graduate of the innovative Black Mountain School of poet Charles Olsen, and the author of any number of poetry collections, the first being THE HOTEL WENTLEY POEMS.

Wieners had said that a significant event occurred to him while he was walking by the Charles St. Meeting House on Beacon Hill in Boston, during the 1950's. Famed Gloucester poet, Charles Olsen was reading and folks were handing out his literary and art journal the BLACK MOUNTAIN REVIEW. Weiners was inspired by this magazine, which was founded by such men as Olsen, Robert Creeley, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. The BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL , ( connected with the magazine) in rural North Carolina was described as an "experiment in open education." In the spring of 1955 Wieners enrolled in this unique institution, and later came back to Boston,to publish MEASURE MAGAZINE, that featured many BLACK MOUNTAIN poets.

Virginia Woolf - 1904

Leslie Stephen suffered a slow death from stomach cancer, he died in 1904. When Virginia's brother Thoby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown. Vanessa, Virginia's sister, influenced a number of her characters; in childhood they bathed and slept together.

William Butler Yeats - 1887

As a writer Yeats made his debut in 1885, when he published his first poems in The Dublin University Review. In 1887 the family returned to Bedford Park, and Yeats devoted himself to writing. He visited Mme Blavatsky, the famous occultist, and joined the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, but was later asked to resign.

I continue to be surprised by my recent interest in Westerns. Although this one wasn't quite as good as 3:10 to Yuma (the new version starring Christian Bale and Russell Crowe), this Billy Bob Thornton directed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel was surprisingly engaging and well done.

After watching the most recent adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men, I won't be surprised by any amount of violence in a movie based on his work. However, I wasn't expecting to be so disturbed by this movie. A film whose title refers to beautiful animals doesn't seem like the type that should feature several gruesome, jolting scenes. But it does just that.

This movie almost plays out like a serialized story. At the beginning it feels like an adventure, but subsequent parts involve sudden shifts into romance, coming of age, survival, etc. If I were to categorize it, I'd have to call it an epic.

The movie features a great cast of familiar faces. Matt Damon is the headliner, and although the movie was filmed in 2000 when he was already 30, he looks very young. (He should, since he's playing a teenager.) Damon's character, John Cole, sets out with his friend Lacey, hoping to find work on a ranch in Mexico. Lacey is played by Henry Thomas, best known for his role as Elliott in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. He also played one of Brad Pitt's brother's in Legends of the Fall. John and Lacey encounter Jimmy Blevins, a brave and reckless teen, on their way to Mexico. Jimmy is played by Lucas Black. I think Black is the most impressive actor in this movie. He has been acting since he was very young. I remember seeing him on the short-lived and creepy television show American Gothic. (Anyone remember the promos that featured a little girl repeating the phrase "someone's at the door" in a monotone voice?) And perhaps his best known role is as the little boy opposite Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade. I'm guessing that helped him get the role in this Thornton directed film.

Much of the movie focuses on the relationship among these three young men, but the main focus remains on Damon's character, as we see him develop feelings for Alejandra (played by Penelope Cruz), have his will tested, and be forced to grow up fast. It seems misleading that Cruz was featured so prominently in the movie ads, since, as I mentioned before, the love story is somewhat of a subplot. Whatever sells tickets, I suppose... In my opinion, this romance between John and Alejandra was the least developed part of the movie.

While the movie is well done and entertaining, it does have its faults. At times, particularly in the second half, the story gets muddled down in some bizarre scenes in which, as a viewer, I didn't know whether I was watching hallucinations, a dream, or a grim reality. Some things were never explained, leaving me frustrated at the end.

I do recommend this movie to anyone interested in seeing an out of the ordinary Western. From the beautiful scenery to the sudden shifts in plot, it is well worth two hours of your time.

SPOILER ALERT!  I'd like to excerpt one of my most favorite passages from the book:

The chill wind battered their gaunt frames.  It would have played their ribs like sad xylophones were it not for the thin jackets.  The man looked out to the horizon.  Cold grayness stretched out, morbidly, like a corpse.  It was dark and cold.  The black river to the side looked still below its frozen top.  A snow fell, gray and impure.  Darkness encroached upon their grimy, gray selves.  A gray coldness darkened the evening.  The boy was cold and hungry.
Can we stop to eat?
We can't stop to eat.
Because the bad men will find us?
Yes, they will find us.
But I'm so hungry.
You are hungry.
Okay.
Okay.

(This was not actually taken from The Road.  BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN.)

Art of the Day: Sunrise Over Himalayan Foothills Seen From Poon Hill (Nepal) by Corey Wise

OMG! I got my first non spam comment today! I'm probably a little too excited about it but it felt kinda cool that someone had read my blog. Read it and not thought I was a raving lunatic as well. Go Me!

Sorry about the exceedingly short post yesterday. I literally spent almost all of my day reading Matt's blog. I read it backwards though so at times I was confused but seriously, the man is amazing. And loved his wife so very very much. Which just makes it all the worse to me. How many marriages are there out there where they aren't even happy, don't care about each other at all and are sticking together for all the wrong reasons; kids, money, just being so used to the way things were? And this one, this one that was so happy was ripped away far too soon. Guess that's the way it goes though. Life's unpredictable at the best of times. And damn chaotic at its worst.

Matt made a comment one day about how he used to be a cynic but with all the outpouring of love and gifts he's received from complete strangers, he's not so much of one anymore. He shows all the things he gets and the man has gotten so much from complete strangers. Or as he says, strangers friends. It truly is touching and makes me want to look at people differently. Better. Maybe I'm not as much of a cynic either.

I wish I could travel more. Seeing pictures like my Art of the Day pic really make me want to see these things in person. I have been blessed. I've seen glaciers in Alaska and felt tiny in comparison to the majestically beautiful untouched mountains there. I've been to countless beaches and been on several cruises. I've climbed the waterfalls in Jamaica ...an experience I recommend to everyone. I've been to the Empire State Building and made friends with pigeons. I've swam in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (the Pacific is a little chilly). I've flown Delta enough times to know that if you fly with them, you will be going to the Atlanta airport ...even if your destination is Seattle.

But there is so much more I would love to see. I want to take a road trip to see the Redwoods. I want to go to Alaska again because it really made me feel that there is still a frontier, still untouched beauty on this Earth. I want to go to the Arctic and have to have a 'buddy' to check for frostbite. I want to go bungee jumping off a bridge with a river underneath me. I want to go to Ireland and stand on the cliffs. I want to walk through a castle. I want to go to Africa and see lions and elephants not in a zoo. I want to see Victoria Falls in person. I want to travel to third world countries giving aid and cry at the selfish life I've led. I want to see the Northern Lights.

But I don't want to do it alone. And unfortunately, I have no one to go with. They either can't afford it or have no interest in going. So, for now, I'm learning to be content with my shitty little town. I forget where I read it...a blog I think (I'm really getting into blogs lately), where a woman and her husband couldn't go anywhere on vacation for a while so they decided to be tourists in their own town. Going somewhere they'd never eaten, taking the requisite touristy pictures, and so forth. She said that it really felt like they were tourists. She was taking everything in more than she usually would and she had a blast. Maybe we should all do that.

That pic of Mendenhall? I've been there. It's not my pic but it brought back memories. While we (we being family) were there we were told how much it had shrunk over the years due to global warming. It was kind of shocking actually. It's gotten a lot smaller a lot quicker just the last few years as well. Two of my sisters (Marion and Lowen) and I took our own little hike while we were there. You see that patch of land close to the glacier? We walked there. I don't even know if we were supposed to because we were the only ones doing it but it was amazing. We saw what looked to be some kind of large animal tracks too which I was completely stoked about. We were gone quite a while and we started getting a little freaked that Mom would start wondering where we were. Nobody had cell phones with them, though we probably wouldn't have been able to get signal anyway. So Marion and I turned back so Mom wouldn't have a heart attack