Kevin > Recent Status Updates

I've really wanted to read this book for awhile but I this paragraph makes me want to stop here.

"It seems the right moment now for Jessica to throw a dart: one dart. Hair swinging, breasts bobbing marvelously beneath each heavy wool lapel. A hiss of air, whack: into the sticky fibers, into the dead center. Milton Gloaming cocks an eyebrow. His mind, always gathering correspondences, thinks it has found a new one."

"And it did so in complete silence. Yes, that's what lends it such beauty: the silence. It's almost unbearable.
You see, Thomassons lead a silent existence. What really hits you about a Thomasson is its silence."

"Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchal cultures of domination children do not have rights. Feminist movement was the first movement for social justice in this society to call attention to the fact that ours is a culture that does not love children, that continues to see children as the property of parents to do with as they will. Adult violence against children is a norm in our society."

"There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more."

"As he grew older, awareness of self became awareness of time. He gradually came to make out the sound of the white ants. Moment by moment, second by second, with what a shallow awareness men slipped through time that would not return!"

"It was midnight, and you went out for a walk in a park with paths broken like your flesh, Quetzalcoatl, paths licked by the hot wind of the sky closing in. Like yesterday, like tomorrow, you ate the hunger of ripe, turgid fears withdrawn under your tongue made rough by so many soliloquies without doors, without circles, without bent syllables recalling tunnels sown in your ear."

Hyperbolic statement for the day: no one has ever written about beauty more eloquently than Yukio Mishima. Beauty representating how every moment in life is the intersection between the seemingly simple and infinitely complex. Like the momentary glimpse of a woman's nape representing hundreds of years of Japanese culture and history, and at the same time the essence of youth, desire, and the unattainable.

"The siblings said, with good reason, that there are two ways to face our humanity: digging into the sky or digging into the earth. Clouds or worms. Sky-blue or black. Normally we all dig into the sky, because only crazy people look down and excavate. Supposedly we want the immensity, not our own but the one that’s beyond us, that’s always far away from skin and bones, far away from the dust to which we’ll return..."

Feel like I missing something reading this book. McCarthy seems to be making a comparison between buying a horse and buying a woman? As if to demonstrate that a man who can spot a lame horse from 10 seconds of walking can't spot a "lame" woman after months of paying to fuck her?  But somehow trying to make it seem endearing because "love" and "times were different then".

"You sure you’re okay?

Yeah. I’m all right. I just get to thinkin about things is all.

Yeah.

It dont help none though, does it?

Nope"

Strong thread throughout The Crossing series (and all of aMcCarthy's books?) is the power of doing and letting the thinking happen in the background. Or maybe it is thought without action is a waste of time?

"It was a time of opulent, mysterious luminescence before the dusk of evening. A time controlled by light, when the contours of all things were perfect, every dove painted in detail, when everything was dyed a faded yellow-rose, when a languid harmony reigned with the exquisiteness of an etching between the reflection on the river and the glow in the sky."

"Beauty stands before everyone; it renders human endeavor completely futile. Before the brilliance of evening, before the surging evening clouds, all rot about some ‘better future’ immediately fades away. The present moment is all; the air is filled with a poison of color. What’s beginning? Nothing. Everything is ending."

There is a subset of books where the idea for the book is more interesting than the book itself. Legends and Lattes is one of those books. "Retired orc fighter opens a coffee shop." Every beat in the book though falls back on that idea. And due to the linear nature of the book, and the fact that it reads as though it was written in a linear fashion lends itself to wondering why the book needs to be finished.

"Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to be required to give constant proof of one’s manliness—to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak."

"However, the lingering beams of the warm summer sun sinking into the woods of Hikawa Shrine shone through the busy, soiled fingers of the two boys, and from the direction toward which time was slipping came the distant, burnt odor of the inevitable killing to come."

"...the darkness was not filled with the heat of mid-summer. The chill of early spring held possession of the sanctuary. Then, too, it was just before dawn, and from the rear of the priest’s house could be heard the crowing of roosters. Their cries seemed to shatter the darkness like streaks of crimson lightning. They were rending cries, as if the dark throat of night had been burst asunder and was spurting blood."

The Andy Dick of novels

"Maple had two eyes but they didn’t relate to each other. Lil said Maple had no bones. She and Al had decided Maple was female because they couldn’t find a penis. Lil also clucked and sighed over Clifford, who looked like a lasagna pan full of exposed organs with a monkey head attached. The twins and I called Clifford “the Tray” when Mama wasn’t around" Glad I picked this out and have decided to start my day with it

Something I find interesting about Cormac McCarthy's books is that the characters spend very little time thinking about things. They simply do. A boy rides off his ranch tracking a wolf, traps it, ends up riding to rto Mexico to return it to its homeland and never once does he stop to think 'what am I doing?' Never once does he think 'how will I get back.' He has dreams but all thought is portrayed as instinctive.

"When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her."

Guys I figured it out. Its part sports drama, part manual for how to survive if you ever find yourself inhabiting the body of a gifted but depressed teenage boy in the 1990s, part reference book for the obsessive wordsmith/drug enthusiast, and part laugh at all the horrible ways you can find yourself living and dying. Got it.

This book is like if someone sent you a video of your dog getting hit by a dump truck but your dog was actually your childhood best friend and helped you through a miserable childhood but you had to leave it behind because it was your parent's dog and they were the reason you were miserable and the reason you left but also who sent you the video and for some reason had added the Price is Right trombone to the video.

"The Advanced Basics chairperson looks like a perfect cross between pictures of Dick Cavett and Truman Capote except this guy’s also like totally, almost flamboyantly bald..."

This may be the only instance in the history of the english language where the phrase "flamboyantly bald" was used.

Not sure what to think when my favorite chapter of this book is about someone going through heroin withdrawal first in a dumpster, then in the stall of a public bathroom, and finally on a public train. With graphic description of the humiliating, desperate, and agonizing experience. A scene which ends with their death by codeine and heroin withdrawal induced seizure.

As if he were writing about my teens and early 20s:

"Pemulis starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of Kornspan’s mesomorphic head and whispers. ‘Hey. Eliot. Hey.’
Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way.
Pemulis whispers: ‘Pussy.’"

At 87 pages, I'm feeling a little lost. Looking for a point among all of the well everything maybe pointless. Or is the point just the absurdity of it all. Haha!

Not a great book to start the year with. I thought it would be a fun, action packed, steam-punk adventure. Instead its a boring, cliche, clunky, slog.

I also don't understand the use of dated terms to refer to BIPOC people. The book is set in the late 1800s but aside from that language and references to the civil war it may as well be set in the 1990s.

Quote Audre Lorde when discussing intersectionality.
"Women of today are still being called to stretch across the gap of male ignorance to educate men as to our existence and needs...Now we hear that it is the task women of colour to educate white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival."

"This approach was criminal when we turned it on tribal nations amd their homelands. It was criminal when we rubbbed out animals we classified as vermin. It remains criminal now, as we scalp prairies that overlay bitumen, gut mountains for their last rich veins, and subdivide fertile parties that might otherwise sustain us."

There is something special about reading a paragraph and feeling the author's anger.

“Even from the point of view of your desire to be attractive,” he told her, “don’t you understand how much of your charm you lose when you stoop to lying? With one confession, think how many faults you could redeem! Really you are much less intelligent than I thought!”

This Swann fella is a bit of an ass when he's in love.