Month: December 2022

December Deliberations

My Kindle reader is an expensive graveyard of unread mediocre bestsellers with shrewdly intriguing opening lines.

My most-hated journalistic locution is currently “questions swirl,” along with its sister phrase “questions are swirling.” If you can’t be bothered to document why your readers should care about an issue, or to demonstrate that anyone else does, just begin by stating “Questions are swirling…” Questions are swirling over why I was charged for an iced tea when the lunch combo is supposed to include a medium drink. We hope to have answers soon…

Putin’s strategy for winning the war in Ukraine seems to rely on making every Ukrainian man, woman and little baby suffer as much as possible—those who are lucky enough not to die outright from a missile or drone attack. I don’t think it’s going to work. Or maybe it just makes him happy to inflict death and destruction on the helpless Ukrainian people from afar. Will he personally have to suffer any painful consequences of his evil behavior? That’s for the Russian people to determine. “Russia, if you’re listening…”

Do you think Putin is sleeping well at night? It would be interesting to know. I think if I were responsible for starting an unexpectedly problematic war, I’d be a little anxious. It gave Mussolini ulcers.

I kind of hope Trump follows through and runs for a second term. All those Republicans who didn’t overtly repudiate him and his four years of foul words and deeds now deserve him. No one stopped, say, Kevin McCarthy from doing the noble Liz Cheney thing.

I’ve made my peace with reading the paper in a browser. I’ve come to prefer reading books on my tablet. You know what I miss? Menus. Those sticky, laminated, hold ‘em in your hand, ketchup and grease stained, half the items scratched out and new ones written in by hand, menus. You can tell your app to go scan itself.

I’m at that uncomfortable age at which death, though to all appearances still off on a pleasantly vague and distant future date, would cause no great astonishment in the medical community were it to strike today. (If this blog ends in four pages filled with, say, the letter j, you’ll know I actually keeled over face down on the keyboard.) “He looked so good the last time I saw him,” I imagine my acquaintances saying. “What do you want to do for lunch?”

What this realization means to me is that, being so lucky thus far, I need to live life to the fullest, realize my full potential, experience as many adventures as I can in the time I have left. And to show karmic appreciation for the good health I have enjoyed so far, I must cut down on fat, salt, sugar, carbohydrates, cholesterol, and calories in general. And increase daily minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise.

All of which I fully intend to do, right after I take a nap.

(Made you look, didn’t I, you morbid rascal!)

On Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger

In which we interview ourselves on one of the two new novels by the author of All the Pretty Horses.

Hey bud.

Hey yourself.

Aptly put. So how was it.

How was what.

The book.

What book.

The Passenger, one of the two ones just published by Cormac McCarthy. Thats what we’re doing here, right?

I thought we were here in order to live a good and meaningful life.

Christ its going to be a long day.

Just yankin your chain bud. The book. Well the good news is its better than ninety nine percent of the crap they got out on the New York Times bestseller list.

But.

But its got serious problems. Quite a few in fact.

For example.

For example threads.

Threads. Are you jerkin my chain again?

No I’m serious as a cockroach caught on the floor in the midst of an oversubscribed clogging contest. Too many threads that start up promising something and end up not going anywhere on their own nor tying into any others. Like the mysterious plane crash in the ocean with a missing passenger thread. Dramatic and perfectly rendered and it sets you up to think hey this is going to be a ripping yarn.

Like The Road.

Exactly. Or All the Pretty Horses. Then it pretty much gets dropped halfway through. Like the other threads. The schizophrenic girl math genius thread. The physics genius turned Vietnam maybe traumatized maybe not combat helicopter pilot turned deep sea salvage diver thread. The brother sister romance thread. The transsexual high dollar prostitute thread. The darkly hinted at possible super weapon development thread. The treasure buried in the foundation thread. The

OK I get it.

But thats not the main issue. The main is issue is too much McCarthy.

How can there be too much McCarthy. He is the author of the book if I am not terribly mistaken.

Indeed he is. And to read this book is to understand that he has lost any editorial restraints on his own tendencies not to mention his own artistic sense of proportion. He indulges his authorial peculiarities to an extent that distorts the novel beyond anything anyone might actually enjoy reading.

By anyone you mean you.

Oh you think youll like it, then go ahead and be my guest.

Fair enough. So what authorial peculiarities.

Like the nature of his dialogue. Pretty much all the male characters talk the same way. In the same casual unflappable tough guy jokingly insulting self deprecating way. Well OK maybe thats how a lot of working class guys talk. But then each and every one is given to long obtuse metaphysical ramblings which the reader cant understand but everyone in the book has no problem with. They all seem to be some kind of self taught hobo philosopher with an improbably arcane vocabulary. These rants were of modest proportions in like Blood Meridian and slogging through them was worth it in order to ultimately get back to the story. But here it just keeps going until the book runs out of pages and you’re left wondering just what in the hell it was all for.

Is that all.

If only it were bud. Also his love for technical detail overflows its banks. One of the aspects that made his earlier works so engaging. The unhurried exposition of ranching in All the Pretty Horses. The world-creation and improvised strategies for post-apocalyptic survival in The Road.

Loved it.

Me too. But here we are treated to long expositions on deep sea salvage diving, rifle design considerations, car-racing. Did you know there was such a thing as Formula 2?

I did not.

Neither did I but I do now.

Doesn’t sound so bad.

Maybe not if it all added up to something. Or if that is all there was to it. But there is more. Towards the end whatever is left of the story gives way to more long expositions on mathematics and quantum physics. Of which I can make out neither head nor tail.

Maybe that’s your problem.

Well if I wanted to understand advanced physics I would have gone to MIT and made a study of it. But I went to Chicago and studied literature. And this aint it.

In your opinion.

In my opinion. Maybe that should be the title of my blog. And there’s another thing. The darkly hinted at but never quite fleshed out deep state conspiracies. The IRS as a front for 24 7 surveillance of the entire citizenry with the absolute technical and legal ability to shut down any individual’s freedom at the drop of an unreported hat.

What do you care if he wants to make a story out of that?

It is of great concern to me that one of this country’s greatest novelists seems to be buying into the darkest deep-state paranoid fantasies.

You seem to have forgotten that we’re discussing a work of fiction here. Just because the author portrays the world this way doesn’t mean he actually believes thats how it is.

Sure bud.

So I guess youre not going to read Stella Maris?

I have decided the money would be more profitably spent on a sharp stick with which to poke my eye. But yet.

But yet what.

But yet there are some fine passages. Moving. Jewel like observations that stick in the mind.

For all his dedication there were times he thought the fine sweet edge of his grief was thinning. Each memory but a memory of the one before until…What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies. — McCarthy, Cormac. The Passenger (p. 257). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

On that note.

On that note, you all take it easy now.