Nothing seems to make sense. I took a short hike and then stretched it out longer, just to amuse myself because the fall weather in Austin has been so nice. Some days have a coherent narrative thread, and then some days, when Mars is backwards? It all comes unraveled.
Previously noted:
Video on a computer means? iPorn? Fight back with coffee cups?
Beat Books:
I’ve been savoring the flavor of No Country For Old Men because I like the way the story is being told. All I can do is recommend the book.
I have first-hand experience with its milieu, the world in which the novel is set. I haven’t encountered any novel that has captured the cadence of speech so well since reading vintage McMurty. And even that comparison really isn’t valid because the two have rather different styles. But that being said, what excited me was the way the language was crafted, the precision used in capturing a cadence that, because I’ve been there, I can safely assure what is real.
I think it was a McMurty novel that drove me home to Texas, and from there, I started on this leg of the journey, where I get to travel parts of the Texas trail.
I was working with upcoming material, and needed a bathroom break. No new magazines (fishing and literature) so I grabbed the novel I was reading. I only read about two pages, but I was overwhelmed, again, by the language. Or maybe it was some other biological function, but I’d like to think it was the book.
I finally finished it late the other evening. Surprised me, but then again, it didn’t. A rather mature and muscular novel, with just hint casual and causal sentiment buried beneath its surface. Plus there’s always that elegiac tone to the author’s work.
One lit professor I had studied with suggested that most authors tell the same story, over and over. Plot, action, setting, that all changes, but inherently, the same tale, over and over. I couldn’t see the Border Trilogy in it, but there was an echo of his Blood Meridian.
Life’s a beach:
There are some days, and one line out of the No Country For Old Men text reminded me about this, some tidbit that borders on the absurd.
