Art of Reading by Samuel Bak

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Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

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"They climbed through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood." This kind of unbelievable combination of words and ability to engage and describe is endless in this book. Maybe sometimes it almost seems to rich ... almost, but not quite, sappy. Here is another line just in the next paragraph: "It was raining again and they rode slouched under slickers hacked from greasy half cured hides and so cowled in these primitive skins before the gray and driving rain they looked like wardens of some dim sect sent forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land." The great literary critic Harold Bloom says this is the greatest american novel by a living novelist, but he also admits that it took him three tr...
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Clocks from Hell

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  Last night I finished Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Its one of his earlier works, published in 61. At the end his main character gives an interesting analogy on extremist like Nazis or the KKK, etc. He describes them as clocks from hell. Not exactly.   Clocks, at least in the past, were built on interlocking gears and it was the teeth lining up that kept the time. He said some people file teeth off. So then the clock tells time perfect for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, then misses, then another 2 hours and 52 minutes and then misses. These people in extreme political movements have access to see the world as all of us do, to know reality as we all do. But they take some of their teeth off with a metal file. They remove the vision of, lets say, little Jewish children being so similar to their own children. So then all their gears turn and they love Wagner and Brahms, perhaps even Prokofiev Peter and the Wolf (1936), but they file off the teeth for Jewish human-likeness.  ...
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Why History?

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  Interesting story - vignette that sounds familiar from about 80 years ago. February 1961 in Montgomery, AL where the seven states who seceded gathered to create the Confederacy one hundred years earlier … the city organized a weeklong celebration. White men dressed up as confederate colonels and women as confederate belles for a parade and fair attended by fifty thousand. There was also a pageant that told the dramatic story of secession and resistance to federal power. The parade passed directly in front of Dexter Avenue Baptist, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King, Jr. The pageant included a detailed reenactment and swearing-in of Jefferson Davis, played by a local attorney.   Judge Walter Jones said white people had gained “a deeper appreciation of the things the Confederacy fought for, and helped them to realize that unrestrained federal power is destroying this nation.” Another newspaper comment was “Today the South is facing many of the same problems it faced in 186...
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