"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...
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. ...
like loose leaf paper scattered by the wind went my life and my soul Log after log of solid living wood falling finally landed on my rotted heart and splintered it irreconcilably.
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