utterly and completely off topic

don doggett · 03 Aug 2006, 17:40 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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From: kingwukong at yahoo.com (don doggett)
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 10:40:48 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) utterly and completely off topic
In-Reply-To: <f5238c30608021719i40fb6c75ydda60ab4fea1d60f at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20060803174048.29905.qmail at web32402.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote: 

[regarding Blood Meridian]

> I have to ask, why you think it is so marvelous? I
> read that just last
> year, and I remember thinking in incomprehension
> that the judge was a
> marvelous character, but that the rest seemed pretty
> pointless and
> gratuitious (Harold Bloom's criticism
> notwithstanding).

I have to admit I haven't read Bloom's criticism. The
book was recommended to me by a couple of friends. I
would agree that much of the goings on in it are
pointless and gratuitous but I would argue that that
is precisely the point of the book. At it's base level
the book is about the violent convulsions that created
the westward expansion in this country. And having
lived in the southwest desert for the past two years,
I have to say it is still one of the most casually
violent (in attitude if not physicality) places I have
ever resided. But for me, this aspect of the book on
its own would make a pretty pedantic read. It's the
biblical rhetoric and the elevation of every action to
the level of myth that sets this book apart for me. In
my mind the scalp hunters are no different from the
Argonauts (read Graves' Hercules my Shipmate or John
Gardner's Jason and Medea) or the Achaeans at the
walls of Troy, violent, unreflective men whose
unchecked impulses are raised by poetry to epic
significance. It's a western myth in an old world down
and dirty blood sacrifice kind of way that unsettled
me in my gut. I feel there's even more to it,
especially in the interplay between the Kid and Judge
Holden, but I'm not far enough away from my reading to
think about it clearly.
But that's my two cents. I think it's a brilliant book
but I know plenty of people who couldn't finish it
because of the violence or who thought it was a
pretentious waste of time. To each their own.

regards
Don

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