Blood Meridian - still utterly and completely off topic

don doggett · 01 Oct 2006, 14:32 · from 2006-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: kingwukong at yahoo.com (don doggett)
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 07:32:39 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Blood Meridian - still utterly and completely off topic
In-Reply-To: <51AF7BE5-EEB8-4A74-92DF-022296726825 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20061001143239.7908.qmail at web32405.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Transentient <transentient at gmail.com> wrote: 
I also read this last month because it was mentioned on this list. I  
really thought it was excellent.

What I don't understand, though, is why this book is considered part  
of the "litchrature" genre and not "gorefest cowboy horror" genre. My  
copy of the book had a tagline or quote on the front cover that was  
like, "A classic American novel of regeneration through violence,"  
and my response to that is: wtf does that even mean?

It doesn't mean anything to me, but Michael Herr wrote it (he wrote Martin Sheen's monologues in Apocalypse Now, and the very excellent book Dispatches) so you're sposed to look at it and say, oh, Michael Herr digs it so I'll buy it too. I hate those things myself. They ruin a perfectly nice book cover. On a more Wolfe related but still OT note, Neil Gaiman has just published a new book of short stories called Fragile Things. I have it and haven't read it but I think he is far and away at his best in the short story medium so I'm pretty excited about it.

Don

---------------------------------
Stay in the know. Pulse on the new Yahoo.com.  Check it out. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20061001/aec0a428/attachment.htm

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net