yo... mine had bubkiss except for this:
Dating Violence
Part III
the supreme metal council declares:
Dog Malfunction
Morning Wake Up Rocket
Panda Suprise
Wake Up Rocket ...diggit
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Death by Poetry
Many of the writers I admire have really hit me when they write about the one thing we will all know but have never experienced first hand. Death. (yeah, I know. pretty cheery...)
Robert Stone from Damascus Gate:
'Such a dirty, fearsome place. Then she was swinging free and breath was all she cared about, all, it seemed she had ever cared about, the air of that filthy-smelling place, but there was none to be had. So with her breath all the thoughts of her devotion were expunged while the angry men stood watching her in the beam of their light and she wondered if she would ever ever die and then a deeper darkness, in its mercy, came.'
Yeah..., that passage got to me. I read it three times.
This next passage by Cormac McCarthy describes not the death of a character but the looming, heavy nature of things that have been and will be, all weighted with the inevitability of death. From The Road:
'He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salt drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay smoldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack. At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.'
yeah... heavy...
Robert Stone from Damascus Gate:
'Such a dirty, fearsome place. Then she was swinging free and breath was all she cared about, all, it seemed she had ever cared about, the air of that filthy-smelling place, but there was none to be had. So with her breath all the thoughts of her devotion were expunged while the angry men stood watching her in the beam of their light and she wondered if she would ever ever die and then a deeper darkness, in its mercy, came.'
Yeah..., that passage got to me. I read it three times.
This next passage by Cormac McCarthy describes not the death of a character but the looming, heavy nature of things that have been and will be, all weighted with the inevitability of death. From The Road:
'He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salt drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay smoldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack. At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.'
yeah... heavy...
the deception
If you seek the truth, do not lie to yourself, otherwise, do not expect cooperation.
History cannot be depended on for the truth.
In seeking the truth, you have declared war on culture; rest assured, our culture inventories superior munitions.
The truth is a lonely reward, not unlike heaven.
History cannot be depended on for the truth.
In seeking the truth, you have declared war on culture; rest assured, our culture inventories superior munitions.
The truth is a lonely reward, not unlike heaven.
My last combo Abbey/Stone Book Review: 1 Stinker and 1 Triumph
Bad news first: Good News by Edward Abbey is an uninspired, steaming pile of shit devoid of humor or common sense. I am thoroughly disappointed with this book. Abbey is my favorite author for three reasons: 1) his gift for painting natural beauty using language. 2) his politic of the anarchist as an individual. 3) his rapid-fire humor and sentiment. None of which make an appearance in this book. Granted, this is a genre stretch for Abbey, a futuristic novel, vaguely sci-fi.
One of the saddest aspects of this read is Abbey's attempt to resurrect Jack Burns from his obvious death at the end of The Brave Cowboy. Incidentally this isn't the only time Burns has miraculously appeared in other mediocre Abbey works. Jack Burns also makes a cameo appearance in Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang sequel Hayduke Lives! itself a disappointment. Abbey even attempts to grace Burns, now an old man, with an unending ability to avoid death. I see the reason behind this endowment but it just doesn't fit. Abbey seems unwilling to let his past lessons of sacrifice and hope-in-futility stand, resulting in an unbelievable resolution by the end of the novel. The other characters in this book fall short of being anything more than expendable, paper-thin personalities in a setting where they could have been grand symbols of America. All but one: the Chief. The Chief, the newly risen despot who is determined to march his conscripted army across the west to the capital, is the only fully fleshed out character. It's as if Abbey wrote the meeting between the Chief and his old university rival Rodack then hurried the rest of the novel into place around it. This exchange, or non-exchange thanks to Rodack's refusal to engage his tormentor, is the books only bright spot. As a result of Rodack's silence, the Chief falls into an argument with himself during which he nearly outwits himself with his own logic.
The political features of Good News are way too heavy-handed. I found myself wanting the idiotic soldiers to murder Rodack and his band of rebels if for no other reason than to shut down the gaseous melodrama.
Another huge disappointment for me is Abbey's lack of a strong female character. Dixie Dalton, outland barmaid, is first girlfriend to Sergeant Brock, ruthless hunter and torturer in service to the Chief, then lover of Burns' companion Sam, a Hopi shaman. Dixie has the potential to be a great character to read and root for but Abbey never quite feels her out as every asshole in the book feels her up.
Good News is bad news in the strictest definition. The dialogue is dead. The humor is flat. The scenes are incomplete. The action is predictable. It would've made a great movie but it's a terrible book.
Now the real good news: Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone is a perfect novel. I can't find one wrong step, one sideways error. The entire saga is pitch-perfect. Stone proves his mastery once and for all with this leap of superb writing. Set in the early 90s, Owen Browne is a salesman for a high-end yacht brokerage, Hylan Marine. Browne is married to the successful, alcoholic Anne Browne and father to an unapproachable teenage daughter, Maggie. Set against a daily deteriorating national economy, the Brownes face pressures ranging from unrealized dreams, Anne's addiction, their daughter's increasing isolation, and the fact that the owner of Owen's employing company, billionaire playboy Matty Hylan, has suspiciously vanished and, unbeknownst to the Brownes, has taken a huge chunk of Hylan Corp's liquid assets with him. In his absence Hylan has also abandoned his highly publicized entry in a yachting race, a solo circumnavigation of the globe.
Anne Browne has tolerated Owen's periodic spells of despondency, wondering for years if their life together--marriage at a young age, his leaving the Navy too soon, his confinement in an unrewarding job--is not the reason for his moods. When Browne discovers Hylan's disappearance, he volunteers himself to the executives at Hylan Corp as a replacement in the race. A deep feeling of unspent greatness compels Browne to make this one last attempt at fulfillment. Even though both Anne and Owen know that fundamentally he isn't experienced enough behind the helm to safely make the cruise, neither will really discuss it to the extent that the truth is acknowledged and the notion abandoned. The Hylan execs simply see him as a good-looking distraction to their present downturn in publicity.
During all of this, Ron Strickland, talented, seedy filmmaker hired by Matty Hylan to document the race prior to his vanishing, is primed to unearth all the dysfunctions of the Browne family and the reasons behind Hylan Corps gamble to allow Owen to sail. Why expose them? Why harvest their sadness? Because Ron Strickland is good at it. The best, in fact. He feeds off the pain and dark secrets displayed in his films. His stutter, his ever present stammer, gives most people the impression that he might be slightly stupid or dense. This opens them up. They say things and portray things they normally wouldn't. Eventually, in Owen's absence, Strickland seduces Anne, destroying all she thought she was, tearing down her life and exposing it to her as well as, to his own dismay, falling in love with her.
On the ocean in the heat of the race (which he is winning until a storm reveals the secret inadequacies of his boat, one last parting gift from Matty Hylan) Owen finds himself in uncharted waters at the bottom of the planet, lying to world through relayed shortwave radio messages, facing his madness alone, a melancholic hallucinatory madness that leads to an ambiguously positive ending. 'In one step, Browne thought, I'll make myself an honest man.' The title 'Outerbridge Reach' comes from a piece of New York Harbor real estate owned by Anne's family, a desolate place in the bay where worn out boats from different eras of seagoing sit and rot under constant erosion from the brutal seasons, a metaphor not lost in the final mix.
This book is a poem. It is pure art in language as only Robert Stone can produce. Lyrics such as: 'The color of her eyes was nearly Viking blue, but with a Celtic shadow,' are too many to count, almost rivaling Cormac McCarthy in stylistic beauty. And he does it effortlessly page after page after page. This is Robert Stone's finest work, surpassing Damascus Gate and Dog Soldiers by Olympian leaps.
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