I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.
Suttree
Suttree went on. A mute and shapeless derelict would stop him with a puffy hand run forth from a cavernous sleeve of an armycoat. Woadscrivened, a paling heart that holds a name half gone in grime. Suttree looked into the ruined eyes where they burned in their tunnels of disaster. The lower face hung in sagging wattles like a great scrotum. Some mumbled word of beggary. To make your heart more desolate.
I bought a pack of cigarettes for my sister a few weeks ago. The girl at the checkout counter, who was just a girl, likely still in her teens, looked at me sideways for a bit longer than is normal for that kind of transaction, so at looked at her back, waiting. She finally scanned the pack and said, “I almost carded you there….” Somewhat flattered and somewhat shocked, I said, in my attempt at charm, “Well, you got it right. It’s been a pretty long time since I was too young to buy cigarettes.” And she quickly replied, as if to immediately shoot down any confusion, “Oh, yeah [clearly meaning: obviously]. But we’re supposed to card anyone who looks under 40.” No longer flattered, and somewhat crushed, I said, “Oh,” looked away, and started to pretend something else had caught my attention as she finished ringing me up.
God damn you, father time.
Carver and Zoë
My immediate family came to visit this weekend. That includes my grandniece Zoë. Zoë and Carver love each other. It’s interesting, as a parent, to see. Carver thinks Zoë could walk on water. If she likes something, he’s almost set on liking it himself. When he sees her, he lights up. And it is just obvious to someone who has spent a huge amount of time around Carver that he thinks about her in a different way than he thinks about anyone else.
I’m not trying to say something ridiculous, like they are bound to get married, or something. First of all, they are first cousins once removed. Second, Carver is two and Zoë is six, they don’t think that way yet and we don’t think about them in that way. And when it comes right down to it, Carver would miss either of his parents more than he’d miss Zoë, but the friendship is special. There’s something about how kids relate to other kids that adults, no matter how fun and cool, just cannot match. And that’s better than fine.
The Road
Anne and I just finished watching The Road. Here are some of my thoughts:
(1) It was a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. With a few minor issues, some of which could be considered major depending on your viewpoint.
(2) Viggo Mortensen is a badass. He is the epitome of hardcore when it comes to acting. I love that dude.
(3) Anne thinks she’d take the route the mother did [SPOILER ALERT], which is to kill herself after the point when things get really bad. I like to think I’d stick it out and follow “the road,” clinging to hope. But who knows what one would do if things got really, really bad.
(4) Anne says she wouldn’t eat our dog. I say, you know, if you’re starving…
(5) Anne and I listened to the audio book of The Road when we took a road trip to South Carolina when Carver was a month old. During the movie Anne and I had a quick conversation about how the story is harder to bear now than it was then, because we have a child. We had a child then, but it was different. I figured that then the reality hadn’t really set in, and/or that it’s harder now because Carver is more of a person, with his own personality, than he was then. Either way it is true, and tells me something about love.
I love my son more than anything. Not to be flip, or silly, or spout some sort of cliché, or whatever, but I didn’t know what love could mean until Carver came along. I love my wife, and my family and dear friends, and have loved past girlfriends, and (particularly with my wife and past girlfriends) at various times I’ve felt I’ve loved them so much that I’d die if something ruined that relationship. But seriously it doesn’t even compare to how I feel about Carver. While it’s hard to think about and accept, I think if anyone I cared about other than my son died I’d be very, very upset, but I think I’d recover eventually. I’ve suffered that kind of loss before, and it’s awful but I can take it. But if something happened to Carver…I seriously, from a very informed perspective, cannot even imagine being able to go on.
And all of this informs my reading/listening/viewing of The Road. And let’s just say that the story is hard to take.
Also: I don’t think I ever fully appreciated what my parents felt about my sisters and me. When I think about how they probably think (or at least thought) about me the way I think about Carver, it makes me wish I were much, much nicer to them.
(6) The story also, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit, makes me think that maybe those survivalist crazies aren’t so crazy. Of course I don’t mean those who think our government is out to get us, or those in the town I grew up in who thought they needed to arm themselves to the teeth during the LA riots because all the brown people from the city were going to storm our fair (literally, in one respect) enclave of privileged racists. But if something horrible happens and you want to protect those that mean more to you than everything else in the world, how frustrating would it be to not have an extra $10 in ammunition when you’re left with two bullets in your revolver?
I was checking out the website of this guy I kind of know. It was very nice, part weblog, part other stuff. Anyway, one of the things he had on his site was annual lists that contained every book he read, movie he watched, etc, over the course of that particular year. I thought it was cool. I want to try to do something similar and figure the best way to do it will be to create monthly lists so I remember to stay on top of things.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
First Clown: . . . . Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.
Hamlet: Whose was it?
First Clown: A whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?
Hamlet: Nay, I know not.
First Clown: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a' poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.
Hamlet: This?
First Clown: E'en that.
Hamlet: Let me see. [Takes the skull.] Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. . . .
Shakespeare, Hamlet.
And listen to this, one of my favorite songs of all time (song starts at 0:17, I strongly encourage you to stop it by 3:23 as the music they use for the end credits totally kills the mood):
Two Words I Used Earnestly in a Five-Day Period
(1) Cad – I referred to someone as a cad.
(2) Swell – When a friend asked if I’d like him to share some information with me, I said it would be swell if he did.
Relatedly: About six months ago I referred to someone as a “dickweed.” Immediately after it came out of my mouth I was shocked by it. That word was an often-used piece of my vocabulary when I was in my early teens, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say it in at least 17 years or so.
Words from Suttree
I just started reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. I’ve never read any of his stuff before, except for the first 10 pages or so of No Country for Old Men (I didn’t stop because I didn’t like it, I was just browsing the books on my mom’s bookcases). Never in my life have I had to look up so many words when reading something. There’s a saying about reading Infinite Jest: make sure you have two bookmarks and the O.E.D. handy. But, so far, on a words per page basis Suttree blows Infinite Jest out of the water on the words-Trent-doesn’t-know scale. So here’s a list of the Suttree words I looked up in getting through the first chapter (25 pages of text, but the dialog sections have way fewer words that I need to look up, so the words here are almost all from the 15 or so pages of non-dialog): [n.1]
Foetal – Variant of fetal/fetus
Alluvial – Detritus from running water
Hawser – Large rope for towing/securing/etc a ship
Interstitial – Relating to / situated in a gap
Striae – Stripe/line, groove, channel
Stele – The central vascular portion of the axis of a vascular plant, usually cylindrical
Pinchbeck – Fools gold, a counterfeit thing
Rictus – The gape of a bird’s mouth
Mucilage – Gelatinous substance of various plants
Reticulate – Resembling a net or network
Plover – Type of bird, like a sandpiper
Viscid – Sticky, having an adhesive quality
Volute – Spiral or scroll shaped; a type of mollusk
Gambrel – A stick or iron for suspending slaughtered animals
Incruent – Bloodless
Homunculus – A little man
Instanter – At once
Grapnel – Small anchor, usually with 4 or 5 flukes used especially to recover sunken objects
Stob – Stake, post
Flowage – An overflowing onto land
Rimpled – Wrinkled, crumpled
Agoggle – (Agog) Full of intense interest
Cerements – A shroud for the dead
Sulcate – Scarred with furrows, usually longitudinal
Davited – (davit) a crane that projects over the side of a ship
Catenary – The curve of a cord that hangs between two fixed points
Cannelured – Ring like groove, the groove near the butt of a bullet
Breeks – Breeches, trousers
Parget – Any plaster or rough cast used to cover walls/etc
Gaitered – (gaiter) A covering for the ankle, calf, shoe top, compare to “upper”
Amphoric – Resembling the deep, hollow sound made by blowing across the mouth of a bottle
Note 1: The definitions are mostly my abbreviated versions I noted when I looked each word up. Also: A few of the words in the list are somewhat familiar to me (e.g., alluvial, interstitial, pinchbeck), and others are of the sort where I could’ve made a decent guess (e.g., viscid, instanter, riven), but I wasn’t sure so they made the list.
