Keith Miller's Blog, page 3

Over at the always wonderful Biblioklept, Edwin Turner draws interesting parallels between the enigmatic epilogue to Blood Meridian and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Here's the epilogue:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.

 Like Turner, I'd read the epilogue as describing the actions of a post-hole digger, followed by archaeologists  ... and "those who do not search" (settlers; us?). I'd imagined the digger marking the boundary between Mexico and the U.S., but as Turner notes, he could also be "carrying the fire, freeing the fire from the earth." Turner notes other interpretations: "it’s the final gnostic clue in the Judge’s web of mysteries; it’s the Promethean redemption of humanity against the Judge’s evil; it’s the spirit of civilization that will measure and conquer the bloody West, a progressive new dawn; it’s Cormac McCarthy’s signature, his designation of himself as the writer who carries the fire." Turner doesn't arrive at a satisfying conclusion; perhaps all we can say is that both McCarthy and Anderson are grappling with America's greedy, blood-soaked past and (perhaps) trying to draw lines to the present.

I first read Blood Meridian in Burundi, where I served with Mennonite Central Committee as a peace worker. It was a fraught time, and perhaps the novel explained or at least echoed some of the horrors I witnessed. A fellow MCCer had borrowed the book from a friend in the States, and I read the twice-borrowed copy to tatters, entranced by the language and the character of Judge Holden. For a while I thought it was McCarthy's finest novel, but now I'm back to All the Pretty Horses, with Suttree a close second.

My wife's novel A Stranger in Olondria has won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. Earlier this year, Sofia won the British Fantasy Award for best novel, as well as the John W. Campbell Award and the Crawford Award. At the World Fantasy Convention, she announced that she has signed a contract with Small Beer for a second novel, The Winged Histories, and a collection of stories.

Open Culture has a list written by Tolstoy of books that influenced him. Very pleased to see my beloved George Eliot on the list. Mrs. Henry Wood (Ellen Wood) is new to me. I'll have to check her out. They also have a scratchy audio recording of him reading in English, German, French, and Russian.

Here's the book list:

WORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION

Childhood to the age of 14 or so

The story of Joseph from the Bible - Enormous
Tales from The Thousand and One Nights: the 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman - Great
The Little Black Hen by Pogorelsky - V. great
Russian byliny: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich. Folk Tales - Enormous
Puskin’s poems: Napoleon - Great

Age 14 to 20

Matthew’s Gospel: Sermon on the Mount – Enormous
Sterne’s Sentimental Journey – V. great
Rousseau Confessions - Enormous
Emile - Enormous
Nouvelle Héloise - V. great
Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin - V. great
Schiller’s Die Räuber - V. great
Gogol’s Overcoat, The Two Ivans, Nevsky Prospect - Great
“Viy” [a story by Gogol] – Enormous
Dead Souls - V. great
Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches - V. great
Druzhinin’s Polinka Sachs - V. great
Grigorovich’s The Hapless Anton - V. great
Dickens’ David Copperfield - Enormous
Lermontov’s A Hero for our Time, Taman - V. great
Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico - Great

Age 20 to 35

Goethe. Hermann and Dorothea - V. great
Victor Hugo. Notre Dame de Paris - V. great
Tyutchev’s poems – Great
Koltsov’s poems – Great
The Odyssey and The Iliad (read in Russian) – Great
Fet’s poems – Great
Plato’s Phaedo and Symposium (in Cousin’s translation) – Great

Age 35 to 50

The Odyssey and The Iliad (in Greek) – V. great
The byliny - V. great
Victor Hugo. Les Misérables - Enormous
Xenophon’s Anabasis - V. great
Mrs. [Henry] Wood. Novels – Great
George Eliot. Novels – Great
Trollope, Novels – Great

Age 50 to 63

All the Gospels in Greek – Enormous
Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) – V. great
Henry George. Progress and Poverty - V. great
[Theodore] Parker. Discourse on religious subject – Great
[Frederick William] Robertson’s sermons – Great
Feuerbach (I forget the title; work on Christianity) [“The Essence of Christianity”] – Great
Pascal’s Pensées - Enormous
Epictetus – Enormous
Confucius and Mencius – V. great
On the Buddha. Well-known Frenchman (I forget) [“Lalita Vistara”] – Enormous
Lao-Tzu. Julien [S. Julien, French translator] – Enormous

Salah Elmur was one of the artists I hung out with in Khartoum in the early 1990s. He had a unique playful style, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His wife was also an artist, working on fanciful dolls. I later met him in Nairobi, where he was living with a number of other Sudanese artists who had fled Bashir's repressive regime. I recently stumbled on Salah's new website, and also realized he has a Facebook page filled with wonderful images. His latest work is remarkable, combining East and Northeast African idioms and symbols with an artistic sensibility the equal of David Hockney or Francis Bacon.

The LA Times writes about Charlotte and Bramwell Brontë's tiny books, made when they were twelve and thirteen, respectively. The Houghton Library at Harvard holds nine of the books, which are just an inch wide and two inches long; eleven others are held by the Brontë Museum or are in private collections. You can leaf through the books here.

My short-short story "The Blue Girl" won our local paper's flash fiction contest. You can read the story here (it'll take you thirty seconds). The cover of the paper was an illustration of the story!

Nice review of The Book on Fire from The Broke and the Bookish:

"This is a book about book lovers. This is a book for book lovers. This is a book for someone who can curl up in the same spot for hours and completely lose their surroundings to the story they are occupying. This book so accurately captures the feeling of being entranced and obsessed with stories. It describes how stories are completely different when they are read alone than when they are read aloud and shared with another. It wonders what happens to a story when its book has been burned . . ."

Marvelously convoluted and Borgesian tale of a stolen Borges first edition, the Argentinian National Library, and a possibly shady bookseller, up at the Paris Review :

"Casares, now suspected of having taken part in the very crime whose investigation he had initiated, testified before the judge that the book was not the same one that had been stolen from the Library—nor, however, was it the facsimile he’d sold to Pastore. It was, he explained, a third book, similar to the others."

Excellent poem by my wife up at Tor:

"Araweilo the queen is dead wicked queen Araweilo.
Sing she is dead.
Rejoice she is dead cruel Araweilo the foe of men.

She is dead, the queen of impossible tasks who said: Men climb Mil-Milac or else you die, climb Mil-Milac the mountain of glass.

Araweilo laughed and her teeth were of glass like the mountain her manicured nails were of glass and the clasps of her slippers her cell phone her lipstick her car."

Read a bit about Araweilo here.