Recent content by Riddley Walker

Raises hand.

Infinite digression as the source of any situation. No one like Faulkner shows how over determined our circumstances are.

I've listened to a couple of very good podcasts on Blood Meridian. One is called "Blood Meridian Now", a couple of Canadians discuss the book in exquisit detail. This podcast devotes one episode to each chapter (there are 26 chapters plus the epilogue), they are currently at Chapter 17. It's...

I've read All the Pretty Horses but not Cities of the Plains. So that's on my list. Also want to read Suttree. This was my second reading of The Crossing. First book I read by McCarthy was The Road.

I just finished "The Crossing" written maybe a decade after "Blood Meridian". I've read BM 4 times and each time I get more out of it. It's one of the most extraordinary works of literature I've read or even heard of. But "The Crossing" is a very good book, maybe even better than BM though I...

Let every day be St. Patty's Day, and may the devil mistake you for a wild rose.

I can see how you were reminded of this from O'Tuama's poem, but they're also quit different, or maybe two sides of the same coin. I see "Our Lady of the Garden" as a statement that poetry isn't so much about the self and our laments as it is about the moment and becoming one with our place in...

Our Lady of the Garden Pádraig Ó Tuama i.m. Paula Merwin All this time, I felt like I had to describe the things I did, and what was done to me, how I had to wander a strange world for years, needing to be busy, sleeping in strange beds, searching through cities for chapels to weep in...

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac…We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell...

Nah - "psychopomp" is what pretentious councilors advise.

Sepulturero - gravedigger

No poet should give up their day job. It's pretty hard to make a living writing poetry.

Best info this thread has produced yet. Thanks.

Goverments role should be to prevent the strong from devouring the weak.

I think the reason that so much song and literature is devoted to the idea of love is because we crave it but really cannot fully grasp it. Love is truly beyond our understanding. The closest I can get to defining it is "intense concern." But everyone knows that's inadequate. Part of the...