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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor

 

Cormac McCarthy vs. J. D. Salinger

The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Judge Holden, Blood Meridian

I could read Cormac McCarthy’s works for the rest of my life and be completely satisfied.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world it to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

The Judge, Blood Meridian

He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

…when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

New Years Resolutions.

Of course, the more cynical bunch of folks will deny that these things will ever institute any sort of drastic change, but I figure that there is no better time to change my habits than the turn of a year. So, for your viewing pleasure, I issue some goals and resolutions I would like to have accomplished by the end of this year:

  1. I want to finish a book a week, not including school. That amounts to fifty-two books over the next year, which is entirely doable. I probably have that many unfinished books lying around my room that I should not have to buy any new ones. (For those who are interested, I’m starting with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which has already made itself one of my favorites. I’ll probably start Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment afterwords.)
  2. My biggest goal is to be published by the end of the year, whether the published work be a poem, short story or what have you. Definitely have some works I need to do some intense editing on.
  3. I am going to write more this year than I ever have in a previous year-long period.
  4. Perhaps most importantly, I want to live deliberately over these next twelve months. I want to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world,” as Thoreau so succinctly described.

So, to each and every one of you I wish an amazing new year. 2011 should be an interesting one, eh? Don’t forget that you have but one life to live.

If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.

Father, The Road

People were always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didnt believe in that.
Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.
It didnt even know they were there.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes) (via awritersruminations)

I don’t think goodness is something that you learn. If you’re left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.

Cormac McCarthy,The Washington Post, November 13, 2009, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy” by John Jurgensen

I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Cormac McCarthy,The Washington Post, November 13, 2009, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy” by John Jurgensen