intro

[Eraser Thom Yorke]

The last few months I've been keeping a word document documenting (coincidentally) the books I've been reading lately. This is just a web-based continuation of that, I suppose. I intend to write in the same candid style that I have been, almost as if I were just talking to myself (which is all I'm really doing, anyway). I've considered publishing my backlog of word-based posts on here too, but I think it's unnecessary since no one's going to read this anyway. Well, except for me.

Book: The Road Cormac McCarthy 8/10
A few days ago I finished The Road and haven't had the chance to write about it yet. I'd never read a McCarthy novel before, and I've been really looking forward to being able to. Ever since I found out who he is (first introduction: last spring in Fredricksmeyer's writing class when the "world's foremost Cormac McCarthy scholar" lectured us on his only other passion in life: Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. btw, how do you become the world's foremost scholar of anything? I mean, I understand how you do it, but at what point does your obsession become a noteworthy achievement?)(second introduction: No Country for Old Men the movie. It was like one of my least favorite movies when I went to see it [I rank movies long before I see them], but after the first 3 minutes when serial badass with a 3-year-old-girl-from-the-1970s haircut Javier Bardem choked the shit out that cop, the movie instantly shot up to being in my top five [I also make almost every movie I like be in my top five for at least a few hours after seeing it].) he's been this kind of mythical figure.

I need a fucking change of music. Thom is the man, but it was putting me to sleep and after getting no sleep last night because of daylight savings, I need something that won't loll me into a deep trance. Hence
[St. Elsewhere Gnarls Barkley]

So I've been really intimidated to read anything of his. But I finally got around to doing so once I finally finished the marathon read of Calamity Physics (took me like all of February to finish. weak).

The book is bleak as hell, but rightfully so. McCarthy never really gives you any signs of hope because there are none in the world he creates. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Earth in which no life can really sustain. As I was reading, it reminded me of the asteroid that impacted Earth and killed all the dinosaurs: constant global cloud cover, ash covering the land (as they walked through it, images of Neil Armstrong walking through the lunar regolith popped into my head), fires burning through the dead forests, and mass extinctions (he talks a lot about how there's no more birds or fish). Wikipedia, though, says that McCarthy has admitted before that he assumes that the devastation was caused by man, and that the environments described in the book resemble a nuclear holocaust (I just remembered, there was a flashback the man had that described several earth-shaking booms or rumbles or something, which reinforces the bomb theory). This therefore lead some green environmental guru to label McCarthy as one of the world's biggest environmental eyeopeners by showing us how fucked up shit can get if we fucked shit up. It's like Les Stroud to the extreme. Without any other forms of life other than humans (the only other things they encountered were mushrooms and a single dog), everybody resorts to scavenging for canned food (since the story seems to be set within half a decade or so of the initial devastation, most other foods have gone bad or been scavenged already. But since it hasn't been too long, it's not impossible to find food overlooked by others in the years past.), and some have resorted to cannibalism - the only semi-readily available meat source. At one point they even find an infant roasting on a spit over a fire.

The whole thing is just a struggle for their (the protagonist and his young son) survival, and it's just an endless cycle of scavenging and hiding. This makes it so that the plot isn't real linear (although it's mostly chronological save for a few flashbacks) and instead read more as a string of situations that were thematically linked by showing how the man and the boy would find different ways of surviving in different situations. There's no real reason (that I saw) that the series of events had to occur in the exact order they did. Occasionally I'd try to go back and look up specific passages, and this story structure made it hard to find useful reference points that would easily tell me if they happened before or after the passage I was looking for. This didn't detract from the story at all, it was just something I noticed and thought about quite a bit.

Now that I'm falling asleep for real, it's time to wrap up. As I read, I kept thinking about whether it would make a good movie or not. I like doing that with books and trying to visualize how it would look and who would play the characters and what parts of the story would be cut, etc. I think that this book would have to be handled very carefully if it were adapted to the screen. I think that it's McCarthy's style to have very little dialog describe what's going on, and I'm wondering if such a visually informative movie would keep a pop-culture MTV generation audience's attention, and I honestly don't know if it could be done without straying too much from the story. I'm afraid that if it is made into a movie (I should leave out the "if" because it is for sure become a movie), they're going to make it into an action focusing mainly on the cannibalism and the few "action-packed" confrontations that happen in the book. I'm just afraid that it's not going to do much justice to the book. Viggo Mortensen isn't a very good dialog actor, so we'll see if they can keep his mouth shut enough to make the movie not seem too wooden.
Whatever, I'm over it.

UPDATE: [from 3030, Deltron 3030]
...half the world's a desert
cannibals eat human brains for dessert
buried under deep dirt, mobility inert
I insert these codes for the cataclysm...