*Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain -Cormac McCarthy
An oeuvre that changed my life, no doubt. No doubt. John Grady, Billy Parham, Suttree, wayfarers, the most honest reaches in the world, laboring over the trails of pre-history. The stories they tell are the stories that have always been told. The only story that there is to tell. I stood up and had to pace a few times in the middle of this one. Slug some port. Look away. The problem is that you can’t look away. Closing your eyes isn’t good enough.
“Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”
“He walked up Juárez Avenue through the hucksters and pimps. He saw a boy selling stuffed armadillos. He saw a tourist drunk laboring up the sidewalk carrying a full suit of armor. He saw a beautiful young woman vomit in the street. Dogs turned at the sound and ran toward her.”

*Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain -Marcel Proust
Of course sexuality, nostalgia, literature, androgyny, musicology, deontology, rhetoric, francophilia, poetry, post-modernism and all the brave or craven want to take a slice of the diluvium that is Proust… let ‘em all gobble… close a lovely book… swell with a deeply-inspired subtlety… and continue through this gracious tortured world.
“It’s far more difficult to disfigure a great work or art than to create one.”
“For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.”
“…and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven deeper.”

the next page in Suttree

"A curtain is rising on the western world. A fine rain of soot, dead beetles, anonymous small bones. The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted sockets of the interlocutor's skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley. Fourfooted shapes go to and fro over the boards. Ruder forms survive."

thats on page three.

good lord.

from Suttree

"There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless."

and that's on the second page.

of this four hundred eighty page book.

uh oh.