(no subject)

[proximoception]

For those who've read it, here's something that might help me: what do you most vividly remember, from Blood Meridian?

Because the overstuffing method would seem to lend itself to the simplification-through-intensity that Bloom sets against Yeats' intensity-through-simplification. But only if the same moments are similarly intense for most.

Might be some white noise here due to the novel's horrors. Like how everyone shrugs off most of what goes down in The Ring but no one shrugs at everything.

I'll write down my own answer now and post it later for comparison.

Comments

SPOILERS

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

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Ear bit off at the beginning. Kid sparing that guy. Death of Glanton. Judge's geology. Death of the Kid at the end. The ex-priest. The massacre (or one of them, anyhow, when they cross and recross the border). It's been about twenty years though....

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Longer ago the better, for this purpose.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

These yes plus the snakebit horse, Glanton's dog and the tipping point moment when they just start scalping everyone regardless of race or combatant status just anyone who gets in their path.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I remembered there was one but forgot it involved an old woman.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

Tree of babies. That is mostly what I remember from my first reading. The second and third were more studious.

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

"of this is the judge judge..."
I know that's not in the spirit of the question. But it sticks in my mind. Also "They rode on," over and over again.

More to your point, I think, that description of the appearance of the tatterdemalion army of Indians, all in the most fantastic costumes. A wedding dress, or veil, on one of them.

I seem to remember nothing else. Yet I claim to really like that book.

"Tree of babies" is what I'd expect to be the most common answer. When I read the book again for a class a few years ago, that's what everyone mentioned when they saw the book on the syllabus; I had completely forgotten that part.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Totally what I was after - it's fascinating what phrases stick.

"They rode on" may even be more common than "in the afternoon they came (wherever)" which echoes The Lotos-Eaters. I don't think I've ever read a non-McCarthy Western, but I assume "them riding on" is a foundational genre trope? And I also assume he ignores almost all of the others.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

The hard thing is remembering that first read. But I know I was struck by:

The yard fight with Toadvine.
The tent scene where the Judge first appears.
The tree of dead babies.
The falling mules.
That first lakeside massacre.
The war sermon.
The Kid becoming cut off from the others.
The Judge escaping with a cannon.
The Judge trying to kill the Kid among animal bones.
The Judge letting the Kid know he knew about his reservations (at the same time letting us know about them).
The Judge visiting the Kid in jail and in dreams.
The kid the Kid kills.
The jakes at the end.
The wtf epilogue.

In the second reading I was most struck by the dried woman and the horses by the Pacific - as well as the curiously spaced-out direct allusions to various authors. And how closely the unseen Maker whose work the Judge judges resembles Ibsen's button-molder.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

There's one passage that describes crossing the desert at night that always sticks with me.

Also, shooting a cat (I think) with an impractically large gun, and the cat basically vanishes.

The freedom of birds speech.

It's not quite warm enough for the biennial rereading. It has to at least get to 85 and the grass has to brown a bit before it's time.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Let me know which passage when hou pick it up next? Page no. suffices if your fingers are tired.