Meridian, Bloody Meridian.

On Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West:

Much is made of this novel and with good reason. At only 335 pages BM is a sweeping epic that, much like its iconic Judge Holden, identifies and catalogs many discreet human phenomena, with the most extended and fascinating being that of the mythology surrounding the Western idea of the “Devil”. This investigation and subsequent characterization alone is enough to enlighten and inspire the intellectually curious among us, but ultimately what embronzes this book into the hallowed halls of classical art is the masterful writing of Cormac McCarthy. It is my opinion that McCarthy is author to the bravest and, because of that reeking and lewd courage, greatest American literary achievement.

I fancy myself a man of above average intellect with a happy talent for both composition and reading comprehension and yet I found myself drowning in the deep and hazardous waters of the first few chapters’, as if I was reading Chaucer or Beowulf. I knew that what I was reading was English, thine eyes recognized and put meaning to the characters, words and sentences on the page, but I might as well have been trying to translate some dirty relic of Anglo-Saxon antiquity unearthed and then set to the American Southwest. Dense doesn’t being to describe this Red Dwarf and, I think, a lot of the early struggle was in trying to get in rhythm in the choppy and unfamiliar waters of a novel that is unique in that it is written with with supremacy of confidence. McCarthy clears a path by allowing his prose to burn forward, raging with the oxygen of risk in his ability and it’s my stance and appreciation that it takes a true artist to be able to cast off the comfortable shackles of preassembled speech patterns and description and create something original, to “utter a new word”.

Further, BM is methodically and expertly researched (from historical accounts to relevant, archaic words and dialogue) which serves to validate the work, from the investigation of ‘The Devil” to lending the extreme and often graphical violence a legitimate voice. It is to this end that I cannot understand those who say things read in BM count as some of the most disturbing things they’ve read because to be disturbed is to be uncomfortable due to an incongruity and inappropriateness. Severe violence, like in War and Religion (pardon the redundancy, Your Honor) in BM not only has a responsibility to exist but is exhibited in such harmony that McCarthy shows himself to be more poet than warrior.

Once having gained my sea legs, I found myself in awe that McCarthy was able to create dynamic combustion with the seemingly static and sterile ingredients of 19th century jargon and esoteric descriptors. For my experience, reading BM was like taking a hard, psychoactive drug; you’ve heard these wondrous and ecstatic things and are anxious to feel them yourself. You flip the first page, swallow hard and off you go on this cerebral journey. The aforementioned struggle to inhale the first thirty pages, over-thinking and staunchly garrisoned in your own brain, leaves you with the creeping doubt that “Maybe I got a bad copy" and questioning "Is this book ever going to get me high?” Eventually, however, your brain adapts to the new normal and equilibrium that McCarthy so deftly creates and before long you aren’t just reading the story, you are experiencing the journey and it is taxing, it is physical, it is work. You are dancing. Perhaps you too will never sleep; perhaps you too will never die.

And like most hard drugs, if BM were submitted as a manuscript today, I fear it would not be street legal. BM might still have found a demand in the boutique and niche publishing houses or broken up into shorts in some cavalier magazine, but, I fear, in today’s era of cheap and easy conflict and “tension on every page” we have devolved into a culture more interested in the easy digestion and quick, frequent highs than of the long, slow burn that a great writer can stir. We’d rather smoke the equivalent of literary crack over and over, in a volume play, than involve ourselves, engaging as an audience to commit to art, getting our hands dirty with rubber tubing and hypodermic needles.
Ultimately, however, the story moves me because I was once young, violent and drunken -a modern marauder- in a past recent enough that, late at night when the kids are safe and soundly sleeping my thoughts wander to the wanton days of fatalistic and wild adventures. I can still recollect the highs and lows of a vandal life and BM, at its core, is an epic journey- a frontier Odyssey combined with a more brutal Paradise Lost and, as a native of Texas whose unique history is one, not of peaceful and political annexation, but of conquest and revolution, the premise resonates wholly within me.

Lastly, McCarthy paints a clear picture that Judge Holden is in fact “The Devil”. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Happy Juneteenth 2012!

So, I decide to go to Joppa (pronounced Joppy) and pick up a friend to go experience this whole Juneteenth thing at the deepest root we have available.

So for those who aren't familiar, a little background. Joppa is a little settlement on 45(S) past the trinity river bottom and flanked by a huge railyard depot and buttressed by wilderness to the South. There is no local law presence (DPD has to be about 20 minutes away from call to contact) and, if you've ever seen Training Day it is exactly like that; there is one way in, across the tracks and over a bridge, and one way out. Joppa is one of the oldest left freedmen settlements from the old policy "40 acres and a mule" days.

Generally speaking, these tracts of land given as a sort of "reparation" have long since evolved into thriving communities, assimiliated and later incorporated into normal cities of today. Well, for whatever reason (my theory is geography) Joppa is the last, isolated settlement that is almost 100% African-American and has remained largely insulated to the point that residents dont have basic necessities like A/C and the government subsidizes almost everything there. At any rate, me and a friend decide it would be fun and fitting to drive over there, walk around and maybe crash a yard party or drink a 32oz. beer out of a paper bag, see if there is a place to eat lunch, general tomfoolery.

We get there and I don't leave my car.

Prostitutes, crazy vagrants and drunks roaming the street, evil glares. I've had a gun pulled on a group of us at 5am on Canal St. in New Orleans and this rivals that incident on my psychological state of fear and safety. The best way to describe it is there is a general sense of doom once you enter, like being in a haunted house. Anyways, some pics attached, which include a prostitute with a cane, a horse in a house and a shotgun house that, ostensibly burned down, but the charred embers still remain. I didnt take pics of some of the more flagrant things because I was fearful of what would happen if they saw me taking pics. It amazes me that a place like this still exists, in Dallas at that, and that 98% of my peer group has never heard of it.

Also in this link a professional European photag did there is a picture of a guy with the words 'Dog Life' tattooed on his face, that alone should have told me not to go.

http://www.panos.co.uk/stories/2-13-...What-is-Joppa/

So, after that whole rigamarole I go to Sweet Georgia Brown in Oak Cliff- much safer way to celebrate my black heritage.