A thing all but inexplicable in that landscape.

Can't stop watching Fringe. Here's a bucket of quotes thrown at you from All The Pretty Horses. It's lovely... lots of Spanish and cussing in it but a true cowboy tale. Fun. I find that the prose style is almost just like The Road -- you don't see speech marks, ever (so Faulkner) and McCarthy's got plentiful 'tree terminology' as  I like to coin it (didn't have half a clue what a nopal was before reading McCarthy, and seeing as Chrome underlines it in red, squiggly lines, it's not too familiar to the educated society either). Reading this makes me miss horse riding. Powerful animals, they are.

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.

Love the quote above, true determination and valor.

They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

I can feel the darkness described above.

They were drowned, shot, kicked by horses. They perished in fires. They seemed to fear only dying in bed.

The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing.

Ayn Rand could fully support the quote above, ha!

They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle legged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the grey twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.

Quote above: disgust at fellow dirty humans... horses feel it too!

“You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?

Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.

...nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Absolutely love the one above.

Blood and longing

Going to read All the Pretty Horses ... now. Just spent a pocket
of time watching Fringe (S1E4) and conducting Mozart's Symphony
41, Allegra Vivace in the small space of my study.

41

Was obliged to write about Coachella and Pottermore ages ago but I really can't be fussed with it  now but in summary:

Best of Saturday - The Black Keys
Best of Sunday - Bon Iver (and Laura too of course)

Was also meant to write about The Day the Earth Stood Still - familiar story but acting details and screenplay - especially screenplay - could do with heaps of work to genuinely succeed as a special movie, not just the 'usual'.

More on movies tomorrow, I'm debilitated...

Those matters will take care of themselves; the young people will find a way

I've finished Emma! I can truthfully say I've loved it. It is probably my favourite Jane Austen novel to date (the one I've understood clearest, admittedly). I love Emma, despite her bossiness. "I wonder what will become of her," her friends said, and I'm delighted with the way the book ended. A well deserved 381 page break from The Road! Speaking of The Road, after Emma I'll be swiftly moving on -- or should I say  back -- to Cormac McCarthy again... so I'll be saying farewell to posh England and witty women who through parties all day long and eventually end up married, and a hello to a familiar desolate American and blood and guts.

Better start planning my recovery book after McCarthy -- I wouldn't mind reading another Austen but I think I'll save that for next year... an Austen per year, that sounds about right!



Below are just two lovely quotes I'd read from the remainder for the book, from where I'd last dropped off. Usually there would be more, but I suppose I'd been

It was a clear thing he was less in love than he had been. Absence, with the conviction probably of her indifference, had produced this very natural and very desirable effect.

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;—but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

Well, the next book I shall read is entitled All The Pretty Horses and is part of The Border Trilogy, which is nice because I've been intending (rather subconsciously, I discover) to begin reading a trilogy, or a sequence of books, lat least.

Below is another cute Star Wars picture (just for fun):

22

I've been playing lots of guitar lately and would like to pay homage to the two 22-year old wonderful ladies that  have inspired me most in strumming those six strings. Taylor for her lovely songs that encouraged me to actually go out and buy and self-teach myself the guitar, and Laura for her delicately empowering melodies plucked hauntingly and soulfully. Below are my favourite guitar-songs of theirs, some that I used to play much, and a few that I just love.

                          Laura                                                     Taylor

                Alas I cannot swim                                      Safe and Sound

                   Blackberry Stone                                        White Horse 

     Goodbye England (covered in snow)                    Come in with the rain

                          Sophia                                             Should've said No

                     Hope in the air                                            Our Song

                      Devil's Spoke                                              I'd Lie