Mad Girl's Love Song

Nearly done with The Crossing. Lots of quotes already, yes. In the meantime:

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sylvia Plath!

All the Pretty horses

I finished All the Pretty Horses, and I LOVE IT and I've collected a swarm of quotes that I've decided to upload in batches whilst reading The Crossing which is also stunning. I've finished Part 1 already.

So, here's how the procedure should progress in terms of writing a review of ATPH and updates for The Crossing; they are going to overlap. Here's the official in retrospect review for ATPH:

If William Faulkner and Toni Morrison had a love child, he'd go by the name of Cormac McCarthy. He executes a similar style; writes of harsh truths, a loss of innocence, wry dialogue... yet McCarthy whips in his own input into these qualities. There is something about his writing, that despite however the story may end, one does not aspire only to curl up in a blanket and weep, but more strongly so a push to seize a horse (or wolf) and gallop away to the mountains, to the acacia, the lake, the moon...

That is precisely what ATPH succeeds to do. It tells the story of a boy, John Grady Cole, who runs away from home in hopes of finding himself and the country, and he soon winds up in Mexico. John and his friend Lacey find work as cowboys. They also encounter a curious young man: Blevins, who brings them a fair amount of trouble later, yet later showcases a deeper -- or more necessary -- understanding under his layer of juniority. John meets Alejandra and this is where the fiery romance starts, unlike all his previous works. However, before their match can succeed, John is taken to an entirely new country... only after all his experiences does he eventually comprehend that one does not really know a country until one's down there in it.

It is this revelation that makes it such a beautiful book to me despite the evils in it. Also, it does begin and end in a similar way, wrapping the story up nicely and reminding us of where John began.

Apparently, Marcus Mumford loved it too! He rambled about it on his book blog here.

The title of the book most likely comes from this familiar lullaby (an extract below):

Hush-a-bye, don't you cry, 
Go to sleepy little baby. 
When you wake, you shall have, 
All the pretty little ponies. 
Blacks and bays, dapples and greys, 
Daddy's boy Mama's joy 
Go to Slumberland my baby 
When you wake, you shall have, 
All the pretty little ponies. 
Hush your cries 
Close your eyes 
Dream of pretty little ponies 
Darkness falls and man calls 

Oddly seems to be referencing death and the heaven that awaits; given the love for horses shown in the book, I see how McCarthy may have transformed this childhood lullaby into a harsher concept: proof that his book is, after all, a bildungsroman.

The quotes I shall later upload will explore the themes he wanted to portray. This is a strongly recommended read.

May the 4th be with you

May

Wanted to post this so, so badly last year but forgot about it completely.
May, my month! Will soak it up and write down dates as much as possible.
So, here is the phenomenal, alliteration-master: Joyce. Read it aloud, that
is when it is at its prime. It's a sweet poem, unlike the lyrical but angry poetry
(well it's prose but I like to think of it has poetry) of A Portrait of the Artist as 
a Young Man.

Winds of May

Winds of May, that dance on the sea,
Dancing a ring-around in glee
From furrow to furrow, while overhead
The foam flies up to be garlanded,
In silvery arches spanning the air,
Saw you my true love anywhere?
Welladay! Welladay!
For the winds of May!
Love is unhappy when love is away!

James Joyce

And, for more May celebration:

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.