I read 'The Road', recommended to me by a once friend who lived up the hall in The Old Place. Yes, it was a violent book but at the end of it I cried. I feel violence in a book is one of those things - if it gets really scary you can blink your eyes and repaint the picture in your mind. I don't care for violence in movies...
I love colons, semicolons, em dashes, and ellipses - anything that sets apart multiple parts of a sentence without wholly severing the connection.
I am one of those readers who does not visualize (although lately I have been trying, with little success): so I read violence with more equanimity than I can view it onscreen.
Apparently Jane Austen used dashes. I read an article by someone who said that replacing the punctuation imposed by her editors with the original dashes makes for a rather different reading experience.
So we are now to "dumb down" punctuation for lazy writers, lazy readers, and lazy editors?
What that really sounds like is either monumental ego on the part of Cormac McCarthy (as in, only he can truly use punctuation correctly and no one else on the planet has the mental acuity and mental vigor to comprehend written language correctly punctuated), or a desperate need to hide his own inability or refusal to bother with using punctuation according to the traditional...canons? Is it all right to say, "canons?"...of the English language.
(Dang. I haven't read this author, hadn't even heard of him, that I recall, until now, and already I don't like him. <---and that's my monumental ego, speaking.)
This is my month (I may have the next one, and the one after it and the one after that, too, as mine) for extrapolation of personalities or intentions, based on the individual's written word.
I'm always skeptical when critics or fans decree, "Greatest [anything of any time period, be it a generation or 'of all time,' which latter expression I consider to be downright stupid.]" And personal experience has made what used to be a suspicion, a certainty, which is that I don't care for most of the popular authors of the past century and a quarter, many of them labeled "great" or "greatest." But this may mean nothing more than that I have philistine tastes....
I don't care for most of the "great " modern authors either. I'm racking my brains and the only modern "great" I can think of whom I really like is Evelyn Waugh.
I have a string of battery-operated lights just waiting for my favorite evening shift caregiver to string them up, just like he did with my string of Halloween ghosties!
We just had our Thanksgiving. so I'll wait until he's on duty on Wednesday. :)
I can identify with your mother's attitude. I too might have read McCarthy if I'd come across him when I was younger. Now I can't really be bothered....
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I read 'The Road', recommended to me by a once friend who lived up the hall in The Old Place. Yes, it was a violent book but at the end of it I cried. I feel violence in a book is one of those things - if it gets really scary you can blink your eyes and repaint the picture in your mind. I don't care for violence in movies...
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Movie violence rarely upsets me.....
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I am one of those readers who does not visualize (although lately I have been trying, with little success): so I read violence with more equanimity than I can view it onscreen.
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What that really sounds like is either monumental ego on the part of Cormac McCarthy (as in, only he can truly use punctuation correctly and no one else on the planet has the mental acuity and mental vigor to comprehend written language correctly punctuated), or a desperate need to hide his own inability or refusal to bother with using punctuation according to the traditional...canons? Is it all right to say, "canons?"...of the English language.
(Dang. I haven't read this author, hadn't even heard of him, that I recall, until now, and already I don't like him. <---and that's my monumental ego, speaking.)
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There are those who think McCarthy is the greatest American writer of his generation. Not having read himI'm unable to comment....
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I'm always skeptical when critics or fans decree, "Greatest [anything of any time period, be it a generation or 'of all time,' which latter expression I consider to be downright stupid.]"
And personal experience has made what used to be a suspicion, a certainty, which is that I don't care for most of the popular authors of the past century and a quarter, many of them labeled "great" or "greatest."
But this may mean nothing more than that I have philistine tastes....
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Our friend across the road already has lights strung up on his house front- and very splendid they are too.
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We just had our Thanksgiving. so I'll wait until he's on duty on Wednesday. :)
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I offered to lend my mum The Road and she said "I'd have read it when I was your age but I don't want to now," which I thought was fair enough.
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I can identify with your mother's attitude. I too might have read McCarthy if I'd come across him when I was younger. Now I can't really be bothered....
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