/lit/ - Literature

yo, /lit/,

what are some good books if I want to get to know the history surrounding Blood Meridian, i.e. a little history about of the frontier, of the Mexican-American War, etc.?

>>11126734
>>11127024

What about a mini-series?

About 5 episodes long, kinda like a westworld bt only a season.

Is the Blood Meridian audiobook worth listening to? Does it do justice to the text?

>>9762347
I did not interpret Blood Meridian this way at all. The story did not glorify violence so much as it used violence as a tool to explore its thematic elements. There is no way you were supposed to read this and be like, oh hey these people are so badass sure was fun shootin' 'em up in the ol' west!

Blood Meridian was very anti-romantic and I think you kind of missed the point.

Confucian ancestor veneration and the words of our venerable Judge Holden are eerily relevant...

>Now this son whose father's existence in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

Thinking of Blood Meridian in terms of ritual is fascinating. The suspension of all judgement, the suspension even of a character's actions and thoughts (even though they are implied to persist within the page, absent though they haunt it) are the effects of ritualistic violence being ontologically prior, even to life. Even fear of death is absent. It's the dark side of ritual when you neglect your bearings in the world and lose all sense of telos.

Scalping of course is ritual par excellence. Although there is a bounty, economic considerations are secondary. It's almost like they were glad to spend the bounty as quickly as possible so they can get back to the hunt, where one will get to partake in scalping for the sake of itself once more.

Ritual is Zen.

>that's why you save your father from the belly of the whale first
>it's kinda important you do it in that order
>no really

>>9691449
Pretty cool.

>>9691860
My eyes hurt. And my brain...

>>9540361

The tiger smiled. Tigers are born for cages. Nothing else. Every child knows that zoos are nobler than jails. He knows too that the worth or merit of a cage is not inherent in the cage itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Cages of zoos require a keeper to have meaning at all. Cages of tigers involve the skill and strength of the caged because they restrain in the worth of the principles and define them. But cages of zoos or cages of self all cages aspire to the condition of war for here that which is caged imprisons us all.

Ancient escapes, escapes of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In cages of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.

Six. Rockets they sang. God how did the limbs did fall.

Nael studied that tiger, flesh-starved, rending. You're crazy tiger. Crazy at last.