Random Notes

I’ve never finished Ulysses.  In fact, I think that I’ve only reached about fifty some odd pages into it—and the last attempt, I think, was twenty-six years ago.  In my very nice hardcover Random House edition, a reprint of the 1961 edition, I find one of my business cards from a job I left in […]

About that ending.  Many years later in 1878, the kid runs into the judge in whore-infested Fort Griffin, sees him drinking whisky in a bar, the sort of scene we all can easily see thanks to countless movie scenes; and like many times throughout the novel, the kid tells the judge that he’s crazy, “you […]

I like the sound of the word ‘meridian.’  It has a distinguished, well-traveled global sort of feel to it.  I think of stately lines on a map, well–defined and sensibly laid out arcs, a civilized sort of netting thrown by sober Masons and Dixons (un-Pynchonian perhaps) intent on imposing Western order on natural chaos.  Paths, […]

Inevitably playing in my head as I begin reading Blood Meridian is Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.  Clint Eastwood squints and leaves Eli Wallach to die and three characters journey endlessly on the deserts of Spain that are standing in for the American West.  The movie was made in 1966, and […]

Private Investigator.  The P. I.   Private eye, private I.   Kafka the gumshoe in a hall of mirrors.   Say what?  I dunno.  I’m just sayin’. Who wrote this book?  Of course, Paul Auster did, but throughout The New York Trilogy somebody named Paul Auster makes appearances as a character and that somebody is probably the narrator of The […]