Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (01/10)

One of the more shallow ways to react to literature: prove yourself unable to get past some moral sticking point in the story, particularly when the author shows himself aware of the injustice.

Nonetheless:

Torn hymen=spoiled meat.

Weird synchronicities between this one and the subsequent Midnight's Children. Preoccupation with virginity, the preservation and loss thereof. Stained marital sheets displayed to an expectant public. Old, but perhaps not that old, moral codes that still stir up indignant rage in me.

By the way, do you know those successful neo-Victorian books by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, The Dangerous Book for Boys, The Daring Book for Girls, etc.? They follow a simple prescription, namely resurrect a nostalgic Victorian weltanschauung of colonial explorers and Kipling-esque right-is-right, moral backbone, which we all thought rightly buried under the million hapless corpses of the Somme (but not, of course, in forgotten African mass graves). I was content to leave it there, but the present-day fathers of the UK and USA are nothing if not wistful for days when you could call Cecil Rhodes anything other than a bag of worthless horsefuck; when, in fact, one could crown him a Dangerous Hero among others in the Igguldens' obscene new book. Please let's not have a Victorian revival. So they were genteel. They also enslaved the entire fucking world.

Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism by Eric Hobsbawm (01/10)

Old socialist critiques American imperial project of the Bush years. Crisis of state legitimacy as global trends affect citizens in ways governments cannot ameliorate. Unstable, unprecedented balance of power. Exploitation of the terrorist non-threat. Differences between British (int'l trade, direct governorship of colonies, non-messianic) and American (home market, satellite states, universalist revolution) world empires. Effortless summations of things you knew but had never woven into a tight and cogent argument. Apparent command of all regional histories.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (01/10)

Note my commitment to gritty, earthy, manly. I dont use apostrophes or quotation marks. Not manly. Semicolons: super, super unmanly. Taut, lyrical descriptions of manly. Women and their adjectives. Manly.

Oh, look what I found:

The ashen prose covered everything. But then, in fits, the lyricism would appear like a blossom on a turd with the Germanic sprouting into Latinate. The reticulate sky would wrinkle its vermiculate back to expose a cloying sentimentality lacquered by logorrhea--a cheesy mysticism lurking behind the cracked, Naturalistic veneer. But here the sun never rose, for the old man and his scion, the bell tolled and all wrapped up in a startling deus ex via as the hooded, stoven-boned veteran hove into view and whisked our boy off to some humming deep-glen mystery older than man. (Link)