God's Not Dead, He's Just In Texas

Walking to Bondi
Exhausted again! This work malarkey really doesn't agree with me, though I was in until 7. Oh, and I updated over 3,000 webpages. No joke. Must take some time off. Certainly I'm hoping to go to the Lucien Freud exhibition tomorrow.

Only a few pages left in 'No Country...', but I have my doubts as to whether I will go to the movie. I know, given that it is the Coen Brothers, I will eventually, but I have no yen for it. That book is bleak and nothing that can happen in the final few pages will sweeten this particular bitter pill. As a consummate craftsman, McCarthy knows exactly how to achieve the effects he does. I am not sure then if he is heartbreakingly honest, gut-wrenchingly sadistic, or indeed both. Given that he is a right-wing so-and-so, it breaks my heart to say he is definitely one of the finest novelists there is, and a right-wing so-and-so I will always have time for. He even has the audacity to have his sociopath compare himself to God and seem credible. But it is a tough, tough book, and bleak, bleak, bleak. For lots of reasons, one should never forget that it is a fiction, and one written by a man with definite views. No character within those pages exists outside. By that I don't mean there are not people who do the things done in the book. There are. I mean the book's characters behave the way they do because it suits McCarthy, it suits his views and his purposes. That all sounds obvious, but it should not be forgotten. Every text is a political statement.

It's kind of ironic that I should be reading Nietzsche at the same time given that the Ubermensch and Chigurh have a lot in common. Still in a chapter on causality Nietzsche writes practically word for word, even if they are slightly flamboyant words, my own thoughts on our creation of 'reasons' to explain away the unknown and fearful. It's just a shame that being mixed up with a lot of iconoclastic tripe the good stuff gets obscured and tarred with disreputability.