Rdrama Bookclub Discussion Thread #12 . Blood Meridian (Chapter I-V)

!bookworms, I forgot to add this post to /h/lit is there any way to edit that and assign it now?

Maybe I'm a brainlet but idk why the kid fought the dude from the bar. Seemed like an over react

Also:

Man:

How did you know he did it?

Judge:

I've never seen that man in my life

idk about this judge fella he kinda rubs me the wrong way, hopefully he will redeem himself in the rest of the book

>How did you know he was a a p-do?

>Never met him before

There are two things in life I really hate, being dirty and unpredictably violent poor people. This book is my personal heck.

I've read Blood Meridian a couple of times so I decided to have a look at the book that inspired it, My Confession by Samuel Chamberlaine, which is available on internet archive. It's hilarious.

>I thought in a society so dangerous I should go armed, and purchased myself a Bowie Knife with a nine-inch blade warranted to cut through bone without turning the edge. A few days later I had trouble with Scotty about the division of some money we had won at a three handed game of Poker with a commissary clerk, in which, to keep up appearances, I lost all my money to Scotty, along with the clerk. When I asked for a settlement, Scotty denied all partnership and swore he had won not only the clerk's, but my money in a fair game, and this when I had “rung in the cold deck” that fleeced us both!

>There was only one way in Texas in '46 to settle misunderstandings of this nature. We went for each other, and he very foolishly run onto the point of my “Arkansas toothpick” and was badly cut for his want of judgement. I was seized by the guard, old Spanish irons were placed on me, and I was thrust into the “Callaboose,” a room about twenty feet square, inhabited by a very select society of Indians, Texans, Horsethieves, Murderers and the vilest characters of the lawless frontier.

>The horrors of the Old Spanish Jail in San Antonio were more terrible than any scene in the Inferno of Dante. How long I remained here I never knew; it seemed years, though it could have been but a few days. I was covered with vermin, the heavy rusty irons wore the flesh of my ankles in which the lice burrowed, my jacket was stolen, and my shirt I tore into strips to bind around the irons to keep them from chafing! The place was outrageously filthy, the air hot and pestiferous, food scant and poor, with water unfit even for washing. The awful blasphemy of the wretches incarcerated with me, their horrid bestial orgies too revolting for belief, drove me in my weak state insane.

>Fortunately for me Scotty recovered and declined to appear against me, so I was turned loose, with nothing on but my pants, and wild with my sufferings. I can faintly remember flying, I thought pursued by Demons, and then came darkness and oblivion.

>From this I awoke with a most delicious sense of comfort and freedom from pain. I was in a nice soft clean bed and an old lady was sitting close knitting beside an open window through which came a sweet fresh breeze. Hearing me stir, she left the room crying out, “Carl! Carl!” and a young man entered the room. He congratulated me on the recovery of my reason and informed me that I was in his house in Castroville, thirty miles from San Antonio, that I had been found by a farmer three weeks before, lying near the road entirely nude and insensible. My host was a Doctor, Carl Ritter by name, a member of the German settlement at Castroville.

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I loved the part where the judge said "I will be the judge of that." And then he let loose and judged all over everyone.

My thoughts on it so far. The story and setting are quite engaging, the lack of punctuation makes it a bit harder to follow at the beginning but one gets used after chapter 1. The narration style is quite interesting, the book begins with “See the kid”, as if the narrator is showing us what is happening. The book is more gruesome that I thought, so far we've seen babies murdered, an entire town scalped and mutilated, gory details about eyes being plugged, smell of urine mixed with blood after the battle, etc. All of that within the context of the end of the American-Mexican war, the captain is a moronic burger with no plan at all besides some vague “we'll take the north of Mexico for us, rule over the mexicans and kill the darn injuns” which ends up backfiring horribly.

I like it, I'm curious to see where the story goes.

ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

It's quite interesting

But a little bit hard to read for me without punctuation and many rare words, that I see for the first time

"Ctrl + f"

"Ni..."

The way the text is written makes it feel droning to me, which I think is intended.

The kid is oddly lucky in terms of finding people who will give him kindness. Of course he tends to lie to make himself more sympathetic, but it's still striking to me. I guess partially because I was warned about the violence so it has less of an effect.

Of course, the hermit probably wanted to r*pe the kid, so that's only half a kindness I guess.

this book is very loosely based on true events, judge was a real dude

For once I actually had time to read

Western America sounded like a meh setting at first but so far I am pleasantly surprised.

The author made up the word sleared for his book, what an butthole