When we were at King's English the other night, my friend Emily Wing Smith received one of the funniest parking complaints I've ever seen, and she tells the story here. Check it out if you want a laugh. (And if you happen to be the person who wrote it, my apologies.)
Also, I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy.Wow. It's about a father and a son who are stranded in the burned out shell of what was once Earth, struggling to survive. (After an un-named apocalyptic event.) It was gripping, disturbing and tender, so, yeah, I loved it.My biggest problem with the book was that the event was never explained, and my obsessive little brain couldn't handle it. My mind would start wandering, trying to account for why everything in their world is on fire, and three pages would go by.Therein lies the rub. Cormac McCarthy uses words I've never heard of, and he uses them a lot. So a mere glance of the sentences would not dump any actual information in my brain. McCarthy has an insane mastery of the English language.For instance:“He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.”I had to read the darn sentence like three times before I finally figured out what the heck he was talking about. Apparently only brilliant people get stranded in the post-apocalyptic world. Maybe I'm just jealous, because I would have written the above sentence like this:“He stood up and looked around.”And if my book had young gay lovers in it, I would have said "young gay lovers". I wouldn't have thought there was a specific word for it. Catamites. There's your vocabulary word for the day. Try using it in a sentence.That's why Cormac McCarthy has Nobel prizes and stuff. He knows those words exist. And he would never use the word "stuff". The Road is going to be a movie in October. Here's the trailer. What are y'all doing this weekend?
