Buster Scruggs & The Heart of Darkness

November 17, 2018
   We had a stunner this morning.

Ratcliff Ridge Sunrise at 6:55 a.m.

   Finally got to see "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" last night.

Short review: loved the quirky, peculiar story turns. Funny in parts, hilarious in one or two instances, but overall, uneven. On the other hand, it never goes where you think it might and I loved that. Did not care for a couple of the endings (it's an anthology, not a single story), or rather, non-endings. Still, God bless those Coen boys, it's a full fledge Western.


   Working on narrative sequences this weekend:

Olive Sequence:

"Riders On The Talking Rocks"

   Meanwhile, it took me five years, but I finally finished reading a classic short story this morning:

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart."

"...their multitude of secular trees looking patiently after this grimy fragment of another world [their steamboat], the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings."    Joseph Conrad just summed up the march of civilization in one sentence. This totally nails the conquest of the Western United States.

"Perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible." In other words, when we die.

"I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams." Welcome home!

"She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead."

And the last lines of the story: "The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."
—Joseph Conrad's classic short story, "Heart of Darkness"

"I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

—Cormac McCarthy