The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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New Year's resolution check-in:
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
You are not allowed to say this you... you... Whatever you are, I sentence you to be thrown into a pit. At the bottom, looking upwards to the sky, it will be your own tempest stirring. It will be your body thrashing against red clay walls. It will be your voice that lashes out against the inhumanity and indignity of your sentence as your voice booms in fury, hoping to reach the sky with your intentional heresies. Your mortal vessel may fail before this spirit is extinguished, but with the torture of time pressing on your voice will become detached from its defiance. You will find invectives no longer reach the heavens. Instead they swirl around your hole like a pride of Comanche riders set on scalping your soul.
Lashing out upwards no more the sky will become foreign to you. No longer appearing as an escape hatch or an object of desire, the passing clouds and lazy buzzards will only be seen as through a dull window to a queer place. A dream ready to be forgotten, a land you can never return to. Turned inward, the words will flow only as a meagre tool of weeping utterances. Your incoherent ramblings will no longer escape beyond the bounds of this Promethean existence, landing only as a feeble dribble that falls from chapped lips to bare feet, and you will be forced to look downward to find the pit is now your home. The pit is all you need. The pit is where you belong. You will converse with the dirt that surrounds you. You will say things like "Violence is the eternal dance," and as your only loyal friend the pit will eagerly listen to this newfound wisdom. You will speak to the walls and you will bury your hands into the dirt. You will whisper sweet nothings of despair directly into the ear of Gaia hoping to touch her cruel heart. Eventually, after your madness is cured, she will speak back and say, "Delete this. Delete this right now."
Upvoted for a really nice McCarthy parody. Laughed a lot.
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I haven't read The Dark Tower, but the other two books have very different themes. The theme of ASoIaF is, to quote another work, "Come see the violence inherent in the system". It treats violence as something humans choose to do. GRRM wants us to judge them.
Blood Meridian, on the other hand, considers violence a force, an innate property of the universe, like magnetism. It doesn't emanate from the people or the systems they create, it permeates them. The Judge is not a monstrous human, he's a personification of violence, its avatar. And, contrary to his name, he doesn't judge and neither does McCarthy.
I did not view Blood Meridian as suggesting that violence is inherent to human nature. The judge wants you to think that's the theme, but the judge is a liar. I think Blood Meridian also wants you to see how a system of social pressure allows people to commit violent acts without blinking an eye because everyone else is doing it. The judge claims that this is a property inherent to humans, but from the first moment we meet the judge he is lying to get people to do what he wants, so why would he be telling the full truth when he monologues to the reader (credit to my friend Emory for this realization).
It's not inherent to humans alone, it's inherent to nature! Human violence is just a single facet of it.
I don't believe that this is the case. The kind of violence present in Blood Meridian is very much not inherent to nature. Animals do not engage in the kind of orgy of killing that Glanton's gang gets up to.
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Forgive me for this:
I'm surprised you compare The Dark Tower favorably to Blood Meridian. I haven't read the latter, just The Road, so I'm no McCarthy truther, but The Dark Tower was incredibly underwhelming when I read it, and I was baffled it had the following it does. From my recollection, and this was fifteen years or so ago, The Dark Tower had only two good characters (Gunslinger and Man in Black) across two and half good books in it before it just falls apart at the seams and descends into nonsense. Yes, this includes the author insert and the demon-baby. I liked Roland's backstory, but it really didn't do much for the later books, and the suspension of disbelief eventually failed me.
It's the only King story I've ever read, and it didn't leave me wanting to read more. Maybe I need the Stand, or It, or something else, but it just didn't stand on its own very well, and ultimately didn't live up to its promise. Maybe if I had read it when I was a teenager, I'd feel fondly about it the way I do about The Wheel of Time.
I will give King credit where due, there aren't many better lines in fiction than, "Go then, there are other worlds than these."
100% accurate. The first 3 books are King at his drunk, coked-out, manic energy finest (I think the 3rd one was the last book he wrote before going to rehab). They are insane in many fun ways. Nothing after that lives up to the first three.
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My B, I def meant A Game of Thrones.
I’m thinking of the series before book 5 where it goes off into crazy land. I like books 5-7 but i recognize that they are objectively bad, especially book 7 with its author insert and Spiderman 3 syndrome. I did genuinely enjoy the ending and I think the message genuinely resonated with me when I read the books. In terms of the focus on violence I’m really specifically thinking about The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, which capture the over the top violence and tarot symbolism of BM without the purple prose, and with dialogue marks and actual character development.
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I can understand not liking Blood Meridian - it is awfully grim and gory, sometimes cartoonishly. But what is the proposed common theme it shares with The Dark Tower and Two Towers? To me, The Two Towers is very much fundamentally hopeful - the world has evil and dysfunction, but it can be and is meaningfully confronted with heroism. In Meridian, heroism is rare and stands no chance.
The two towers? Never said anything about that.
With the gunslinger in particular, i see a lot of parallels between the judge and the man in black. The man in black through the whole first book is forcing roland to commit terrible acts of violence: murdering a whole town of people, pushing jake into the abyss, etc
With Game of Thrones I think the parallel is even more clear. There are specific characters who basically come straight out of BM (Gregor Clegane) and even characters who have some more moral complexity don’t hesitate to brutalize the peasantry in a way that Glanton’s gang would find very familiar.
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