I

Sitting at Fair Trade this afternoon I finished The Road, read to the end of the last page, and sat sort of speechless for a minute or two as the simultaneously elegant yet sad conclusion washed over me.

It's an engaging work, full of stylistic quirks—many "sentences" that are just adjective-filled nominal phrases, a lack of apostrophes in words like don't and won't, short several paragraph segments, and a lack of chapter structure—, and unwilling to pull itself out of its world and in a top-down fashion tell us explicitly all the non-character background we would like to know as we wander along with the man and the boy through the dead landscape.

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of seats. Ten thousand dreams ensupulchred within their crozzled hearts. (230)

• Michael Chabon writes, "The only true account of the world after a disaster as nearly complete and as searing as the one McCarthy proposes, drawing heavily on the 'nuclear winter' scenario first proposed by Carl Sagan and others, would be a book of blank pages, white as ash." Chabon argues against reading The Road as a science fiction novel.
• The Guardian gives a more traditional "review" but also pays attention to style and context, and makes an interesting point in comparing McCarthy and Beckett: "There's one literary figure who seems to have a copyright on desolation and futility, who wrote about last things almost from the first, Samuel Beckett. Eschatology was mother's milk to him. There's one episode in The Road which comes uncomfortably close to Beckett's style, but otherwise, McCarthy steps out of that coldly consoling shadow and dares to overturn Beckett's aesthetic choices."
• Janet Maslin adds, "Since the cataclysm has presumably incinerated all dictionaries, Mr. McCarthy's affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that 'The Road' will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires."

Oprah's Book Club helps us in "Understanding Themes in Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'." Did I actually link to O'sBC? Hrm.

II

What do I get for complaining about inconsiderate scumbags recalling library books on me? Another book recalled:

1/9/2008

UW Madison
MEMORIAL CIRC DESK

Dear BLUEOREGON:

The following item(s) currently charged to you are needed by another patron. The new due date(s) are shown below. Please return item(s) to the indicated location(s).

Location: MEMORIAL CIRC DESK
Title: Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany / edited by Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin.
Author:
Item ID: 89050982875
Call #: B1302 E65 A57 1987

Due Date: 1/22/2008

For information about items you have checked out, go to My MadCat Account at: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.web/mymadcataccount.

If you have questions or need assistance contact us at:
     Location: MEMORIAL CIRC DESK
     Phone: 608-263-7360

It's a really interesting book, but I say that about most of the books I check out. I'm a bookslut. I believed I lent this one to my roommate and told myself it's good thing that he gets back in the country before it is due back at the library. Then I realized that's a different, black covered book, the one with the marvelous chapter on the English empiricists and the status of formal causes (answer: they were relegated to the realm of the metaphysical). I also wondered whether it was another book I have on my shelves, but no, that was Enlightenment Crossings: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses, Anthropological (St. Martin's, 1991), but that's one I picked up in the late summer of 2006 and it contains a nice chapter on Foucault and the Enlightenment (entitled "Foucault and the Enlightenment").

But Foucault au fond is a poet: writing in prose, to be sure, philosophically erudite and sometimes prodigiously learned, possibly more polymathic than any French intellectual living today, obsessed by arcane knowledge and obscure out-of-the-way books—but still at heart a philosophical poet. (41)

The author, G.S. Rousseau, points out that he wrote this back in the early 70s, since clearly by the publication of the book itself Foucault was long dead.

But back to the topic: no, this was not the book in question. Instead the book being recalled is red of binding with faux-gold lettering on the spine, and while like Rousseau's this is an anthology of essays, it is an edited volume that collects lectures from a number of disparate scholars. And the reason I checked it out in the first place was a wittily titled little piece slightly tangential to my dissertation but nevertheless fascinating, Thomas Saine's "Who's Afraid of Christian Wolff?" (102–133).

Wolff is not a figure much discussed in any academic circles these days. He was the philosopher of his age in Germany; they used to refer to the Leibniz-Wolff School, and he represented the pinnacle of pre-Kantian German philosophy. Scholars refer to his German and Latin phases, meaning the language in which he wrote a given text, and thus the "German Teleology" is not especially German or for "the" Germans (whatever that meant at the time), but rather written/published in German. While clearly an Enlightenment thinker, Wolff along with Leibniz brought elements of Scholasticism back into philosophy. Early in his career he was given a day or two to leave the province on pain of death; he'd angered the religious authorities and they'd in turn convinced the king to banish him. Decades he was invited (requested) to return. And while his writing is most definitely pedantic, it is also broad ranging and exceedingly clear. I'm sure that's why I checked this book out of the library.

Perhaps I thought Saine's essay would look good sitting on the shelf next to The Mind and its Discontents. Titles are wonderful things.

III

Shortly before leaving my apartment/house this morning to head via bus toward work I decided to take a brief look at the "nutritional information" provided for the things I'd consumed that very morning.

My package of bacon indicates that indicates that each cooked strip of bacon has about 70 calories, 50 of which come from fat. My carton of large eggs gives a similar number: 70 calories per egg, with 40 from fat. I then checked my milk carton and chocolate soy milk carton: 150 and 140 per cup respectively, with the calories from fat being 70 and 30. Hrm—I hadn't quite expected that, which is just to say that I'd forgotten how many calories are in milk. Mmm ... tasty milk.

The soy milk was Silk; if I compare it with the analogous product from Organic Valley, which also provides the milk I drink, the calorie count goes down to 120. I was drinking whole milk, but if I switch to 2% (which I've done when the red carton of creamy fatty goodness isn't available) I only chug down 130. Not a huge difference, really.

I do not make a habit of counting calories, but I found this bit amusing. And suddenly I had an approximately 600 calorie breakfast (the tea and coffee weren't particularly high in the fat category, as you can imagine). And now you have a better understanding as to why I'm fat.

Well, that and the lack of exercise.

X Days Without ...

• Alcohol: 9
• Ice Cream: 9
• Finishing a Book: 0
• Other ...?

While following up on Hellboy II in a different diary/thread I came across a tidbit I did not know: that Neil Gaiman is directing a film entitled Death and Me, an adaptation of his most excellent Death: The High Cost of Living (he wrote about the project back in 2004). The production is more or less on hold at the moment due to the writers' strike. Guillermo del Toro is current serving as executive producer (thus the Hellboy connection).

And back to food: eggs.

I tend to go for fried eggs in the morning; they're quick and easy. At times I think I should prepare a batch of hard boiled ones to sit in the fridge. Food on the go, but I only get around to it every so often. And that hasn't been recently. Last Sunday I had a hankering for an omelette, or rather I had one a day or two earlier, so picked up some fillings for one when shopping, and I just got around to making it Sunday. Cheesy goodness. Melted cheesy goodness.

If you're not particularly confident in your omelette-making skills, you can always turn to the IntarTubes for visual assistance:

• How to make an Omelette by "meestacrees" (WITH KITTEN!)
• "my-crockpot.com" also shows us "How to make an omelette"
• "fluenty9" ups the ante with "how to make a perfect omelette (omelet)"—yes, perfect
• Even fancy-pants Gordon Ramsey gets in on the omelette-making-craze
• If this is just too fancy, you can always make the perfect omelet with a Ziplock bag

The End.