'There is sufficient space
for about 120 characters
(including spaces) on 3 lines.'
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Sard Harker
There's a good chance with an out-of-print book that you could be the only person on the planet reading it. I might be the first person to have read Sard Harker out loud for seventy... I don't know how many years, maybe ever.
I had to learn off something by John Masefield
about the sea that he wanted to sail a ship on,
heavily stressed. I thought all poets old and bald.
Laurie Duggan, Adventures in Paradise.
There are lots of adventures in Sard Harker - though they take place on land, not sea. There's abandoned pueblo adventures, desert adventures, high sierra adventures, fixed wrestling match adventures, chicken fight, cantina, poblacion, mining town, cougar, stingray, silver train at midnight, cañon hunt, rotten rock, waking up with a snake on your chest, and pages upon pages of wading through swamp adventures.
Another good thing about reading old books is coming across odd spellings. In Sard canyon is spelt with a ñ.
Title of book = name of hero. Might Masefield have been trying to do a Conrad? Sard never quite manages a Nostromo; he's always just scraping through, getting weaker, getting into worse and worse shit, never winning, staying alive but only just.
I was very proud of myself in 1999 or so when I finished reading Nostromo (to myself), proud I'd read such a long book, a full-price purchase (probably from Hawthorn Readings) prompted by the silver-ish cover and the sticker on the front that would've read, 'One of the top 100 books of the Twentieth Century' or somesuch. And I read the whole book, me, and I can still picture Nostromo slipping into the waters at midnight to apprehend a sailboat just like in Swallows and Amazons.
I've not yet got to the end of Sard Harker; the sentences are awful to read out loud, syntax stiff and repetitive; and it's such a shaggy story, I don't trust I'm going to get anywhere when I do.
I had to learn off something by John Masefield
about the sea that he wanted to sail a ship on,
heavily stressed. I thought all poets old and bald.
Laurie Duggan, Adventures in Paradise.
There are lots of adventures in Sard Harker - though they take place on land, not sea. There's abandoned pueblo adventures, desert adventures, high sierra adventures, fixed wrestling match adventures, chicken fight, cantina, poblacion, mining town, cougar, stingray, silver train at midnight, cañon hunt, rotten rock, waking up with a snake on your chest, and pages upon pages of wading through swamp adventures.
Another good thing about reading old books is coming across odd spellings. In Sard canyon is spelt with a ñ.
Title of book = name of hero. Might Masefield have been trying to do a Conrad? Sard never quite manages a Nostromo; he's always just scraping through, getting weaker, getting into worse and worse shit, never winning, staying alive but only just.
I was very proud of myself in 1999 or so when I finished reading Nostromo (to myself), proud I'd read such a long book, a full-price purchase (probably from Hawthorn Readings) prompted by the silver-ish cover and the sticker on the front that would've read, 'One of the top 100 books of the Twentieth Century' or somesuch. And I read the whole book, me, and I can still picture Nostromo slipping into the waters at midnight to apprehend a sailboat just like in Swallows and Amazons.
I've not yet got to the end of Sard Harker; the sentences are awful to read out loud, syntax stiff and repetitive; and it's such a shaggy story, I don't trust I'm going to get anywhere when I do.
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