wickedflea | (no subject)

My darling

wretchmuffin correctly identified the source of "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified" as Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. I'm reading that again, and I dig it the most. Hahaha, I just remembered a funny story about that book. I first read it in my 20th-c. American novel class in '98. Dr. Little always did this thing when we started covering a new book where all the students would write down one thought-provoking . . . um, thought. He'd collect them, mix them up, and then read random ones out loud. For Wise Blood, he was unlucky enough to pick out mine and read: "After reading the first few chapters of Wise Blood, my first thought was, 'This book is fucking crazy.' So now I've gone ahead and finished it, and my thought is still 'This book is fucking crazy.'" It was hilarious because it was almost like he didn't realize what he'd said until it was already out of his mouth.

A guy who'd graduated high school with me was also in that class--which was sort of interesting considering that we'd graduated nine years earlier. This was the kid who'd pulled a knife on me in the ninth grade because I called him "the Laughing Buddha." Don't ask--it was a bad scene. Anyway, after high school, dude got in a bad car wreck. He recovered pretty well, but something happened that made his voice really gravelly. But it must not have bothered him, because he was always talking shit and asking weird questions in class. I can still hear him talking about Hazel Motes's visits to Leora Watts's house: "So when he went to the whore's house, why did the whore just let him in? Wouldn't the whore have had her door locked?" Something like that. I can't remember the exact question, but the important thing is his use of the word "whore." I dunno, it's a perfectly valid word, but it just struck me as incredibly funny that he didn't say "prostitute" or "Leora Watts." And repeating it in that billygoat gruff voice, too: "the whore . . . the whore . . . the whore." I was sitting right next to him making those *SNORK* noises that come when I try to stifle a laugh and it escapes through my nose. You know the ones. I can't explain exactly why I thought it was quite so funny, particularly in a class where I'd already gotten the professor to use the term "fucking crazy," but you can't always explain those things.

Anyway, yes, re-reading. All over the apartment are new books waiting to be read, and I'm reading the ones I already know. But I like doing that sometimes. I can revel in them much more easily when I'm not trying to figure out what the hell's going on. I think that's one reason that I wasn't more succesful in grad school: I never had time to read anything twice. Heck, I didn't read a lot of the stuff we covered in class even once. And I always made A's and B's. I was pretty good at somehow absorbing what was said in class and somehow regurgitating it later. Which is to say that I didn't learn a lot in grad school except how to write longer papers. I think I took more out of my undergrad classes. Pity, really. I've always said I'd be dangerous if I could just get my shit together. Still waiting on that one.