9.11.2008

just an old man

remember 9.11 [NEVER] FORGET
the greatest PAIN a tragic hero can bear, is to grow to be an old man...

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I always hated Steinbeck as a kid, but that's a great quote. When/where did he say that?

9:46 PM  
Blogger Sniperboy said...

I honestly don't know who Steinbeck is ; p but this is a quote that gets circulated a lot in pro gun circles when talking about the legal right to carry firearms.

It becomes true and truer as I get older... I think MGS4 came at a perfect time for me.

12:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steinbeck is a famous American author (probably infamous in schools around the country), regularly being used as literature material in middle and high school. He's written such "classics" (:P) as Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Grapes of Wrath (the last was the only one I could stomach). In retrospect, I might appreciate his work more now that I'm older, but I sure as hell thought it was boring when I was a kid. ;P

6:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

(editorial)
-Grapes of Wrath- would have rocked hard if only it had had a real ending--I keep remembering his use of some hypnotic rhythms in the flow of the writing. Quite probably that was part of the elaborate symbolism, kind of like how the last real image in the book was that of a young woman with a dead baby who was breastfeeding an old man... But at the time, I was just pissed because I couldn't help feeling that the story needed at least another hundred pages. :P
(/editorial)

Was -Red Pony- that fabulously depressing short story about a kid who had a red pony that caught some kind of throat/lung disease and wandered into the desert to die, and the kid had this freaky experience where he killed one of the vultures eating the body with his bare hands? I kind of remember that among all the other traumatic literature that high school teachers used (fuck you, "To Build a Fire")...

So Shinji survived to be that old... That idea seems like it could spawn a whole new storyarc just by itself. ^.^

--J.

7:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, that was the red pony. :3

Of all the REAL high school literature I despised (I don't count my first year, where I was taught English not only by a French teacher who could barely speak it, but who was also a complete idiot, asking what "clan" I belonged to after reading the habitually boring book, Hiroshima :/), I hated Beloved the most. I just remember it being asinine in the way it was written, being unnecessarily complicated and meandering so that I was completely apathetic. A book shouldn't be written in a "hard to read manner" just for the sake of it. :P

But the worst book I ever read was one I had to read for my first year in a college. It was a poor man's Grapes of Wrath, chronicling illegal Mexican immigrants finding work in the states, except it was written extremely badly, had entire passages of untranslated Spanish despite being written in English (huh?), and had an ending in which the family spends every last dime they have to transport a friend/loose romantic interest of the main character (a young girl) to the hospital, only to ABANDON him there without money or support and have the girl wistfully thinking about the future on a farm rooftop at the end. It was the only book I ever willfully threw away. >P

Uh, sorry, big tangent there. ^^;

2:02 AM  

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