One of Best Things About Winter Break

Is that I actually get to sit down and read for significant chunks of time. It is something I don't get much of during the hectic season of making films...something is sorely missing from our MFA education that we are not forced to read more. I do the bare minimum on my own, I think, but I suspect large numbers of film student rarely read anything of any significance. In fact, I bet more technical literature about fancy cameras and/or the daily bullshit of Hollywood is read more than good literature or academic developments. Are we in trade school?

Anyway, enough pretention for the afternoon, I've been reading Lonesome Dove. Ever since reading From Here to Eternity, the only novels I want to read are this massive male melodramas. Is that weird? But I love it. Completely. The characters are amazing, Gus, this boisterous, competant lazy fellow and his partner, Call, a quiet, keep to himself, man, a work-aholic. All good characters you see in yourself and I see myself in both Gus and Call in different circumstances with different people. And Loreta, the whore whom everyone loves...McMurtry has this fascinating conception of the simple woman who attracts without her consent the love and affections of endless men.

It's one of those books, you read 10 pages from any section and I think it'll hook you. Part of me is like, too bad it's 900 pages - the other part of me wishes it would on even longer.

Sample, from the beginning:

Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever too he had in hand. "A man that slows for snakes might as well walk," he often said, a statement that made about as much sense to an educated man as most of the things Call said.

Augustus held to a more leisurely philosophy. He believed in giving creatures a little time to think, so he stood in the sun a few minutes until the rattler calmed down and crawled into a hole.

Could this be a perscription for liberals versus conservative values, strategies, philosophies...if it is, or even close, it makes me think - these guys are best of friends and partners. But in our current political climate, conservatives and liberals aren't friends and aren't partners, but view themselves an enemies. Shouldn't we be closest with each other - using each other as sounding boards and testing our theories and strategies against one another, under the assumption we are cut from the same cloth...rather than assuming we are so different?

PS - I didn't intend all of that, it just came out of trying to find a cool quote from the book.