wise blood

what makes these characters tick? what crosses do they bear? why are they so weird? these people killed people deliberately! necessarily! the loneliest, most windswept, ahistorical, ignorant little minds birth these fanatical passions. towards the very end there's a reference to Haze's military pension because the war messed up his insides (or something) (it's written with that vagueness in the book). i'd been waiting to hear about the war, to hear anything to better anchor him and understand him.

Enoch just has his little ditty, his pat paragraph he'll spit out about having a government job and his papa forced him to come here and he ain't but 18 years old and he works at the zoo. that's all he's capable of saying. and yet he's wild with these fixations, with his blood. "i gotta get outta here." (or something like that he always says) He killed a man!

i wanna pick through this book again, try to sink my analytic hooks into these text someplace. i'm sure it's allegorical as hell. part of my problem is that it's founded in a totally alien universe: the dusty south with jesus everywhere. so what do i know.

one thing is that this book is funny. it is often hilarious, which was appreciated, but really only made the rest of the book weirder, for it meant the stuff that wasn't funny really wasn't funny.