Are there any Cormac McCarthy fans out there?

wow, great article

agreed.

Great stylist, good on campy (not that he sees it so no sir) Southern Gothic crap, takes himself way too seriously.

suttree is fantastic

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 30 September 2008 23:34 (4 months ago) Permalink

read this since christmas- it felt in some strange way (thematically, maybe) to me like the type of book you were made to read aged 11 in english class and report on, but obviously a lot more adult in the terms and details.

Kind of like a gritty version ofI am David or The Silver Sword, maybe.

it's definitely "first novelish" in that he's basically revisiting his youth, and the knoxville of his youth, and the feelings he had as a young man (specifically the rejection of his parents), and i can see how that comes across as a youth novel but the language itself is so forbidding and ornate and even the plot itself is so opaque i don't really see it that way

okay so i am currently reading blood meridian and finding it one of the best things ever. the language can be obscure, but it's so glaringly visual! which he somehow obtains without even describing much. i would never have imagined something so bad ass, violent and macho could be so beautiful.

what u ain't never watched profeshnal boxin buhfer?

i tried to get through blood meridian three times

\;_;/

― Mr. Que, Thursday, October 30, 2008 10:40 AM (5 months ago) Bookmark

blood meridian is great and only a slog for the first 80-100 pages or so and thereafter becomes absolutely gripping in my experience reading it (once.)

yeah i think i've stalled around page 100 all three times ;__;

i'm still only around page 90 and it hasn't shown any sign of sloggin'.

hey has anyone read suttree? i've just picked it up at the bookstore. and flipping through it it looks as if there's alot of dialogue in it, which i think should be a good thing since all the dialogue in blood meridian was pure gold. also, the back cover has the most lovely description ever. "the funniest and most unendurably sad of his novels" or something.

Itill have the same reservations about Suttree as I had above, but I've just re-read Blood Meridian, and I might just re-read it again. I still don't have a clue what (if anything) is moving the story, but it gripped me a lot tighter this time round.

suttree is beautiful, alot less exhausting than blood meridian but equally less gorgeous as a result. makes up for relative blandness with wonderful dialogue, happiness, and great sometimes extremely likeable characters. harrigate is so endearing, it's like the more naive and stupid and wrong he is the more i like him, honesty oh man.

goes a long way.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a6a4629e970c-800wi

http://msnbcmedia1.msn.com/j/ap/8c07a303-b9f7-45e8-ba36-5e2fb0be4eef.hmedium.jpg

Here you go, stans

Pic 9 - "Chicago" cast shot

http://media.knoxnews.com/media/img/photos/2007/12/07/1209cormac9_t607.jpg

Love it!

Child of God

^ skipped through this the past few nights before bed. I don't really have any thoughts on it, other than it's like an anecdote from a longer McCarthy, just fleshed out (poor choice of words there maybe). Enjoyed it- again, dialogue and associated quirks of language are so vital.

HBO doing a film of his two-character play The Sunset Limited (which I loved and was surprised it didn't get more attention), starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.

finished The Orchard Keeper but it took awhile for such a short book.

I read No Country for Old Men - loved it. Read The Road, it was amazing. Bought a ton of his other books - never feel like opening them.

Try the border trilogy i guess.

My ex-wife used her vagina as a goddamn holster. Whilst disputing with her current paramour the affections of space aliens. While wearing lingerie in New Mexico. From where it was placed in her womansparts, she retrieved it and then pointed at the man and asked Who is crazy you or me?

?!?!?

In the moonlight she had innercourse with that goddamn Colt. Heard it from the next room. She yelled again WHO IS CRAZY YOU OR ME. In her lingerie she bought from the Sears down in Yuma when she was staying with her mother. I did not answer her.

I walked in and she removed that goddamn Colt from her interior and pointed it at my head her lip quivering. Why I did not answer her. Deputy, I don't know how but I got that goddamn Colt out of her hand and took it straight to the bathroom and dropped that goddamn Colt in the toilet. Shoulda flushed it. I had had enough of this woman tonight and her goddamn crotch holster, Deputy Zook, I can't take no more of that.

a-

My ex-wife used her vagina as a goddamn holster.

I misread this too quickly as "My ex-wife used her vagina as a goddamn lobster."

not a lot in it, to be fair

With a gun and a lobster, I'd say it was pretty crowded.

lol http://www.theparisreview.org/the-art-of-fiction-no-223-cormac-mccarthy

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/books/early-cormac-mccarthy-interviews-rediscovered.html

sorry, two new ones in the next eight weeks? wtf?

I know, right?

The Atlantic has said some things.

I went through a really intense McCarthy phase a few years back, centered most of all on Suttree but also on the horsey ones.

Dunno if I need this new material, given how much mayhem is already out there in the world. For me, C McC was partly an escapist reading experience. I could get lost in his louvhe world when my own life was basically pleasant. In times when life actively sucks, however, I am less interested in gritty fiction.

*louche

"I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try."

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572

James Wood: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19/cormac-mccarthy-peers-into-the-abyss-the-passenger-stella-maris

Isn’t there a rumor he’s really right wing?

You're thinking of James Woods.

My brother (who has a predilection for long-winded writers) gave me Suttree and the Border Trilogy years ago. I thought the former was a well-crafted piece of Southern gothic. All the Pretty Horses was a good read, but I cannot get through the books after that no matter how hard I try, and I'm someone who will generally stick with a book. There is just something about McCarthy's writing that I find . . . precious? Too in love with itself? Bleak?

new one (the passenger at least) is a chill hangout book with some paranoid southern gothic dreamworld shit going on, also many scenes in notable new orleans restaurants and bars. haven't read stella maris yet. but the passenger is very good.

Finally messing around with chat GPT pic.twitter.com/GBfovHpxth

— Elliot (@BurrNotice) December 22, 2022

reminds me of https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/

e.g.

And so. The day came. The alguacil asked the boy what did he wish for a last meal. The boy asked for a bowl of pasta from Olive Garden. The alguacil considered this and finally agreed saying there was indeed an Olive Garden in the next town.

That evening a mozo came back into town leading a procession of men and burros. Panniers on the animals steaming like ungulate engines. The cloying aroma of pasta sauce. The loamy musk of breadsticks. The algaucil came to them. What was he to think of this?

And a man from the restaurant came forward and said they had brought pasta for the boy and that in the tradition of their restaurant the boy’s bowl would never be allowed to empty nor would he be want for breadsticks until such time as he was sated.

The algaucil was very angry. He shouted at the men and the burros and the mozo and all cowered but none would leave. For they knew as well as the algaucil of the law of that land. That the last meal could not be denied. And so the boy was served in his cell the unending pasta bowl. Attendants from the restaurant refilling the dish as it neared empty. A train of burros plodding from restaurant to jail and back to restaurant.

The boy’s day of execution came and went. A week passed. Then another. The algaucil fuming in his shabby office. The boy grew fat eating the pasta and the breadsticks.

On the hundredth day the alguacil walked to the jail and told the jailers to leave. And then he entered the cell where the boy lay eating and he unholstered his pistol and he told the boy he would shoot him if he ate any more pasta or breadsticks. And the boy lay there lacquered in sauce and bursting from his prison rags and closed his eyes as if to consider this ultimatum. He belched thunderously and was still. And so. The boy escaped the noose.

i think i am going to take a pass on this. i basically majored in quantum mechanics (we called it "physical chemistry") and i teach physics to high school kids now and i believe me i love physics (and chemistry)! i am not so great at math, i can manage calculus and linear algebra and euclidean geometry well, but that's easy stuff and besides i just use it to solve problems, which is pretty much what i use physics and chemistry for. i love the stuff, but largely because it's useful on a practical level, and sometimes when young people tell me they love physics and start babbling about quantum mechanics and the nature of reality i want to yell at them like yoda yells at luke in empire strikes back, but instead of saying "wars not make one great" i want to yell "math and science not make one smart" (of course neither does critical theory but that's a separate discussion)

i think the one part of my (long ago now) college education that i am still in awe of is what they call statistical mechanics, which is a fairly theoretical branch of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics (as opposed to the mechanical engineering side that's involved with making engines and plumbing work IRL) and it starts out with some very over-simplified suppositions about how things like atoms and molecules interact, and then solves some pretty hardcore calculus-based statistics problems, and magically comes out the other side with very useful conclusions about how large-scale matter (like, say, a liter of hot gas in a piston) will behave. and these conclusions are not only practical but easily confirmed with relatively simple experiments

and i guess the flipside of that is that i always cringe and want to die inside when some kook like deepak chopra takes something beautiful and practical like physics and uses it as a gross vehicle to advance his stupid half-baked hippy dippy ideas. i guess the thought of a writer i like doing the same thing is a bridge too far for me, even if he's using it as a vehicle to advance a nihilistic existential philosophy i largely agree with. i just don't have time for that!

this part of that new yorker review seems relevant to how i feel about how this stuff gets fetishized and reading it was probably the point where i realized i am not going to bother

But this only returns us to the problem. Why are Bobby and Alicia written up as mathematicians rather than, respectively, as a race-car driver and a violinist? If neither character can be caught in the act of uttering or creating an original mathematical idea, then, curiously enough, these are merely novels about the idea of mathematical ideas. Practically speaking, this means that Bobby and Alicia must sound like “geniuses” while delivering clever and diligently knowing reports (full of famous names, and so on) on twentieth-century developments in physics and mathematics aimed at ordinary, non-mathematical readers. These are novels in love with the idea of scientific and musical genius. And how do geniuses sound? They speak rapidly and gnomically, impatient with their sluggish interlocutors. They are willful, eccentric, solitary. They are in mental crisis, close to breakdown and suicide. They are imperious around success and failure: they announce that they stopped playing the violin because it was impossible to be in the world’s top ten. They are obsessed with intelligence, their own and other people’s. Of Robert Oppenheimer, Bobby says, “A lot of very smart people thought he was possibly the smartest man God ever made,” while Alicia says, “People who knew Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, said that he was the smartest man they’d ever met.”

Do geniuses actually sound like this? Well, people who are fixated on the idea of genius perhaps sound like this.

i think that ny criticiam ia basically accurate, the siblings are cormackian superheroes for sure. but since the book is floaty and plotless it didn't bug me too much.

there's also a big piece in the xmas LRB but it's sadly by christian lorentzen