Are there any Cormac McCarthy fans out there?

And I thought everyone else had read all of McC. I finished Blood Meridian in the last week or so and was on the yea side. Okay, I am susceptible to the romanticism of male isolation, but what goes on between me and the book I'm reading is my business, right.

It was a strange book: you know there's no story, and that it's really just a relentless machine repeating a stock set of 3 or 4 scenes, but I found it compulsive material. If anything I liked it more when it stuck to its unpicturesque picaresque than when it got all mytho-allegorical at the end with the judge and the retard. In one way, it felt less like reading and more like observing a wave of something like insects swarming over a field, destroying what came into their path, getting involved in inscrutable scrapes, etc. That makes me sound like a sci-fi fan, which I'm not intending, moreso nature doco. Which is perhaps more embarrassing than the violence/male isolation admission, but there you go.

Judging from the above, I think I'll go Suttree next. Not much mention here of The Road, which is a bit funny, no? (Not that I've read it either, but my wife had it on her bedside table and I'd sneak guilty peeks when she was out of the room. Well, they were less guilt than the revulsion/fascination thing)

When hes not getting bogged down in his weird little philosophical debates between characters (Blood Meridian and the coda of Cities of the Plain feature doozies) he often seems to me to be some sort of crazed genius. His writing - for atmosphere and description of action and landscape in particular - is unmatched in America today.

The chapter where they're trying to make gunpowder to fight off the Indians was pretty exciting, though.

if it didn't have cormac mccarthy's name on the cover then i could just as easily mistake it for one of my grandad's old western books

this boggles my mind. I mean, I've read enough Louis L'Amour (care of MY grandad) to know that Blood Meridian is leagues ahead of the average western potboiler. Ahead in terms of the writing and characterization. Whatever you want to say about the characters in Blood Meridian, almost wholly despicable human beings, at least they're not cookie cutter cowboys n indians. Also in terms of the storytelling, the approach is quite different. Blood Meridian is much more episodic and less propulsive than the average good guy/bad guy gunfight.

Do McCarthy fans like Hall's "Warlock"?

i loved loved loved Warlock

the "cookie cutter cowboys'n'indians" of a men's adventure novel probably have more resemblance to actual people living or dead than most of cormac mccarthy's characters.

yes, but i don't agree with the implied value judgment that realist characters are necessarily better.

"a men's adventure novel" = should be a movie title.

or a book by michael chabon

yes, but i don't agree with the implied value judgment that realist characters are necessarily better

that's an interesting line of argument

really

Pound's statement “fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing”

stolen from the raymond carver thread on ILE, for reference

whoops somehow the word statement got doubled up there

In response to Pound (I assume we're talking Unc Ez here?) All this realism hokum is overrated. That 'accuracy of statement' phooey doesn't really mean anything, does it, at least not for fiction? I mean, the great advantage of fiction over factual writing is the problem of selection doesn't really come up - you're not leaving anything out, what is written is part of that fictional reality, what isn't written, doesn't exist. No, the problem in fiction is one of emphasis.

Certainly an overemphasis on exploration of character can be extremely disruptive to tone in some genres - science fiction and horror spring immediately to mind. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that thin two-dimensional, rather everyman, possibly even cliched characters can be an advantage in those forms.

what is written is part of that fictional reality, what isn't written, doesn't exist

that sounds more like the attitude of a particularly decadent 21st century reader than that of a writer

Hmmm, not sure about that. It maybe came across as more abstract than I intended. It's just a way of saying that, say, in writing a biography, part of the problem is knowing what to leave out as much as what to put in, it's to do with selection (although bloody try telling that to modern biographers, everything bar the kitchen bloody sink), in fiction that's not an issue. Although in terms of writing you inevitably edit and leave vast chunks that you've written out, the finished product is just that, it is sufficient unto itself.

I'm not sure I feel particularly decadent saying that. I don't know really, because I'm lying in bed dreadfully tired after a curry induced sleepless night.

Anyway, I don't really think it affects the central premise that characters and fiction need not be realistic, that's a relatively recent thing isn't it? Is Jeeves realistic? Is Sherlock Holmes? They're just very well drawn characters.

Christ, listen to me. What a boring git. I've woken up now and want not to have written these things on this thread in the way that I writ em.

"the "cookie cutter cowboys'n'indians" of a men's adventure novel probably have more resemblance to actual people living or dead than most of cormac mccarthy's characters.

― moonship journey to baja, 21 September 2008 18:42 (1 week ago) Bookmark "

totally. the campfire philosophical debates between the judge and the priest seemed forced and out of place, even if the characters (especially the judge) were entertaining.

suttree is fantastic

outer dark was teh only book i was able to finish. it was good, like climbing a mountain is good. child of god is the one i want to read.

suttree appears to be a very high mountain.

child of god is the one i want to read next

getting through blood meridian felt more like digging a hole

digging a hole to bury someone in

i tried to get through blood meridian three times

\;_;/

Should've stuck with reading it once first.

it took you fifteen minutes to come up with that??

Yup

cormac could've written a chapter killing off an entire village in that space of time.

I'm a fan. Enjoyed reading "Blood Meridian". But I wonder if his allusions to Melville, Milton, and Wordsworth add more weight to the novel than it deserves. Some parts are overwritten, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all that blood.

michael chabon on mccarthy & apocalyptic fiction: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19856

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.

Shortly before, as in early in 1992.

Thinking there was a build-up, a run-up.

before 1992 blood meridian existed without my knowledge and therefore without my consent

Suttree had a nice yuppie Vintage Contemporaries edition in the mid/late 1980s.

Thanks! The ones I had were Vintage Internationals of a later, um, vintage, do u see? They had kind of a mostly black and white layout with some Guy Maddin smeared blur of a few other colors in the background overlaid by a kind of gold paint lettering design.

Which vintage did indeed seem to be early 1992.

The punctuation in Blood Meridian versus the punctuation in Absalom, Absalom! pic.twitter.com/bv0MjfwKNu

— Claudia Durastanti (@CDurastanti) June 14, 2023