Are there any Cormac McCarthy fans out there?

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

I thought the lrb piece was broadly fine (and not that big compared to eg ten pages on the history of Birmingham)?!

it's ok i guess but it's by christian lorentzen and i was reading it on my phone so it seemed big

by contrast ten pages on birmingham is not enough pages

The Birmingham piece was great don’t get me wrong. Would love to read cormac on Birmingham.

RIP. First time reading Blood Meridian I was in a queue at an airport and during the first battle scene my knees gave out on me. Time to read Suttree, I guess.

That's the one people have been mentioning a bit rn, so..

Big fan of the border trilogy. Incredible epilogue.

yes these are the ones

i think no country is great, a seventies airport novel that leaps off the page into the movie- i think its criticised for what it isnt, which is never valid ofc

I really liked NCFOM, maybe not quite as much as the film, but it's good stuff.

When death isn't enough to cancel the guy

look i'm not a big literary brain or a contributor to the new left review or anything, but i do think poverty *is* bad? no-one should *have* to eat only beans or bathe in lakes and if i was married to a v successful writer and having to do that i'd prob be a bit salty about it https://t.co/97oOnpadgA

— fish tit supremacy (@tubbsOreally) June 14, 2023

The very notion of artistic principles is passing along with writers like McCarthy.

oddly Pretty Horses was on tv last night. i don't remember having seen it before.

I never saw it but it was yet another one where people later griped that Weinstein butchered the director's cut.

I wish The Road was a better movie. The book remains my favorite of his.

Quite an arc.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/opinion/cormac-mccarthy-publishing.html

Did Suttree and Blood Meridian really go out of print before 1992 and get saved by All the Pretty Horses? I seem to recall buying and reading them before AtPH was published. Maybe they went back into publication immediately beforehand.

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