His famous “Legion of Horribles” quote below. I often think of “death hilarious”: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a…
I'm quite sure he means a post-hole digger. I can practically smell the odor of digging in rocky soil with those, coming off the page, almost feel the cracked dust-sweat-caked knuckles of setting posts on a hot, dry day. [EDIT] As for the rest, putting aside metaphorical readings, the clockwork-like progression and repeated crossing of the line of holes calls to mind the stop-and-start movement of running barbed wire and working a ratcheting tensioner tool behind the one digging the holes, and in the right country, the curious among those workers may pause to reflect on the remains of…
As fantastical as this passage may sound, most of the details McCarthy provides are historically accurate, and based on a particular event: The Great Raid of 1840 [1]. A thousand Comanche warriors conducted an extremely deep raid into Southeast Texas, where they sacked the port of Linnville. An exceptionally large amount of trade goods were present in the port that day, including clothes bound for various settlements across the Texas frontier. The bits about umbrellas, stovepipe hats, and even the wedding veil come directly from eyewitnesses to the raid. The bit about a Comanche warrior…
As others have mentioned here, John Hillcoat (director of the film adaptation of "The Road") is taking a crack at filming the "unfilmable" "Blood Meridian". I'm stoked to see how he handles BM, especially who he casts as Judge Holden. I feel like Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been perfect for the role, but I'm confident Hillcoat will find someone equal to the task. My favorite Judge quote from BM: “This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance, in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance…
"The Passenger" and "Stella Maris" by Cormac McCarthy are fantastic. In general, I enjoy McCarthy's work because I believe he manages to present interesting ideas drawn from philosophy and religion, and if you read between the lines of his work, there is a fairly elaborate cosmology behind them. With these final works, he manages to combine this tendency with his decades of residence at the Santa Fe Institute and work with researchers in complexity science, mathematics, physics, etc. Moreover, he does so without the more trite ways non-scientists often draw upon science (for instance, just…
I'll add some recommendations to the author's list, as I have found that reading difficult literature (both fiction and non-fiction) has been like exercising a muscle for me. For example, I read Blood Meridian before doing this and then again after doing it for a few years, right after McCarthy passed away, and it was a night and day difference in how "difficult" the prose was. A few things I think fit into the "short little difficult books": Borges is not someone I consider too difficult, but many do for the same reason the author mentioned people finding Calvino to be difficult. His works…
When I read The Road I found the lack of punctuation distracting rather than mesmerizing. I was using an e-reader and my initial thought was, "Is this right? Maybe they OCRed this and only glanced at the output." I had heard that the book was good from a few different sources, but none mentioned the unusual style. I Googled it to find out that this was, in fact, how it was supposed to be, and continued. I am used to reading text with punctuation marks. When I enjoy a book, I forget that I am reading words on a page, and it feels like I'm seeing the story play out in my mind. The syntax of…
A double movement is when two contradictory or opposing actions/things/themes work together to produce an aesthetic effect. Thesis/antithesis/synthesis. If you haven't read Blood Meridian (you should - I'm biased, it's my favorite book, but it's widely considered one of the great American novels) it would be hard to discuss thematic double movements in detail, but one example would be scientific knowledge as a means of control vs the ultimate unknowability of fate. In the case of social media, the author appears to be arguing that on the one hand it is not some "special place" that is…
Obligatory: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-reade... Excerpt: > Now read this from McCarthy's The Crossing (1994), part of the acclaimed Border Trilogy: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." > Thriller writers know enough to save this kind of syntax for fast-moving scenes: "... and his shout of fear came as a bloody gurgle and he died, and Wolff felt nothing" (Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca, 1980). In McCarthy's sentence the…
From my reading and working in editing movies: The point of the book is not at all the visual, most of it is very subtle. One commentary that I heard that was very astute pointed out that many parts of the book are specifically not detailed, one big example being that we rarely if ever witness the Kid killing or partaking in the murder/general viciousness of the gang. This means that a large part of the book is emulated in your brain while reading - did you infer that the kid is doing all this, and is just as bad as them? Is he an observer, like you, and doesn't leave because he doesn't…