Any Cormac McCarthy fans here ?

[russspeakeasy]

Love the guy. I think I've read all of his stuff. I just finished my second reading of "Outer Dark"....it's even better the second time around.
I realize he's not for everyone. A couple of years ago a friend of mine told me she was reading "Outer Dark" and had to stop every couple of pages because it was so "damned depressing".
I admit it is, but damn the man has a way with words.

[bemildred]

1. Present.

Read all his novels (I think). I tend to like his middle period, Border Trilogy, esp. "The Crossing", but "The Orchard Keeper" was moving too.

If you haven't dug up "Suttree" yet, I can recommend it, best of his early stuff, IMHO.

Edit: and yes, re-reading will serve you well, sometimes is necessary, not something I say of many novelists. A serious writer, whatever you think, but not to everyone's taste.

[russspeakeasy]

2. 100% !!

[JitterbugPerfume]

5. yes, even though he tends to give me nightmares

[bemildred]

6. Hey Jitterbug!

Yes, not for light entertainment. You want funny, read Hiiasen or someone like that.

[JitterbugPerfume]

7. I prefer the scary stuff LOL

[bemildred]

10. So did you read "Child Of God" yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_God

Aside from Blood Meridian, I found it the most difficult to wrap my mind around.

[JitterbugPerfume]

14. it should be fed ex'd to me tomorrow

along with two other McCarthy books I haven't read yet. Lately I have been reading a lot of Kim Stanley Robinson and Philip K Dick

[bemildred]

16. Hmm, I'll look into Mr Stanley. He sounds interesting.

Thanks for that.

[JitterbugPerfume]

17. my favorite KSR books are

The years of Salt and Rice, about a group of "souls" and their journey through several reincarnations in a world where the USA and Europe are not predominant . It is a fascinating boo


Also Forty days of Rain, about climate change(and many things) The chatracters are absolutly fascinating.

It is part of a trilogy but I can't recall the titled of the other two , but they are well worth reading.

[bemildred]

18. I'll find it.

[bemildred]

19. A short disquisition on Cormac McCarthy and his work:

McCarthy rarely gives interviews, and is not forthcoming when he does, so I make no claim to represent his views, I'm just describing how his works of fiction look to me in retrospect, nor do I know anything about his plays. It is my impression that he wants his work to stand on its own, and that suits me as well.

His first two novels (Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark) seemed like "practice" to me, early efforts which have sections of scintillating prose, but do not quite hang together as stories, one finishes then not quite sure about "the point".

With "Child of God" he seems to find his subject and his voice. I don't know how to characterize his subject matter, he reminds me of Harry Crews, who also liked to examine what is in the "Outer Dark"; but from there on out, his novels hang together as stories. What he says:

McCarthy now lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico, area, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy. In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy reveals that he is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

I am confident that the feeling is mutual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy

From that point on I see two threads in his work: the hopeful and the bleak. Generally the bleak wins out, the difference is whether the hopeful gets a hearing or not.

The "hopeful" thread:

Suttree (1979) ISBN 0-679-73632-8 - a fine read. I would call it his most personal work, and one of the most straightforward.

Border Trilogy:
-- All the Pretty Horses (1992) ISBN 0-679-74439-8
-- The Crossing (1994) ISBN 0-679-76084-9
-- Cities of the Plain (1998) ISBN 0-679-74719-2

Lyrical in places, very bleak in places. Something of a Rorschach Test which you prefer, I still like "The Crossing" best, which starts out lyrical and gets pretty bleak as it goes along. "All the Pretty Horses" has a "happy" ending (John Grady Cole escapes), "Cities of the Plain" does not (John Grady Cole dies). The title "Cities of the Plain" echoes the title of one of the Proust's volumes in English translation, an allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think that is not an accident, which is interesting given McCarthy's stated opinion of Proust.

The Road (2006) ISBN 0-307-38789-5 - I call this hopeful, because it argues for the value of the human project, even in the most dystopian of worlds: "we carry the fire"; and the kid finds the means to carry on at the end when his father dies.

The "bleak" thread:

Child of God (1973) ISBN 0-679-72874-0:
-- "One of the novel's main themes is sexual deviancy, specifically necrophilia and pedophilia." and " "The author said in an interview that the character Ballard is based on an unnamed historical figure."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_God

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) ISBN 0-679-72875-9:

In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian. Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by still more ferocious irony. Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny, of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville.
—Steven Shaviro, "A Reading of Blood Meridian"

It is generally accepted that McCarthy was scrupulous in basing events in this quite fantastical novel on historical sources, and the parallels with Moby Dick are obvious. Very violent. Sometimes (like Moby Dick) a bit of a slog. It is interesting to me that Suttree, Blood Meridian, and the Border Trilogy occur in that order following Child Of God, as they also seem to me the most ambitious of his works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian

No Country for Old Men (2005) ISBN 0-375-70667-4
-- Bleak all the way, only the sheriff survives, everybody else dies, even Chigurh is left in an ambiguous state. A meditation on the state of America in the 21st century.

[Rowdyboy]

3. Oh yeah....Haven't read "Outer Dark" yet but I'll add it to my list...n/t

[russspeakeasy]

4. Leave a post after you read it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

[JitterbugPerfume]

8. Rowdyboy!

[Rowdyboy]

9. Hello my friend....I'm still around and kicking....

Its spring though and we've been working every day in our "urban garden"! I lurk a lot more than I post these days but I'm still around!

Good to see you again too!

[JitterbugPerfume]

15. Hi sweetie

I kinda miss you occasionally.

I am planting a container garden this year. It is a lot easier on an old womans knees and back.

[TuxedoKat]

11. Umm

I'm trying to figure out how to read him. I downloaded an exerpt of Blood Meridian on my Nook and felt like I'd landed in the middle of I don't know what. Felt a little like reading Beckett's Molloy. I'm sure there is an enjoyment in reading him and something to gain too. Maybe that was the wrong novel of his to start with?

[russspeakeasy]

12. If you get the chance "Suttree" is one of his very best, IMHO.

[TuxedoKat]

13. Ok then

I'll try that one, thanks.

[JitterbugPerfume]

20. Just started Child of God--

wow!

[russspeakeasy]

21. That is one great book... Hope you enjoy it.

[JitterbugPerfume]

22. I love it

That Lester is as CRAZY as a barn cat!

[russspeakeasy]

25. If that's as crazy as a person can get, you nailed it.!

[bemildred]

23. A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, about the new movie No Country

If you were going to play the parlor game of arranging the most interesting, improbable, imaginary conversation among American entertainers, you could do worse than the one that took place in midtown Manhattan earlier this month. The participants were the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, known for smart, stylish and slightly silly movies like Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. If it were a reality show it would be called Eccentric Genius Island.

McCarthy and the Coen brothers have just collaborated on a movie version of McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, a thriller about a serial killer and a busted drug deal. It's a searing, shocking movie that plays like a eulogy for the great American West. It also features the best scene ever filmed of a dog chasing a guy in a river.

McCarthy is famous for two things: his omnivorous curiosity and his extreme reclusiveness. In his 74 years, he's given a total of three interviews. But here he chats freely with the Coen brothers, who have a tendency to finish each other's sentences. Time's LEV GROSSMAN was invited to observe. The conversation took place in a fancy hotel room with stunning views of Central Park in early autumn. Nobody glanced out the window even once.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1673269,00.html

[russspeakeasy]

26. Thank you for that link. Someone once asked him why he became an author.

He supposedly said, "Because I failed at everything else".

[bemildred]

27. Just trying to share.

[JitterbugPerfume]

28. thanks for sharing

[bemildred]

29. Well, I consider it a rare and valued opportunity to talk about these things.

All the Pretty Horses:

"In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half-naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of all their secular and transitory and violent lives."

I really don't have any idea what to call that. I think I got it all right. I made the mistake of opening that book again yesterday, and now I'm not going to get anything done for a while.

[bemildred]

24. Blood and time: Cormac McCarthy and the twilight of the West

---

In places where life is harsh and cruel, in barren lands where human habitation finds only precarious purchase, McCarthy follows a causality strict and inevitable. As Guy Davenport wrote in a 1968 essay, every sentence in McCarthy's fiction conveys swift and significant action. “He does not waste a single word on his character's thoughts.” Such austerity may offend the self-appointed guardians of bourgeois consciousness, but book reviews leave little trace in the strata of literary history. What lasts are those monuments, like the pictographs and painted pebbles of the Pecos River people, like the stone water trough whose image closes No Country for Old Men, that are made to last ten thousand years:

You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I've read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. . . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise.

McCarthy takes the long view, and any reading of his work that fails to understand that, any reading that suggests that this most disciplined and rigorous novelist had any object in mind other than making a novel that will outlast our cities of the plains, has failed to reckon with his art.

Not all art will comfort us as we age, and McCarthy's least of all. His fiction, like so much of our oldest literature, is tragic, and as such is held together by the very warp of the world. Sometimes his subject is the tragedy of history, in which two laws equally just and true come into unavoidable and violent conflict. Sometimes it is that of transgression, as when a brother and sister come together in the darkness and out of that furtive grappling are undone. Most often it is the simple natural drama of predator and prey, of hawks and wolves, trappers and hunters and snake catchers and those who run dogs under the moon; the drama of muskrats and field mice and catfish, wild house cats aloft in the claws of owls, all of which fall prey to man, who hunts all things. In No Country for Old Men, we witness the drama of householders and peaceful folk who wish only to be left alone, but who are drawn into inevitable strife with the world's hidden powers. At its root, McCarthy's fiction arises from the tragedy of all wild creatures, of whatever is begotten, born, and dies, the tragedy of autonomous life in a world increasingly circumscribed by a rage for order and captivity. More than merely human. It is the tragedy of warm blood itself, of blood and time.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/02/0080935

[russspeakeasy]

30. Wow, you are good.

Thanks for taking the time to post your observations. I always liked him and due to your post, I like him even more.

[fe6252fes]

31. here.

[Tom Ripley]

32. I love everything with the exception of what I call his "Larry McMurty Period" (The Border Trilogy)

I obviously prefer the gothic

[russspeakeasy]

33. I know what you mean......