This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books.
I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:
> Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes." Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.
TL;DR: An old testament reference to the "malevolent god". E.g. "god in the old testament wasn't so nice or forgiving.."
> In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the lesser creator god who fashioned the material world and is often seen as the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. Unlike the supreme, unknowable God, the Demiurge is ignorant, imperfect, and sometimes malevolent, responsible for the flaws of the physical world and the imprisonment of the divine spark within humans. Gnostic beliefs see a spiritual journey not as submitting to the Demiurge, but as a process of escaping his creation to return to the true, good God.
Not an Old Testament reference, but a Gnostic belief. 1 John addresses Gnosticism by refuting some of its claims such as Jesus only appearing to be human. While John doesn't reference the Demiurge, the concept goes hand in hand with this Gnostic teaching that Jesus was a pure spiritual being. Gnostics considered material things evil, so Jesus coming in the flesh and a benevolent creator God did not fit their worldview.
If you want to learn more about the demiurge, this guy provides a good simple explanation and puts it in context. Without ever mentioning gnosticism, by the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgGfQdv_rPc
Or maybe he was searching for "structure", the way Grothendieck was - in pure math, in systems biology, in complex networks (e.g. civilizations, culture, occult) and in individual behaviors
It doesn't have to be a direct stand-in. It's mentioned in the article that people suspect McCarthy of reveling in the violence in his novels. Whether he does or does not he would certainly have been aware of that perception.
Judge Holden as a character embodies many distasteful qualities of mankind, it would make sense that the qualities he embodies the most distinctly are the ones McCarthy sees in himself.
If you read his last two novels he was clearly well-informed about mathematics.
However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here, I think the reporter may be a little too credulous about that. I suspect he had the very common experience of buying a yellow book and being defeated in the first couple chapters.
That might be an understatement of his capabilities, though obviously he wasn't a professional mathematician. It's a joy to read some of the eulogies professors at the Santa Fe Institute gave to him:
> He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and a memory to match. Topics ranged from salvage diving — something we discussed a few days ago — to far more academic fare often focused on mathematics and physics.
> Cormac and I engaged on a wide range of topics. Some recurring themes included social mobility, machine intelligence, the intersection of genius and madness, and cars and trucks.
> Cormac also often remarked that a lively conversation with friends is about as good as sex. He’d talk for hours about physics, math, novels, philosophy, human nature, bawdy humor, corny humor, architecture (including detailed advice on my own house), gambling, history, and any question that lacked a quick and obvious answer.
> His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments,
I'm not saying that he did, but this along with being the right age to have read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler strongly suggest that he used that book to grasp a lot more of his books than most people can.
That book gives you a very good strategy for reading books that are beyond you normally. In the three years since I've read it I've managed to finish books that I couldn't read even when I was doing my PhD and it was my full time job to understand them.
The funny thing is that I only ran into that book when I was trying to figure out how to build knowledge graphs for complex documents using LLMs. Using multiple readings to create a summary of each chunk, then a graph of the connections between the chunks, then a glossary of all the terms and finally a critique of each chunk gave better than sota results for the documents I was working on.
I'm playing around with using hyperlinks in pdfs to get around how much the www sucks for posting serious research with serious working code.
Caveat emptor: I'm first working on getting the basic groundwork out, like a pipeline that shows what you need to do to extract a scanned pdf in a quality that tesseract can actually get text out of.
> I'm first working on getting the basic groundwork out, like a pipeline that shows what you need to do to extract a scanned pdf in a quality that tesseract can actually get text out of.
Sounds like TBL's contribution doesn't suck so much after all.
> However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here
Why? And what exactly would mastery look like? Regardless, McCarthy didn't make his mark as a mathematician so his private ability to understand doesn't matter. Why take the opportunity to make a negative assumption and diminish the possibility that he had mastered an understanding in his private life? What does this accomplish? Seems like the only thing it could possibly do is to try and make you and me feel better about our own inadequacies, without proof.
"Stella Maris" is a great novel that could only be written by someone who was very knowledgeable about math. As far as art that engages deeply with math and science, I don't know of anything comparable. Most artists would focus only on the human drama of discovery, without being able to engage with the subject matter.
However, I would consider "mastery" of a math textbook to be you have worked through almost all the chapters, can do a reasonable chunk of the exercises, and could TA the course without too much trouble.
While I don't know for sure, I doubt McCarthy achieved that level of understanding for all the yellow books he owned. I think buying a math textbook on an interesting topic and then not making it very far is a very common and human experience.
Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math makes an appearance. The other is “The Weyl Conjectures” by Karen Olson, which captures what it’s like to really do mathematics. Highly recommend both.
I have loved Cormac's books since I was a child, but never read Larry McMurtry until recently. If you're in the same boat, I implore you to give one of the below a try.
Lonesome Dove -- A great story about washed-up Texas Rangers with achingly beautiful writing.
The Last Picture Show -- More tonally similar to Cormac's stories. Coming of age in a dusty Texas town.
Leaving Cheyenne -- I have never in my life recommended a romance novel until this moment. I'm literally crying as I write this, remembering the closing scene.
Initially thought you may have meant revisionist as a slight, but I see that it's a sub-genre. For anyone else unfamiliar (from wikipedia):
> The revisionist Western is a sub-genre of the Western fiction. Called a post-classical variation of the traditional Western, the revisionist subverts the myth and romance of the traditional by means of character development and realism to present a less simplistic view of life in the "Old West". While the traditional Western always embodies a clear boundary between good and evil, the revisionist Western does not.
I read The Road long before I became a father and part of me is, I guess, afraid to read it again now that I have two kids—perhaps because I remember how devastating it was then and suspecting it would be 100x that now. But I do intend to reread it sooner or later.
If you think "Blood Meridian" is dark, try "Child of God." I'm a huge McCarthy fan, but "Blood Meridian" is tough to appreciate. "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," and "All the Pretty Horses" are his most readable works; try them, then decide how much farther you want to go.
I think Blood Meridian is his best book by far. The first time I read it, when I got to the end, I didn't even get up from my chair, just went right back to the beginning and started reading it again.
I also like the border trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Sort of surprisingly, never actually read No Country for Old Men although I've seen the movie three or four times.
Yes. There’s something cruel there, or perhaps simply resigned, to reflecting the most brutal aspects of humanity in their most casual, logical, and inherent expression ([0] spoiler).
You certainly never shake the feeling that something terrible is going to happen at any moment.
I have read The Road and All the Pretty Horses. I won’t read any of the others. AtPH has less horror than The Road, for what it’s worth. It’s very much a bildungsroman.
If you enjoyed the road and want more like that, but without the horror; I’d say try our Steinbeck if you haven’t. He’s a greater writer, and less cruel.
[0] AtPH spoiler: For example mangling that boy’s feet. It’s not arbitrary, not entirely necessary, but it had a logic to it; and is exactly the type of thing people do to each other.
The Road was the first of his books I read. I read his last two books The Passenger and Stella Maris shortly after he passed. Both contained interesting thoughts on philosophy, science, mathematics. Of the two, I think Stella Maris was better - it's kind of a deep dive into genius and the madness that often accompanies it.
Agree on Steinbeck. Less cruel and more hopeful. My favorite American author. It would have been very interesting to be a fly on the wall in a discussion between an aged Steinbeck and a young McCarthy - one of those questions where if you could have two authors talk to each other over a beer and sit in on the conversation.
Slight tangent brought up by the article, but usually the greats aren't good at just one thing but have a combination of eccentricities that form the person. I find it heartening that Cormac had these in spades.
The answer stems from McCarthy’s deeply disparaging view of modern society, which he considered lost, divorced from nature, history and tradition and heading toward social collapse and apocalypse. “Cormac considered contemporary fiction a waste of time,” said Dennis, “because contemporary writers no longer have a legitimate culture to feed their souls.”
> They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.
Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned 300,000 books.
Among the famous writers that I know through their writings, I'd expect Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco to have read many thousands of books, because that wide culture was a major element of their fictions. The later did have 50,000 books at home, but the former became blind and probably didn't own many books.
With simple math, reading 2 books each week leads to at most 7,000 over a lifetime. If Denny McCarthy's guess is right (read 85% of 20k), his older brother read about 4 to 5 books a week, every week, from teenager to his old age.
Funny that you bring up Borges and Eco. Eco when commenting on his library, I can't remember if in an essay or lecture, referred to it as an 'anti-library', pointing out that one of the most important skills a reader can possess is to be able to talk about books one hasn't read. As in Borges Library of Babel most people will be doomed to only read very little of what is in existence.
He thought his huge library should be taken as a research tool and sign of 'conscious ignorance' of the vast things you don't know, rather than taking a consumer mindset to it, which you see a lot of people do when they brag about how many books they've read.
> “I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”
Someone who enjoys this please enlighten me or show me a way into McCarthy's prose using examples of what's good. I tried several times to read his novels and I'm sorry, but it's just terrible. It's hard to put my finger on what is so unappealing. The closest I can come to what is bad about it is that it reads like farce without humor (if you take 'farce' to be a question of tempo, as in "tragedy sped up"). The opening to Blood Meridian (his masterpiece, I'm told) is just this endless stream of backstory that The Kid is supposed to have done or been but no exposition of anything. It sounds like the imagination of a 13yo boy playing with his GI Joes or super heroes. The fragmentary style and purply-pulpish register is very hard to take seriously. Where's the beef? Please post some passages that don't sound like common pulp fiction, unless that's what people are crowing about, in which case...I got nothin'.
“Do you think we’re going to die?”
“No.”
“We’re not?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re carrying the fire.”
“What fire?”
“The fire inside. Goodness. That’s what we’re carrying.”
Not trying to piss on the fire but that's almost exactly the kind of thing I'm unable to enjoy. I guess I wonder "Who speaks like that?" It's wooden and affected to my ear. It comes across as needlessly obtuse. I'm not saying it's exceptional for that style, but to me it reads like so many YA fantasy novels from my youth, or maybe a /r/ for aspiring writers. If I'm being asked to work so hard to elucidate the symbolism or metaphorical content, then shouldn't I expect a little back in the form of beautiful English. If this were a poem (where obscurity is expected) I would say it's a meh poem just on the basis of not being very interesting. I get this is a father/son dialogue and maybe the terseness appeals to some, but I would ask those readers if that's how they talk to their own sons.
In the spirit of fairness, I found some fan favorites from /r/cormacmccarthy and if these are representative of his most powerful prose I don't know what to say:
"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
A "heraldic tree...left afire"? That's, er, not good. It's actually bad. And "auxiliaries routed(?) forth into the inordinate(?) day"? This is like the guy in the Community Arts writing class who gets a lot of praise but could really use an editor.
And the 'ands' are just interminable. And this and that and the other thing and one more and something totally different but also this and that. Good lord, someone give this man a period, or even a semi-colon. Here's another exemplar of a sentence that runs on more than the horses in it.
"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."
"that resonance which is the world itself" is just royal purple prose.
I apologize for disliking something others like, it doesn't seem fair, but I get the feeling that Cormac McCarthy is one of those "favorites" for people who don't have a lot to compare it to. Anytime someone tells me their favorite author is Cormac McCarthy, I'm always tempted to ask, "Who's your second favorite?"
I really liked the long run on sentence about the horses you pasted in. It's lyrical and preachy, maybe a little breathless. It drones and twirls like dervish
I found it broke down
In my head
Into verses
Alternating
Between a few
And several syllables each
And lo!
I heard it sung
By Bono
By Jim Morrison
By Johnny Cash and David Byrne
Each having
His own band
Accompaniment
Alike unto his kind.
I can't really represent it as I experienced it. But the prose really lent itself to some of the more epic pop music in my head.
It was a minute of cinema piped directly into my mind. Quite a treat. Thank you for dereferencing them!
Having said all that, it's still a cheap shot of dopamine that leans heavily on this reader to pick and layer his own poisons for effect.
I'd dare say another reader more skilled in poetry might be able to dice it into various meters and recite to different types of music.
Werner Herzog's voice, pronunciation, and pacing are fun to use to read these
Appreciate your sharing your experience. I can hear Jim Morrison's incantatory rhythms as you point out..."Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding. Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."
But as you point out, you're bringing a lot to the equation. If all we had were Jim Morrison's lyrics they wouldn't be that interesting. He just wasn't that great of a poet compared to what's available in English poetry. Without the music it doesn't have much magic.
A more irrecoverable criticism is if something lends itself to parody. My sense is McCarthy's prose style is extremely parodyable. How could one distinguish between it and something an LLM generates? Not in the fragmentary incantatory cadence or questionable semantics. Not in the meaning, or the symbolic and metaphoric content? So where then?
Ah, yeah... It makes sense for why the publications push certain writers, but then where is the reader? Are we to assume the public fans are just hypnotized by critics? I wonder how many people take their cues (and taste) from book reviews in the New Yorker et al. More than I'd hope probably. Depressing. This was funny and useful though:
"This is a good example of what I call the andelope: a breathless string of simple declarative statements linked by the conjunction 'and'. Like the 'evocative' slide-show and the Consumerland shopping-list, the andelope encourages skim-reading while keeping up the appearance of 'literary' length and complexity. But like the slide-show (and unlike the shopping-list), the andelope often clashes with the subject matter, and the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the methodical meal that is being described."
No one is obligated to like anything because someone else likes it. It doesn't work for you, it's a big whole world out there and this is just one of may subjective representations of it.
On the point about punctuation, you just infer where they should be. It takes some getting used to but once you're in the rhythm and cadence of the style (& era Cormac writes about) you kinda don't notice it and pause at the natural places.
Anyway I like his stuff. Not all of it but plenty of it. One of my more favourable lines from him (Blood Meridian I think): "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage"
Honestly, it's less about the lack of punctuation and more about the apparent lack of cohesion or even relation among the list elements. It sounds like these are just what items occurred to the writer's mind in a sort of ecstatic frenzy (that register he favors). What I'm hoping is that I'm just blind to the intricate relatedness of the images, symbols, word choices, etc... They read like just whatever he thought of at that moment of his febrile brain running along and not to have more intentionality than that. If the listicles were in a poem (even a lengthy one, like Whitman) I might be inclined to do the work of teasing out the relationships. But the enumerations are frequent and endless. That's a lot to ask if there aren't visible markers of genius. Surely there a hermeneuticists among the fandom that can shine a light on the necessity of this prose style as structural supports for the work overall. Otherwise it's just pulp and doesn't mean anything except a vibe. Which, ok, whatever, but that's not much of a selling point. Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.
Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.
McCarthy has his champions among ordinary readers but he also won many "serious" awards. Which authority could satisfactorily bless his work if not the reading public and not professional critics/professors/writers?
I like McCarthy, but I also understand not liking authors that other readers love. Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall garnered widespread acclaim, and I generally like historical fiction, but I had to give up on it after a few chapters. Sometimes an author doesn't fit with one's tastes. Trying to persuade a reader to feel differently is like trying to persuade someone who loves/hates fish how they should feel about grilled salmon.
Are there any collections of annotated pages from books belonging to well-known authors that have been made available online? I'd be interested to get some impression of how they engaged with the material, whatever it is.
Just listened to Broken Record episode and learned Cormac McCarthy had black Ferrari. Opened HN and we talk about his personal library. Time to read No Country For Old Man I guess.
Fascinating article. As I was reading it, particularly the part about his son John saying his father was very loving and was there for him, but also saying he did not like to be interrupted during his work or reading, and would say "Go away! I am reading!" immediately made me think he was quite narcissistic. His work was more important than even his own son. Later on his brother Dennis confirmed my suspicions that McCarthy was a narcissist. I have an insatiable curiosity as well and truly love learning, but in being a christian I have actively worked against my tendency to narcissism. A life like McCarthys sounds romantically fabulous, but when you think about the end of it, four people around your bed, it sounds tragic. There is something profound in sacrificially loving others and it doesn’t seem like Cormac experienced that. Though I am sure his wives, brother Dennis, and son John, did.
There's nothing wrong with having boundaries. Anyways, the quote goes on:
"But he was a great father, always there for me, and I learned so much from him. We would have these long conversations about science and history and music, and whatever else, and he was the funniest person I’ve ever met, just a natural comedian.” "
"McCarthy’s detractors, meanwhile, found his writing overly mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him of relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly."
Yeah, maybe his detractors were on to something.
I haven't even started "The Road" because of its reputation. I have only read "Child of God" and wondered why someone might write about the worst among us. But then I'm not a fan of Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker for the same reason.
I've always gotten the sense from McCarthy that he was keenly aware that civilization is not just something to take for granted and that there is always something dangerous at the edges that needs to be carefully guarded against.
His worldview seemed to be that humans as a species are extremely violent and capable of the most inhumane acts and we’re hanging on by a thread. Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
Probably my favorite author of all time, him or maybe Delilo.
@sharweek said
> Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
@JKCalhoun
> in my world-view most humans want to be kind.
These two views aren't necessarily in conflict. Individuals can overwhelmingly want to be kind but still be in a system where society pushes them to behave to the contrary.
You don't have to love them, but dismissing two of the 20th century's great artists in their respective mediums while having a blog named "engineersneedart" is certainly ironic.
I don’t see the irony or any conflict. I just don’t celebrate the worst in humanity and have no desire to see it in art either. Perhaps I think the world is dark enough and that the better art inspires and can lift us.
I don’t “love” either artist to be sure. Is that also dismissive? I’m not sure.
I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean.
The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the setting.
Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty) is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art. You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to make the mundane sing and that's great, but McCarthy obviously didn't seem to care for that approach.
I think I can see why Child of God put you off enough for the thoughts of others to prevent any further effort, but I'd suggest you give him another go.
I'd save blood meridian for later tho; If you don't get too distracted by the setting of the road, it's a perfectly optimistic book.
As the poet said, something in us does not erode (free pun!)
I would argue that the ending of the book is optimistic despite the event that precedes it. An imperfect father wants the best for his child, and does the best he can with the hand he's dealt. In a dying world of cannibals and worse, there are people who are good, and whose surroundings don't poison their view on what it means to be good. "Do you carry the fire?" is, to my mind, an incredibly optimistic sentiment.
The ending is definitely the most optimistic part of the book, but on balance I think the overall picture is still excruciatingly bleak. It gives me the impression that any optimism of the part of the characters is likely unwarranted. They're still doomed.
The point is that everyone is doomed (even if you imagine we can survive the civilization-murdering tools we've cobbled up, we can't outrun physics), but that even at our most vulnerable, since the book occurs during a period directly after Armageddon, it is possible for some goodness in us to persist.
I don't want to spoil, but the optimism isn't for the characters, it's for we the reader, and the species.
The thimble of fire joins the wider flame. Goodness survives even there, and even then.
I don't think so; preserving goodness and decency comes at little personal cost to most of us, but McCarthy's effort in the book is at its core a depiction of these things surviving even the apocalypse, and at an incredible cost.
That fire they carry is not extinguished even in a world where all systems and pretenses at civilization have been ruined. It finds the wider flame, and decent folks to tend it.
It is one of the more optimistic works he's done, not despite the setting, but because.
I’ve only read The Road and found it extremely difficult because of the nihilism. I put it down in the middle of it and stewed for 6 months before I picked it up again. I am so glad I did. I think his detractors are right, it is violent, nihilistic, masculine and whatever else. Through that the other side of the contrast becomes so vivid. Maybe there are better ways to get there. For me it hit.
My daughter and I talk about the message in the book regularly. Though she has yet to read it. I see more clearly my purpose as a dad and as a member in my community. Totally worth the read.
It sounds like the book itself isn't nihilistic but there may be nihilistic characters in it, which doesn't seem like something worth criticizing it over.
How do you tell that a book with nihilistic characters isn't a nihilistic book? The difference is obvious in principle, but I'm not sure it is in practice.
I can't think of a single character in the book for whom nihilism is their defining trait, and certainly not the primary characters. The effort to preserve goodness in the world only really matters when it's hard, when it comes at cost. The book turns that up to 11, but that is why it is hopeful.
If you want to read McCarthy doing nihilism, maybe try the sunset limited.
"You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left."
I have a theory that everyone has a different level of detachment vs self-insertion when consuming a fictional narrative. Those more self-insertive probably shouldn't read his books.
I think its just a simple matter of aesthetics. Some people find violence ugly, and don't like looking at it. Some people think that by looking at it you're somehow coming to a greater understanding of the world or something. Maybe that is the case for some super sheltered individuals, but I doubt it's the case on the whole.
If anyone has any ideas on what the point of violence in art is, I'm open to hearing it. Obviously horror is a genre and so is gore, and people seem to enjoy being shocked. I don't think that is what McCarthy was going for though. And he wasn't going for the vengeance-catharsis angle like Tarantino either.
It's a media literacy issue. It's good to read challenging works to grow your understanding. I think the self-insertive tendency comes from consuming works oriented toward it with typical hero/villain structures
It could be clownish and a caricature. I enjoyed The Road but it makes me think of a critique of sci fi I read once, wherein masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones. Some books tackled this by demonstrating the presumptive and flawed approach sci fi writers take to biospheres / space stations / generation ships for example (Voyage from Yesteryear, A Half Built Garden) where despite all the engineering, the biosphere suffers. I suppose a part of why Dune made such waves was that it took a very human and ecological perspective front and center.
The Road could be seen as overly masculine in its portrayal of a man and his son against nearly the entire world, which is often the fantasy of male prepper types. Some oppositional takes to this would be e.g. Cory Doctorow's Masque of the Red Death, where he presents the dichotomy directly in a post-apocalypse world and argues for the more optimistic outcome, wherein people work together in a non-exclusionary way to overcome whatever the apocalyptic scenario is, which might be considered a more feminine perspective. Others taking that perspective would include Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell."
In the Too Like Lightning series, Ada Palmer takes on the male/feminine sci fi angle directly by creating a near-utopian society of mostly gender neutral people. At one point in the novel a character argues that in fact they've created a feminine society of women, and therefore aren't prepared to handle the outlier class of people that want to create war, who have for the most part began to present explicitly as men.
> masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones
I'd say the Road is a full inversion of this in that it doesn't bother explaining why the world collapsed and purely focuses on how people are left to cope with it
It's a world where femininity and fertility have been completely eradicated and turned into a living hell by said survivalist men who vie to dominate what little is remaining
The only "good" to be found in it is the memory of the Man's wife and the family the child meets at its conclusion
Don't really understand this comment, I'm looking at the latest Pulitzer and Hugo winners and seeing what sound like pretty classic masculine tropes. James is about a man who escapes from slavery, fends for himself in the wilderness, violently avenges his wife and daughter, etc. Alien Clay is about a man who rebels against an evil government, is sent to a prison camp in space, bangs his boss (a woman), starts another rebellion, etc. I haven't read these books so maybe the descriptions are misleading, but I don't feel like I'm having any trouble finding masculinity here.
On the other hand I (a man) have read Blood Meridian, and while I loved it, anyone who reads it and thinks "fuck yeah these are real men" is a psycopath. Nobody should want to be associated with those characters (or the real people that inspired them) in any way.
> people feign to wonder where the male readers have gone
I haven't heard this concern, but if this is an issue I can't really believe awards have anything to do with it. Nobody is saying "yeah I used to like books but Hugo nominees these last few years weren't to my taste, so I just stopped reading". At least in my experience the average person doesn't really care about media awards, they are mostly for industry insiders and a small subset of major enthusiasts.
You're right, I guess "overly masculine" is the core of what I didn't understand. I don't know what that means, and while I can imagine someone being disappointed if they couldn't find any books with masculine characters and themes (which I think we agree are not hard to find, even among award nominees), I can't imagine someone finding those but thinking "but these aren't overly masculine, that's what I want". If you have some examples other than Cormac McCarthy books I think it would help explain the concept.
Haven't read any of those Nebula/Hugo books, but there are shifts in style and emphasis that are very indicative of the author's gender. Not at all universal, but given a thousand words of writing, I bet I could identify the author's gender at 80% accuracy.
Very common modern disease to associate a description of something with approval of its existence
Loathing the inevitability of McCarthy to get the same posthumous treatment as Kerouac did and with those benevolent and corrective blows kill pure art just a little bit more
There really aren’t that many books with genuinely masculine men. I haven’t read the ones you brought up, but usually it’s not the specific events in the story that matter- it’s more about the overall vibe, the way the character carries himself. And a lot of the time, that’s where the sense of masculinity just doesn’t come through anymore, at least not in any way a young boy could look up to.
Oh I have read almost all of McCarthy’s novels including this one. That’s beside the point though, what’s wrong about something being overtly masculine?
I’m not certain it’s the case for McCarthy’s works, but I think inept attempts at manly men could certainly veer into accidental parody. An “overly masculine” character might just bring Johnny Bravo to mind. To offer an example, I tried watching “Untamed” recently and the highly concentrated gruff machismo coming off of that main character mostly had me wondering if he would ever do or say anything that wasn’t so cliche as to be scripted by predictive text. (Maybe it gets better, but the first few episodes did not hold me.)
Parent comment says overly masculine rather than overtly masculine. Overly anything as a subjective judgment is usually defined as a bad thing. The question instead is why does op think it pushes into overly.
Haven’t read “The Road” yet, but I was able to take the time to read “Blood Meridian” this year— I don’t think I would describe the violence depicted as “relished.” It came across as vivid in an arduous, can’t-look-away-from-the-wreckage-so-bear-witness way, and I was really intrigued by how the Kid’s POV dissolves during the worst of it. And about “why someone might write about the worst among us”—the glory-seeking and hypocrisy of the Glanton gang also felt timely, to be frank. So, to me, it felt more like a clinical exposure of ugly rot rather than a luridly violent power fantasy like Inglorious Basterds.
Though I do kinda feel the “masculine” note in that quote haha, if only because the women that appeared in the story were steadfastly hospitable (or victims.) Disregarding any incident where the Judge was involved, it actually felt quaint, especially in contrast to everything else going on.
I’ll be interested as I check out the rest of his catalogue as to if the stomach-churning detail involved still feels necessary, or if my tolerance starts to change.
Yeah it's hard to say he's "relishing" violence when he a very well-researched depiction of complete horrific and genocidal chapter of the Manifest Destiny period that was essentially forgotten.
I see the violence as a refutation of the idealized, sanitized version of the West popularized in mainstream Westerns. Where law and authority = good, even though the Glanton gang was funded and armed by US authorities
I think McCarthy is one of the greatest American writers, but I will say my two main gripes with him are his tendency to drift over the line into overwrought (sometimes the biblical language is incredibly powerful, sometimes not), and his utter inability to write women.
He did ok with Alicia in his last couple books, but even there he flounders some. "If I had a baby I wouldn't care about reality"? Hmm, ok?
"His face was all covered in girljuice"? C'mon bud.
Watched a video essay yesterday by a female reader who found the Aunt’s four page monologue in ‘All the Pretty Horses’ one of the most insightful and moving explanations of women she’d ever read.
She was particularly surprised to find such a passage in a book by McCarthy who she expected to be some gruff man’s man.
I haven’t read that passage myself, but seemingly Cormac was capable of writing women when he chose to. Perhaps not enough, though.
It's funny you mention it; I have a friend who writes books who had trouble with McCarthy and I recently mentioned this same criticism. I suggested ATPH to her and this same character came to mind as a decent piece of work on that subject.
I will say this about the passage tho: McCarthy writes a small narrative which does seem to explain her choices and character as it affects John Grady. It's convincing, and she's a good character, but even there she's something of a set piece.
"Child of God?" You started at just about the darkest, least approachable place. Try "No Country for Old Men" or "All the Pretty Horses," both of which are far easier to read and contemplate.
Or The Crossing, which, at least for the first third is his sparest and best writing. At least, I prefer the marriage of the gothic sensibility and poetry with the classic western.
All the Pretty Horses has much of the bleakness that characterizes his stories but also genuinely beauty and romanticism that he pulls off equally well
This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books.
I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:
> Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes." Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.
I think that’s an allusion to the Gnostic demiurge.
For the uninitiated (like me!):
TL;DR: An old testament reference to the "malevolent god". E.g. "god in the old testament wasn't so nice or forgiving.."
> In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the lesser creator god who fashioned the material world and is often seen as the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. Unlike the supreme, unknowable God, the Demiurge is ignorant, imperfect, and sometimes malevolent, responsible for the flaws of the physical world and the imprisonment of the divine spark within humans. Gnostic beliefs see a spiritual journey not as submitting to the Demiurge, but as a process of escaping his creation to return to the true, good God.
See also: https://gnosticismexplained.org/the-gnostic-demiurge/
Not an Old Testament reference, but a Gnostic belief. 1 John addresses Gnosticism by refuting some of its claims such as Jesus only appearing to be human. While John doesn't reference the Demiurge, the concept goes hand in hand with this Gnostic teaching that Jesus was a pure spiritual being. Gnostics considered material things evil, so Jesus coming in the flesh and a benevolent creator God did not fit their worldview.
If you want to learn more about the demiurge, this guy provides a good simple explanation and puts it in context. Without ever mentioning gnosticism, by the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgGfQdv_rPc
The allegorical parents and the internalized judge to overcome.
Or maybe he was searching for "structure", the way Grothendieck was - in pure math, in systems biology, in complex networks (e.g. civilizations, culture, occult) and in individual behaviors
I hope that wasn't Cormac McCarthy's stand-in because the Judge character is like some type of supernatural violent being.
It doesn't have to be a direct stand-in. It's mentioned in the article that people suspect McCarthy of reveling in the violence in his novels. Whether he does or does not he would certainly have been aware of that perception. Judge Holden as a character embodies many distasteful qualities of mankind, it would make sense that the qualities he embodies the most distinctly are the ones McCarthy sees in himself.
The only "self-insert" he's done is the main character of Suttree which is semi-autobiographical
The judge is an incarnation of evil and a pedophile so I don't think that's his Mary sue
> The judge is an incarnation of evil and a pedophile so I don't think that's his Mary sue
Although... he did rather famously have a thing for underage girls...
https://medium.com/belover/cormac-mccarthy-was-a-pedophile-a...
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If you read his last two novels he was clearly well-informed about mathematics.
However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here, I think the reporter may be a little too credulous about that. I suspect he had the very common experience of buying a yellow book and being defeated in the first couple chapters.
That might be an understatement of his capabilities, though obviously he wasn't a professional mathematician. It's a joy to read some of the eulogies professors at the Santa Fe Institute gave to him:
https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/memoriam-cormac-mcc...
> He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and a memory to match. Topics ranged from salvage diving — something we discussed a few days ago — to far more academic fare often focused on mathematics and physics.
> Cormac and I engaged on a wide range of topics. Some recurring themes included social mobility, machine intelligence, the intersection of genius and madness, and cars and trucks.
> Cormac also often remarked that a lively conversation with friends is about as good as sex. He’d talk for hours about physics, math, novels, philosophy, human nature, bawdy humor, corny humor, architecture (including detailed advice on my own house), gambling, history, and any question that lacked a quick and obvious answer.
Etc.
Thanks very much for posting this link. The eulogies were indeed a pleasure to read. Choked up a few times.
> His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments,
I'm not saying that he did, but this along with being the right age to have read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler strongly suggest that he used that book to grasp a lot more of his books than most people can.
That book gives you a very good strategy for reading books that are beyond you normally. In the three years since I've read it I've managed to finish books that I couldn't read even when I was doing my PhD and it was my full time job to understand them.
The funny thing is that I only ran into that book when I was trying to figure out how to build knowledge graphs for complex documents using LLMs. Using multiple readings to create a summary of each chunk, then a graph of the connections between the chunks, then a glossary of all the terms and finally a critique of each chunk gave better than sota results for the documents I was working on.
Where can I read more about your research? Knowledge graphs interest me.
Drop me a line on my profiles email.
I'm playing around with using hyperlinks in pdfs to get around how much the www sucks for posting serious research with serious working code.
Caveat emptor: I'm first working on getting the basic groundwork out, like a pipeline that shows what you need to do to extract a scanned pdf in a quality that tesseract can actually get text out of.
> I'm first working on getting the basic groundwork out, like a pipeline that shows what you need to do to extract a scanned pdf in a quality that tesseract can actually get text out of.
Sounds like TBL's contribution doesn't suck so much after all.
I'm curious why you think that "strongly suggests" anything?
> However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here
Why? And what exactly would mastery look like? Regardless, McCarthy didn't make his mark as a mathematician so his private ability to understand doesn't matter. Why take the opportunity to make a negative assumption and diminish the possibility that he had mastered an understanding in his private life? What does this accomplish? Seems like the only thing it could possibly do is to try and make you and me feel better about our own inadequacies, without proof.
I don't think it diminishes him.
"Stella Maris" is a great novel that could only be written by someone who was very knowledgeable about math. As far as art that engages deeply with math and science, I don't know of anything comparable. Most artists would focus only on the human drama of discovery, without being able to engage with the subject matter.
However, I would consider "mastery" of a math textbook to be you have worked through almost all the chapters, can do a reasonable chunk of the exercises, and could TA the course without too much trouble.
While I don't know for sure, I doubt McCarthy achieved that level of understanding for all the yellow books he owned. I think buying a math textbook on an interesting topic and then not making it very far is a very common and human experience.
Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math makes an appearance. The other is “The Weyl Conjectures” by Karen Olson, which captures what it’s like to really do mathematics. Highly recommend both.
I have loved Cormac's books since I was a child, but never read Larry McMurtry until recently. If you're in the same boat, I implore you to give one of the below a try.
Lonesome Dove -- A great story about washed-up Texas Rangers with achingly beautiful writing.
The Last Picture Show -- More tonally similar to Cormac's stories. Coming of age in a dusty Texas town.
Leaving Cheyenne -- I have never in my life recommended a romance novel until this moment. I'm literally crying as I write this, remembering the closing scene.
If the revisionist Western appeals to you, I'd also recommend Oakley Hall's Warlock.
Initially thought you may have meant revisionist as a slight, but I see that it's a sub-genre. For anyone else unfamiliar (from wikipedia):
> The revisionist Western is a sub-genre of the Western fiction. Called a post-classical variation of the traditional Western, the revisionist subverts the myth and romance of the traditional by means of character development and realism to present a less simplistic view of life in the "Old West". While the traditional Western always embodies a clear boundary between good and evil, the revisionist Western does not.
I had confused the two. Knew of McMurtry through his son James, writer of songs like Choctaw Bingo and Can’t Make It Here Anymore.
The Road is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.
I could not stop reading it, but at the same time I hated how it made me feel. I stoped reading novels for years after finishing it.
The Road is my favorite fathering book ever. I have recommended it to all my dad friends. Audiobook is excellent too.
I can see why, but as a new father the last thing I want my fatherhood associated with is that horrible horrible story.
I read The Road long before I became a father and part of me is, I guess, afraid to read it again now that I have two kids—perhaps because I remember how devastating it was then and suspecting it would be 100x that now. But I do intend to reread it sooner or later.
I gifted it to a couple of new Dad friends. They never did get back to me about it. Fair.
I've read it twice. Once as a naive 16-year-old. Once, as a young father. Profoundly upsetting the second time.
I'd also suggest Siddhartha for this. Having read it at different points of my life makes it uniquely special.
The only book I've ever read in a single sitting.
After reading the Road, I started on Blood Meridian and could not continue, swearing never to read McCarthy again. The man's soul was just too dark.
If you think "Blood Meridian" is dark, try "Child of God." I'm a huge McCarthy fan, but "Blood Meridian" is tough to appreciate. "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," and "All the Pretty Horses" are his most readable works; try them, then decide how much farther you want to go.
I think Blood Meridian is his best book by far. The first time I read it, when I got to the end, I didn't even get up from my chair, just went right back to the beginning and started reading it again.
I also like the border trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Sort of surprisingly, never actually read No Country for Old Men although I've seen the movie three or four times.
I think The Road is overrated.
Child of God and The Crossing are two of my favourites by him.
Yes. There’s something cruel there, or perhaps simply resigned, to reflecting the most brutal aspects of humanity in their most casual, logical, and inherent expression ([0] spoiler).
You certainly never shake the feeling that something terrible is going to happen at any moment.
I have read The Road and All the Pretty Horses. I won’t read any of the others. AtPH has less horror than The Road, for what it’s worth. It’s very much a bildungsroman.
If you enjoyed the road and want more like that, but without the horror; I’d say try our Steinbeck if you haven’t. He’s a greater writer, and less cruel.
[0] AtPH spoiler: For example mangling that boy’s feet. It’s not arbitrary, not entirely necessary, but it had a logic to it; and is exactly the type of thing people do to each other.
The Road was the first of his books I read. I read his last two books The Passenger and Stella Maris shortly after he passed. Both contained interesting thoughts on philosophy, science, mathematics. Of the two, I think Stella Maris was better - it's kind of a deep dive into genius and the madness that often accompanies it.
Agree on Steinbeck. Less cruel and more hopeful. My favorite American author. It would have been very interesting to be a fly on the wall in a discussion between an aged Steinbeck and a young McCarthy - one of those questions where if you could have two authors talk to each other over a beer and sit in on the conversation.
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It’s the only book I’ve read where I came upon a passage that literally caused my jaw to drop.
Do you remember which one?
It is most certainly the feed-people in the basement scene. I felt dizzy after reading that.
Babies in the tree?
That's Blood Meridian
Yes.
Which passage was it?
>hated how it made me feel
I sometimes don't like feeling either.
Slight tangent brought up by the article, but usually the greats aren't good at just one thing but have a combination of eccentricities that form the person. I find it heartening that Cormac had these in spades.
Thanks for posting, he was a really interesting guy.
This is my favourite interview with him so I will take this post as an excuse to share it.
https://youtu.be/HrUy1Vn2KdI
Was just about to post this.
Thank you.
The answer stems from McCarthy’s deeply disparaging view of modern society, which he considered lost, divorced from nature, history and tradition and heading toward social collapse and apocalypse. “Cormac considered contemporary fiction a waste of time,” said Dennis, “because contemporary writers no longer have a legitimate culture to feed their souls.”
> They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.
Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned 300,000 books.
Among the famous writers that I know through their writings, I'd expect Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco to have read many thousands of books, because that wide culture was a major element of their fictions. The later did have 50,000 books at home, but the former became blind and probably didn't own many books.
With simple math, reading 2 books each week leads to at most 7,000 over a lifetime. If Denny McCarthy's guess is right (read 85% of 20k), his older brother read about 4 to 5 books a week, every week, from teenager to his old age.
Funny that you bring up Borges and Eco. Eco when commenting on his library, I can't remember if in an essay or lecture, referred to it as an 'anti-library', pointing out that one of the most important skills a reader can possess is to be able to talk about books one hasn't read. As in Borges Library of Babel most people will be doomed to only read very little of what is in existence.
He thought his huge library should be taken as a research tool and sign of 'conscious ignorance' of the vast things you don't know, rather than taking a consumer mindset to it, which you see a lot of people do when they brag about how many books they've read.
> “I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”
Gets me every time.
Someone who enjoys this please enlighten me or show me a way into McCarthy's prose using examples of what's good. I tried several times to read his novels and I'm sorry, but it's just terrible. It's hard to put my finger on what is so unappealing. The closest I can come to what is bad about it is that it reads like farce without humor (if you take 'farce' to be a question of tempo, as in "tragedy sped up"). The opening to Blood Meridian (his masterpiece, I'm told) is just this endless stream of backstory that The Kid is supposed to have done or been but no exposition of anything. It sounds like the imagination of a 13yo boy playing with his GI Joes or super heroes. The fragmentary style and purply-pulpish register is very hard to take seriously. Where's the beef? Please post some passages that don't sound like common pulp fiction, unless that's what people are crowing about, in which case...I got nothin'.
Not trying to piss on the fire but that's almost exactly the kind of thing I'm unable to enjoy. I guess I wonder "Who speaks like that?" It's wooden and affected to my ear. It comes across as needlessly obtuse. I'm not saying it's exceptional for that style, but to me it reads like so many YA fantasy novels from my youth, or maybe a /r/ for aspiring writers. If I'm being asked to work so hard to elucidate the symbolism or metaphorical content, then shouldn't I expect a little back in the form of beautiful English. If this were a poem (where obscurity is expected) I would say it's a meh poem just on the basis of not being very interesting. I get this is a father/son dialogue and maybe the terseness appeals to some, but I would ask those readers if that's how they talk to their own sons.
In the spirit of fairness, I found some fan favorites from /r/cormacmccarthy and if these are representative of his most powerful prose I don't know what to say:
"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
A "heraldic tree...left afire"? That's, er, not good. It's actually bad. And "auxiliaries routed(?) forth into the inordinate(?) day"? This is like the guy in the Community Arts writing class who gets a lot of praise but could really use an editor.
And the 'ands' are just interminable. And this and that and the other thing and one more and something totally different but also this and that. Good lord, someone give this man a period, or even a semi-colon. Here's another exemplar of a sentence that runs on more than the horses in it.
"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."
"that resonance which is the world itself" is just royal purple prose.
I apologize for disliking something others like, it doesn't seem fair, but I get the feeling that Cormac McCarthy is one of those "favorites" for people who don't have a lot to compare it to. Anytime someone tells me their favorite author is Cormac McCarthy, I'm always tempted to ask, "Who's your second favorite?"
I don't think you've anything to apologize for.
I really liked the long run on sentence about the horses you pasted in. It's lyrical and preachy, maybe a little breathless. It drones and twirls like dervish
I found it broke down In my head Into verses Alternating Between a few And several syllables each And lo! I heard it sung By Bono By Jim Morrison By Johnny Cash and David Byrne Each having His own band Accompaniment Alike unto his kind.
I can't really represent it as I experienced it. But the prose really lent itself to some of the more epic pop music in my head.
It was a minute of cinema piped directly into my mind. Quite a treat. Thank you for dereferencing them!
Having said all that, it's still a cheap shot of dopamine that leans heavily on this reader to pick and layer his own poisons for effect.
I'd dare say another reader more skilled in poetry might be able to dice it into various meters and recite to different types of music.
Werner Herzog's voice, pronunciation, and pacing are fun to use to read these
Kermit the frog? Hilarious!
Appreciate your sharing your experience. I can hear Jim Morrison's incantatory rhythms as you point out..."Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding. Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."
But as you point out, you're bringing a lot to the equation. If all we had were Jim Morrison's lyrics they wouldn't be that interesting. He just wasn't that great of a poet compared to what's available in English poetry. Without the music it doesn't have much magic.
A more irrecoverable criticism is if something lends itself to parody. My sense is McCarthy's prose style is extremely parodyable. How could one distinguish between it and something an LLM generates? Not in the fragmentary incantatory cadence or questionable semantics. Not in the meaning, or the symbolic and metaphoric content? So where then?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Reader%27s_Manifesto>
Ah, yeah... It makes sense for why the publications push certain writers, but then where is the reader? Are we to assume the public fans are just hypnotized by critics? I wonder how many people take their cues (and taste) from book reviews in the New Yorker et al. More than I'd hope probably. Depressing. This was funny and useful though:
"This is a good example of what I call the andelope: a breathless string of simple declarative statements linked by the conjunction 'and'. Like the 'evocative' slide-show and the Consumerland shopping-list, the andelope encourages skim-reading while keeping up the appearance of 'literary' length and complexity. But like the slide-show (and unlike the shopping-list), the andelope often clashes with the subject matter, and the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the methodical meal that is being described."
No one is obligated to like anything because someone else likes it. It doesn't work for you, it's a big whole world out there and this is just one of may subjective representations of it.
On the point about punctuation, you just infer where they should be. It takes some getting used to but once you're in the rhythm and cadence of the style (& era Cormac writes about) you kinda don't notice it and pause at the natural places.
Anyway I like his stuff. Not all of it but plenty of it. One of my more favourable lines from him (Blood Meridian I think): "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage"
Honestly, it's less about the lack of punctuation and more about the apparent lack of cohesion or even relation among the list elements. It sounds like these are just what items occurred to the writer's mind in a sort of ecstatic frenzy (that register he favors). What I'm hoping is that I'm just blind to the intricate relatedness of the images, symbols, word choices, etc... They read like just whatever he thought of at that moment of his febrile brain running along and not to have more intentionality than that. If the listicles were in a poem (even a lengthy one, like Whitman) I might be inclined to do the work of teasing out the relationships. But the enumerations are frequent and endless. That's a lot to ask if there aren't visible markers of genius. Surely there a hermeneuticists among the fandom that can shine a light on the necessity of this prose style as structural supports for the work overall. Otherwise it's just pulp and doesn't mean anything except a vibe. Which, ok, whatever, but that's not much of a selling point. Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.
Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.
McCarthy has his champions among ordinary readers but he also won many "serious" awards. Which authority could satisfactorily bless his work if not the reading public and not professional critics/professors/writers?
I like McCarthy, but I also understand not liking authors that other readers love. Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall garnered widespread acclaim, and I generally like historical fiction, but I had to give up on it after a few chapters. Sometimes an author doesn't fit with one's tastes. Trying to persuade a reader to feel differently is like trying to persuade someone who loves/hates fish how they should feel about grilled salmon.
It's really difficult to find any/many of these titles in English or German in Germany.
Are there any collections of annotated pages from books belonging to well-known authors that have been made available online? I'd be interested to get some impression of how they engaged with the material, whatever it is.
you could start here https://archive.ph/M2H3s here you can find an archive of hannah arendt's marginalia and annotations https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hapl_marginalia_all/
Thanks, these are great! A link to some scans of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in the New Yorker piece too. For the curious: https://archive.ph/o/M2H3s/www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases...
Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45383439
Great article. Reading it, I was expecting the author to come across a little sled labeled "Rosebud" every next sentence.
It would be great if the researchers uploaded a text catalog of the archive.
Just listened to Broken Record episode and learned Cormac McCarthy had black Ferrari. Opened HN and we talk about his personal library. Time to read No Country For Old Man I guess.
I just watched "The Road" yesterday night.
Good movie.
Incredible article. Thanks for sharing.
Fascinating article. As I was reading it, particularly the part about his son John saying his father was very loving and was there for him, but also saying he did not like to be interrupted during his work or reading, and would say "Go away! I am reading!" immediately made me think he was quite narcissistic. His work was more important than even his own son. Later on his brother Dennis confirmed my suspicions that McCarthy was a narcissist. I have an insatiable curiosity as well and truly love learning, but in being a christian I have actively worked against my tendency to narcissism. A life like McCarthys sounds romantically fabulous, but when you think about the end of it, four people around your bed, it sounds tragic. There is something profound in sacrificially loving others and it doesn’t seem like Cormac experienced that. Though I am sure his wives, brother Dennis, and son John, did.
There's nothing wrong with having boundaries. Anyways, the quote goes on:
"But he was a great father, always there for me, and I learned so much from him. We would have these long conversations about science and history and music, and whatever else, and he was the funniest person I’ve ever met, just a natural comedian.” "
What's wrong with dying with four people around your bed? Do you think that's too few or something?
Just a reminder, that, as the article also says:
"Moby-Dick was Cormac McCarthy's favorite book"
... and mine too...
"McCarthy’s detractors, meanwhile, found his writing overly mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him of relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly."
Yeah, maybe his detractors were on to something.
I haven't even started "The Road" because of its reputation. I have only read "Child of God" and wondered why someone might write about the worst among us. But then I'm not a fan of Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker for the same reason.
I've always gotten the sense from McCarthy that he was keenly aware that civilization is not just something to take for granted and that there is always something dangerous at the edges that needs to be carefully guarded against.
100%
His worldview seemed to be that humans as a species are extremely violent and capable of the most inhumane acts and we’re hanging on by a thread. Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
Probably my favorite author of all time, him or maybe Delilo.
Instead, in my world-view most humans want to be kind. (And I don’t carry a gun everywhere like McCarthy either, ha ha.)
@sharweek said > Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
@JKCalhoun > in my world-view most humans want to be kind.
These two views aren't necessarily in conflict. Individuals can overwhelmingly want to be kind but still be in a system where society pushes them to behave to the contrary.
> He said that things would get better.
> The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I'm satisfied they caint get no worse, he said.
> But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so.
You don't have to love them, but dismissing two of the 20th century's great artists in their respective mediums while having a blog named "engineersneedart" is certainly ironic.
I don’t see the irony or any conflict. I just don’t celebrate the worst in humanity and have no desire to see it in art either. Perhaps I think the world is dark enough and that the better art inspires and can lift us.
I don’t “love” either artist to be sure. Is that also dismissive? I’m not sure.
I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean.
The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the setting.
Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty) is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art. You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to make the mundane sing and that's great, but McCarthy obviously didn't seem to care for that approach.
I think I can see why Child of God put you off enough for the thoughts of others to prevent any further effort, but I'd suggest you give him another go.
I'd save blood meridian for later tho; If you don't get too distracted by the setting of the road, it's a perfectly optimistic book.
As the poet said, something in us does not erode (free pun!)
I think it's a stretch to call The Road optimistic.
I would argue that the ending of the book is optimistic despite the event that precedes it. An imperfect father wants the best for his child, and does the best he can with the hand he's dealt. In a dying world of cannibals and worse, there are people who are good, and whose surroundings don't poison their view on what it means to be good. "Do you carry the fire?" is, to my mind, an incredibly optimistic sentiment.
The ending is definitely the most optimistic part of the book, but on balance I think the overall picture is still excruciatingly bleak. It gives me the impression that any optimism of the part of the characters is likely unwarranted. They're still doomed.
The point is that everyone is doomed (even if you imagine we can survive the civilization-murdering tools we've cobbled up, we can't outrun physics), but that even at our most vulnerable, since the book occurs during a period directly after Armageddon, it is possible for some goodness in us to persist.
I don't want to spoil, but the optimism isn't for the characters, it's for we the reader, and the species.
The thimble of fire joins the wider flame. Goodness survives even there, and even then.
Yes, but I wouldn't call that optimistic. It's just an epsilon away from 100% pessimism.
If you say so. I think we could agree that when it comes to McCarthy, one has to grade on a curve.
It’s quite a stretch.
I don't think so; preserving goodness and decency comes at little personal cost to most of us, but McCarthy's effort in the book is at its core a depiction of these things surviving even the apocalypse, and at an incredible cost.
That fire they carry is not extinguished even in a world where all systems and pretenses at civilization have been ruined. It finds the wider flame, and decent folks to tend it.
It is one of the more optimistic works he's done, not despite the setting, but because.
FWIW, I've seen every one of Tarantino's films since "Reservoir Dogs".
I may give "The Road" a chance though.
I’ve only read The Road and found it extremely difficult because of the nihilism. I put it down in the middle of it and stewed for 6 months before I picked it up again. I am so glad I did. I think his detractors are right, it is violent, nihilistic, masculine and whatever else. Through that the other side of the contrast becomes so vivid. Maybe there are better ways to get there. For me it hit.
My daughter and I talk about the message in the book regularly. Though she has yet to read it. I see more clearly my purpose as a dad and as a member in my community. Totally worth the read.
> I think his detractors are right, it is violent, nihilistic, masculine and whatever else.
Thinking masculine is a criticism is quite a tell.
I think the toxic kind probably does deserve criticism.
It sounds like the book itself isn't nihilistic but there may be nihilistic characters in it, which doesn't seem like something worth criticizing it over.
How do you tell that a book with nihilistic characters isn't a nihilistic book? The difference is obvious in principle, but I'm not sure it is in practice.
I can't think of a single character in the book for whom nihilism is their defining trait, and certainly not the primary characters. The effort to preserve goodness in the world only really matters when it's hard, when it comes at cost. The book turns that up to 11, but that is why it is hopeful.
If you want to read McCarthy doing nihilism, maybe try the sunset limited.
"You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left."
I have a theory that everyone has a different level of detachment vs self-insertion when consuming a fictional narrative. Those more self-insertive probably shouldn't read his books.
I think its just a simple matter of aesthetics. Some people find violence ugly, and don't like looking at it. Some people think that by looking at it you're somehow coming to a greater understanding of the world or something. Maybe that is the case for some super sheltered individuals, but I doubt it's the case on the whole.
If anyone has any ideas on what the point of violence in art is, I'm open to hearing it. Obviously horror is a genre and so is gore, and people seem to enjoy being shocked. I don't think that is what McCarthy was going for though. And he wasn't going for the vengeance-catharsis angle like Tarantino either.
It's a media literacy issue. It's good to read challenging works to grow your understanding. I think the self-insertive tendency comes from consuming works oriented toward it with typical hero/villain structures
My impression is that Tarantino and McCarthy author with different motives in mind.
Depiction isn’t endorsement
How is overly masculine a bad thing? Makes me want to read it even more.
It could be clownish and a caricature. I enjoyed The Road but it makes me think of a critique of sci fi I read once, wherein masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones. Some books tackled this by demonstrating the presumptive and flawed approach sci fi writers take to biospheres / space stations / generation ships for example (Voyage from Yesteryear, A Half Built Garden) where despite all the engineering, the biosphere suffers. I suppose a part of why Dune made such waves was that it took a very human and ecological perspective front and center.
The Road could be seen as overly masculine in its portrayal of a man and his son against nearly the entire world, which is often the fantasy of male prepper types. Some oppositional takes to this would be e.g. Cory Doctorow's Masque of the Red Death, where he presents the dichotomy directly in a post-apocalypse world and argues for the more optimistic outcome, wherein people work together in a non-exclusionary way to overcome whatever the apocalyptic scenario is, which might be considered a more feminine perspective. Others taking that perspective would include Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell."
In the Too Like Lightning series, Ada Palmer takes on the male/feminine sci fi angle directly by creating a near-utopian society of mostly gender neutral people. At one point in the novel a character argues that in fact they've created a feminine society of women, and therefore aren't prepared to handle the outlier class of people that want to create war, who have for the most part began to present explicitly as men.
> masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones
I'd say the Road is a full inversion of this in that it doesn't bother explaining why the world collapsed and purely focuses on how people are left to cope with it
It's a world where femininity and fertility have been completely eradicated and turned into a living hell by said survivalist men who vie to dominate what little is remaining
The only "good" to be found in it is the memory of the Man's wife and the family the child meets at its conclusion
No kidding. Try to find an "overly masculine" book among Pulizer or Hugo nominees today. And people feign to wonder where the male readers have gone.
Don't really understand this comment, I'm looking at the latest Pulitzer and Hugo winners and seeing what sound like pretty classic masculine tropes. James is about a man who escapes from slavery, fends for himself in the wilderness, violently avenges his wife and daughter, etc. Alien Clay is about a man who rebels against an evil government, is sent to a prison camp in space, bangs his boss (a woman), starts another rebellion, etc. I haven't read these books so maybe the descriptions are misleading, but I don't feel like I'm having any trouble finding masculinity here.
On the other hand I (a man) have read Blood Meridian, and while I loved it, anyone who reads it and thinks "fuck yeah these are real men" is a psycopath. Nobody should want to be associated with those characters (or the real people that inspired them) in any way.
> people feign to wonder where the male readers have gone
I haven't heard this concern, but if this is an issue I can't really believe awards have anything to do with it. Nobody is saying "yeah I used to like books but Hugo nominees these last few years weren't to my taste, so I just stopped reading". At least in my experience the average person doesn't really care about media awards, they are mostly for industry insiders and a small subset of major enthusiasts.
> if this is an issue I can't really believe awards have anything to do with it
That wasn't what I intended to convey. They're altogether not published to the same degree they were.
> I haven't heard this concern
do a search
> I don't feel like I'm having any trouble finding masculinity here.
What were the exact words I used? They're right there. Read them again.
You're right, I guess "overly masculine" is the core of what I didn't understand. I don't know what that means, and while I can imagine someone being disappointed if they couldn't find any books with masculine characters and themes (which I think we agree are not hard to find, even among award nominees), I can't imagine someone finding those but thinking "but these aren't overly masculine, that's what I want". If you have some examples other than Cormac McCarthy books I think it would help explain the concept.
Haven't read any of those Nebula/Hugo books, but there are shifts in style and emphasis that are very indicative of the author's gender. Not at all universal, but given a thousand words of writing, I bet I could identify the author's gender at 80% accuracy.
Interiority being a huge axis here.
Very common modern disease to associate a description of something with approval of its existence
Loathing the inevitability of McCarthy to get the same posthumous treatment as Kerouac did and with those benevolent and corrective blows kill pure art just a little bit more
There really aren’t that many books with genuinely masculine men. I haven’t read the ones you brought up, but usually it’s not the specific events in the story that matter- it’s more about the overall vibe, the way the character carries himself. And a lot of the time, that’s where the sense of masculinity just doesn’t come through anymore, at least not in any way a young boy could look up to.
Just read it and you will find out. Is a really short book.
Oh I have read almost all of McCarthy’s novels including this one. That’s beside the point though, what’s wrong about something being overtly masculine?
I’m not certain it’s the case for McCarthy’s works, but I think inept attempts at manly men could certainly veer into accidental parody. An “overly masculine” character might just bring Johnny Bravo to mind. To offer an example, I tried watching “Untamed” recently and the highly concentrated gruff machismo coming off of that main character mostly had me wondering if he would ever do or say anything that wasn’t so cliche as to be scripted by predictive text. (Maybe it gets better, but the first few episodes did not hold me.)
Parent comment says overly masculine rather than overtly masculine. Overly anything as a subjective judgment is usually defined as a bad thing. The question instead is why does op think it pushes into overly.
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Please don't cross into personal attack. We had to warn you about this just a little while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45419871.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Haven’t read “The Road” yet, but I was able to take the time to read “Blood Meridian” this year— I don’t think I would describe the violence depicted as “relished.” It came across as vivid in an arduous, can’t-look-away-from-the-wreckage-so-bear-witness way, and I was really intrigued by how the Kid’s POV dissolves during the worst of it. And about “why someone might write about the worst among us”—the glory-seeking and hypocrisy of the Glanton gang also felt timely, to be frank. So, to me, it felt more like a clinical exposure of ugly rot rather than a luridly violent power fantasy like Inglorious Basterds.
Though I do kinda feel the “masculine” note in that quote haha, if only because the women that appeared in the story were steadfastly hospitable (or victims.) Disregarding any incident where the Judge was involved, it actually felt quaint, especially in contrast to everything else going on.
I’ll be interested as I check out the rest of his catalogue as to if the stomach-churning detail involved still feels necessary, or if my tolerance starts to change.
Yeah it's hard to say he's "relishing" violence when he a very well-researched depiction of complete horrific and genocidal chapter of the Manifest Destiny period that was essentially forgotten.
I see the violence as a refutation of the idealized, sanitized version of the West popularized in mainstream Westerns. Where law and authority = good, even though the Glanton gang was funded and armed by US authorities
I think McCarthy is one of the greatest American writers, but I will say my two main gripes with him are his tendency to drift over the line into overwrought (sometimes the biblical language is incredibly powerful, sometimes not), and his utter inability to write women.
He did ok with Alicia in his last couple books, but even there he flounders some. "If I had a baby I wouldn't care about reality"? Hmm, ok?
"His face was all covered in girljuice"? C'mon bud.
But no writer is flawless.
Watched a video essay yesterday by a female reader who found the Aunt’s four page monologue in ‘All the Pretty Horses’ one of the most insightful and moving explanations of women she’d ever read.
She was particularly surprised to find such a passage in a book by McCarthy who she expected to be some gruff man’s man.
I haven’t read that passage myself, but seemingly Cormac was capable of writing women when he chose to. Perhaps not enough, though.
It's funny you mention it; I have a friend who writes books who had trouble with McCarthy and I recently mentioned this same criticism. I suggested ATPH to her and this same character came to mind as a decent piece of work on that subject.
I will say this about the passage tho: McCarthy writes a small narrative which does seem to explain her choices and character as it affects John Grady. It's convincing, and she's a good character, but even there she's something of a set piece.
Still, glad you mentioned this. Thanks.
"Child of God?" You started at just about the darkest, least approachable place. Try "No Country for Old Men" or "All the Pretty Horses," both of which are far easier to read and contemplate.
Or The Crossing, which, at least for the first third is his sparest and best writing. At least, I prefer the marriage of the gothic sensibility and poetry with the classic western.
The first third ripped my heart out
All the Pretty Horses has much of the bleakness that characterizes his stories but also genuinely beauty and romanticism that he pulls off equally well
Love it
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Eek, accumulating, curating, memorializing misses the point he made.
> the point
Just the one?