This is my first time hearing of this… Maybe I will have to be the canary in the coal mine.
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can’t think of anyone better equipped to tackle those books than the world’s only living Clarel reader
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Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author. This article is going to kick me in the nuts, isn’t it?
Edit: I’m most upset that “principal” was used and not “principle.”
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Maybe. McCarthy was in his 40’s and married when he linked with Britt who was 16 at the time. Britt is very clear that she didn’t view it as predatory at all and they stayed together/in love for years after/to his death I think. I’m not sure if that changes your opinion of his novels.
Edit: I should say i skimmed through the original piece so there may be some subtext I’m missing about the whole situation. As a McCarthy agnostic I didn’t really find the time to finish it.
I posted the interview with the author of the Vanity Fair article because the dude who wrote it seems next level annoying in a very particular MFA-y free spirit kinda way.
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well people have pointed out a 1974 letter from Guy Davenport to Hugh Kenner mentioned that CM ran away to Mexico with a teenager so either there’s another teenager or Britt was 14
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Call me a prude but that sounds even worse
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This night just keeps getting better and better.
who are some authors who never hooked up? Borges maybe? Kant for sure never got laid but idk if philosphers count
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Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson definitely count. Trying to think of someone off the beaten path. Maybe Thomas Gray?
Oh, this made me angry.
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didnt know Cherryh was still with us god bless
Henry James never scored I believe
I’ve read a few things recently.
-Reread Slaughterhouse Five for a book group. Vonnegut was my hero when I was first getting really into books. I kind of outgrew him, but it was fun reading this one again. Hits like a truck, super funny, immensely readable in spite of being sort of experimental in terms of chronology and sci-fi/psychological elements. I don’t feel the need to really explain this book because I think most people know it, but yeah it was cool to revisit and I was glad that it for the most part held up.
-Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead took me forever to read, the total opposite of a page turner, but it was beautiful. Sort of amazed that a book this deliberately Christian got picked up by a major publisher and won a Pulitzer, but it works so well. The main character is an elderly pastor writing a letter to his son who is only like seven years old, the idea being he’ll be dead before his son is old enough to understand who he really is. There are long digressions about predestination debates and how one might or might not interpret particular verses of the Bible and references to Feuerbach and Karl Barthe, which I get could be annoying for some people but it’s right up my alley and it’s cool that here it never feels pedantic, it always just feels like us along for the ride of a thoughtful person’s interior life and emotional wrestling. I find the best novels are the hardest to summarize /are about the most basic things (family, community, sense of place, how we view the world, time), and this meets that criteria. Nothing that huge happens. There are no scandals or sudden twists. It’s just about how one man gets through his time in this life and tries to make meaning out of it, suffused with both gravity and tenderness.
-Haven’t read any philosophy in a while so I read W.V.O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” This was some pretty tough reading for me, some good old-fashioned hard-nosed analytic philosophy, but I made it through and I think I understood some things. Sometimes I just like the wild ride of trying to keep up with somebody whose mind is absolutely cranking at another level in terms of specificity and abstraction than most people. I’m not going to summarize it here because a) I don’t think I can and b) you’d be better off just reading the Wikipedia page or something anyway, but it was worth it and I think he does succeed in what we sets out to do, ultimately.
Two favorite lines.
- When rejecting Rudolf Carnap’s attempt at a supposedly purified rational empirical language, Quine feels that it is not quite purely empirical enough. He writes, “Empiricists there are who would boggle at such prodigality.” (It’s a great dunk. Also: “Boggle” as an intransitive verb? Cool!)
- I’m less sure of what he even meant here, but at one point he says Carnap’s formulations aim to achieve “the laziest world compatible with our experience,” and I just liked that turn of phrase.
- I’m scheduled to read some plays by Terence next for my book group. I’ve never read any Roman drama before, so I’m intrigued to see what it’s like.
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Between books in the Realm of Elderlings I read Jason Schreir’s Blood, Sweat & Pixels. I like his writing a lot and the stories really stuck with me. It’s both inspiring to hear how these huge games were made and exhausting because of the same issues we hear about so often in game dev. I came so close to getting sucked up into that crunch machine, but couldn’t get the money to go to school for 3d animation. I consider that a good thing, unfortunately.
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Finished the book I was reading (it is a Spanish book) and now I’m jumping into Bouvard and Pécuchet.
Let’s see how this one’s going to be.
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spoilers for Book of the New Sun
wouldn’t be caught dead as a plot hole nitpick guy, but I do recall being confused when, around let’s say page 100-200, Severian and Agia’s coach crashed into the pelerine church thing (is it a tent? “cathedral”?), leaving the driver and animals dead but both of them only stunned. Sincerely glad that Wolfe circles back to explain this long-forgotten detail on page 1,004 of this book lol
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i just read three tales yesterday because of our conversation earlier in the thread. strange little book. Halfway beautiful.
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what’s a good place to start with flannery o’connor?
Wise Blood if you want to read a novel or A Good Man Is Hard To Find if you want short fiction. Not much published work in total so don’t think you can go wrong. I think The Violent Bear It Away is pretty good but it’s a little tougher to get into so maybe not the ideal starting point
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perfect
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Yeah, I recommend just getting a collection of short stories and going through it. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” or “Good Country People” are my favorites, but I like them all.
I recommend Wise Blood (the better novel) after you’ve read at least a couple of short stories.
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