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I recently read my first new McCarthy in a while, All the Pretty Horses, and it's gotten me all worked up about McCarthy again, so I'm happy to have come across this thread! Just read through the whole thread and it's got me a) thinking about my 9-year-old recollections of Blood Meridian a ton and therefore making me want to reread it (I kinda can't believe I read it when I was 15; I'm sure I didn't properly absorb more than 10% of it) and b) really wanting to read Suttree. That melonfucker excerpt posted a couple pages ago is hysterical. First I'm gonna go through the Border Trilogy, though! And, since no post would be complete without quoting some of this dude's fantastic writing, here's where he pretty much straight-up writes about why the book doesn't start off super bleak in All the Pretty Horses: Cormac McCarthy posted:He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all
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Jul 2, 2015 17:58
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 Yo McCarthy thread! Getting Blood Meridian-esque vibes from the trailer for The Revenant Check it out if you haven't already!Mahlertov Cocktail posted:I recently read my first new McCarthy in a while, All the Pretty Horses, and it's gotten me all worked up about McCarthy again, so I'm happy to have come across this thread! Just read through the whole thread and it's got me a) thinking about my 9-year-old recollections of Blood Meridian a ton and therefore making me want to reread it (I kinda can't believe I read it when I was 15; I'm sure I didn't properly absorb more than 10% of it) and b) really wanting to read Suttree. That melonfucker excerpt posted a couple pages ago is hysterical. First I'm gonna go through the Border Trilogy, though! Suttree is really fantastic - it's his gross-out comedy, but is as beautiful and dark as anything else. I think it might have unseated BM as my favourite of his. The only Border Trilogy I've read is The Crossing , which was heart-breaking. Haven't read Pretty Horses yet, but it's pretty sad I hear.
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Jul 28, 2015 18:17
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Oh neat, I thought that movie had gotten stuck in development hell. I remember vague rumblings about Christian Bale being attached to it a year or so ago. Also has there been any more word about The Passenger? McCarthy isn't exactly consistent when it comes to the time between his novels, but the fact that he was talking about it a while back made me assume it was relatively close to being finished.
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Jul 28, 2015 20:23
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:Oh neat, I thought that movie had gotten stuck in development hell. I remember vague rumblings about Christian Bale being attached to it a year or so ago. There's going to be a public reading of some sections from the Passenger next month actually. Don't know what that means for it's publication though.
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Jul 28, 2015 23:30
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There are two untitled books on Amazon UK with listed publication dates in September and October 2016. No clue if those dates are just placeholders. ISBN 9780330457422 ISBN 9780330457446
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Jul 29, 2015 00:05
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Yeah I got McCarthy vibes from that trailer too and I'm really stoked for the movie.
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Jul 29, 2015 07:30
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Just saw a link to this article, but it's behind a paywall. If anyone is a Newsweek subscriber, is there anything new about The Passenger there?
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Aug 20, 2015 13:21
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It seems to have loaded the whole article for me:Newsweek posted:Organizers at SFI confirmed to Newsweek that the novel will be released in 2016, though McCarthy's agent and publishers declined to comment on the status of the book. Newsweek posted:Cormac McCarthy thanks the crowd following an August 5 reading from his new book, "The Passenger." Caitlin McShea (second from the left), who read dialogue as the book's female protagonist, is alongside participants David Krakauer and James Drake (far right). Newsweek posted:There was also an original soundtrack for the event composed by McCarthy's son, 17-year-old John Francis. But the biggest surprise of all was a digital recording of McCarthy introducing the characters—the only publicized instance in which he has participated in a large public reading. Newsweek posted:Other previous novels have subtly woven in science, but according to Krakauer The Passenger will place science in the foreground. “It's everywhere,” he says. Just as the author went through an “Appalachian phase” and a “Southwest phase”—the terms used by scholars to describe his early and middle works—Krakauer says the new book is going to be “full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel.”
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Aug 20, 2015 13:58
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Boco_T posted:It seems to have loaded the whole article for me:  Cormac McCarthy, doing sci-fi?
mdemone fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 15:40
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Thanks man! I am hella interested in how it turns out.
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Aug 20, 2015 16:58
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Does anyone have the McCarthy quote about how he finds optimism and/or optimistic people dangerous? All I can find is a Vanity Fair interview that doesn't quite match up to what I remember.
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Aug 22, 2015 09:07
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Black Bones posted:
quote:Near the forks of the Grand River in present-day Perkins County, in August 1823, while scouting ahead of his trading partners for game for the expedition's larder, Glass surprised a grizzly bear mother with her two cubs. Before he could fire his rifle, the bear charged, picked him up, and threw him to the ground. Glass managed to kill the bear with help from his trapping partners, Fitzgerald and Bridger, but was left badly mauled and unconscious. Henry (who was also with them) became convinced the man would not survive his injuries. I know it's because DiCaprio only plays leads but I'd love to see a version of this with the parts reversed.
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Aug 22, 2015 09:49
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Desumaytah posted:Does anyone have the McCarthy quote about how he finds optimism and/or optimistic people dangerous? All I can find is a Vanity Fair interview that doesn't quite match up to what I remember. From an old New York Times article called "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" (April 19, 1992 if you have archive access): quote:"I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."
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Aug 23, 2015 06:59
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mdemone posted:
Wouldn't be the first time.
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Aug 24, 2015 15:47
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My google skills are lovely or I'm messing up something in the word order. Does anyone have that pdf (I think...) of his vocabulary list? I did find this delightful smear-piece however http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/14/cormac-mccarthy-american-south-west Reminds me of that posthumous hatchet job NPR published after Howard Zinn's death. Frostwerks fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Aug 26, 2015 |
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Aug 26, 2015 15:53
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Frostwerks posted:My google skills are lovely or I'm messing up something in the word order. Does anyone have that pdf (I think...) of his vocabulary list? http://www.johnsepich.com/cormac_mccarthy/words_cormac_mccarthy_uses_in_his_novels.pdf ? Seems like a rather tedious exercise in statistics. I was hoping for an abridged selection of the particularly obscure and antiquated.
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Aug 26, 2015 15:57
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mdemone posted:The best thing I've ever heard said about Updike is that it's doubtful he has ever had an unpublished thought, but I can't remember who said it. Maybe DFW? If so that's incredibly ironic. rest his guts fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Aug 26, 2015 |
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Aug 26, 2015 18:07
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Thought I'd share Cormac McCarthy's "Home Alone": http://www.theawl.com/2015/12/the-home
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Dec 16, 2015 19:48
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The North Tower posted:Thought I'd share Cormac McCarthy's "Home Alone": http://www.theawl.com/2015/12/the-home Goddamn.
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Dec 16, 2015 22:37
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DFW also called Updike "a penis with a thesaurus," which is a much better burn imo. edit: To contribute to McCarthy chat: has anybody read Whales and Men? I've always been curious about it. One of this other early stories, A Wake for Emily, is floating around online, but I've never seen Whales anywhere. McCarthy's juvenilia is pretty interesting; it's definitely not good, but you can see these embryonic elements of his style in them. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Dec 17, 2015 |
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Dec 17, 2015 01:32
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I've never heard of Whales and Men, it's not listed on Wikipedia. It's pretty easy to find the two they have there, Wake for Susan and The Drowning Incident, they're in the PDF on this page. Googling based on your post, I guess it's an unpublished screenplay that was very bad, and apparently there is a PDF of it somewhere? I will look around and see if I can find it buried somewhere.
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Dec 17, 2015 01:50
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Boco_T posted:I've never heard of Whales and Men, it's not listed on Wikipedia. It's pretty easy to find the two they have there, Wake for Susan and The Drowning Incident, they're in the PDF on this page. Yeah, it's a screenplay that is supposedly just heinous, and there's a copy in San Marcos along with Wake for Susan and The Drowning Incident, so you'd think it would be online somewhere. There used to a pdf with all three on it, but I forgot to read it and the link I had is dead now.
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Dec 17, 2015 02:02
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What is McCarthy's next book? Dude's cracking on in years. I want to read The Passenger, I just have such faith in what he writes that I will be, let's use the word "entertained", although you know as well as I do that isn't the word sometimes.
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Mar 7, 2016 12:33
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March 2017: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/the-passenger-postponed/ here's a picture of him holding a monkey to tide you over 
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Mar 8, 2016 00:49
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UrAClassAct posted:March 2017: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/the-passenger-postponed/ Well at least there's something on the schedule somewhere. You hear me, Pynchon, damnit?
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Mar 8, 2016 04:09
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mdemone posted:Well at least there's something on the schedule somewhere. You hear me, Pynchon, damnit? Don't Pynchon's novels always sneak up with little fanfare, though? The most you ever hear are rumblings when somebody stumbles across a page on Amazon. It is my sincerest wish that we get one more 800+ page beast from Pynchon before he hangs it up. Bleeding Edge and Inherent Vice are really good and all, but I want a proper follow-up to Against the Day - especially since you can really see how his big novels build on each other.
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Mar 8, 2016 08:01
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UrAClassAct posted:here's a picture of him holding a monkey to tide you over He looks so... handsome.
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Mar 10, 2016 15:23
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House Louse posted:He looks so... handsome. I always picture him as some bitter old man or something.
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Mar 10, 2016 15:26
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I always found it funny that as he gets older his dust-jacket photos keep getting less jovial. He currently looks like he's in the middle of killing someone with his mind.
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Mar 11, 2016 06:41
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Has this news hit the thread yet? Russel Crowe to star in a James Franco-directed movie version of Blood Meridian http://deadline.com/2016/05/russell-crowe-james-franco-to-direct-cormac-mccarthy-blood-meridian-cannes-1201749735/ On the one hand this will be terrible, but on the other hand it was always going to be a terrible butchery of the book so having these two on board may salvage it. There's the possibility that the movie disappears up its own rear end so thoroughly as to become some kind of hilarious bizarro version of the move that could have been a la Jorodowsky's Dune.
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May 5, 2016 21:42
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It's already been reported that it fell through because they couldn't obtain the rights. Weird.
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May 5, 2016 23:07
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Started Suttree and got a real try-hard vibe from the opening vignette. All of the verbosity with none of the grace that I enjoy from McCarthy. This carried through somewhat into the first few pages and now the book has been put into kind of a bad frame for me and it feels a little clunky. Does it even out a bit?
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May 6, 2016 00:09
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meanolmrcloud posted:Started Suttree and got a real try-hard vibe from the opening vignette. All of the verbosity with none of the grace that I enjoy from McCarthy. This carried through somewhat into the first few pages and now the book has been put into kind of a bad frame for me and it feels a little clunky. Does it even out a bit? Not for me it didn't. Suttree reads like a bad parody of McCarthy's work.
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May 6, 2016 00:52
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Suttree is loving awesome and has some of the funniest moments I've read in a McCarthy book.
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May 6, 2016 02:01
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meanolmrcloud posted:Started Suttree and got a real try-hard vibe from the opening vignette. All of the verbosity with none of the grace that I enjoy from McCarthy. This carried through somewhat into the first few pages and now the book has been put into kind of a bad frame for me and it feels a little clunky. Does it even out a bit? I also didn't like Suttree. I haven't liked any of his stuff that before Blood Meridian
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May 6, 2016 14:16
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of the pre-Blood Meridian works, I'd say that I enjoyed Suttree the most. The other ones never really came together for me, though they all had spectacular moments. They just never wowed me as a whole like Blood Meridian or The Crossing did.
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May 7, 2016 01:35
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I just wanna see John Travolta in the role of Suttree. No more, no less.
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May 7, 2016 02:06
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Leaving Las Vegas era Nicolas Cage, please.
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May 7, 2016 02:10
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Jewmanji posted:Leaving Las Vegas era Nicolas Cage, please. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3aCuxY1DY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpwJOqeU5Vo
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May 7, 2016 02:12
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:DFW also called Updike "a penis with a thesaurus," which is a much better burn imo. That whole DFW essay (or review, I guess, since it was just about the Updike book) is a treat. I haven't stopped calling Mailer, Roth, and Updike the "great male narcissists" since I read that. It's not wrong, either. All of their later-year books (except maybe Mailer, who I'm under-educated with) are about old professors loving twenty-year-olds. Bringing it back to McCarthy: I wish he wrote more non-fiction. I'd like to have a better idea of what the guy thinks of the world at-large. I know he's averse to that, but it's fascinating to think about, especially what he thinks of modern-day literature, if he thinks anything of it. He touched on this a little in an NPR interview years back (with Werner Herzog!), but, unsurprisingly, he was the quietest in the room.
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May 11, 2016 02:27
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