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I just wanna say that I find "....that's what she said" the height of simple, stupid jokes. Just finished reading No Country (well, a week and a half ago, but whatever), and I'm glad that Cormac McCarthy has finally lent me a little a credence and class when I break that one out at inappropriate times.
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Jun 22, 2013 11:02
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Helmacron posted:I've still got to read the Border trilogy, Suttree and Child of God, but they're on my iPad and it's only a matter of time. The ending is intentionally vague, it is true that he "dances forever" with a fiddle but what he does to the Kid is left for interpretation. I assumed rape for awhile as well, but I read an essay recently that argued that he was just doing some unspeakable act of violence, and the guy made some pretty excellent points. Saying "you hope he was raped" is a bit macabre though, the book doesn't need a clandestine rape scene to emphasize the homoerotic undertones...
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Jun 24, 2013 21:50
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Haven't seen this discussed in this thread, and it was somehow not on my radar at all, but here's the trailer for The Counselor, a Ridley Scott movie, written by Cormac McCarthy. Not sure how I had no idea about this, but hopefully it will come close to No Country.
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Jun 25, 2013 23:28
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I kinda always assumed the kid was just brutally murdered and mutilated in the jakes. Rape stuff never crossed my mind, personally. Go figure.
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Jun 26, 2013 08:03
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Jewmanji posted:Haven't seen this discussed in this thread, and it was somehow not on my radar at all, but here's the trailer for The Counselor, a Ridley Scott movie, written by Cormac McCarthy. Not sure how I had no idea about this, but hopefully it will come close to No Country. Wow, that sure is something.
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Jun 26, 2013 08:35
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I always thought the point of what happened in the jakes was that you didn't know specifically what happened, but whatever it was was so bad that in a novel filled with all manner of utterly horrific poo poo, it's the only time something couldn't be "shown" to the reader. It's almost Lovecraftian: what happened in the jakes? Something unspeakable. It's also the only act of violence in the whole book someone has a physical reaction to, so it has that going for it as well.
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Jun 26, 2013 13:45
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Popular Human posted:I always thought the point of what happened in the jakes was that you didn't know specifically what happened, but whatever it was was so bad that in a novel filled with all manner of utterly horrific poo poo, it's the only time something couldn't be "shown" to the reader. It's almost Lovecraftian: what happened in the jakes? Something unspeakable. It could not be understated just how bizarre the last few chapters of Blood Meridian are, or at least elements therein. The judge, being lead by the naked fool (iirc) on a tether, carrying an umbrella ribbed of animal bones and covered in hides is something that seems downright Jodorowsky-ish.
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Jun 26, 2013 15:02
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Regarding the ending scene 3Romeo posted an interpretation that I've liked more and more with re-readthroughs. Reposting here for those who don't have archives3Romeo posted:As a result, I believe in that sceneless scene in the jakes, McCarthy doesn't describe what happens to the Kid not because he wants to leave that depravity to the reader's mind but because he (as he often does) jumps completely into metaphor. The Judge taking from the Kid the violence of his heart and making it his own. The West not pacified by man but man pacified by the West. What remains of the Kid then is nothing more than a man who, with that violence taken from his heart, digs the holes in the epilogue and lights the fires that show men the way, either because of his experience or, because he is "now divested of everything he has been," the west is safe to men like him and all men that follow because the west has proven itself superior.
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Jun 27, 2013 01:19
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Hell, the whole book has that feel of a plausible surrealism just from all the little one mention scenes that are never again referenced in any way. The child leading the blind man with a string, the infant tree, the burning bush, the exploding Judas effigy, the mirage city and so, so many more.
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Jun 27, 2013 08:00
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The final passage of No Country is one of my favourite pieces of writing, particularly the way Jones delivers it in the movie. I think that really changed my opinion of him as an actor(favourably, obviously).quote:The other thing is that I have not said much about my father and I know I have not done him justice. I've been older now than he ever was for almost twenty years so in a sense I'm looking back at a younger man.[...] I've thought about him a lot less than I should of and I know that ain't right neither. I had two dreams about him after he died. I don't remember the first one all that well but it was about meeting 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 carrying 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.
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Jun 29, 2013 23:34
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Yeah that's a real nice dream. It's also a prophecy/summation of The Road!
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Jun 29, 2013 23:51
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Black Bones posted:Yeah that's a real nice dream. It's also a prophecy/summation of The Road! I hadn't thought of it like that, but yeah, I guess it does pre-figure The Road, thematically at least.
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Jun 30, 2013 21:57
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I'm not usually a fan of audiobooks, but the Blood Meridian audiobook version is by far the best I've ever listened to. I can't recommend it highly enough. The narrator is absolutely perfect for the material, and McCarthy's prose works unexpectedly well when read out loud. There was a short clip linked earlier; here's another, longer one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIQynsWpBpQ The same narrator also recently did Suttree. I've found that the main drawback of having read a lot of Cormac McCarthy is how hard it gets to read books by lesser writers, because suddenly every stilted piece of dialogue or overwritten description stands out that much more clearly. Every few pages of so of almost every McCarthy book I've read, I've had to pause to marvel at just how absurdly well he writes, and, for lack of a better expression, how true everything feels. Alekanderu fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Jul 14, 2013 |
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Jul 14, 2013 01:20
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Alekanderu posted:I'm not usually a fan of audiobooks, but the Blood Meridian audiobook version is by far the best I've ever listened to. I can't recommend it highly enough. The narrator is absolutely perfect for the material, and McCarthy's prose works unexpectedly well when read out loud. There was a short clip linked earlier; here's another, longer one: McCarthy ruins books in the same way that David Simon ruins television.
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Jul 14, 2013 17:14
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Frostwerks posted:McCarthy ruins books in the same way that David Simon ruins television. Actually David Simon ruins books too- check out The Corner if you haven't already. Was anyone aware that Todd Field was the latest name to be tackling a Blood Meridian adaptation? It seems Ridley Scott has finally thrown in the towel. Field would be an interesting choice- his two movies certainly have a unique approach to depraved persons.
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Jul 14, 2013 20:28
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Jewmanji posted:Actually David Simon ruins books too- check out The Corner if you haven't already. Still don't think Blood Meridian is right for a film. Make it an HBO mini instead.
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Jul 14, 2013 20:55
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Jewmanji posted:Actually David Simon ruins books too- check out The Corner if you haven't already. At this point I'll be shocked if it ever happens- I've heard everyone from the guy that did Drive, to James Franco is trying to adapt it.
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Jul 14, 2013 21:18
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Nobody's going to adapt BM because you'd have to basically discover a hidden-talent actor who's seven feet tall and could look menacing while hairless. Without the Judge stealing the show, any film adaptation would be a clunker. And then there's the issue of the extreme violence.
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Jul 14, 2013 21:25
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mdemone posted:Nobody's going to adapt BM because you'd have to basically discover a hidden-talent actor who's seven feet tall and could look menacing while hairless. Without the Judge stealing the show, any film adaptation would be a clunker. And then there's the issue of the extreme violence. It's a shame because I think it could be done if it had no intention of being a profitable venture. I think it would benefit from being very long, very quiet, and very plaintive (something along the lines of the Coen Brothers' No Country or Meek's Cutoff). I think when done by a studio, on a big budget with all of the regular trappings of a Hollywood production, it would turn out pretty much like The Road- admirable but ultimately a failure. The whole thing needs to just be a 5-7 hour fever dream of old men whispering over cook fires, interspersed with unimaginable violence and lots of shots of people on horseback crossing salt flats in silence. edit: On second thought, I'm not sure I could stomach the stark, literal immediacy of a film ostensibly about scalping. It's one thing to read it on the page and be able to put it down at your leisure to catch your breath or close your eyes, but those images might just make for something altogether too unpleasant.
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Jul 14, 2013 22:36
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It's the Come and See principle at play. It's not meant to be enjoyed so much as experienced.
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Jul 15, 2013 07:20
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Just make Blood Meridian a four hour long music video for the band Earth directed by Tarsem Singh.
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Jul 15, 2013 07:38
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Frostwerks posted:It's not meant to be enjoyed so much as experienced. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure someone will make a movie eventually, but I don't see any investor actually seeing profit in it. To get the feel of the book, the film has to have a 2001/Thin Red Line/Tree of Life vibe but with long sweeping vistas and NC-17 levels of violence.* Not likely to be a money maker. *Not to mention an unseen denouement in an outhouse.
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Jul 15, 2013 13:43
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ruddiger posted:goddammit, I just finished reading Suttree. I'm sorry to quote a post from so far back in the thread, but I just finished Suttree today (HELL of a good book btw) and when did Harrogate die? I even went back and checked, the last chapter with that character in it he gets busted for the stealing from the phones and winds up in prison, but I don't remember any mention of him dying. Am I just the most unobservant reader ever?
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Jul 23, 2013 03:43
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20 good posts in a row today in the What Did You Just Finish? thread about Blood Meridian: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2175822&pagenumber=232#post418352580 Gonna try to send them here since we already have this thread going and all.
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Aug 12, 2013 23:52
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It's interesting from those posts that a lot of people have taken the meaning 'ugly people on a beautiful planet' from Blood Meridian, where I've always read it as hideous people formed by a hideous landscape. The passages describing the landscape are long and extremely eloquent, but the language they use isn't beautiful. Suns are boiling. Icicles glisten red like blood. Hail falls like arcane eggs (or possibly stones of a dried river bed are like arcane eggs, I can't quite recall). Most of these gruelling and harrowing passages through which the kid or the gang persevere are followed by tremendous acts of violence; inspired by or indeed the landscape manifested. This need for violence is inherent in the land and the judge is obsessed with breaking things down and cataloguing it, whether in rocks or in animals or in man - each are simply an equal facet of a chaotic and cruel world.
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Aug 13, 2013 15:12
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Popular Human posted:I'm sorry to quote a post from so far back in the thread, but I just finished Suttree today (HELL of a good book btw) and when did Harrogate die? I even went back and checked, the last chapter with that character in it he gets busted for the stealing from the phones and winds up in prison, but I don't remember any mention of him dying. Am I just the most unobservant reader ever? I think the poster you quoted messed up - I don't remember him dying either and am pretty sure he didn't. Also, speaking of Blood Meridian, I've finally gotten around to getting into it and halfway through it's very good, classic McCarthy. I'm not done and prefer to reserve judgment until I am, but I think I prefer the style of Suttree and am surprised at how readable BM is after reading everyone's reviews calling it McCarthy's life work and grand opus and all that. That being said it's still miles above everything else I've been reading in terms of style. I love McCarthy's works because they are so readable and yet fulfilling, I can knock out fifty pages without adjusting my rear end and know that I've consumed something of utmost quality. It should be a rule that when you review or mid-review something of McCarthy's you must provide a line from the work to show what a goddamn master the man is. Here's a random sentence: Blood Meridian posted:It was the remains of the scalps taken on the Nacazari and they had been burned unredeemed in a green and stinking bonfire so that nothing remained of the poblanos save this charred coagulate of their preterite lives. It seems a common thing in this book for McCarthy to tell you there is nothing else going on except what he's telling you and what he's telling you is just some horrible poo poo that has to be said.
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Aug 13, 2013 16:33
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It is easier to deal with the Judge when you realise that he can be defeated. Just not permanently. And insofar as he represents man's capacity for evil or drive for conquest or whatever we shouldn't expect to be able to. The Judge is 'defeated' in Blood Meridian in chapter XXI, when he searches for the Kid in the desert but can't find him and eventually moves on. And in that sequence the Judge makes what appears to me to be a concrete mistake, and the only one I can think of in the book. To encourage the Kid to come out, he says that the Kid would not hide and the Priest put him up to it, when earlier that chapter we saw just the opposite - the Kid persuaded the Priest to hide, and the Priest even suggested to fight the Judge despite their disadvantage. Instead the Kid renounces violence and escapes the Judge. He dies eventually, but everyone does. Since the Judge is previously seen wanting to know things and then destroy them, this suggests that ultimately he was unable to know the Kid and destroy him at the time of his choosing. At least that's how I read that section. When I first read it I was surprised that the Judge then appeared again because I read that part as his defeat, but if the Judge is an indelible aspect of humanity or the world it makes sense. He cannot be destroyed and what has been done cannot be undone, but he's not omnipotent or omniscient.
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Aug 13, 2013 22:26
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However he is both utterly ruthless and, more unusually, terribly, terribly patient. That patience is pretty scary. He waits like 15 years to get the kid. No normal person would wait that long. It really goes to his single-mindedness. It reminds me of somethign I read about about psychopath children, where they're capable of waiting unusually long periods of time to exact revenge on those they think have wronged them - far longer than you would expect a normal child of that age to be able to plan and pursue goals. Though I don't want to dwell too much on the psychiatric aspect because I think it distracts from the more important mythic and symbolic side of the character. I'd heard the argument from someone (before reading it) that the book sets up some slight parallels to Moby-Dick, and while your first guess when you hear this is to guess that the giant, pale, hairless man might seem like the whale, by the end of the book he seems to share a lot more with Ahab. He seems to see the existence of some inner morality in the kid as a sort of personal slight. Or maybe it's revenge for having escaped earlier. Or maybe it's just unfinished business to him. Hard to say. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 04:22
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This is a crosspost I posted in the fan theory thread almost a year ago now. I typed it up drunk at the time, but proofread it and posted it while sober the next day since it wasn't too offensively stupid. I'm about to do what I hope is a tradition of annual re-reads for Blood Meridian so I'll keep a close eye on it while I'm doing it. Frostwerks posted:Judge Holden in Blood Meridian is not a satanic representation although he's definitely made to appear as so and is even referred to frequently as such. He's God Almighty, though not in an explicitly Christian since. He passes judgement on men, records all things under heaven in his book and damns the memory of the ill suited by effacing the external records of their existence so that he alone commands their history. He is possessed by the ordering of things and his mastery over all of them and has come to earth to personally lead a Titanomachy against the primal elemental gods that predate him by annihilating the superstitious adherents that gave them names and in doing so has pursued them to land's last end in the west where they are forced to a futile stand against the encroaching night of their existence. e: I'm about halfway through Suttree now, but what is the check game with the pills and pill bottle that is being played at Comer's on 235? Frostwerks fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 08:27
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Cream_Filling posted:However he is both utterly ruthless and, more unusually, terribly, terribly patient. That patience is pretty scary. He waits like 15 years to get the kid. No normal person would wait that long. It really goes to his single-mindedness. It reminds me of somethign I read about about psychopath children, where they're capable of waiting unusually long periods of time to exact revenge on those they think have wronged them - far longer than you would expect a normal child of that age to be able to plan and pursue goals. Though I don't want to dwell too much on the psychiatric aspect because I think it distracts from the more important mythic and symbolic side of the character. The way I read the interchange between this passage and the one Peel posts about is that the Kid defeats the Judge precisely through his rejection of violence, in refusing to fight and kill the Judge . Note that the Kid disappears from the book during the Glanton atrocities. We know he's with them, but he's never referred to or mentioned. Then, on the dispersal of the the gang, his attitude towards violence appears to have changed from the beginning of the book. What happens between that instance and the next encounter with the Judge is, among other things when he reluctantly kills the kid the in the desert after which I believe he is called The Man I think the idea is that he has now exposed himself to the Judge's power again. Not sure I need to spoiler this stuff, but the other people did so....
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Aug 14, 2013 13:14
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^ I wouldn't say he was very reluctant to kill the kid. He told the kid and his friends "If I see him again I'll shoot him." And the kid took a shot at him with his rifle. After the missed shot The Man says something like "You wouldn't have lived either way."
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Aug 17, 2013 18:57
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Fun Times! posted:^ I wouldn't say he was very reluctant to kill the kid. He told the kid and his friends "If I see him again I'll shoot him." And the kid took a shot at him with his rifle. After the missed shot The Man says something like "You wouldn't have lived either way." He didn't say that to his friends to threaten them, he meant it for boy alone after he antagonized him and insinuated that he was a liar about the scapular of ears and a coward who shot people in their sleep. After that ultimatum the kid crept back into the camp after the fire died with his rifle but the man had moved away to sleep in hiding and got shot from the darkness. The man did gave him several opportunities to quit his poo poo and, while it's not explicitly stated in the text, I wouldn't be surprised if he fired second; after the boy did. Had the boy not fired, he might have given him yet another shot  at keeping his life. Blood Meridian posted:"I know'd you'd be hid out," the boy called. He pushed back the blanket and rolled onto his stomach and cocked the pistol and leveled it at the sky where the clustered stars were burning for eternity. He centered the foresight in the milled groove of the frame strap and holding the piece so he swung it through the dark of the trees with both hands to the darker shape of the visitor. "I'm right here," he said. The boy swung with the rifle and fired. "You wouldn't have lived anyway," the man said.
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Aug 17, 2013 21:10
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The text does explicitly state that The Man fires after the boy. In the part you quoted, The Man has a pistol and the boy has a rifle. "The boy swung with the rifle and fired." After that the kid's dead because The Man shoots him with his pistol. The Man shot second! My original point was that The Man was not reluctant in killing the boy. Someone was making a point that The Man "gives in" to the power of the judge in killing the boy or whatever, but I'm of the opinion that The Man was just acting on his own without any symbolic ties to the judge. From the time the kid left home in the beginning of the novel and gets shot a few times Cormac writes that the kid was finally divested of all that previously made him, or whatever. Fun Times! fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Aug 18, 2013 |
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Aug 18, 2013 17:43
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Did you get the feeling that the boy was the one mentioned in the Judge's story set in the wilderness of the Alleghenies? Or maybe just alluded to? Or does it even matter? There were probably plenty of orphaned youth left to fend for themselves and even if he played no part in the Judge's story, he certainly played an important ancillary role in McCarthy's. e: Which makes me wonder if there's any meta-text analysis of blood meridian
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Aug 18, 2013 18:27
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Ed Tom's dialogues at the beginning of chapters in No Country are beautiful. I've reread that book five times just to read those.
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Aug 19, 2013 03:30
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The only McCarthy book I've ever read was All the Pretty Horses and I hated it. While I enjoyed the overall themes of the novel, I felt that the only good part of the book was the middle. There are a lot of thought provoking elements in the middle, particularly with Alejandra's grandmother and the guilt Grady felt over killing the man in the prison camp. But I couldn't stand the beginning or ending of the book. I felt most of it was just description of wilderness and travel, and while McCarthy's prose is wonderful a times, it gets boring just reading about characters going from Point A to Point B, with nothing interesting happening (narratively and thematically) in between. I'm probably weird for having a problem with this, but I hated how he included Spanish in some parts of the book. I don't always read in a place with easy access to a translator, so it was frustrating when Spanish appeared and I couldn't entirely understand what was going on. Most of the time it was easy to infer from context, but not always. And I know why he omitted quotation marks and traditional methods of writing dialogue, but I found it incredibly frustrating a couple times. Particularly, a scene with Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins, all using third-person pronouns. I had no Idea what happened during the scene at all because I just had no idea who was talking. Furthermore, I found it tough to understand many of the intense-horse parts of the novel, as it was full of technical equestrian terms that I didn't know, so I had no idea what exactly Grady was doing when he was training the horses, it was basically technobabble to me. Finally, I refuse to accept the idea that horses are these perfect examples of nature and are just so much better than us evil humans. Why specifically horses? Is it because they don't have the intellectual capacity to be evil like humans do? Couldn't that be said of all animals? I like bleak writing that exposes evils of society and human nature, but I hated how it help up horses as paragons of purity. Does this make me some horrible moron with the worst opinions?
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Aug 28, 2013 01:46
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Not an Owl posted:I'm probably weird for having a problem with this, but I hated how he included Spanish in some parts of the book. I don't always read in a place with easy access to a translator, so it was frustrating when Spanish appeared and I couldn't entirely understand what was going on. Most of the time it was easy to infer from context, but not always. Furthermore, I found it tough to understand many of the intense-horse parts of the novel, as it was full of technical equestrian terms that I didn't know, so I had no idea what exactly Grady was doing when he was training the horses, it was basically technobabble to me. Finally, I refuse to accept the idea that horses are these perfect examples of nature and are just so much better than us evil humans. Why specifically horses? Is it because they don't have the intellectual capacity to be evil like humans do? Couldn't that be said of all animals? I like bleak writing that exposes evils of society and human nature, but I hated how it help up horses as paragons of purity. I don't really know how to say this without coming off as rude, but in the most diplomatic terms possible, I think maybe you just came into this with the expectation that books should be... undemanding? There are definitely sentences in McCarthy's works that cannot be ingested on one read through- either grammatically or thematically. It's symptomatic of his larger ethos which is to not make his books effortless or breezy (note: your aversion to this does not make you dumb or a bad reader, simply someone who probably came at this with the wrong attitude). Your statement about Spanish sounds eerily close to the complaints people have about Spanish signage in the United States- as in it's your right to understand the story on your terms, not on the author's/character's/anyone else's. As for the technical equestrian stuff, it's true that McCarthy gets very technical about certain things like this, and for me that's part of the joy. I've never so much as touched a horse, but I find his passion and knowledge about horses utterly infectious, and I respect them all the more as creatures and icons because of his writing. If he ever refers to something I don't know, looking up in a dictionary/wikipedia is usually a pretty edifying experience for me. Your last point about the "superiority" of horses seems odd and defensive.
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Aug 28, 2013 02:00
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Horses are pretty cool animals. Why would you hate a horse? It's like reading Moby Dick and getting mad at whales. Which I guess does happen from time to time but that's probably because Moby Dick is immense and incredibly dense and a lot of people are sort of forced to read it for school.
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Aug 28, 2013 02:23
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Moby Dick is a favourite novel of mine, but are people seriously made to read it in school? That's terrible. Books like that (Ulysses is my main example, and Blood Meridian is another) can't be forced. You have to approach them on your own initiative. Peel fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Aug 28, 2013 |
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Aug 28, 2013 02:31
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Peel posted:Moby Dick is a favourite novel of mine, but are people seriously made to read it in school? That's terrible. Well, I guess it depends on when you're forced to read it in school. I'd love to take a graduate class on any of those books (in fact, I've pretty much written off reading Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake because they seem to be books that can only be appreciated when you've got a great teacher to guide you- or keep you from giving up).
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Aug 28, 2013 02:58
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