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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?
"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 Tarantin…
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.
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.
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 mo…
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 recommend…
If the revisionist Western appeals to you, I'd also recommend Oakley Hall's Warlock.
> 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.
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> 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 t…
Where can I read more about your research? Knowledge graphs interest me.
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.
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. Corm…
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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…
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.
> 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 t…
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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.