Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
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Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
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Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#2A book I have never read and never will.
(I watched the Wendigoon 5 hour review of it so I know the plot though)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu6STuj4njw
edit: Downvotes? I will never watch A Serbian Film either, are you going to downvote me for that too?
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#3Great article. Thanks for sharing. I can stomach stories of what happened between Germany and Russia in lands between them in WW2, so I can probably handle the violence in this. It does sound gruesome.
I'm not surprised his fiction is history because he really didn't have to embellish anything, just see it accurately.
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#4> McCarthy shares none of these inclinations. His characters ride aimlessly through the desert and kill for what seems like no reason at all. Blood Meridian is a book that reflects a particular moment in history, but his characters have no sense of that history, are otherwise immune to time, and seem oblivious to the forces ordering their world.
This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty, where the forces of evil are literally superhumanly powerful (like the judge) and nihilistic misanthropy is the only sensible philosophy.
But, in the novel's defense, I grew up after the myth of the west was dead. I have only ever thought the frontier was a miserable, lawless place full of bandits. So perhaps if the novel's goal was to 'bust the western myth', that's why it failed to engage me in any way except utter disgust.
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#5> McCarthy shares none of these inclinations. His characters ride aimlessly through the desert and kill for what seems like no reason at all. Blood Meridian is a book that reflects a particular moment in history, but his characters have no sense of that history, are otherwise immune to time, and seem oblivious to the forces ordering their world. This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like point…
Try the books from the Border Trilogy or Suttree. They're very different to Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men.
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#6> McCarthy shares none of these inclinations. His characters ride aimlessly through the desert and kill for what seems like no reason at all. Blood Meridian is a book that reflects a particular moment in history, but his characters have no sense of that history, are otherwise immune to time, and seem oblivious to the forces ordering their world. This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like point…
Have you read _All the Pretty Horses_?
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#7> McCarthy shares none of these inclinations. His characters ride aimlessly through the desert and kill for what seems like no reason at all. Blood Meridian is a book that reflects a particular moment in history, but his characters have no sense of that history, are otherwise immune to time, and seem oblivious to the forces ordering their world. This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like point…
There is a strong philosophical message in the works of McCarthy, but it's not explicit, you have to synthesize it. If you read his best works being totally oblivious to what he's really saying, then they'll feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty.
Blood Meridian is perhaps the easiest of his works to understand in that regard, since he's as far from deliberate occultation as he can possibly be. The philosophy in that book reaches out and punches you in the face.
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#8The Road was the most horrifying movie I've ever watched, thanks to having kids.
Being unable to protect your children like in that movie hit all my primitive parental fears.
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#9A book I have never read and never will. (I watched the Wendigoon 5 hour review of it so I know the plot though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu6STuj4njw edit: Downvotes? I will never watch A Serbian Film either, are you going to downvote me for that too?
Everybody talks about the violence in BM but that's not its point. It's not an exploitation story designed to shock for the sheer fun of shocking.
To me it's a beautifully-written poetic exploration of a world without evil. For evil to exist there must be something else to compare it to. And there's nothing else in BM. It's just a mundane world of unceasing animal violence reduced to the quotidian. I imagine the inhabitants of WW II concentration camps might recognize such a world.
A world without evil is a much scarier place than one where the concept of evil needs to exist in order to contrast it with something else.
Re: Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
#10> McCarthy shares none of these inclinations. His characters ride aimlessly through the desert and kill for what seems like no reason at all. Blood Meridian is a book that reflects a particular moment in history, but his characters have no sense of that history, are otherwise immune to time, and seem oblivious to the forces ordering their world. This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like point…
This book made a lot more sense to me when it was explained as a Gnostic fable and the Judge as the Archon.