RIP Cormac McCarthy, again

I can’t believe it’s been two years since the Great One died. Time flies when you’re a miserable sack of shit. And there’s been a lot that has come out about McCarthy’s personal life in the time since. Honestly, there’s nothing too surprising about these revelations. He was a voracious reader, which stands to reason. A book hoarder. AND he carried out a “relationship” with an underaged girl back in the 70s while he himself was in his 40s. So in other words, Cormac McCarthy was a dirtbag. There’s no skating around it.

But I give little shit about his personal life. The only thing I mourn is the that there will be no more McCarthy novels. Because my fundamental assertion stands: he was the greatest American writer of all time. And I might go a step further. It’s possible that he’s the greatest writer of English literature. Initially what annoyed me with his obituaries was the constant citing of No Country for Old Men and The Road as his most known books when obviously his greatest work is Blood Meridian. And I stand by that. But that’s my assertion from a critical and historical perspective. It’s not my personal favorite of his.

Blood Meridian, his fifth book, was a turning point in McCarthy’s career when he shifted from the “southern gothic” genre into the western. And I’m gonna be honest with you: I prefer the earlier work. Not to say that I don’t appreciate the westerns. Every work from McCarthy is a treasure. Blood Meridian is obviously a masterpiece. Some of his finest prose can be found in the Border Trilogy starting with All The Pretty Horses. In fact, many McCarthy heads will call the second in the trilogy, The Crossing, his best work. And I say that the conclusion to Cities on the Plain is the most moving. But as a personal preference, my two favorite of McCarthy’s are his third and fourth books: Child of God and Suttree respectively.

Next to his first book, The Orchard Keeper, Child of God might be his least appreciated work. I don’t know if it’s due to it being centered on the heinous acts of a serial killer or what. Next to Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, it might be McCarthy’s most nihilistic novel. But I think it’s McCarthy at his most stripped down and it sets up many of the themes that we’d find in his later work, notably No Country for Old Men. After Child of God, he followed it up with his most personal novel, Suttree, which along with his last books The Passenger/Stella Maris, might be the biggest outlier.

In the two years since McCarthy’s passing, Blood Meridian has been recognized as one of the great American novels. In fact, his Reddit board is now mostly artistic renderings of the novel’s antagonist, Judge Holden. So in short, Blood Meridian has entered the zeitgeist. But I want to make it clear, although Child of God and Suttree are my personal favorites, it could be argued that any one of McCarthy’s books is the greatest American novel.

RIP Cormac McCarthy

The three artists that have influenced me the most are comedian Nick Mullen and authors Charles Bukowski and Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy is an outlier compared to those other two. Other than our penchant for nihilism, we really don’t have any overlapping sensibilities. So I don’t try to emulate him. No one can.

But what inspired me about his writing is the way how he elevated the medium. McCarthy didn’t give a shit about correct grammar or punctuation. Some of his novels have entire conversations in Spanish and he doesn’t care to translate them into English or explain what they were about. He sometimes went into minute details over mundane actions that had no real consequence to the story. Nevertheless, you were completely engaged in this dark world of McCarthy’s creation.

While the obituaries since his death have cited No Country For Old Men and The Road as his most famous works, in my opinion (and really, the opinion of those in the know) his finest novel is Blood Meridian. I’ll go a step further and say that it might be the greatest American novel ever written. McCarthy’s vision of the Old West was dark and violent because the spilling of blood was the only language that land understood. Yet more importantly, never had violence been portrayed more poetically.

It’s unfortunate that it takes death for us to realize this, but hopefully now Cormac McCarthy will be recognized as one of the greatest writers of all time.

Things n such

I’m gonna keep saying this until the internet listens: stop trying to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian into a movie.

But if Hollywood is hellbent on doing so, my instructions above is how you do it.

I actually agree with McCarthy, the novel is not unadaptable. The problem is that Hollywood thinks too big. Last I heard, David Fincher was interested in the project. But I can’t stress this enough: no typical Hollywood director can tackle this material.

Not Ridley Scott. Not Spielberg. Not Tarantino. Not Fincher.

The novel is a nightmarish interpretation of the old west and it needs to be treated as such. You need a director that visually speaks that language. Therefore you need maestro of horror to do the job.