BLOOD MERIDIAN

Corman McCarthy, American novelist

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness In The West, is a brutal novel that traces the journeys of a band of marauding scalp-hunters in the Old West who viciously murder Indians and Mexicans, armed and unarmed alike. The book is a dark masterpiece and a meditation on violence and the American psyche that owes much to Melville and Faulkner, as well as the King James Bible and Paradise Lost. McCarthy has written a number of excellent books, including the Border trilogy (which includes the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses), and his most recent novel The Road is being made into a film, but he is probably best known to the general public as the writer of the book that became the Coen Brothers' film No Country for Old Men, which won four Oscars including Best Picture of the Year (2007).


Wheezing literary eminence Harold Bloom (pictured here guarding the canon) hailed Blood Meridian as one of the best books of the last century and placed it firmly in the Western canon, as well as his own "canon of the American Sublime." Bloom spoke recently to AV Club:

"I went straight through it and was exhilarated. I said, 'My God! This reminds me of Thomas Pynchon at his best, or Nathanael West.' It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In fact, I taught it for several years...I don’t think McCarthy will ever match it, but still… He has attained genius with that book."

Read the entire Harold Bloom interview here.


Professor Amy Hungerford teaches The American Novel Since 1945 at Yale, and she devoted two lectures in the course to Blood Meridian. This is the first lecture, and the second can be found here:


In a rare interview, the reclusive McCarthy speaks with Oprah. Perhaps not as insightful an interviewer as one would hope, her teatime chat at the Santa Fe Institute will give you some idea of McCarthy the man--and surprisingly enough he does not carry a six-shooter or wear a scapular of dried human ears. In fact, he seems like a perfectly pleasant gentleman--but looks can deceive.

The latest film based on McCarthy's work, The Road, is a harrowing post-apocalyptic story about a father and son (played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) traveling through a burnt out wasteland in search of safety while evading predators. The film will be released October 16th.

Read a great on-set story from the New York Times here.

THE WRITER'S JOURNEY

Pow! Crunch! Attention spans shrink to the small end of nothing, and the flash-bang memory burn of the cinema and the flatscreen makes reading an exceptional feat of concentration (too slow! too many distractions!) and we wonder if literature is dead or dying, or struggling in intensive care with a morphine drip. More and more we want sparkly things, flashy things, like jangling car-keys before the eyes of an infant. Reading is still and slow and silent. We want comic book superheroes in Dolby surround sound!

People still read, of course, and scholars continue to debate gnat-size points of narrative theory and structure and so on, so books are safe from the dustbin for a while, but they seem more like artifacts from another time, and we fear literature has lost the power to body-slam the culture, grab our lapels, challenge our calcified views, make us weep over poor Nell. I don't want to sound cynical and elitist to boot, but I bet there are more people who saw "Iron Man" this weekend than all the people who have read all these books put together... Oh, skip that. Anyway, here are some writers. Since this will be a regular feature, I won't lament those I haven't included, or the fact that these writers all happen to be male, and white. We'll get to others.

Ken Kesey. This Oregonian had some misfires, sure, but he delivered at least one classic -- the story of a lone individual who fights the Combine. Not your typical writer, whatever that means, this former wrestling champ and Merry Prankster painted the first psychedelic school bus and hit the road with Neal Cassidy, the man who inspired Kerouac to write "On The Road." Here is a news magazine story on Kesey and his post-lit life in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. Kesey wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion."


Cormac McCarthy. An ornery old coot who writes dark neo-westerns in sometimes spare, sometime ornate language. Without him, no "Deadwood." Part of a rare interview with McCarthy (interviewed poorly by Oprah). McCarthy is known for the Border Trilogy, "Blood Meridian," and "The Road" -- and "No Country for Old Men."


Jonathan Lethem often returns to his Brooklyn childhood in his work, and his love of music permeates his writing. Here he discusses his latest book, "You Don't Love Me Yet." Lethem also wrote "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude."


Jonathan Franzen on Charlie Rose. Writing novels is useless..." More famous for fighting Oprah (Oprah again) for not wanting to have Oprah book club stickers on his novel "The Corrections," a novel exploring relationships in a contemporary American family that owes much to Victorian novels. "The Corrections" won the National Book Award.

OSCAR MEET DIABLO

Diablo Cody won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Juno, a witty little movie and my favorite coming of age/teen pregnancy film of the year. You know, cool soundtrack, sassy dialog -- snarky with a heart. The story behind the story is Diablo Cody's meteoric rise from stripper and phone sex partner to Oscar winner, and sure she's sexy, but she's also whip-smart, and wrote a screenplay that didn't follow the tired old formulas that insist on a bump every ten minutes, and "plot points" that you can set your watch to. I got a kick watching this quirky oddball in a leopard skin mu-mu snake her way through the gowns and opulence of Hollywood and grab the gold. Or brass, or whatever it is.

This interview is a year old, when she was flogging "Candy Girl," a book she'd written about her experiences "stripping for Joe Sixpack," as she puts it. The other screenwriting award went to the Coen Brothers for their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," which also won an Oscar for Best Picture. If you haven't read McCarthy, read the Border Trilogy (starting with "All The Pretty Horses") or dive in to the darkly brilliant "Blood Meridian."