A simple correction in the biography of McCarthy. It was not the hills of Texas that he retreated to when he was young. It was the hills of Tennessee, and he attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for a time. He grew up in Knoxville before he ever went west.
I am grateful to have found your channel. I still remember the impression I had listening to the blood meridian, I did it during a series of afternoons, climbing to the top of a mountain. As I moved away from society and uphill I felt like I was having a mystical experience. It's still in my memory and I hope it never goes away.
Thank you for this. It was useful. I knew nothing of McCarthy when I happened upon 'The Road', which made a big impact, but it was 'Blood Meridian' that caused me to read just about all else he wrote. 'Blood Meridian' ran deep for me, I could put words to it - "mythical", 'arousing the fear of the unknown', a modern 'Iliad' - but these are just labels like a carpet over my feelings, which I lack the intellectual resources to unearth and articulate. You've helped me prepare for my next reading of his stories.
The Sunset Limited was a beautiful exploring of depression and suicidal ideation, even attempt. The contrast between the suicidal character and the relatively poor but happy black man who saves him is novel and impactful. The former has no objective reason to be suicidal, and the latter has no objective reason to be happy and stable. It’s all about perspective, state of mind, and attitude.
"“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” I'm happy every time I read that line.
When talking about Ludwig Wittgenstein it is worth mentioning that his three brothers committed suicide. His depression most likely was genetic by nature
It doesn't make sense for suicidal depression to be genetic, since these genes would have taken themselves out of the gene pool the moment they appeared. It is more likely a combination of environmental factors (heavy metals, "poisoned houses", general pollution, leaded fuels, lack of certain nutrients etc) combined with some genetic component of reduced antioxidant capacity that wasn't obvious until the environment started changing after the industrial revolution.
Wittgenstein’s personality was what we’d call extreme today. Brilliant, intense, anxious, suffering from depression, and at times manic. The little I’ve learned of his upbringing, it’s no wonder. A fabulously wealthy and cultured Viennese family with extremely lofty expectations of their children, and a very strained household atmosphere. A family friend described the behavior in the household as akin to being “at court.” And not the legal kind.
What is really fascinating, @pjmlegrande, is that your comment is the forth message about Wittgenstein's I received in four days !: - on Saturday I talked with another 50+ year old karate student. It turns out that he is a philosophy professor and his area of expertise is Wittgenstein - On Sunday I was walking past a bookstore and immediately I saw a book in a window called "Wittgenstein as an architect " - Two days I talked with another karate student and it turned that he is an architect - and now your comment. Carl Jung would call these sequence of events "synchronicity"
I'm reminded of Joseph Conrad's quote from Heart of Darkness: " Droll thing, life is; that mysterious arrangement of a merciless logic for a futile purpose; the most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late, a crop of inextinguishable regrets." Cormac (Mac Airt) was High King of Ireland and said to be "absolutely the best king that ever reigned in Ireland before himself...wise learned, valiant and mild, not given causelessly to be bloody as many of his ancestors were, he reigned majestically and magnificently". Exceptional video. well done.
I really loved how you threaded the concepts and with the depth of his words. Much appreciated. The dark beauty he captures in his characters moves me. And the simplest moments of gratitude in the day to day exchanges. Fresh eyes to read. Thank you.
Wow, what a gem of a video! Thank you very much. So much food for thought. Especially the part starting at 31:35. I just discovered you and hope more people will. Keep it up!
Very few commentators mention his style which got me from the start. A master of the English language,poetic prose. Amazing. Loved to hear more about his approach to style. Hemingway’s sparse ‘journalistic’ style such a contrast.Thank you.
It must have taken you a while to put this together-Good job. I've read all his works many times over and will continue to re-read them as I get older because many elements of philosophy are interspersed and elucidated in subtle ways best transported through a fiction narrative.
Having read most, but not all of McCathy’s novels, a few of them several times, I found Mr. Gast’s analysis riveting and insightful. He pulled out the recurring themes that I realize take me back to them over & over for their resonance to my own experience. Thanks Mr. Gast.
The above was a very good exposition. Certainly better than the last few videos on McCarthy that I viewed here on youtube. I'm very poor at literary analysis so your ideas were very helpful. I would also very much like to know the background of the photo 26 seconds into the video. Holden, "the judge" in "Blood Meridian" is one of the most haunting characters of any work in fiction and the man standing in the background of that old black and white photo could easily have been him if not for what seems like a lack of any malice in his countenance. But then, demons often have angelic faces.
Just read my first McCarthy novel, Suttree. Great novel, very rich, parts of which went right over my head, but nevertheless a book I plowed through in satisfying ways. Pretty grim book -- not sure I saw the humor that others have found in it. But thanks for a great discussion. I’ll be listening to more. Upon finishing it, I agreed with Suttree’s (McCarthy’s) father. Suttree’s very escape to freedom in the netherworlds of Knoxville was made possible by those same people and their life choices that his father applauds and his son seems to disdain. Each diner that McCarthy loves was built with a loan from a banker who shows up every day at his office. Architects, engineers, construction workers, cops, city public works and maintenance workers, street pavers, cooks, waitresses - they all made that diner possible as a place for you to find your romantic community and freedom. They did so by showing up to work every day. Without them, we'd all be living in mudhuts. So leave the workaday world, if that’s what you feel you need to do, but let’s not get romantic about the choice.
"Though much is taken, much abides..." - Tennyson. His goneness is merely physical. His art is here, not gone. His ideas are very ungone. I only hope his enduring presence will forgive my use of quotation marks.
Fantastic analysis of an incredible novelist. The Road is one of my favourites, hauntingly sparse in style, just like the world he describes. No Country for Old Men is another of my favourites, and the film adaptation is true to the novel.
Well. You got my follow. I'll watch the rest now and hope you make more. You remind me of the channel called "Like Stories Of Old." That's a better compliment than maybe you know yet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if All the Pretty Horses was the book that finally brought him more mainstream attention at least partially because of the deceptively cute-sounding title.
Helpful…Thank You You did not try to provide too many answers, but pondered some questions and possibilities - no wonder he did not do interviews, for in the end, when it comes to the unconscious, there really are few answers in the long run - it does not speak - I wonder if our unconscious is God?
cogent review... the stark descriptions of visuals (i.e. BM) stand as minimalism tainted with ideas from antiquity akin to Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars of intense conflict and human suffering that (on surface) lacks redemption... Suttree echoes a "refusal of the call" by visiting myriad side portals of experience--- its overt refusal of individuation ultimately (in a non-linear way) succumbs to that which it tries to avoid---maturation and redemption...
So serious Conrad Melville Faulkner the Russians Thomas Hardy softened with women the Brontë sisters Dickens with children Hemingway with lovers John Locke with enduring beauty Steinbeck with humanity But Shakespeare did all of this plus repeat plus humor
Shakespeare's humour was bad. But yes, he did do a lot. The thing about Shakespeare is that he did not have real characters, they were more archetypes, albeit intelligently written archetypes. Although, McCarthy's characters were cartoons of course - Steinbeck was the writer McCarthy would be like if he was a great American novelist. Melville had great and well realised characters and brought fiction into a different level entirely than anything that had come before. He also had better humour than Shakespeare. The modernist playwrights like O'Neill had the most sophisticated characters and drama in plays. Betty Smith's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is probably the greatest character study in published fiction after Moby Dick.
Absolutely, Jim outshines Cormac McCarthy at times. McCarthy is a genius there is no doubt (thank God for the thesaurus). Do you have a favorite of James Lee Burke?
How the hell is Pynchon a great writer? His work is horrendously bad. Even McCarthy was not a great writer but a decent bit better than Pynchon. It's sad how people could claim such nonsense with a straight face. Literacy is dead.
@@NathanLucas5 No, that's the thing. I actually can read and think for myself. That's WHY I say he's bad. YOU can't, you just want to be popular in pretentious lit circles. Pynchon's writing has no music, it's juvenile, it's painfully unfunny, is drenched in cliches. He has no clue how to develop characters, all of them are 1 dimensional stick figures, and his plots are inane. There's no poesy, it's just masturbatory BS and most people are aware of this outside of Pynchon's cult. People like the mystery around him and think his work is this cypher with hidden meanings. Which is how a lot of bad lit is sold these days.
@@TheCompositeKing amazing, you managed to write a critique of Pynchon that accuses him of doing things he didn't do, and accuses him of failing to do things he did. Like, I get if it's not your cup of tea, that's cool, different strokes for different folks. But to try and say he's terrible is just laughable and you should genuinely be ashamed for such a trash tier take my dude
I offer instead an alternative biographical interpretation of “Cormac” (who can blame him I suppose for not wanting to be known as “Charlie McCarthy”, during an era where that name was UNIVERSALLY associated with a famous ventriloquist’s dummy of the same name who’s character was that of a pretentious juvenile flirt. Actually … kind of a mirror of Cormac’s own pompous adoption of some alleged pure Irish aristocracy of blood that the name “Cormac” was supposed to represent. McCarthy is the classic upper middle class nihilist who both refuses to grow up and adopt his parents bourgeois values and contribute something positive to society, but chooses instead to live like a bum, but the pretentious intellectual prince of the bums, because even while he rejects his parents bourgeois lifestyle, he can never quite bring himself either to identify with or completely associate with the destitute or the working class people either and adopt their lifestyle going forward, and fully embrace those who HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LIVE THAT WAY (McCarthy’s solidarity misanthropic and anti-social lifestyle he made clear frequently was ALWAYS BY CHOICE. It seems it suited his art of course, but his pompous “simplicity” was always lived so as to avoid the responsibilities of the class his intellect was borrowed from, while he used that same intellect to live a life above and apart from those powerless people that were the basis of his lower class characters that he looked upon so ironically and unsympathetically as beneath him for being consumed in their actual lives by daily issues of no historical consequence… for only he could see the greater, almost mythic significance their sick twisted lower class actually represented in the story of US exceptionalism as he saw it. The truth is his father was an upper middle class lawyer and immigrants and sees the progressive movement that seeks to empower laboring people as somehow beneath him and “phony” but also representing of some great loss of the purity of a bygone era of the “common rugged individual man” when technology, politics, civilization and bureaucracy weren’t employed to settle people’s differences, but rather, direct violent confrontation was used for its alleged “purifying” and cleansing effect that settles things via direct confrontation. Such bourgeois fascist-adjacent romantic nonsense! And McCarthy couldn’t seem to bring himself either to fully embrace the values of the ruling class and side with the growing new conservative movement either and their aristocracy of wealth. A self-imposed misanthropic nihilist. And he wasn’t the first of course. Many writers had been suspicious of the the progressive claims of the improvability of man in previous generations. Dostoevsky was one, for his time and place. Mirabeau in the early 20th century in the leadup to WWI, and Huysman (“Agaisnt Nature) both in French and Joseph Conrad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in English. Disillusioned middle class writers turning to nihilism is nothing new. And McCarthy also shows he distrusts civilization, and regards it merely as something that delays what he sees as the inevitable violent confrontation to come and the purging of these ugly emotions which he seems pessimistically to believe are forever part of human nature and cannot be grown out of through compromise, discussion and mutual respect. We’re truly better off with him gone. Read the books. Understand the danger his and allure of his eloquence represents. Warn everyone who’ll listen about what I’ve just told you. McCarthy is a dangerous last sample of a dying generation that we are better off without in an era when the violence he portrays as politically purifying can now bring about the destruction of cities and countries. He is himself I suspect a psychically damaged self-loathing member of the mid-20th century American bourgeoisie … a singularly PRIVILEGED GENERATION OF PEOPLE … and he seeks to encourage the violent confrontation between the past and the future as a means of achieving resolution of some sort. He’s a pessimistic misanthrope whose beautiful sentences while intoxicating carry with them a poisoned message to the middle class who seem to love him so much. Fear the future he says. Mythologize a past that might not even have existed as I depict it. Embrace the violent palingenesis and do the work of the invisible ruling class, in the false sick belief that the “inferior” races and peoples can still be swept away at the cultural interfaces as a means of taking one’s “rightful” place as the new heirs to the ruling class as the sick and decrepit of the preceding generations die away under the weight of their own lassitude, inactivity and decadence. He was the most dangerous kind of nihilist of all … the post-modern nihilst. He wove a tapestry of violence depicting acts of such cruelty and transgressions of all manner of American morals, but as the very means by which the present we live in was created. And he would seem to imply the existence of this present moment is reason enough to seek to continue the methods by which we got here, as long as we employ the purified versions of them, unsullied by progressive ideals that foolishly seek to “improve” people by some plan that is not entirely seeking pure self interest. The world of his imigination is long gone. And it was a sick, twisted, oppressive, cruel world when it did once exist. If it did once exist. It’s hard to know with McCarthy for he clearly has adopted the post-modern notions, but in a reactionary conservative manner. We’re better off with him gone. Read the books. Understand the danger and allure his stark eloquence represents. He doesn’t build up or encourage understanding or encourage even self-respect of humanity itself. Warn everyone who’ll listen about what I’ve just told you. But we have lost nothing of lasting value with his passing other than to mark the fact he represented an epitome of a demented trope; the reactionary post-modernist.
I offer for consideration a provocative thesis. The world has lost nothing of lasting value with the passing of Cormac McCarthy. He represents the death of a rare but dangerous, seductive and destructive literary type; the nihilistic post-modernist reactionary.
Good lord, what a horrible, headache-inducing comment. your version of mccarthy is such a parody of the real writer that it honestly saddens me to imagine you might have read some of his work and taken this away from it. it's like you saw his vision and it scared you so much that you had to strawman it to hell and back in order to feel free of it, and then you had to go out of your way to find people who disagree with you so you could lecture them about it. And i say that as someone who isn't particularly infatuated with McCarthy's vision of life (and what little can be gleaned without doubt of his politics from his work). It's literature, bro. It doesn't need to be THE truth. It just has to be a powerful enough vision of A truth to illustrate some aspect of human life. McCarthy captures a certain element of human life excellently: its brutality, its savage creative and destructive energy, and its capacity for seeing beauty in nature and in work, whether that work be creative or destructive. This is only dangerous if you have the laughable worry that postmodern novels are liable to convince anyone to treat them like the Bible.
I love the books of Hemingway, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver and that class of American writers. However, this video did nothing for me. I must be more stupid than I thought I was because, to be honest, it just sounds like tired pseudo-intellectual, overly self-serious gobbledygook to me. Then again, I could say pretty much the same about the novels of Cormac McCarthy. About as believable as someone pushing a supermarket trolly full of stuff for miles on end down a bumpy road. You should try it (guess who obviously didn't). (Sorry, I'll get me coat.)
The comp to Faulkner is good because both fail in the same way- a good paragraph or 2 and then 20+ pages of a desert of bad tropes and cardboard goonish grotesques. Neither was a great writer.
Only if you let him be. That's kind of sick, actually, because it's like admitting we're not even going to try and see if another great writer can emerge. Tyrannical is what this is. MccArthy was a good writer, but not very wise. Science is not our saviour but our shackle. Man can call anything science, and without literature, all will naively believe it.
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A simple correction in the biography of McCarthy. It was not the hills of Texas that he retreated to when he was young. It was the hills of Tennessee, and he attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for a time. He grew up in Knoxville before he ever went west.
Yep
Thanks, that was bugging me too. Also, clearly the narrator has never been to Texas. No mountains to be found.
I caught that as well, I was headed to the comments to say it and it was the top comment already.
As there are no mountains in Texas, they kid was in Tn
@@spencerpillay8223lol what utter idiocy. Texas has beaches, swamps, forests, deserts, cities, and, yes, many mountains.
I am grateful to have found your channel. I still remember the impression I had listening to the blood meridian, I did it during a series of afternoons, climbing to the top of a mountain. As I moved away from society and uphill I felt like I was having a mystical experience. It's still in my memory and I hope it never goes away.
😂
I had a similar experience listening to The Crossing, narrated by Brad Pitt, while driving across the Mojave Desert. It felt like I was in the story.
Thank you for this. It was useful. I knew nothing of McCarthy when I happened upon 'The Road', which made a big impact, but it was 'Blood Meridian' that caused me to read just about all else he wrote. 'Blood Meridian' ran deep for me, I could put words to it - "mythical", 'arousing the fear of the unknown', a modern 'Iliad' - but these are just labels like a carpet over my feelings, which I lack the intellectual resources to unearth and articulate. You've helped me prepare for my next reading of his stories.
Blood Meridian was like a fever dream, it was fantastic, my favorite of his
The sunset limited has been burnt into my mind for the last fourteen years. I think about it all the time.
The Sunset Limited was a beautiful exploring of depression and suicidal ideation, even attempt. The contrast between the suicidal character and the relatively poor but happy black man who saves him is novel and impactful. The former has no objective reason to be suicidal, and the latter has no objective reason to be happy and stable. It’s all about perspective, state of mind, and attitude.
I think the best compliment I can pay is that this gave me a strong desire to read McCarthy as well as to want to see your other videos.
Very true
Start with Blood Meridian if you can stomach it, but I wouldn't recommend it to many people I know although it is a true masterpiece.
Blood Meridian is a book so good, deep, and historical fiction so real that the Cohen brothers could not bring it to the screen. It must be read.
Apologies. The Coen brothers.
"“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
I'm happy every time I read that line.
I'm curious, which of his books is that from? I can see the Faulkner influence, letting the words flow in a stream of consciousness. Beautiful.
@@gastondeveaux3783 Blood Meridian, funny enough.
When talking about Ludwig Wittgenstein it is worth mentioning that his three brothers committed suicide. His depression most likely was genetic by nature
Genetic engineering is a very complex field
It doesn't make sense for suicidal depression to be genetic, since these genes would have taken themselves out of the gene pool the moment they appeared. It is more likely a combination of environmental factors (heavy metals, "poisoned houses", general pollution, leaded fuels, lack of certain nutrients etc) combined with some genetic component of reduced antioxidant capacity that wasn't obvious until the environment started changing after the industrial revolution.
Wittgenstein’s personality was what we’d call extreme today. Brilliant, intense, anxious, suffering from depression, and at times manic. The little I’ve learned of his upbringing, it’s no wonder. A fabulously wealthy and cultured Viennese family with extremely lofty expectations of their children, and a very strained household atmosphere. A family friend described the behavior in the household as akin to being “at court.” And not the legal kind.
What is really fascinating, @pjmlegrande, is that your comment is the forth message about Wittgenstein's I received in four days !:
- on Saturday I talked with another 50+ year old karate student. It turns out that he is a philosophy professor and his area of expertise is Wittgenstein
- On Sunday I was walking past a bookstore and immediately I saw a book in a window called "Wittgenstein as an architect "
- Two days I talked with another karate student and it turned that he is an architect
- and now your comment.
Carl Jung would call these sequence of events "synchronicity"
@ hmmmm … interesting. I’m determined to penetrate his philosophy some day! If only read secondary sources about it in dumbed down form
I love how you can see Cormac's McCarthy's influence on the writing of this video
I'm reminded of Joseph Conrad's quote from Heart of Darkness: " Droll thing, life is; that mysterious arrangement of a merciless logic for a futile purpose; the most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late, a crop of inextinguishable regrets."
Cormac (Mac Airt) was High King of Ireland and said to be "absolutely the best king that ever reigned in Ireland before himself...wise learned, valiant and mild, not given causelessly to be bloody as many of his ancestors were, he reigned majestically and magnificently".
Exceptional video. well done.
I really loved how you threaded the concepts and with the depth of his words. Much appreciated. The dark beauty he captures in his characters moves me. And the simplest moments of gratitude in the day to day exchanges. Fresh eyes to read. Thank you.
This is one of my favorite videos on RUclips.
Wow, what a gem of a video! Thank you very much.
So much food for thought. Especially the part starting at 31:35.
I just discovered you and hope more people will.
Keep it up!
It's one of the best videos I have had the privilege of viewing and listening to. Now I need to read these books.
Well done!
This is the best video of this sort I’ve ever come across. U should be proud of yourself, and eager to make more! 💯💯💯💯
Very few commentators mention his style which got me from the start. A master of the English language,poetic prose. Amazing. Loved to hear more about his approach to style. Hemingway’s sparse ‘journalistic’ style such a contrast.Thank you.
Your breakdown is fantastic and your insights carry their own poetry. Thank you for this inspired creation…
It must have taken you a while to put this together-Good job. I've read all his works many times over and will continue to re-read them as I get older because many elements of philosophy are interspersed and elucidated in subtle ways best transported through a fiction narrative.
Having read most, but not all of McCathy’s novels, a few of them several times, I found Mr. Gast’s analysis riveting and insightful. He pulled out the recurring themes that I realize take me back to them over & over for their resonance to my own experience. Thanks Mr. Gast.
The above was a very good exposition. Certainly better than the last few videos on McCarthy that I viewed here on youtube. I'm very poor at literary analysis so your ideas were very helpful. I would also very much like to know the background of the photo 26 seconds into the video. Holden, "the judge" in "Blood Meridian" is one of the most haunting characters of any work in fiction and the man standing in the background of that old black and white photo could easily have been him if not for what seems like a lack of any malice in his countenance. But then, demons often have angelic faces.
Cormac was a larger than life figure. You made a good attempt to present him to the larger world. Thanks for your insights!
Brilliant work mate.
I had no idea he passed until NYE when they included him in the in memoriam list. I cried 😭😭
This was excellent. Original and with beautiful quotes and images.
Very well done 👌
Thank you 🙏
Just read my first McCarthy novel, Suttree. Great novel, very rich, parts of which went right over my head, but nevertheless a book I plowed through in satisfying ways. Pretty grim book -- not sure I saw the humor that others have found in it. But thanks for a great discussion. I’ll be listening to more.
Upon finishing it, I agreed with Suttree’s (McCarthy’s) father. Suttree’s very escape to freedom in the netherworlds of Knoxville was made possible by those same people and their life choices that his father applauds and his son seems to disdain.
Each diner that McCarthy loves was built with a loan from a banker who shows up every day at his office. Architects, engineers, construction workers, cops, city public works and maintenance workers, street pavers, cooks, waitresses - they all made that diner possible as a place for you to find your romantic community and freedom. They did so by showing up to work every day.
Without them, we'd all be living in mudhuts.
So leave the workaday world, if that’s what you feel you need to do, but let’s not get romantic about the choice.
Great video, I hope it get more popular
Desert Solitaire is one of my favorites. Didn't Abbey and McCarthy were pals, but it makes sense !
Increble vid. Thank you.
Great vid man. I needed this tonight 🙏
C. M. transfixed me with Blood Meridian. i rode i fought i wondered i survived with him. thank you for the periods of joy and so much more. ❤
"Though much is taken, much abides..." - Tennyson. His goneness is merely physical. His art is here, not gone. His ideas are very ungone. I only hope his enduring presence will forgive my use of quotation marks.
His ability to link the conscious and unconscious is his greatness for sure.
I enjoyed this! Great job
❤simply beautiful i realy enjoyed the video the info the sound the selection .thank you ❤
2:59 Air Force?
3:13 In the Army?
Which is it?
Fantastic analysis of an incredible novelist. The Road is one of my favourites, hauntingly sparse in style, just like the world he describes. No Country for Old Men is another of my favourites, and the film adaptation is true to the novel.
sorry if this is a nitpick, but every time you mention the crossing i have the feeling you mean to be talking about Billy, not Boyd.
McCarthy didn’t mind his wives spending their time working to support him.
Well. You got my follow. I'll watch the rest now and hope you make more. You remind me of the channel called "Like Stories Of Old." That's a better compliment than maybe you know yet.
bump
edit: the biggest question I've fell on lately, having finished up Stella, is, what is the true Archatron? Is it music?
Thank you. Really nicely written. Looks like PHd thesis in English Literature
Wow, great video. 👍
I'm an aspiring screenwriter. I own everything ever published by McCarthy. Hopefully one day I can be as impactful as this man.
Excellent work !! I haven't read any McCarthy but Blood Meridian is there in eyesight
Blood Meridian is from 1985. Rly enjoying the video, thank you
God bless Cormac may he rest in peace.
where are these mountains of texas?
Close to Kentucky. 😂😂
'Why use five words when you can use two hundred?'
Excellent video
Hey this is a freakin good video bro
He was a genius
Blood Meridian came out in 1985, not 1981. Also, all the pretty horses came out in 1992, not 1993
Easy on the ear. Thank you.
Amazing! Thank you 🙏🏻
I wonder if the Oprah interview happened during the time she was fully invested in her Book Club on her show.
He lived in Knoxville and went to the University of Tennessee not Texas. Suttree is literally about people in Knoxville.
You're right. It was Tennessee. Will update
@@sonnygastcan you correct it with a *note on thefilm itself?
Tip: Sonnys narration sounds better on 1.5 speed.
Great video. He really was the greatest. R.I.P. Cormac.
That was amazing!
Tennessee. Not Texas.
Do you watch write conscious? This is fantastic by the way.
Such a funny parable for describing his process. Doesn’t seem like he had any time for academic critique
Thank you.
you make great videos.
I wouldn’t be surprised if All the Pretty Horses was the book that finally brought him more mainstream attention at least partially because of the deceptively cute-sounding title.
It is totally unbelievable Such a Jungian topic but Jung's name was never even mentioned !
Bravo
Helpful…Thank You You did not try to provide too many answers, but pondered some questions and possibilities - no wonder he did not do interviews, for in the end, when it comes to the unconscious, there really are few answers in the long run - it does not speak - I wonder if our unconscious is God?
Now that McCarthy is gone I would argue that Brett Easton Ellis is the greatest living American author.
Depends on how you define greatness, Pynchon, Stephen king has had more of an impact on American culture than most who ever lived….
@@NoNameNo.5 wow just finished gravitys rainbow and forgot Pynchon is still alive!
cogent review... the stark descriptions of visuals (i.e. BM) stand as minimalism tainted with ideas from antiquity akin to Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars of intense conflict and human suffering that (on surface) lacks redemption... Suttree echoes a "refusal of the call" by visiting myriad side portals of experience--- its overt refusal of individuation ultimately (in a non-linear way) succumbs to that which it tries to avoid---maturation and redemption...
His writing is mesmerizing, until it ends in bleak despair. How messed up is that?
I am not sure how you can say "Last Great American Writer" when Thomas Pynchon is still very much alive.
Thomas Pynchon ain't too shabby.
Pynchon is a terrible writer. Why people can't see that is what baffled me.
Blood meridian wasnt published in 1981
25:51 I hate 2024 brain rot because what I heard.
So serious Conrad Melville Faulkner the Russians Thomas Hardy softened with women the Brontë sisters Dickens with children Hemingway with lovers John Locke with enduring beauty Steinbeck with humanity But Shakespeare did all of this plus repeat plus humor
There is a name for this unnecessary Shakespeare worshiping Disease...do you know it?
Shakespeare's humour was bad. But yes, he did do a lot. The thing about Shakespeare is that he did not have real characters, they were more archetypes, albeit intelligently written archetypes. Although, McCarthy's characters were cartoons of course - Steinbeck was the writer McCarthy would be like if he was a great American novelist. Melville had great and well realised characters and brought fiction into a different level entirely than anything that had come before. He also had better humour than Shakespeare. The modernist playwrights like O'Neill had the most sophisticated characters and drama in plays. Betty Smith's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is probably the greatest character study in published fiction after Moby Dick.
Annoying how James Lee Burke is ignored by so many. Every bit as great as Cormac in every way.
Absolutely, Jim outshines Cormac McCarthy at times. McCarthy is a genius there is no doubt (thank God for the thesaurus). Do you have a favorite of James Lee Burke?
I hope Blood Meridian is never filmed, it’s far to vivid in the recess of minds to be slap pasted into some directors digital nightmare
Idk about last greatest. Pynchon could still be alive, delillo is also still alive.
Lore of The Mysterious Mind Of Cormac McCarthy (America's Last Great Writer) momentum 100
Don't need who needs to hear rmthis, but Quinton Tarantino needs to do Blood Meridian.
McCarthy was a silly man in the X-Files.
Air Force or Army?
Air Force
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"last great writer" bestie Pynchon is still around
Pynchon may very well be dead for all we know. XD
How the hell is Pynchon a great writer? His work is horrendously bad. Even McCarthy was not a great writer but a decent bit better than Pynchon. It's sad how people could claim such nonsense with a straight face. Literacy is dead.
@@TheCompositeKing just say you can't read bestie
@@NathanLucas5 No, that's the thing. I actually can read and think for myself. That's WHY I say he's bad. YOU can't, you just want to be popular in pretentious lit circles. Pynchon's writing has no music, it's juvenile, it's painfully unfunny, is drenched in cliches. He has no clue how to develop characters, all of them are 1 dimensional stick figures, and his plots are inane. There's no poesy, it's just masturbatory BS and most people are aware of this outside of Pynchon's cult. People like the mystery around him and think his work is this cypher with hidden meanings. Which is how a lot of bad lit is sold these days.
@@TheCompositeKing amazing, you managed to write a critique of Pynchon that accuses him of doing things he didn't do, and accuses him of failing to do things he did.
Like, I get if it's not your cup of tea, that's cool, different strokes for different folks. But to try and say he's terrible is just laughable and you should genuinely be ashamed for such a trash tier take my dude
What's this about living in the mountains of Texas and going to school in Texas? T for Texas . . . T for Tennessee . . .
That's what I thought as well
Funereal reading of one of the funniest scenes McCarthy ever wrote. Kind of took me out of this video.
“A weighty soul”
I offer instead an alternative biographical interpretation of “Cormac” (who can blame him I suppose for not wanting to be known as “Charlie McCarthy”, during an era where that name was UNIVERSALLY associated with a famous ventriloquist’s dummy of the same name who’s character was that of a pretentious juvenile flirt. Actually … kind of a mirror of Cormac’s own pompous adoption of some alleged pure Irish aristocracy of blood that the name “Cormac” was supposed to represent.
McCarthy is the classic upper middle class nihilist who both refuses to grow up and adopt his parents bourgeois values and contribute something positive to society, but chooses instead to live like a bum, but the pretentious intellectual prince of the bums, because even while he rejects his parents bourgeois lifestyle, he can never quite bring himself either to identify with or completely associate with the destitute or the working class people either and adopt their lifestyle going forward, and fully embrace those who HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LIVE THAT WAY (McCarthy’s solidarity misanthropic and anti-social lifestyle he made clear frequently was ALWAYS BY CHOICE. It seems it suited his art of course, but his pompous “simplicity” was always lived so as to avoid the responsibilities of the class his intellect was borrowed from, while he used that same intellect to live a life above and apart from those powerless people that were the basis of his lower class characters that he looked upon so ironically and unsympathetically as beneath him for being consumed in their actual lives by daily issues of no historical consequence… for only he could see the greater, almost mythic significance their sick twisted lower class actually represented in the story of US exceptionalism as he saw it.
The truth is his father was an upper middle class lawyer and immigrants and sees the progressive movement that seeks to empower laboring people as somehow beneath him and “phony” but also representing of some great loss of the purity of a bygone era of the “common rugged individual man” when technology, politics, civilization and bureaucracy weren’t employed to settle people’s differences, but rather, direct violent confrontation was used for its alleged “purifying” and cleansing effect that settles things via direct confrontation. Such bourgeois fascist-adjacent romantic nonsense! And McCarthy couldn’t seem to bring himself either to fully embrace the values of the ruling class and side with the growing new conservative movement either and their aristocracy of wealth. A self-imposed misanthropic nihilist. And he wasn’t the first of course. Many writers had been suspicious of the the progressive claims of the improvability of man in previous generations. Dostoevsky was one, for his time and place. Mirabeau in the early 20th century in the leadup to WWI, and Huysman (“Agaisnt Nature) both in French and Joseph Conrad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in English. Disillusioned middle class writers turning to nihilism is nothing new.
And McCarthy also shows he distrusts civilization, and regards it merely as something that delays what he sees as the inevitable violent confrontation to come and the purging of these ugly emotions which he seems pessimistically to believe are forever part of human nature and cannot be grown out of through compromise, discussion and mutual respect.
We’re truly better off with him gone. Read the books. Understand the danger his and allure of his eloquence represents. Warn everyone who’ll listen about what I’ve just told you.
McCarthy is a dangerous last sample of a dying generation that we are better off without in an era when the violence he portrays as politically purifying can now bring about the destruction of cities and countries. He is himself I suspect a psychically damaged self-loathing member of the mid-20th century American bourgeoisie … a singularly PRIVILEGED GENERATION OF PEOPLE … and he seeks to encourage the violent confrontation between the past and the future as a means of achieving resolution of some sort. He’s a pessimistic misanthrope whose beautiful sentences while intoxicating carry with them a poisoned message to the middle class who seem to love him so much. Fear the future he says. Mythologize a past that might not even have existed as I depict it. Embrace the violent palingenesis and do the work of the invisible ruling class, in the false sick belief that the “inferior” races and peoples can still be swept away at the cultural interfaces as a means of taking one’s “rightful” place as the new heirs to the ruling class as the sick and decrepit of the preceding generations die away under the weight of their own lassitude, inactivity and decadence.
He was the most dangerous kind of nihilist of all … the post-modern nihilst. He wove a tapestry of violence depicting acts of such cruelty and transgressions of all manner of American morals, but as the very means by which the present we live in was created. And he would seem to imply the existence of this present moment is reason enough to seek to continue the methods by which we got here, as long as we employ the purified versions of them, unsullied by progressive ideals that foolishly seek to “improve” people by some plan that is not entirely seeking pure self interest.
The world of his imigination is long gone. And it was a sick, twisted, oppressive, cruel world when it did once exist. If it did once exist. It’s hard to know with McCarthy for he clearly has adopted the post-modern notions, but in a reactionary conservative manner.
We’re better off with him gone. Read the books. Understand the danger and allure his stark eloquence represents. He doesn’t build up or encourage understanding or encourage even self-respect of humanity itself. Warn everyone who’ll listen about what I’ve just told you.
But we have lost nothing of lasting value with his passing other than to mark the fact he represented an epitome of a demented trope; the reactionary post-modernist.
I offer for consideration a provocative thesis. The world has lost nothing of lasting value with the passing of Cormac McCarthy. He represents the death of a rare but dangerous, seductive and destructive literary type; the nihilistic post-modernist reactionary.
@Jal_8, You understand little. Your "writing" is hyperbole and nonsense. And your "anger" leans toward authoritarianism. Have a nice day.
Good lord, what a horrible, headache-inducing comment. your version of mccarthy is such a parody of the real writer that it honestly saddens me to imagine you might have read some of his work and taken this away from it. it's like you saw his vision and it scared you so much that you had to strawman it to hell and back in order to feel free of it, and then you had to go out of your way to find people who disagree with you so you could lecture them about it.
And i say that as someone who isn't particularly infatuated with McCarthy's vision of life (and what little can be gleaned without doubt of his politics from his work). It's literature, bro. It doesn't need to be THE truth. It just has to be a powerful enough vision of A truth to illustrate some aspect of human life. McCarthy captures a certain element of human life excellently: its brutality, its savage creative and destructive energy, and its capacity for seeing beauty in nature and in work, whether that work be creative or destructive. This is only dangerous if you have the laughable worry that postmodern novels are liable to convince anyone to treat them like the Bible.
Quite possibly the most inane substanceless ramble I've ever read, I feel lesser just for enduring this wordvomit
This is an amazing video but please for the love of god it’s pronounced PAUSE-IT, Hero’S Journey, ARKEType, KELTIC, SENSORY
o7 cormac say hi to my grandmas
I love the books of Hemingway, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver and that class of American writers. However, this video did nothing for me. I must be more stupid than I thought I was because, to be honest, it just sounds like tired pseudo-intellectual, overly self-serious gobbledygook to me. Then again, I could say pretty much the same about the novels of Cormac McCarthy. About as believable as someone pushing a supermarket trolly full of stuff for miles on end down a bumpy road. You should try it (guess who obviously didn't).
(Sorry, I'll get me coat.)
Godspeed and jolly trolly pushing, my man!
The comp to Faulkner is good because both fail in the same way- a good paragraph or 2 and then 20+ pages of a desert of bad tropes and cardboard goonish grotesques. Neither was a great writer.
This video is ridiculous. Cormac was (is) the bomb though.
James Ellroy is alive and well
The fact that he died June 13 is a fair sign to his literature and may be gnostic thinking.
“The last great writer of western literature” … that absolute audacity. 😑
pynchon: "am i a joke to you"
There IS no God to wrestle with ... all we EVER wrestle with is our Own individual nature ...
This is a decent video, but God I cannot get past his constant mispronunciations.
So many words.
Only if you let him be. That's kind of sick, actually, because it's like admitting we're not even going to try and see if another great writer can emerge. Tyrannical is what this is.
MccArthy was a good writer, but not very wise. Science is not our saviour but our shackle. Man can call anything science, and without literature, all will naively believe it.
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