Cormac McCarthy's Country

Just finished No Country For Old Men and it, like everything I've read by McCarthy, is brilliant. The storytelling and scope of the Border Trilogy, the shambling beauty of Suttree--in this book McCarthy writes a true page-turner and still manages, somehow, to work his magic for capturing a landscape and its people. Not content with that, he weaves in deep, abiding questions of good, evil, and human nature.

As curious a comparison it may seem, Cujo by Stephen King comes to mind, particularly in the way innocents are swept up in an all-devouring evil. In Cujo, however, the cause of this evil is shrouded, its motives veiled. The result is more akin to Greek tragedy in which fickle gods can be heard laughing backstage. Not so in No Country. God is either absent or "that god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash." Through a forsaken country filled with people that don't know what to believe, the force of evil, embodied in Chigurh, moves unhindered. Indeed, he seems a prophet, full of conviction in his own beliefs, and given to sermons that end in bloodshed.

"I had no say in the matter. Every moment your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning."

Voltaire Revisited

Because, frankly, I think he's brilliant. I think Monty Python owes him an acknowledgement at the very least. Now, for something completely different, a nun with one buttock.

'We would indeed be in a bad way if poets did not have shoulders.'

If you have not read Candide, Voltaire's satiric masterpiece, you should. It's quick, it's fun, it is still relevant well over a century later.

"'Aren't you surprised by what I told you about those two Oreillon girls who were in love with two monkeys?' asked Candide.
'Not at all,' said Martin. 'I don't see anything odd about their passion. I've seen so many strange things that nothing is strange anymore.'"

Reading resource resurrected

This is a list of links I compiled of literary figures (complete with the crude navigability of the day!) - not simply authors, but people with lives that touched meaningful literature meaningfully. Therefore you will find not only resources for Sylvia Plath, but also for Lady Caroline Blackwood, for Vonnegut but also for Leonore Fini (pictured). Please let me know if you discover bad links.

Proverbs for Paranoids revisited

Proverbs for Paranoids: Pursuing Pynchon

Ask most people which author has earned the title "Most Reclusive" and the answer will invariably be J.D. Salinger. I attribute this to his popularity, for if you were truly interested in lifestyles of the shy and reclusive, Pynchon's seclusion is infinitely more interesting.

With the publication of his first novel, V, in 1963 Pynchon went underground and has been seen only rarely since.

Part of what makes Pynchon's penchant for anonymity so attractive is his literature, which not only features paranoia as a dominant theme, but is capable of recreating the experience in the reader. Anyone who has read The Crying of Lot 49 knows that he or she will never enter a post office with the same perspective again.

Combine this literary theme with the sort of personality that enjoys reading Pynchon, and you get a virtual telephone game surrounding the author's reticence. Rumors swirl - someone claims to have toked with Tom, another claims Pynchon wrote Gravity's Rainbow while stoned.

Asterisk's prank with Hunter S. Thompson fans has its forerunner in Wanda Tinasky. When letters began appearing in a tiny northern California newspaper, the style and timing were attributed to Pynchon, who was rumored to be in the area at the time, working on Vineland.

Again it was literary sleuth extraordinaire Don Foster who brought the truth to light. Writing in Author Unknown, the same book in which he made the case for Henry Livingston Jr. as the author of "The Night Before Christmas," Foster concluded that Tinasky was a murderous beatnik, not the reclusive author.

The most recent and reliable Pynchon sighting occurred in 1998, when a reporter named James Bone snapped the author picking up his son from school.

Frankly, I don't buy Bone's bullsh*t rationalizations for taking the photo. I won't even go into the remarks about Pynchon plundering the graves of the defenseless dead - Mr. Bone apparently forgot Pynchon writes fiction. An author that has chosen anonymity is a much different type of public figure, letting readers enjoy creations without the filter of omnipresent celebrity. A picture of Pynchon picking up his son from school tells us nothing about how or why he writes, his professional habits, what creative process from which he pulls inspirations. Note that Bone makes no mention of how Pynchon's son reacts to his father's obvious distress, to the confrontation with a stranger on the street. Such details would likely cast Mr. Bone in the same ghoulish spotlight inhabited by Beatrice Sparks.

Thomas Pynchon's privacy is his own to dispose of at will. That should be respected in as much as it is representative of a right inherent to us all. Beyond that consideration, however, I have an appreciation that I believe others share for the mystery behind the fiction. Like the Poe Toaster, such a mystery only deepens appreciation of the works that come out of it. Each one approaches like cannonshot above a river; it is out of respect for the living, as much as the dead, that we must wait patiently for the river to give up the body.

Postscript:

If anyone ever hears of Bone in Baltimore on January 19, make every effort to insure he is suitably restrained. He is obviously not to be trusted in the presence of a good mystery.

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(pictured above) One of the few extant Pynchon pics.