NP:Blood Meridian

[Ya Sam]

Maybe I'm a bit blase in terms of violence (i.e. in fiction), but this novel 
did not seem to me extremely violent. I don't think there is anything that 
can beat documentary accounts of real violence, at least that's the way with 
me. Maybe it was Harold Bloom's harping about how bloody and unbearably 
violent it was on BookTV.org (I wonder if that in-depth 2 hour feature about 
him is still available online) that I had expected something way beyond any 
reasonable boundaries, something similar to the way I felt first watching 
Pasolini's 'Salo'. Apart from that, the language of Cormac McCarthy is a 
treasure trove, I hadn't thought that it was possible to write that way in 
Enlglish before reading Blood Meridian I think I will get to Suttree 
someday, as the imagery he bombards you on the first pages promise a lot, 
macabre and beautiful at the same time:

'A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the 
blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing 
blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and again the beached and 
stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed and bluish 
or stale gray.  /.../ The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted 
sockets of the interlocutor's skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of 
the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley.'
(Suttree, Picador, 4-5)



>From: "Steve Maas" <tyronemullet at hotmail.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: NP:Blood Meridian
>Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2006 11:07:52 -0700
>
>It's one of the few books that I read periodically. McCarthy's sublime 
>writing combined with the horrible brutality of these vicious thugs 
>combined with the musings on the nature of humanity is stunning. The judge 
>is a character unlike any I have encountered in nature or in real life 
>(thank god for that) and Glanton and the kid an others are memorable too. 
>It's my 2nd most favorite book.
>
>So, uh -- yeah, I'd say keep going....
>
>Though I have no doubt you're right that Deadwood is much more 
>pop-culturally relevant, if that's what you're looking for...
>
>Steve Maas
>
>---------------------------
>Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 13:27:02 -0400 (EDT)
>From: kelber at mindspring.com
>Subject: NP:Blood Meridian
>
>I'm about a quarter of the way through Blood Meridian (just past the 
>massacre by
>the Indians in Mexico sequence).  I know a lot of the people on this list 
>have
>read it.  Question:  Is it worth finishing?  I get the whole history- of- 
>the-
>West-as- bloody- wasteland thing, but is there going to be any real 
>character or
>plot development from here?  Is there anything this book conveys that isn't
>conveyed by the show Deadwood in a much more entertaining/pop culture way?  
>I
>ask, because I'm kind of depressed, and the book's a real downer to plow
>through.
>
>Laura
>
>

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