Monthly Archive

Spilled bear on my laptop the other night — on the righthand side of the keyboard. Everything continued to function, but now a dozen or so keys are very sticky, maybe 3 or 4 of them to the point where it breaks my stride when typing.

Beer strikes me as a Very Bad Thing to spill on a laptop. But I really don’t know how bad. Does anyone know: are things going to get worse if they haven’t gotten worse already? Is there anything I can do at this point other than hold my breath and hope it all gets better magically? Can anyone suggest creative ways I could spin this to Dell support so that it falls under the warranty?

Do not miss “The Old Negro Space Program”:http://www.negrospaceprogram.com/#. A pitch-perfect, hilarious send-up of a Ken Burns style documentary. Hat tip to DAG.

Thanks to “this”:http://slithytoves.sytes.net/~dave/rpggen/rpggen.php, you will never need an idea for your next roleplaying game again.

Hat tip to “Bryant Durrell”:http://popone.innocence.com/.

My favorites so far:

The PCs are supermodel teenagers in our very town who, with computers, fight the Evil Empire for reasons of their own in the distant past.

The PCs are occult elves in a dream who, with breakdancing, fight Nazis for gold in World War II.

For some introductory thoughts on Cormac McCarthy, see the previous entry.

All the way through Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, No Country For Old Men — at least until the three-quarter mark — I kept saying to myself “Well, the wily old dog’s finally gone and done it. He’s written a bona fide thriller, ready-made for the screen. Guess he wants a bit of a nest egg.”

That’s not as unusual as you might think. Sure, McCarthy has a rep for Faulknerian extravagance and existential cowboy philosophizing, but he’s written for the screen before (the little-seen The Gardener’s Son), and his original treatment of Cities of the Plain was actually as a screenplay, not as the third novel in his Border Trilogy. And his latest novel is still just that — a novel — even if it screams to be made into a film.

And mind you, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. McCarthy’s skills at taut dialogue, sharp pacing, and riveting bursts of action haven’t faded, and he employs them all masterfully here. The basic plot: Texas, 1980 or thereabouts. Llewelyn Moss, thirtysomething Vietnam vet, is hunting antelope when he stumbles upon a drug deal gone sour. Bodies everywhere, and, a few miles away, the suitcase full of cash. Against his better judgment he decides to take it, and is hounded from then on by drugdealers and by Anton Chirurgh, a psychopathic killer working for one faction or another in the botched deal. But the protagonist, at the end of the day, is Sheriff Bell, one of those “old men” from the title, on whose turf everything goes down, and who spends the novel following the trail of blood and wreckage left by Llewelyn’s pursuers.

Were it not for the relentless force of Chirurgh, Moss would be in the clear — he is cunning, and pages are spent detailing things like his careful approach to a motel, and the precise way he hides the suitcase full of money in the air duct. There’s a lot of descriptions of people standing still for ten minutes, thirty minutes, or two hours to make sure no one’s watching before they venture to cross a parking lot or stick their head out from behind a rock. And through all this McCarthy keeps the tension ratcheted up, way up, yet also balanced by a dry humor, evident through his characters, that we saw a little of in Cities of the Plain but hasn’t been seen in full force since Suttree.

Now come the spoilers.

…

And then, three-quarters of the way through, the plot-driven novel crumbles. Specifically, Chirurgh catches up to Moss, kills him, and gets the money back. Not only that, but the drama of that scene is deliberately skirted — it’s not even described at all, but only discovered by Sheriff Bell after the fact. A Hollywood ending would have demanded that either Moss get away in the end, or that he get this close, only to die at the very very end. Neither is possible at this point, but one could still imagine a satisfying resolution to the plot that involves Bell picking up the pieces and having a final confrontation of some sort of Chirurgh. But that doesn’t happen, either — Bell, his spirit broken, resigns. The remainder of the novel alternates between Bell’s inner musings, which have been cropping up as italicized introductions to each chapter since the beginning but now take center stage, and the final scenes of Chirurgh’s rampage.

The final chapters are chock-full of philosophical passages that McCarthy fans will find quite familiar. But here, they often fall flat. A big reason is the structural damage done to the novel — the way Moss’ fate is handled drains the story of much of its emotional impact. Elsewhere — especially in The Crossing, where it was laid on thickest — there’d be these huge diversions into free will and the nature of evil and whatnot, but there always seemed to be something at stake for the character in it, or some question about what the upshot would be that tied into the plot. Here they exist after the plot, not as part of it. Missing, too, are the themes of story and witness, solitude and hospitality, and the “world’s dream” — fruitful stuff from earlier books that get left behind in favor of weight-of-the-world, nature-of-evil philosophizing.

Anton Chirurgh is clearly a latter-day version of Judge Holden from Blood Meridian. Like the Judge, he is evil and probably psychotic, though he abides by a twisted sort of ethic — a straightforward code of conduct that is brutal in its simplicity. (Part of it for Chirurgh is to avoid making enemies by killing anyone who might become one.) But as transcendental baddies go, Chirurgh just doesn’t measure up. He’s better material for a film thriller, but doesn’t have the Judge’s eloquence, depth, or force of personality.

A cursory reading of No Country For Old Men can yield a pretty straightforward, conservative message, especially if you assume Bell is speaking for McCarthy. The sheriff clearly sees himself as coming from an older, simpler, gentler time, with all the brutality of the world lying in the future — and, given the way the drug trade has played havoc with his corner of Texas, you can hardly blame him. For him, the 60’s have poisoned the country, and stuff was better in his grandfather’s time. But for all that happens in this novel and in the Border Trilogy, nothing in them, when it comes to terror, fear, violence, or the problem of evil, can hold a candle to Blood Meridian. The history of the region, despite the ups and downs, can be seen as one of progress, at least insofar as things seem to suck a lot less in the 20th century than in the 19th. Besides, if McCarthy was really interested in writing a tirade about the Way the World is Going, why set it back in 1980?

It seems to me, rather, that McCarthy is interested in the Judge Holdens and Chirurghs as they exist at all points of history. The devils will always be with us, in different forms. This time around he’s examining the psychology of an old man confronting all of this instead of a young one, but the conservatism inherent in his response is just Bell’s — though to McCarthy’s credit, he conveys it so well that it’s easy to sympathize with Bell’s point of view.

Ultimately, then, we have here a failed novel by a virtuoso. What might have been a sublime potboiler falls apart at the end, and the thought novel that replaces it doesn’t have enough to offer. There’s a new perspective — that of an old man — but nothing that holds up in comparison to McCarthy’s earlier work. Of course, had this been McCarthy’s first novel, it’d have to be seen in a different light, and would deserve a heck of a lot more praise. Like all aging, great authors, he works under the burden of his own legacy. And, in this case, the burden of time — I realized that part of the reason I was expecting another Great Novel from him was that it had been seven years since the last one. But for all we know, he spent those years spending time with friends, playing pool, living life — and who could blame him?

A final thought: we could still see a movie out of this book. All you’d have to do is shift the focus away from Bell and rewrite the ending a little. It’d make a great movie for some gritty, artsy director, and — holy cow, I just realized — Clint Eastwood could play Bell and Colin Farrell could play Moss and it’d get nominated for an Oscar. Meanwhile, McCarthy fans would get to complain about how the movie was nothing like the book, and McCarthy would get his nest egg and could set to work on the next project. Or just play pool. Everybody’s happy. Maybe that was the wily old dog’s plan all along.

So I’m about to start Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, No Country For Old Men. For me, doing so is a task saddled with a little extra baggage: McCarthy is the author whose works I spent a couple years totally immersed in, working on a dissertation that never coalesced. There’s a whole lot that sucked about that time of my life, but for all the stress and misery, never once did I actually tire of reading Cormac McCarthy. Nor did I ever feel like I ever got to the bottom of one of his books, or even close.

Still, not that many people have read him. College lit students will be reading him in fifty years, I predict, but what about you, now? Don’t know where to start? Here’s a handy-dandy guide.

*If you only read one Cormac McCarthy novel, read . . .*

Blood Meridian. A grandiose, brutal book set in the mid-19th century, telling the story of a lawless band of Indian hunters on the Texas-Mexico border. It is the most violent book I have ever read. In terms of style, it is the greatest accomplishment in English prose in the second half of the 20th century. The protagonist, the unnamed “kid,” must contend with Judge Holden, a terrifying figure who manages somehow to be both Captain Ahab and the White Whale wrapped into one. Whatever your hopes, whatever your beliefs, Judge Holden will bring them to their knees.

*If you only read two McCarthy novels, also read . . .*

_Suttree. With a caveat. Suttree is to Knoxville, Tennessee as Ulysses is to Dublin. And like Ulysses, it is long and convoluted and a downright hard read — and for a McCarthy fan to say this is saying something. So it is definitely not for everyone, but if you’re the sort of person with an appetite for that sort of book, Suttree will reward your effort in spades. It tells the story of a disaffected man who leaves a life of comfort to live among the vagabonds and wastrels of 1950’s Knoxville. But it is exactly the kind of book where telling you what it’s about tells you very little about what makes it great. I wish I could say more insightful things about it off the cuff, but a few years ago, only having read it twice back to back and thought about it a great deal, did I feel I finally had gotten my mind around it. It was a tenuous hold that has since slipped, but left behind memories of “Wow.” So yeah. One of those kinds of books.

*If you only read five of his novels, also read . . .*

The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. You can divide McCarthy scholars into a couple of camps: those who think these books have a lot to offer, and those who think that they’re watered-down and popularized, and that the man has lost his edge. (“Camps” is probably too strong a word, though, because McCarthy scholarship is a pretty small field just now, and whenever they meet at Southern lit conferences or what have you, I’m sure all these people are clustered together at the hotel bar, chatting amicably.)

The trilogy takes place on the Mexico border, and features two young men as protagonists — they each have their own story, and then they meet in Book Three. Each of them is a successor to the unnamed kid of Blood Meridian, but, for all the harsh conditions they must endure and the brutality they must confront, it’s a cakewalk compared to what that poor guy went through. What annoys the people in the second camp about these books is that in them McCarthy seems to be bringing together some concrete thoughts about Big Issues — language, human nature, God — and wrestling with them, whereas those second campers see in McCarthy’s works a relentlessly nihilistic vision, devoid of answers or even, for that matter, of questions.

Strong points of the trilogy: masterful prose, though more in a macho Hemingway-esque style, less in the Faulknerian vein of his earlier works. Some solid idea nuggets to chew on — The Crossing is a straight-up philosophical novel when you get right down to it, with its concluding chapter basically saved for the last part of Cities of the Plain. Weak points: see “macho,” above. Men and boys. Fights and grit. Conspicuous absence of strong female characters.

*If you only read six of his novels, also read . . .*

Child of God. Because, y’know, how many books about necrophiliac outcasts have you read, anyway?

As for where No Country For Old Men fits in here — I’ll let you know when I finish it.

UPDATE: Here’s the promised review.