/lit/ - Literature

>>19658846
God forbid a novelist should send a reader to the dictionary.

>>19658846
He said that punctuation is important.
https://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/cormac-mccarthy-on-james-joyce-and-punctuation-video

>>19658856
I like learning new words but let's be honest: he can be fucking ridiculous.
>A tall hedge of dead privet. An ancient birdsnest lodged in the dark wicker of it. They stood in the yard studying the facade. The handmade brick of the house kilned out of the dirt it stood on. The peeling paint hanging in long dry sleavings down the columns and from the buckled soffits.
Do you know what privet is?
Do you know what it means for something to be kilned?
Do you know what sleavings are?
What about soffits?
What does any of this add to the passage?
Is your experience better for having been made to look up these words?

>>19658938
I assume you're not American/English? They aren't common words but words you would've come across before if you are.

>>19658938
>Do you know what it means for something to be kilned?
A kiln is like an ancient furnace/oven, so it means the bricks of the house were made from the same dirt were the house stood on. No idea about the rest.
t. ESL

>>19658938
Yeah I know kilned so 1/4. But privet is probably some plant. Kilned as in burn bricks, so you can visualize it. Sleavings probably means in lines or trails. Soffits probably means where the column meets the roof, the little extended roof part.

>>19658938
Privet is the only one I had to look up. All the others are not particularly unusual words.

>>19658963
>probably
>probably
>probably
Yeah, you can intuitively stumble your way through it but you're not exactly learning or understanding it, are you?

>>19658949
>>19658960
>>19658967
I kneel. I'm American and I didn't know what any of them meant.

>>19658846
>skips over words and substitutes my own that make sense in the context
What now, Kekmac

>>19659012
You're true anon. But it does improve your vocabulary. Next time you won't have to look them up.

>>19658938
>Doesn't know what soffits are.
You're never going to make it.

>>19658938
Learning new words is fun

>>19659050
It's over.

>>19659021
>asks my mommy what the word means

>>19658938
'Soffit' is the only word I'm unfamiliar with. 'Privet' is a word I would expect an 8 year old to recognise.

>>19658938
Sorry bro. These books are for adult white men.

>>19658938
>not reading Cormac like Finnegans Wake and just imagining what the words might mean and moving on
ngmi

>>19659592
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privet
so 8 year olds should recognize a type of plant not even native to north america? fuck off douche.

>>19659651
>so 8 year olds should recognize a type of plant not even native to north america? fuck off douche.
I'm not from North America, but what does that have to do with it? Privet hedges are probably more familiar to Americans than most native plants.

>>19658846
Upon.....?

I'm more irked by the constant use of Spanish. Spanish dialogue, with no assistance. If you're American, you're probably quite exposed to Spanish and know some, but I'm Norwegian, and I took German in school, I don't know much Spanish at all. I shouldn't say irked, it's just something I can imagine would bother most people. I tend to just try to figure out through the context of what else is going on in the story.

>>19658938
only word i didnt know was sleaving and im dumb af

>>19660430
Try licing in the US. What you describe is evoking my daily toils.

>>19658938
You dont have to autistically know every word to be honest. The sentence made perfect sense when I first read it even though I didnt know two of those words and looking up what they meant added nothing to the overall meaning and context of the scene, and you will forget the exact words used in like 5 pages.

If anything its a testament to good writing to be able to use more obtuse language and still get the message across.

>>19660430
Then learn Spanish. Get outside your Germanic bubble.

He's a pretentious pseud which you can also tell by the deliberate non-use of quotation marks in dialogue

>>19660582
Explain why quotation marks are a necessary form of punctuation when dialogue is recognizable as such without them.

>>19660596
Because it's trying to be transgressive when all it achieves is ugly format and confusing the reader

>>19660596
It just makes it easier to read like any form of punctuation. That's why it's used

>>19660607
Other forms of punctuation are necessary to establish rhythm, sure. But quotation marks are just superfluous. I read McCarthy and never have a problem telling when characters speak.

What proponderous and selcouth macroencephaly and protuberant frontal bossing he has. Indicative of hypermnesia or some other superlative ratiocinative facility.

>>19658846
Then he throws in a
>He spat on the ground
Which is almost hilariously terse and simple.

>>19660675
That's the chamber from which he channels Logos.
>>19660602
Brainlet

>>19658938
I knew all those words...

>>19658846
what bullshit words like mezzanine or caldera
if if you hit a blind spot it takes 5 seconds to learn or take a note for later and you will be better for it

>>19659567
>replace the words with ones that sound better

>>19661688
>bullshit words like mezzanine or caldera
really?

>>19661712
He meant: what bullshit! Words like mezzazine and caldera

>>19658856
Well he uses words that are not in the dictionary and words he made up as well. I still enjoyed Blood Meridian.

>>19659041
I disagree. Sure the likelihood of not having to look them up again will increase the more those words are used but if a word is obscure and archaic enough there is a good chance you'll blank when it comes up again years after. Not everyone's memory is the same and it is ultimately good to learn new words in the longerm, it can be pretty hellish if you genuinely can't understand a text without having to consistently google words you have never heard or potentially will never, read or hear spoken since.

>>19658938
I have privet on my patio, a solar kiln for my wood, sleavlings along my espalier, I installed soffits when I built my deck and changed the flashings on the side of the house, and yes,it added an image to my mind of overgrown and unmaintained housing.

Pic related, it's me constructing my deck with a skid steer, notched beams, joists, 12/3 rafters, balusters, and other common English words.

>>19658938
>Do you know what privet is?
No, but I can easily infer that it is some kind of bush or shrub from the text.

>Do you know what it means for something to be kilned?
He means that the bricks look baked from the same material as the surrounding earth. Kilns are used to harden clay.

>Do you know what sleavings are?
He means that the peeling paint literally hangs like sleeves.

>What about soffits?
Yes, it's a common term in construction and home improvement.

>What does any of this add to the passage?
Prosaic value, entertainment, helps to paint a more vivid picture.

>Is your experience better for having been made to look up these words?
I didn't have to, you did.

> he spat

>>19661874
>>19658938

My privet is just to the right of the slender hinoki (chamaecyparis), adjacent the coleus and rise of Sharon near the dwarf Lebanon cedar.

>>19659651
>t even native to north america? fuck off douche.

Well, it's everywhere in North USA. Moms warned us to leave the berries be.

What next, you don't understand 'grapes' because they aren't native to America?

Please go back to kindergarten and try and stay awake this time.

>>19661874
>>>19658938
>I have privet on my patio, a solar kiln for my wood, sleavlings along my espalier, I installed soffits when I built my deck and changed the flashings on the side of the house, and yes,it added an image to my mind of overgrown and unmaintained housing.
>Pic related, it's me constructing my deck with a skid steer, notched beams, joists, 12/3 rafters, balusters, and other common English words.

this

>>19661970
>>19661961
>>19661880
>>19661874
For my birthday next spring I'm going to wish to stop being a brainlet.

>>19662018
Buy a dictionary or anything that can access google and become a fucking real human and not an idiot

>>19662018
Experience makes you brighter, get involved in the world, go build a house, plant a garden, design something, cook a meal, you'll learn words.

Buying a home taught me a whole new vocabulary

>>19662027
I look up every single word I don't know but the problem is I don't remember them. My memory is terrible. I probably won't even remember the ones from this thread.

>>19662062
Hate to tell you this bud but you might just be stupid. Best advice is at least figure out how to pronounce the words so you can trick people into thinking you are smart

>>19658938
The idea is to make you feel like an idiot. Cormac creates a hierarchy of sorts.
>the judge > narrator > (you) > the kid > Glanton > the imbecile > the expriest

>>19662964
The Judge = The Narrator
They are both equally good rhetoricians.

>>19658938
For me, part of the fun in reading authors like Cormac or really any literary author is getting to learn new words and information about history and literary technique. If I didn't want to engage with the text, I would go read GRRM or Stephen King.

>>19662983
Could be. But the narrator tells us things the judge as a mortal being cannot know. Also, I think the judge is in fact a mortal human being, but devoid of will beyond the will to war. What's essential about him, the submission to war, will never die.

>>19658846
>he's unable to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words from the rest of the sentence
NGMI

shocked at the number of people who don't know what privet is

>>19663017
miss me with your gay shit

>>19658846
Currently reading Blood Meridian and I feel like a retard for having to do this every page. Unless words appear a few times or actually seem important (like some of the Spanish ones) I've mostly started guessing from the context.
t. dumb ESL
>>19660582
I like how he doesn't use quotation marks, but I don't really understand his hatred of capitalization within sentences.

>>19664136
McCarthy has said he avoids quotation marks because he doesn’t see the point of those strange little marks cluttering up the page. I can only assume his lack of capitalizing follows a similar idea of neatness.

>>19664175
He gives his take on punctuation here in this video>>19658885

>>19658846
Truly a singular meme writer.

>>19664089
that interpretation is literally the closest to the text, dumbass

do you guys actually stop every time you encounter a word you don't know?
i just infer the general meaning from context and carry on. after encountering it many times i form a more specific idea of what it means
this is literally how i learned how to understand language in general

>>19658846
I'm italian and I read Blood Meridian in english, the almost total lack of knowledge of the various plant/animal/geography names definitely created a certain atmosphere of being an outsider on uncharted injun land. I have a C2 in English and know most of the vegetation/animals he mentioned, but only in Italian, not in English. I feel that those specific words are only picked up if you are a native speaker or interested in that field. Like, "vinegarroons" mentioned in the burning tree passage: american kids probably know what this is before elementary school, but I had absolutely no idea what the fuck a vinegarroon even is. A spider? A snake? An owl? So I had to look up every word like this and discover the american
desert word by word. I suspect americans also experience part of this "outsider" atmosphere with the spanish bits, which ironically were the most comprehensible parts to me, an italian. Also I had to keep a pdf with the translation by my side to help with some passages until I started getting familiar with his prose, also mostly to get through long descriptive passages with lots of unknown specific terminology.
A true spaghetti western kino experience.
>shillelagh
Cool word

>>19666464
>Like, "vinegarroons" mentioned in the burning tree passage: american kids probably know what this is before elementary school, but I had absolutely no idea what the fuck a vinegarroon even is.

I have no idea what a vinegarroon is. Sounds made up.

>>19665218
It depends on what you're hoping to get out of the book. Maybe you aren't interested in details and only want a general idea of what you're reading: inference works fine.

However, guessing isn't going to allow you to understand words with precision, and it certainly won't prepare you to use those words yourself.

>>19665218
I'm at the point where I'm pretty fucked if I don't know it so I just look it up.

>>19658963
>Yeah I know kilned so 1/4. But privet is probably some plant. Kilned as in burn bricks, so you can visualize it. Sleavings probably means in lines or trails. Soffits probably means where the column meets the roof, the little extended roof part.

Don't give yourself credit for knowing privet is a plant when the sentence literally says it's a "tall hedge." You have no idea what it is specifically.

"Sleavings" is a nominalization of "sleave," which means to separate into filaments (in other words threads). Lines or trails doesn't capture the imagery conveyed here.

Although you correctly point out that the sentence refers to the underside of the eaves, soffits have nothing to do with columns.

You should have humility when approaching these texts and appreciate that they have something to teach you.

>>19666474
Pretty sketchy animal if you ask me

You guys inspired me to listen to the audio book while I work on my deck soffits

>>19658846
ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo

>>19658846
>be me
>Kindle Chadmaster
>see word i don’t understand
>long press word for dictionary, wiki and translation
>now understand word
>effortless

Booklets hate the e-reader Chad.

>>19666911
Based and soffitpilled

Honestly, the fact that I don't know every obscure word he uses is very much a part of the journey of reading his books. Sometimes it's easy to glean what it is from context, other times I don't get it, but then I'll reread the book later and I'll get it.

Reading hard books literally just makes you a better reader; free of charge optimism for you.

>>19667011
A book being “hard” has little to do with using a bunch of retarded, seldom used and/or out of favor words though.

>>19666649
Shut up nigger. It's just a fucking novel for midwits like you

>>19667046
The chud has arrived.

>>19667035
Unless you have an example of a book that is easy to read but at the same time "hard" in some other sense, perhaps you should shut the fuck up.

>>19667035
High usage of low-frequency words has quite a lot to do with difficulty of reading. They are a significant determinant in how long you look at a page compared to high-frequency words which we can essentially skip over.

>story starts with character waking up

>>19666649
>You should have humility when approaching these texts

"these texts"

Thanks for reminding me why I hate people who love literature. Truly the gayest hobby. It's suffering to like something but realize everyone else who likes it is a wanker.

>>19667179
Your precious ego was just damaged there, and it showed.

>>19667345
That bothered you? You sound insufferable.

>>19667351
Reaaaally insufferable. Vidya audience will suit you.

>>19667179
I do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life:_A_User%27s_Manual

>>19667345
Sounds like you're pretty insecure.

>>19658846
McCarthy taught me what it means to hobble your horse.

>Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark's total restitution could appease.

Cormac is the most overrated writer there is.

>>19667671
He isn't for brainlets.

>>19658938
So this is the power of American literature? You are sucking this guy’s dick 24/7 lmfao this is just verbal masturbation.

>>19668371
It's time to call a spade spade. Generally speaking as an ESL I have always found reading British literature infinitely easier to comprehend than American. For example, fag as he was, Wilde could write most descriptive and aesthetic sentences with simplest words a primary school boy in England could understand. It is my opinion that since the average American was much less educated, the writer class often strived to go above and beyond them and to this end often employed complex vocabulary, to sound educated so to speak. Again there were exceptions. Joyce for example was much more complex than any of them but that was intentional and with self awareness. Same as on the opposite side with Hemingway.

>>19668371
If you think 5 declarative sentences, all with a subject, a verb and an object is verbal masturbation, then you need to stop, nigga.

>>19668371
It's a perfectly descriptive scene. In my view the people who are insulting this are insecure about their inability to comprehend it upon first glance. That is not a fault. If you didn't know those words (like I didn't with privet, sleavings, and soffit), that is your problem, not the author's.

>>19658938
I agree with you. It is very mannered, highly curated and over-wrought. It's pretentious and annoying.

I enjoy unusual words and when writers use them in unusual ways but Cormac is just too much, and so stilted. Annie Dillard is a stylist I enjoy who uses odd words in a pleasing way, but sparingly.

As for those words in particular, I knew privet, I could sort of guess kilned (though I hate it; would he say he had just ovened a cake or frying panned a steak?), I could guess sleaving and I do like that phrase, soffits I do not know at all but it is a nice word and I am sure it is architecturally precise. I mean, it's good to be precise with language and name things geographically and architecturally correct, but what grinds my gears with Cormac isn't that, but when he uses very archaic words and how densely he packs strange words into a small amount of space, it's suffocating.

>>19658938
Kilned just really fucking annoys me. When something is put into a kiln it is 'fired', not 'kilned'. I know he knows that. But he chose kilned to be an obscurist cunt and because with 'kilned' he doesn't have to change the sentence structure and can keep his rhythm better (I assume). So in this instance he is not being precise with language at all, but is instead being cute and obscure and archaic. The only sense we use kilned in today is for malting when the grain is heated. You need to look back 200 years or more to see someone using kilned in the sense of fired.

>>19668588
(1) Using older phraseology helps immerse the reader's mind into the older setting of the book.
(2) "Fired" is vaguer than "kilned".

>>19668597
>Using older phraseology helps immerse the reader's mind into the older setting of the book.

That is from The Road. It's set in the future ...

And fired is not vaguer than kilned, it is the precise word and the word that is properly used.

>c. transitive. To bake (pottery, bricks, etc.) in a kiln.

>>19668588
"Fired out of the dirt" would make little sense and is more misinterpretable (fired out of? As out of a canon? How come dirt, one may ask). I like Kilned here. The bricks have laid in the sun-hottened dirt for so long as though they have been baked in them. It's precise imo.

>>19658938
You can figure out what kilned and sleavings are based on their place in the sentence and the recognizable terms they're related to. Without looking it up, kilning means made by a kiln, sleavings are the thinga that sleeve off of something.

>>19667626
every paragraph is the same shit from a different angle
such a limited writer

>>19658856
fpwp. dishonest strawmanners should rope themselves

>>19668737
You are waffling, only to get to dumb conclusions. He is one of the few writers who has changed substantially from his first novel to the latest, like really substantially where you only need to skim a page to tell which McCarthy it is.

>>19658856
Well the book should come with it

>>19658938
>frogposter is retarded
Imagine my shock

>>19662983
fucking based i thought the same thing

>>19668597
>(1) Using older phraseology helps immerse the reader's mind into the older setting of the book.
It's from The Road.

>>19668556

We may not say we "frying panned a steak," but we do say we "grilled a steak." That's not any different than using "kiln" as a verb. Unlike "frying panned," kiln already has a history of being used as a verb. But even if it didn't, I don't see why using it as a verb would be so offensive.

It sounds like you think creative expression is obscurantist BS. Anything that stops to make us think is "overwrought." Should we stop using metonyms, kennings, metaphors, and synecdoches simply because they don't express meaning with banal immediacy?

I'm also not understanding how McCarthy is any less "suffocating" that Joyce, Nabokov, Swift, Milton, Pynchon Shakespeare, Eliot, Faulkner, Gass, Gaddis, Eco, Mann, Borges, etc.

I feel for all the poor babies in this thread who have to look up the words dat bad ol' wwiter McCarthy uses. Does anyone have a hanky I can borrow for all the tears I'm shedding for these "readers"?