/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4568710]

Is Cormac McCarthy a terrible writer?

>He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

[Anonymous No.4568713]

>>4568710

Yes we already talked about this.

[Anonymous No.4568717]

Yes. He thinks style is a lack of punctuation, archaic vocabulary and florid imagery.

[Anonymous No.4568722]

>>4568717
Well, he is old.

[Anonymous No.4568720]

Is this bad?

In the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north. The sun in the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor.

[Anonymous No.4568733]

Expert criticism.

[Anonymous No.4568737]

McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.
>While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned.

[Anonymous No.4568738]

>>4568710
How can night/dark be autistic?

[Anonymous No.4568744]

that was oprah's favorite part OP

[Anonymous No.4568747]

>>4568737
>hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

his diction is deliberate, it's supposed to feel archaic and bible-esque

i just don't like it

[Anonymous No.4568763]

I liked how his books, both Blood Meridian and the Road read out.

You can read it really fast, hard to put it any differently. He can describe things very well when he does it (the desert/sun of BM, the world of the Road).

Why would you say he is bad writer?

How are rest of his books outside NCFOM/Road/BM?

[Anonymous No.4568864]

>>4568738
Because the dark is completely removed from the spectrum of normal human emotion. Unable to care, unable to know. Kinda like an autist.

Or something like that.

[Anonymous No.4568870]

>>4568717
sounds like /lit/ should love him then

[Anonymous No.4568891]

>>4568864
Yeah, I thought of that, but it still sounds rather clunky. I love him at his best, but at his worst his prose reads like self-parody.

[Anonymous No.4568994]

>>4568710

Not terrible, just... grossly overrated by the literary world.

He should be writing in total obscurity given the quality of his work.

[Anonymous No.4569068]

Blood Meridian reads like he had one hand on his scabby cock and one hand thumbing through a Roget's thesaurus.

[Anonymous No.4569476]

>>4568717
Wait, so what the fuck do you think is style?
Style is the way someone does something.
So......>>>/websters/
you stupid fuck cunt?

[Anonymous No.4569506]

>>4568994
not total obscurity. he was better when he was a cult writer. he'd still be that if it weren't for pretentious faggots like the coen bros (jk ilu guys) adapting his work. oh yeah that johnny depp movie too lol.

[Anonymous No.4569521]

>thread shitting on McCarthy

Jesus christ.

The Road is the best novel written in the past 50 years.

Most of you will never understand its amazing grandeur.

For those who wish to understand it, I'm willing to post my essay up on paste-bin.

[Anonymous No.4569528]

I enjoy the hell out of his books. But the ones most people read are my least favorite. I think Suttree is better than Blood Meridian, and Child of God is better than The Road.

[Anonymous No.4569534]

>>4568864
>>4568738
It's like watching tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum building a rocket.

Definition of autism/autistic:

A pervasive developmental disorder characterized by severe deficits in social interaction and communication, by an extremely limited range of activities and interests, and often by the presence of repetitive, stereotyped behaviors.

Ever try to function in the dark? It's pretty autistic, you have to become sensitive to sound and your behaviour (bodily movements, hands outstretched) drastically changes to autist-like behaviours. People have literally gone insane from light deprivation.

Also, poetic prose.

God, you're such fucken plebs.

[Anonymous No.4569535]

Review: THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy
1.5 stars

The author wrote. Short sentences. Clipped and cold, like the air of his novel. Ash covering everything. He stumbled forward.

Why dont we use apostrophes, Papa?
I dont know. We dont use quotation marks either.
Is it confusing?
Maybe. But we do use pathetic fallacy.
What's pafethic phallacy?
Pathetic fallacy. "To signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions."
Oh. Like the weather? Like nature?
Yes, like nature.
Does it hate us?
No, it doesn't hate us. But the author does. He wants to manipulate emotional responses in readers to our relationship by making us suffer. He wants to explore me, an ordinary man, in an extraordinary circumstance.
Is it interesting?
Not really.

He made the characters fashion shoes out of refuse, light fires, look for food, lay listening, push the cart, and sleep together in the cold. Again and again. And again for good measure. And once more. And he aped B-movie plot devices. Hidden fallout shelter. Headless baby on a spit. Limb-by-limb cannabalism (as senseless as that is). The capsized ship. Marching, chained catamites.

There is no cliche in the literature's long history that is not honored here throughout. Whatever form they spoke of they were included. Mad Max interrupted by King James Tourette's . And you knew all along that terms like "stunning", "savage beauty", "terrifying", "trenchant", "cautionary", and "wisdom" would pop up in reviews like bingo calls at the Pretentious Reviewer Retirement Home.

The ashen prose covered everything. But then, in fits, the lyricism would appear like a blossom on a turd with the Germanic sprouting into Latinate. The reticulate sky would wrinkle its vermiculate back to expose a cloying sentimentality lacquered by logorrhea--a cheesy mysticism lurking behind the cracked, Naturalistic veneer. But here the sun never rose, for the old man and his scion, the bell tolled and all wrapped up in a startling deus ex via as the hooded, stoven-boned veteran hove into view and whisked our boy off to some humming deep-glen mystery older than man.

[Anonymous No.4569542]

>>4569521
No one cares.

[Anonymous No.4569543]

>>4569521
do it

[Anonymous No.4569553]

>>4569535

http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0307387895/?filterBy=addOneStar

These are great.

[Anonymous No.4569573]

>>4569553

>Another example of an author made famous by Harold Bloom, the fraud critic and false front of Jewish criticism. By raising the Cormac Hack unto the stratosphere, Bloom's garbage list of Jewish and minority writers look much better by comparison. Look at the list of `top' American Writers: when they are not Jewish (Morrison, Updike), they have Jewish or minority protagonists -- or else they are like Cormhack McCarthy (the one non-minority writing about non-minority concerns), a god-awfully bad writer. This is the ploy, to dictate garbage while Bloom has a good chuckle. And it works, most readers falling into arcane analysis and expressions of half-hearted praise or disingenuous admissions of stupidly "not getting it." There is nothing to get. McCarthy is a non-jew stooge of the machinery of Jewish stardom, pushed onto the stage without knowing why.

I'm alone in my room on a friday night reading 1 star reviews of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

[Anonymous No.4569582]

No, he's an amazing author, and a brilliant writer, the problem is he got too popular and now /lit/ is worried about how cool it will feel against anonymous strangers on the internet because it's populated by vapid shallow hipsters. Trends change quick here, people used to like James Joyce here too, but now he's not cool to like anymore.

>But with normal people, McCarthy is a great writer, if you don't like him that's fine, some people don't like Chocolate Ice Cream either. But again it all comes down to taste.
>>And for the most part most of the threads here are troll posts where all people do is hate on books and are too pussy to admit to liking anything.

[Anonymouse !7tLDpBrPEk No.4569590]

>>4569582
I've always been a big fan. He's taught alongside Faulkner for a reason

[Anonymous No.4569602]

>>4569573

I can't really get mad at stuff like this because I, too, am at a loss to explain why Blood Meridian is described as 'genius' by anyone involved in criticizing literature.

[Anonymous No.4569613]

>>4569602
>I'm a pleb and I don't like things that are harder to read than the hunger games or harry potter, I am reading da vinchi code and it is very complicated

[Anonymous No.4569629]

>>4569613

>he thinks Blood Meridian was hard to read

[Anonymous No.4569639]

>>4569629
>>4569602
>>4569573
>>4569553
>>4569535
>>4568994
>>4569068
>>4568747
>>4568737
>>4568717
>>4568713

>People who think Blood Meridian is hard to read

[Anonymous No.4569656]

>>4569535

Hemingway once wrote that the greater a work is, the easier it is to parody. While I partly feel that he was trying to slyly defend his work (Hemingway was plenty derided in his own time), and while I liked but did not love The Road, I feel he's correct.

McCarthy is a good writer who accidentally stumbled towards great with Blood Meridian, but I don't think his style should be considered so poor as to be mocked as though he's merely faltering for words. He does well, most times.

[Anonymous No.4569665]

>>4569573
>non-jew stooge of the machinery of Jewish stardom

[Anonymous No.4569970]

>>4569573
>Updike not writing WASP as fuck protagonists

[Anonymous No.4569989]

>the first thin crack of thunder reached them no louder than a dry stick trod on.

A dry stick trod on. I liked that at least.

[Anonymous No.4570008]

>>4569573
Bloom's doesn't seem to be much of a shill for Jews or "minorities". He champions Shakespeare above everyone and prefers the King James Version of the bible to the original. I thought he was the "dead white male" shill?

[Anonymous No.4570009]

>>4569970

[Anonymous No.4570089]

I do not think so. He uses alot of peculiar words in his writing among other things but to call it bad is dishonest when there are books like the Twilight series and Fifty shades of Grey out there.

[Anonymous No.4570136]

/lit/ hates him because Harold Bloom made him popular.

[Anonymous No.4570172]

>>4568710

I read McCarthy as a prose in cursive. The words dance around, and are convulted, but not lacking in importance, like the carvings and bass relief on old facades.

[Anonymous No.4570191]

>>4570136
But /lit/ loves Harold Bloom

[Anonymous No.4570216]

>>4568710
>autistic dark

Dude it's so dark in here it's fuckin' retarded.

[Anonymous No.4570222]

>>4568710
>Is Cormac McCarthy a terrible writer?
No.

[Anonymous No.4570303]

>>4570216
HAHAHAHA

my sweet sides

[Anonymous No.4570363]

mccarthy is a great writer, but The Road was pretty bad. it read like a parody a lot of the time.

his style is so poetic, it's easy to fuck up. he was able to pull it off in BM and most of his previous work, but The Road was just lazy.

it's unfortunate how underwhelming that novel was. the same seems to be happening to Pynchon

>“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”

how can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

[Anonymous No.4570388]

>>4570363
>The Road was just lazy
What does that even mean. You're not one of those posturing faggets are you?

[Anonymous No.4570391]

>>4569573
>I'm alone in my room on a friday night

And it's Valentine's Day. Don't forget that.

[Anonymous No.4570595]

>>4570388
i just feel like it wasn't as thought out as most of his other work. for BM, he did extensive research into the history of the Glanton gang, geography, etc. and welded tons of influences from Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.

with none of those things to go by, The Road came off as rambling for the most part.

more than half of that book was about how everything is covered in ashes (which is a pretty incredible feat on its own, i guess, writing almost an entire book describing things covered in ash) and his half assed nihilist philosophies (same problem with The Counselor)

he said in the interview with Oprah that he had no idea how The Road was going to end, and it really came off that way. his incredible descriptions and style ultimately fail to make up for his increasing inability to tell a good story.

nowadays, i often think McCarthy would make a better poet

[Anonymous No.4570606]

>>4568733
>It's clever - but it insists upon itself

[Anonymous No.4570706]

>>4570595
has he written any poetry

[Anonymous No.4570842]

>>4570706
i wish

[Anonymous No.4571103]

>>4569535
This is funny because it's true.