formatting is for suckers...

So, in the best news yet disclosed this week (soon to come: Barry's outta sight Q1 fundraising numbers - why would Axelrodland hold back unless they had boffo figures?) - Cormac McCarthy, portraitist of the bleak violence attending the American conquest of the continent; the ardently reclusive, avant-garde-but-for-the-horses icon of contemporary letters in the United States; the hero of many a citystruck boy eager to reconnect with the wacked-out drunk-ass spirit of William Faulkner, is making his first-ever television appearance.

On Oprah.

Now, only half the fun in this came from the whiskey shot I poured as soon as I heard the news of the man's appearance. Another half comes from the snippy words of the second-rate academics who have, thus far, cultivated his public reputation.

"Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and a former editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal Online.

Dianne Luce, president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, said, "Oh, my goodness. Those poor women don't know what they're getting into." McCarthy's novels, she added, are "very bleak."


Really, the only good criticism I've ever read of McCarthy comes in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Blood Meridian, where the obvious comparisons to Melville and Faulkner are made, as well as the overwhelmingly, hauntingly, irritatingly biblical cast of his prose. Above and beyond that, however, is the fact that McCarthy is a small-d a democrat as you will find. As with everything, I have no idea how to express this adequately; but to fixate on the violence without looking to the kind of democracy such bloodshed would produce is to miss the central point.