Bloody Good Read
My college poetry professor, a renowned aesthete/scamp/hipster, would read us works by John Donne, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens; eyes closed, lips and tongue teasing out each sweet note, he’d actually sigh from the pleasures of a well-written line. One time he exclaimed (without a hint of irony), "Oh, I want to get down on the floor and hug that sentence!" I think of what he said whenever I read anything that just knocks… me… out. Enter Cormac McCarthy. I recently picked up Blood Meridian (1985) after I read an article about McCarthy in The New Yorker and have spent my subway rides since reading and rereading his beautiful sentences, offering up my own exclamations (usually, Holy Sh_t!). McCarthy’s writing is lean and efficient, and never stingy. It complements his Wild West setting without stooping to hokiness. "By full dark the blackened ribracks leaned steaming at the fires and there was a jousting over the coals with shaven sticks whereon were skewered gobs of meat and a clank of canteens and endless raillery." There’s a quietness to it that allows the reader time to see, engage, and appreciate. McCarthy’s characters have almost no interior life, we never know what they’re thinking or feeling. Like some twisted American doppelganger of Virginia Woolf, he writes only exteriority, action, and consequences. Here, he describes an oncoming cattle drive: "By late afternoon, riders were visible to the bare eye, a handful of ragged indians mending the outer flanks of the herd with their nimble ponies." I love "mending" and pretty much all of his other verbs "knuckled," "unseamed," unstalled." Yep, for the next few weeks, if you see me with a glazed look in my eye, know that I’m in a good place: a land of pumice, mud, blood, broken bottles, and mincing wolves.
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:58 pm
Did you save that New Yorker article? I think I missed it. I may have been in Bratislava.
Cormac — like a disproportionate number of American genii — is a Tennessean. Actually, he’s from Knoxville, definitely the least talented section of the state. Still, Cormac shares a hometown with David Farragut (Union
Rear Admiral who uttered, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”), Adolph Ochs (famed NY Times publisher), James Agee (writer/ critic who wrote, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, [with Walker Evans], A Death in the Family, Agee on Film, etc), Beauford Delaney (foremost of the Harlem Renaissance painters), Chet Atkins (influential guitar virtuoso, invented the “Nashville Sound”/ yakety), Nikki Giovanni (Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement, and Re: Creation), Brownie McGhee (blues collaborator with Sonny Terry), Todd Helton (future Home of Fame slugger for the Rockies), Chad Pennington (quarterback for the Jets), Dennis Hwang (Google’s graphic designer), Quentin Tarantino (oh, come on), Chris Whittle (Channel One), Johnny ______ (yes, Jack Ass IS genius), etc.
Impressive as that list may be, that cast ain’t much compared to those from other sections of the state. My favorite Tennesseans: Aretha Franklin (born 1947 in Memphis), Bessie Smith (born 1894 in Chattanooga), Anna Mae Bullock/ Tina Turner (b 1939 in Nutbush), Wilma Rudolph (b 1940 in Clarksville), Alex Haley (b 1921 in Henning), Abe Fortas (b 1910 in Memphis), Isaac Hayes (b 1942 in Covington), Buford Pusser (b 1937, between Finger and Leapwood, sheriff of McNairy County, Walking Tall fame), Morgan Freeman (b 1937 in Memphis), Sleepy John Estes (b 1904 in Ripley), Estes Kefauver (born 1903 in Madisonville), Sam Rayburn (b 1882 in Roane County), Cordell Hull (b 1871 in Pickett County), Alvin York (b 1887 in Pall Mall), Dolly Parton (b 1946 in Sevierville), Bettie Page (b 1923 in Nashville), Carl Perkins (b 1932 in Tiptonville), Cybil Shepherd (b 1950 in Memphis), Peetie Wheatstraw (born 1902, Ripley, “Devil’s Son-in-Law”), “Too Tall” Jones (1951 in Jackson), Grantland Rice (b 1880 in Murfreesboro), Davy Crockett (b 1786 in Greene County, died at the…), Robert Ryman (born 1930 in Nashville), Red Grooms (b 1937 in Nashville), Wink Martindale (b 1934 in Jackson), Justin Timberlake (b 1981 in Memphis), Miles O’Keefe (b 1954 in Ripley, Tarvan the Apeman), etc.
And I ain’t even counting those who moved there later in life, like W.C. Handy, Otis Redding, Al Green, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Sam Houston, Sam and Dave, Samuel L. Jackson (he actually grew up in Chattanooga), Andrew Jackson, James Polk, the Carter Family, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert Penn Warren, Bukka White, Danny Thomas, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Elvis, etc.