I shared this just a few weeks ago but it's too good not to share it again.
After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack.
While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.
In The Book of Lists, a trivia book I grew up on in the years before the term "listicle" had been coined, there was a list of shitty things famous writers made their wives do. The one that stuck with me most viscerally was "Leo Tolstoy had his wife copy out War and Peace five times in longhand."
(Memory may be faulty, so this could have been in another trivia book from my childhood.)
A friend of mine in high school joked for years that he was going to go to college, meet and marry a pre-med student, put her through med school, then once she started working, quit his job and become a poet.
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, Kissinger. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
@judgeholden @coeliacmccarthy and any other similar usernames I've forgoten
lived long enough to predict The Road but not long enough to travel it, rest in power guy
*this RIP is not an endorsement of McCarthy who i know nothing about
I been meaning to check out Blood Meridian for almost a decade. The prose is beautiful, but idk if its a reactionary text or not.
It's been 15 years or more since I've read it, so maybe it has reactionary elements, I don't know, but a perfectly acceptable reading is that we can't romanticize the past, because the United States was built on sadism, oppression, and cruelty. If you liked Moby-Dick you'll like Blood Meridian.
Even if an author is a reactionary (although I haven't read them yet, McCarthy's most recent novels sound like they have some suspicious takes), you can come away with a solid leftist reading of any good novel. Balzac was a reactionary, but he was Marx's favorite novelist. His books understood certain things that Balzac himself may not have.
Yeah that's a good take. Reactionary authors can def sometimes make a piece that end up being critical of oppressive social formations. Brothers Karamazov comes to mind, like that book made me an atheist for awhile even though Dostoevsky def is a religious fundamentalist; even though it also had anti-communist themes I argued that book ended up not portraying communism in a bad light.
No Country for Old Men is one of the best adaptations ever made because he originally wrote it as a script that he couldn't sell, so he did minimal edits to turn it into a novel and sold that instead.
God I love that movie. Also, this is another case where I read the news of someone's death and I swore they died years ago, because they're just that old.
Pretty sure there was a thing with some hoax account that reported him being dead a few years ago, maybe you're remembering that.
