Maybe the least surprising news of all time. You mean to say the guy who spent half his life hanging around the Epstein pals at the Santa Fe Institute may have had an inappropriate relationship with a teenager?

Not to join the twitter bandwagon on this one, but the article really was painfully overwritten and focused on all the wrong things. "The first thing you notice about [Britt] ... is how novelistic she is." "There is a shimmer of recognition with her, an intimate equidistance."

"Two eyes are not sufficient for a sunset in the West. That’s because there is more than one sunset, more than can be seen in a single field of vision. After a monsoon, the sky is Sistine. To the west, lightning races the tousled embroidery of clouds in pink gilt. Turning on my heels, there are Iliads and Edens of violet cloudwork parted by the slimmest blue streamlets of sky. Soon the mountains will be darkened and skimmed of all their reddened lilac, and they will stand like glowing geometry against the sunset’s final yellow. It is all daubed in a nimbus around the muse, like a painting that is still wet, still open to being blended."

Writerly bullshit. Vincenzo Barney must have had some blackmail material on his editor at Vanity Fair. Most interesting parts of it are when the author is directly quoting either Britt herself or else McCarthy's letters to her. The article claims to be about Ausgusta Britt, but is seemingly only interested in viewing her as the author believes McCarthy saw her. Barney hints that Britt has lived a whole life in which Cormac McCarthy was only a bit player, but he doesn't seem to actually be interested in this person who supposedly captured McCarthy's heart. It's as if the Vanity Fair piece believes that this woman is only interesting insofar as she had an abusive love affair with the greatest titan of American Letters. It's McCarthy's story being told here, not Britt's, and isn't that a shame?

Honestly I might be willing to overlook some of that if the prose was as good as Barney thinks it is. But it sucks. What the fuck is "intimate equidistance" supposed to mean? "equipoise between the love of laughing at oneself and soliloquy," either he doesn't know what equipoise means or he doesn't know what soliloquy is. Plus a large portion of the article is devoted to making it seem like the then-43 year-old McCarthy grooming and thenremoved a 17 year old SA survivor was actually romantic and cool. Maybe that's how Barney and Vanity Fair actually feel about the matter, but if not why not call it what it is? Gross. Gross and pathetic and sad. Maybe even immature, in a sense, if we take McCarthy's letters as genuine. But I would say being a gross pathetic loser, full of machismo and self-loathing, is part of what makes McCarthy's work so strong.

This is the most credulous article of all time

🤢🤢🤢

I'm still gonna read The Road eventually

I actually didn't have super high expectations of the guy who seemed to be able to naturally embody the literal force of evil made flesh in his books.

Wow. Cleaning out my spice rack right now.

Never make Men into heroes

People are complicated, they can be beautiful and ugly in equal measure

To put them above is to try and excise that ugliness

But a person is a person, warts and all

EDIT: [I made a stupid comment. I will reflect on how I spoke without a full investigation.]