Notes on Blood Meridian (2013) by John Sepich

Book Review 

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition 

(Southwestern Writers Collection Series, 

Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)(2013)

John Sepich and Edwin T. Arnold

   Here are my highlighted quotes from this book:

Meanwhile, Blood Meridian‘s readership continued to grow, as did academic interest in the book and its author. Harold Bloom’s proclamation in 2000 that Blood Meridian was “the authentic American apocalyptic novel” and that “Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner” was the imprimatur that finally ushered the book into the realm of the modern classics.

Two possible influences on Outer Dark, apart from the obvious spirit of Flannery O’Connor, are Eudora Welty’s Robber Bridegroom (1946) and Madison Jones’s Forest of the Night (1960).

Bartlett writes of the New Almaden cinnabar mine located thirteen miles from the bay of San Francisco.

  Mostly what I harvested from Notes on Blood Meridian is a better idea of the primary sources that McCarthy likely used in preparing to write this book.  One of the issues that McCarthy clearly faced was the potential demystification of his work.  All artists face a potential "disenchantment" process that is linked directly to the production, evaluation and consumption of art-products by different audiences.   The classic posture of this art production dilemma is the artist who rails at false critics and later lives to regret it when there are no critics, not even false ones, describing their art.

  McCarthy managed to side step this problem by never talking to anyone about his work.  But that doesn't mean the work remained undone.  I was able to locate a host of primary sources- most related to the violence between American settlers and Native Americans in the American west and southwest in the mid to late 19th century.  Blood Meridian is very much about this world- the American southwest of the 1850's/60s/70s and McCarthy appears to have approached it much as a historian would. He pulled many ideas and minute details from the historical sources and then accreting is own artistic inspiration.

   I found many of these inspirational titles available in the LAPL and checked out a handful, but unfortunately they are almost all uniformly long and hard to read, so not sure how far that will go, but I'm very interested in the later history of the wars between the American Government and Native American tribes in the west in the 1860's and 70's.

Show Review: Gamma World & Total Pleasure (Wisteria Residency 1) @ Zebulon LA

 Show Review

Gamma World &
Total Pleasure

(Wisteria Residency 1)

@ Zebulon LA

   Man, I would go to Zebulon more if they booked more shows that weren't the indie/underground equivalent of legacy acts.  I mean, I get it, they are going for diversity in their programming, not trying to replace the Echo.  But the regular shows are so good at Zebulon!  So I found myself at night one of the Wisteria Residency in February- every Monday night!  

    The bill started with Gamma World- they were cool- a two piece with a drum machine- that's all you need! They had some anthemic song writing, some political lyrics.  It was fun- I can see a path to a real career for those two, but they've only got one release on Spotify and its "Demo" from 2019 on "Unsigned" so there is work to do there.  Every act needs to make a physical product, tape, cd, vinyl, whatever and then sell it at live shows.   When I looked up their socials I saw my like minded contacts in the world of music were already following these guys, so I would say, worth checking out, hope they do more shows.  Didn't love their look!  I bet they don't care!

    The second band was Total Pleasure.  This is a trad post punk outfit, with a rhythm section that sounded like the Cure, a pair of guitarists that sounded like the Smiths and a normcore singer who looked like one of the neo-shoegaze front men you see out there in recent times.   It didn't quite hang together- the rhythm section sounds like it needs to play more shows together and the songwriting was uneven- some of the cuts really jammed, others felt awkward and flat.   But you know, ever since the pandemic, I've really begun to appreciate EVERY local band- god bless them all, each and every one.  Just the fact that they are playing shows on a Monday night- god bless them.

       Didn't stay for Wisteria- I was curious to see whether Zebulon was mighty enough to keep a three band Monday night bill on schedule and the answer, sadly, no.   Gamma World didn't play till after 9 PM, and I left at 10:30 with Wisteria's set no where in site (they were supposed to take the stage at 10:20 PM).  Here's a tip for Zebulon, or Wisteria- don't book a three band bill on a Monday night if the first band isn't willing to take the stage at 8:30, as was the case last night.  Still was a good time and looking forward to next week.

The Orchard Keeper(1966) by Cormac McCarthy

 Book Review

The Orchard Keeper (1966)

by Cormac McCarthy

    

  This was Cormac McCarthy's first novel and if you don't think it sounds like Faulkner then you have not read Faulkner.  I'm not a huge fan of Faulkner but I'm generally appreciative of his influence on American literature.  He is, first and foremost, a literary modernist in that his books are difficult to understand in terms of the narrative/temporal techniques he deploys.  He is also the first and arguably only great modernist of the American South, which is not a region that generated a ton of modernist artists.  Literary modernism represents a kind of apex of the divide between an artist and their prospective audience. If you want to find readers of difficult modernist authors in 2024, you are going to have to go to an American university- and not an undergraduate class, but the graduate school, to find people who are "into" any kind of 20th century modernist author. 

 On the other hand, these writers have had a huge influence on the audience of future authors of literary fiction.  In fact, it is fair to say that "serious" literary fiction in 20th century America came to be synonymous with the deployment of these complicated narrative techniques to a greater or lesser degree. However, in the terms that this blog uses, The Orchard Keeper was clearly not a hit.  It was an interesting first novel by a promising young writer, but there is nothing necessarily in this book to indicate that the author would go on to write his Western Trilogy, The Road and No Country For Old Men twenty years later.  If you've read those books, you know that he abandoned complicated literary modernism in favor of a spare brand of prose that is more like literary minimalism.   I don't think he gets enough credit for that shift.

   That doesn't help The Orchard Keeper, which I found just as incomprehensible as any of Faulkner's books.  Certainly not a good pick for an Audiobook since the modernist technique practically requires interlineation on a page of text to keep track of the plot.  Like, when I read the Wikipedia description to prepare for this post I recognized what had happened but wouldn't have been able to tell you that as it was going on.

  On the other hand, if you have some kind of interest in the prose style of Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper is invaluable because it is the point of departure.  The reader can already pick up his trick of using simile and metaphor to elevate the description of a bleeding hillbilly to something approaching biblical reverence. 

       While there are some feints at the later McCarthy heart of darkness, The Orchard Keeper is a pretty light hearted affair.   There's no sense of the mythical in The Orchard Keeper and it weakens the impact of the prose.  Also the story is confused because of the literary technique- which is clearly something he figure out later in this career.

North Woods (2023) by Daniel Mason

 Book Review

North Woods (2023)

by Daniel Mason

1,001 Novels: Revised

  Like the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project, I believe the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is best conceived as a project that is meant to be revised.  In the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die, the first revision (2008) was to go back and introduce additional diversity via increased representation of women authors, authors from the global south and generally reducing the number of picks for those authors with more than one book.

  So far, I haven't come across any duplicated authors in the 1,001 Novels project.  Editor Susan Straight is clearly on top of representation in a way the original editors of the 1,001 Books project were not.  Thus, I think the primary concern in revising the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is simply to make it better.  That brings me to North Woods, a novel about a patch of woods in Western Massachussets that made several year end best lists- I finally checked out the Audiobook after it made the New York Times books of the year list.  The fact that this is a book about a piece of land in the United States makes it particularly relevant for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America since it is an approach not embraced by any of the books I've read thus far.

    The book was critically acclaimed, and I enjoyed the Audiobook, though the episodic approach- switching from character to character over the course of hundreds of years, necessarily made it a choppy listening experience.  I'm sure that this would be a book to select for any revision of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project... specifically, one of the books from the Massachussets portion of the list, which looks like this:

1)Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2)The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

3)The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn

4)The Wedding by Dorothy West

5)The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

6)Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

7)Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

8)Promised Land by Robert Parker

9)The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

10)We Love You Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

11)White Ivy by Susie Yang

12)Unraveling by Elizabeth Graver

13)Leaving Pico by Frank X. Gaspar

14)Born Slippy  by Tom Lutz 

15) Beyond That the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

16)Union Dues by John Sayles

17) Faith by Jennifer Haigh

18)April Morning by Howard Fast

19)An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England(2007) by Brock Clarke

20)Caucasia by Danny Senza

21)Vida by Marge Piercy

22)Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

23)The Wishing Hill by Holly Robinson

24)Father of the Rain by Lily King

25)The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

26)The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

27)Don't Ask me Where I'm From by Jennifer de Leon

28)Meeting Rozzy Halfway by Caroline Leavitt

29)The Giant's House by Elizabeth McKracken

30) Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman

  My natural inclination is to just pull one of the books out of the bottom three- I think Meeting Rozzy Halfway  by Caroline Leavitt makes sense, but that also moves the place for that slot from Boston to the west of Massachussets.  Not much of an issue in this case, but I'd be concerned about dropping a more geographically underrepresented region of the country.