RIP Cormac McCarthy

[safe sex 11727]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Quote

Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89.

Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that his son John had confirmed the death.

Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.

The mainstream, however, eventually came to him. “All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective western that cut against the grain of his previous work, won a National Book Award in 1992, and “The Road” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Both were made into films, as was Mr. McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2008.

That film, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, gave the world the indelible image of Javier Bardem as Mr. McCarthy’s nihilistic hit man Anton Chigurh, dispatching his victims with a pneumatic bolt gun meant for cattle.

Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” (1985), a bad dream of a western, “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’”

Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”

Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy’s work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.

Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as “a colossally gifted writer” and “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.”

But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered “close to nonsense,” of “appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records,” and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.

The language and tone of Mr. McCarthy’s novels changed markedly over the decades. Among academics and Mr. McCarthy’s legion of obsessive readers, the essential question about his oeuvre has long been: What’s better, early McCarthy or late?

His first four novels — “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Suttree” (1979) — are bleak fables, set in the Appalachian South, related in tangled prose that owes an acknowledged debt to William Faulkner. Indeed, the editor of Mr. McCarthy’s first five books, Albert Erskine of Random House, had been Faulkner’s last editor.

These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor. In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field. The farmer sues, alleging bestiality, but the man later brags, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”

Mr. McCarthy’s later period began in earnest with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume in his Border Trilogy, which includes the novels “The Crossing” (1994) and “Cities of the Plain” (1998). These novels put on display his powerful and intuitive sense of the American landscape.

His prose was now rich but austere, shorn of most punctuation. It owed more to Hemingway than to Faulkner. The location in his fiction had shifted as well, to the desert Southwest.

The elegiac quality of “All the Pretty Horses,” with its existential cowboys, surprised some of his admirers. One of Mr. McCarthy’s friends, the novelist Leslie Garrett, was quoted as remarking about it, “Cormac finally has succeeding in writing a book that won’t offend anybody.”

“All the Pretty Horses” attracted a vast audience, and was made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. It was not merely Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller; it was his first novel to sell many copies at all. None of his previous books had by then sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover.

The Times noted that they will publish a full obituary soon. 

A crime he was never awarded the Nobel. They really shit the bed on ignoring Updike and McCarthy 

Edited June 13, 2023 by safe sex

[Celery Man 20949]

a giant

Edited June 13, 2023 by Celery Man

[G650 14256]

Well shit

[atomheartbevo 89668]

89 was a pretty damned good run, and his output was amazing.

[NorthLoop 14203]

Glad he was able to put out those last 2 before he died.

Probably a lot of folks around here's favorite author or at least top 3.

[SL Xpress 7513]

“I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

Couldn’t agree more with this. It would take a level of repression that would beg the question of is the cure worse than the disease?

More likely the people who aspire to such beliefs are taken advantage of by those of us who do not harbor such notions. 

Which is why it’s so important not to possess those illusions. 

That said, it’s also true humanity can be remarkably generous with one another, and that’s rarely a prominent feature in the McCarthy books I’ve read. 

[UncleSonny 6572]

He never really lost his fastball either, I thought the Passenger was really good.

There are passages in a few of his books that I think about constantly and have marked in my paperbacks so I can go back to them quickly. 

Damn. RIP to a legend. 

[cactusflinthead 27598]

 

[C-Man 27227]

My first exposure to him was in Dr Graham's Texas Literature class at UT. We read "All the Pretty Horses."

McCarthy was a giant.

[Biff Tannen 45685]

6 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

More likely the people who aspire to such beliefs are taken advantage of by those of us who do not harbor such notions. 

Which is why it’s so important not to possess those illusions. 

That said, it’s also true humanity can be remarkably generous with one another, and that’s rarely a prominent feature in the McCarthy books I’ve read. 

I’ll open this response with the admission that I’ve never read any McCarthy. HOWEVER, as a human being living in the current times, I will say it sounds like he was not super helpful with his literature.  We need less gratuitous violence, not more.  Humans are fucked up enough already. 
 

I just experienced a month on trail and can definitively say that humanity can be remarkably generous. We should celebrate those that accentuate that attribute, not the opposite. 
 

Can’t wait to be destroyed by the fan boys in this thread. 

[Damor 1236]

8 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

“I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

Couldn’t agree more with this. It would take a level of repression that would beg the question of is the cure worse than the disease?

More likely the people who aspire to such beliefs are taken advantage of by those of us who do not harbor such notions. 

Which is why it’s so important not to possess those illusions. 

That said, it’s also true humanity can be remarkably generous with one another, and that’s rarely a prominent feature in the McCarthy books I’ve read. 

"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."

The two authors who I think have had the deepest influence on my life and thinking are McCarthy and CS Lewis.  Lewis helped me to understand good, and I never really grasped evil until I read McCarthy.

[Goredho 17406]

 

12 minutes ago, NorthLoop said:

Glad he was able to put out those last 2 before he died.

Probably a lot of folks around here's favorite author or at least top 3.

Certainly one of mine, probably my favorite (until now) living author.  I loved No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, The Road & Blood Meridian most of all.  I read The Road in the year after my father died, and the ending hit me fucking hard.  I wept like a baby.

[4th&Five 41552]

 

[Willfully Horn 8017]

I read Passenger last night. Godspeed, Mr McCarthy. 
 

[SL Xpress 7513]

10 minutes ago, Damor said:

"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."

The two authors who I think have had the deepest influence on my life and thinking are McCarthy and CS Lewis.  Lewis helped me to understand good, and I never really grasped evil until I read McCarthy.

I don’t think we can actually understand evil from a book, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

My thing is, we’re not on some kind of arc as a species where we get more loving and more generous with each generation, but there are people under the illusion that’s the case. I find that extremely dangerous, which is why I pulled the quote and commented on it. 

Over the last 70,000 years or so our species goes in various kinds of pendulums. Especially since the advent of agriculture, but even before then.

No one measures past civilizations based upon how kind they were, and how happy their citizens were. And of those that were remarkable at instituting a level of equality, communal generosity, and individual freedom, they were invariably destroyed by more powerful civilizations built upon heirarchy, repression, and military prowess.

[Damor 1236]

@Biff Tannen I'm not going to go fanboy jihad on you, but I think any serious reading of McCarthy does not see his work as a celebration of violence.  It does, however, force us to understand, admit, and confront the capacity we all have for cruelty and to do evil.  I suppose the best movie comparison I could make to his work is Unforgiven, which I'd guess owes a great deal to Blood Meridian.

I personally needed McCarthy to present evil to me as Judge Holden rather than a cartoonish "Satan."  But then again, I've been called a psychopath because I feel like I need to read Blood Meridian about once a year.

[Biff Tannen 45685]

8 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

No one measures past civilizations based upon how kind they were, and how happy their citizens were. And of those that were remarkable at instituting a level of equality, communal generosity, and individual freedom, they were invariably destroyed by more powerful civilizations built upon heirarchy, repression, and military prowess.

I feel like you make my point. If out mindset weren’t so predicated on these things, couldn’t we prevent the whole scale violence?  I mean, maybe not. Maybe I’m naive. But I don’t think glorifying it helps. 

[Biff Tannen 45685]

Of course I’m not saying we should whitewash history either. Good god, I’m a history major. 

[Willfully Horn 8017]

1 minute ago, Biff Tannen said:

I feel like you make my point. If out mindset weren’t so predicated on these things, couldn’t we prevent the whole scale violence?  I mean, maybe not. Maybe I’m naive. But I don’t think glorifying it helps. 

CM did not glorify violence. He made the horror of violence crystal clear.

[Bateshorn 9927]

Blood Meridian is the great American novel.  A book about violence, racism, and the beauty of the American West. It was the last book I read before my kind shaky vision pushed me to audio books. I’ve read it twice and already hungry to go again. 
 

And that was only one of multiple books he wrote that are amongst the greatest books in the 20th century canon. 

Edited June 13, 2023 by Bateshorn

[ztejas 43449]

16 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

My thing is, we’re not on some kind of arc as a species where we get more loving and more generous with each generation, but there are people under the illusion that’s the case. I find that extremely dangerous, which is why I pulled the quote and commented on it. 

Are you talking about our DNA and instincts that are ingrained in us? Because society has absolutely become more loving and generous. 

[Your Mom 4806]

This news looks like 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound sack. 

[4th&Five 41552]

45 minutes ago, C-Man said:

My first exposure to him was in Dr Graham's Texas Literature class at UT. We read "All the Pretty Horses."

McCarthy was a giant.

My daughter has to read it this summer for 10th grade English. 

[SL Xpress 7513]

59 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I’ll open this response with the admission that I’ve never read any McCarthy. HOWEVER, as a human being living in the current times, I will say it sounds like he was not super helpful with his literature.  We need less gratuitous violence, not more.  Humans are fucked up enough already. 
 

I just experienced a month on trail and can definitively say that humanity can be remarkably generous. We should celebrate those that accentuate that attribute, not the opposite. 
 

Can’t wait to be destroyed by the fan boys in this thread. 

It would be a shame if you were attacked in too brutal a fashion. 

In every other species a broken leg is a death sentence. Mankind is the only species capable of nursing someone so fundamentally crippled back to health, and also has the willingness to do so. 

There are innumerable fossil records of people given more elaborate burials than their peers who possessed some kind of infirmity. A woman who couldn’t chew and so it’s obvioua someone cared for her by chewing her food for her. People with dwarfism obviously celebrated in some way. 

We are tribal. If we associate someone else in some way as part of our tribe, we can be remarkably generous with one another. Even the most ruthless societies exhibit this. But an inherent defining aspect of being part of a tribe is having some kind of identifiable group that’s not part of that tribe. I don’t believe violence is  inevitable...but it’s very close. Someone at some point demonizes the other tribe, often as part of a bid for power, and then our natural inclination is to go down a path of repression, deportation, and extermination. 

An overall outlook that emphasizes the good in everyone can lead to a mending of fences. But it can also lead to a tribe adding their culture to the fossil record, rather than being extant. 

Having said all that, I feel an emphasis on either view loses an important aspect of our humanity. Personally I am grateful we had someone within my lifetime who wrote so eloquently about something I consider essential to us as human beings. At the same time, I’m glad we have the capacity as a species for other expressions as well. 

[Brisketexan 105139]

48 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

I don’t think we can actually understand evil from a book, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

My thing is, we’re not on some kind of arc as a species where we get more loving and more generous with each generation, but there are people under the illusion that’s the case. I find that extremely dangerous, which is why I pulled the quote and commented on it. 

Over the last 70,000 years or so our species goes in various kinds of pendulums. Especially since the advent of agriculture, but even before then.

No one measures past civilizations based upon how kind they were, and how happy their citizens were. And of those that were remarkable at instituting a level of equality, communal generosity, and individual freedom, they were invariably destroyed by more powerful civilizations built upon heirarchy, repression, and military prowess.

You're not wrong.  But you're not entirely right (and I say that as one of this forum's premier pessimists).  The fascinating thing -- and McCarthy didn't whitewash it (to the extreme) -- is that humanity genuinely holds those dueling natures within itself, simultaneously.  It's not just cognitive dissonance, it's the dissonance of our essence; all at once, we are nurturers and murderers.  Is there a larger point to be made about balance?  Or is the larger point that there's no point at all (and I understand that The Passenger and Stella Maris make some of that point - I really want to read them both)?

I don't know that McCarthy's insights are world-changing, or even right.  But I damn well know that his way of crafting them was otherworldly.  One of the greatest craftsmen I've ever seen.

Edited June 13, 2023 by Brisketexan

[UncleSonny 6572]

57 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I will say it sounds like he was not super helpful with his literature.  We need less gratuitous violence, not more.  Humans are fucked up enough already. 

Is a large part of an artist’s legacy whether their art can be considered “helpful”? What does helpful art look like?

I’d argue that the kind of person that picks up and gets through a McCarthy novel is a relatively thoughtful person that gets a lot out of his unique depictions of violence and morality, whether it aligns with their worldview or not.

Your are editorializing calling it “gratuitous”, especially never having read anything he wrote. I totally get it if you personally don’t like art that focuses on the themes that his books focus on, but to assume they must be a net negative to society at large because you don’t get anything out of it seems pretty reductive.

 

[burntorangebongos 10710]

The little boy in The Road. His character stays with me though I've only read the novel once all those years ago when it first came out. "Unrelentingly bleek" is how I recall describing the book, but the little boy's pureness and his innocent understanding of right and wrong worked magic on me the way it did his father in the book. It gave me hope about humanity, even in the face of the brutality required to stay alive in the book's world. It still echos in my mind after all these years.

Edited June 13, 2023 by burntorangebongos

[SL Xpress 7513]

37 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I feel like you make my point. If out mindset weren’t so predicated on these things, couldn’t we prevent the whole scale violence?  I mean, maybe not. Maybe I’m naive. But I don’t think glorifying it helps. 

Boy, I never found McCarthy glorified violence. He made it seem horrifying. 

I still feel like you have a valid point. I just don’t know if MCarthy is the one I would make as Exhibit A. 

I never wanted to be one of MCarthy’s villains. They weren’t really sympathetic characters to me. To me he illustrated them as elemental forces. They are not to be celebrated. They are to be feared. 

[mchookem 16336]

1 hour ago, NorthLoop said:

Glad he was able to put out those last 2 before he died.

Probably a lot of folks around here's favorite author or at least top 3.

def mine...i was introduced via Blood Meridian in a writing component class at UT in the 90s, had my mind blown, and proceeded to devour everything else i could find...up to Stella Maris which i literally just started reading last weekend. wow. he was a great one. 

[CooterBrown 18012]

Glad he was able to put out those last 2 before he died.
Probably a lot of folks around here's favorite author or at least top 3.

He is my favorite author by a long shot. Off the top of my head, I don’t even know who number two would be.

[Michael Knight 12977]

Anybody that read Blood Meridian and thinks it glorifies violence is a psychopath. As for civilization and advancements as we satisfy our needs and are only left with our wants overall people can be quite generous, but there's always gonna be shitheads

[futureman 22462]

Blood Meridian glorified violence. 

[Biff Tannen 45685]

1 hour ago, UncleSonny said:

Is a large part of an artist’s legacy whether their art can be considered “helpful”? What does helpful art look like?

I’d argue that the kind of person that picks up and gets through a McCarthy novel is a relatively thoughtful person that gets a lot out of his unique depictions of violence and morality, whether it aligns with their worldview or not.

Your are editorializing calling it “gratuitous”, especially never having read anything he wrote. I totally get it if you personally don’t like art that focuses on the themes that his books focus on, but to assume they must be a net negative to society at large because you don’t get anything out of it seems pretty reductive.

 

Extraordinarily well put.  

[mchookem 16336]

18 minutes ago, burntorangebongos said:

The little boy in The Road. His character stays with me though I've only read the novel once all those years ago when it first came out. "Unrelentingly bleek" is how I recall describing the book, but the little boy's pureness and his innocent understanding of right and wrong worked magic on me the way it did his father in the book. It gave me hope about humanity, even in the face of the brutality required to stay alive in the book's world. It still echos in my mind after all these years.

wonderfully put.

years ago i read A Thousand Splendid Suns then went straight into The Road... when i finished i felt like i'd been emotionally abused and i literally cried for three days. i mean, i may have been PMSing, but still...

[mchookem 16336]

12 minutes ago, Michael Knight said:

Anybody that read Blood Meridian and thinks it glorifies violence is a psychopath. 

 

5 minutes ago, futureman said:

Blood Meridian glorified violence. 

 

[MC Fresh Breath 4074]

I read Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men.  My challenge in reading Blood Meridian wasn't the violence, but instead what I would call the 'thickness' of it.  Very dense, many words I could not find in a dictionary and the whole punctuation thing.  It was obviously great, but it was a challenging read and I was releived when I was finished with it.   He wouldn't make my personal list of favorite authors.  But I recognize his greatness and his skilll.   RIP.

 

 

[crash_davis 23113]

This weekend I grabbed The Road off of the bookshelf. I had been putting off reading that book again because it hit me so hard the first time I read it in 2006. It's his only book which I haven't read at least twice. I guess I need to start reading it again.

RIP Mr McCarthy. Your words guide me like no other author has or will.

The sentence below has shaped my temperance to life's events like no other sentence in any book.

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

[miguelito 11266]

No one is going to comment on his lack of quotation marks?

 

 

[GabrielsHorn 2183]

Shame as he’s one of the greatest American writers ever. In the middle of the border trilogy while on paternity leave, and the way he can describe the relationship between man and nature is second to none. 
 

Edit: this line really stuck with me from the tail end of All The Pretty Horses:

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Edited June 13, 2023 by GabrielsHorn

[Goredho 17406]

Whenever I think of Blood Meridian, I always remember the following passage sentence.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

 

 

[dcbc 14484]

3 hours ago, C-Man said:

My first exposure to him was in Dr Graham's Texas Literature class at UT. We read "All the Pretty Horses."

McCarthy was a giant.

Same.  I still have my copy along with Bud Shrake's Strange Peaches. 

 

What a loss.

Edited June 13, 2023 by dcbc

[midtown 3345]

The Road is probably my favorite book of all time.  I finished it about 30 mins before I landed in LA for a conference. I had a 3 yr old son at home and it took every bit of will power not to catch the next flight home. 

[washparkhorn 9939]

RIP Cormac:

 

[mchookem 16336]

1 hour ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

I read Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men.  My challenge in reading Blood Meridian wasn't the violence, but instead what I would call the 'thickness' of it.  Very dense, many words I could not find in a dictionary and the whole punctuation thing.  It was obviously great, but it was a challenging read and I was releived when I was finished with it.   He wouldn't make my personal list of favorite authors.  But I recognize his greatness and his skilll.   RIP.

 

 

i totally get what you're saying here, i feel the same...and that's also how i feel about my other favorites, James Ellroy and Margaret Atwood. and the best TV show ever, Deadwood. and Paul Thomas Anderson films lol. 

i might describe it as...they take extraordinary effort. i find it engaging but maybe also rewarding? the effort makes it stick with me more, for sure. 

to be fair, my favorites also include Stephen King and Seinfeld 😁

[Damor 1236]

The Road was my intro to McCarthy, and absolutely devastated me.  I'll deign to repeat my post from The Road thread:

"I, too, read it as a relatively new dad when my sons were 2yo and about 9mos.  It messed me up for a good three months.  It's the greatest book I may never read more than once.

That said, I now have two first printing copies put away which they will receive when they are fathers themselves.   I wrote them a little something on the flyleaf when they were little, and will add to it before they receive them.  But I'll tell them to wait a few years before reading it.

The concluding paragraph may be one of the most beautiful ever written:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

It comes to mind every time I'm fortunate enough to fish with my boys in a cold stream in Colorado."

Shortly after that post my wife treated me to a stupidly expensive custom fly rod for an anniversary gift, and I chose this for the inscription:

[washparkhorn 9939]

Cormac published his first work of nonfiction in 2016. It is an interesting piece:

https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
 

Quote

I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” 

 

 

[South Austin 52504]

3 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Can’t wait to be destroyed by the fan boys in this thread. 

Should we scalp Biff now, or later?

[Goredho 17406]

8 minutes ago, South Austin said:

Should we scalp Biff now, or later?

Let’s send him to see the Judge in the outhouse.

[mdmost 43001]

Wherever he is, I know he’s smiling while looking down on us with his spyglass. RIP to a literary legend. The world was better for him being in it.

[NorthLoop 14203]

I read The Road in college. One of the best books I've ever read. I have a 4yo son now and there's no way I could reread it. I'd be crying and having a panic attack the whole time.