Like Cormac McCarthy, But More Barbaric

It's Robert E. Howard's 105th birthday. Grognardia quotes H.P. Lovecraft's 1936 tribute to him:

No one could write more convincingly of violence and gore than he, and his battle passages reveal an instinctive aptitude for military tactics which would have brought him distinction in times of war. His real gifts were even higher than the readers of his published works would suspect, and had he lived, would have helped him to make his mark in serious literature with some folk epic of his beloved southwest.[...]That such an artist should perish while hundreds of insincere hacks continue to concoct spurious ghosts and vampires and space-ships and occult detectives is indeed a sorry piece of cosmic irony!

I like how that first part makes him sound like Cormac McCarthy.

Did I mention that I saw the Vincent D'Onofrio/Renée Zellweger take on Howard, The Whole Wide World? It Was Pretty Good.

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Sneak peek: Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi is interviewed in next month's Believer...

Cronin's lot

My review of Justin Cronin's new novel, The Passage, is in today's Los Angeles Times. It begins:

Chosen for both the Pulitzer Prize and coverage on "Oprah," Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel "The Road" regularly appears in debates over genre carpetbagging. Should die-hard fans of a genre (in this case science fiction) be honored or annoyed when an interloper wanders onto their creative territory? The title of McCarthy's book indicates the path its father-and-son protagonists follow, but it might also symbolize the author's journey from revered offshoot of the Melville-Hemingway-Faulkner axis to de facto practitioner of end-of-the-world lit. Justin Cronin's ample vampire-virus saga "The Passage" also presents a vivid eschatology, while its title indicates an even more profound transformation of one sort of literary sensibility into another. Whether the transformation takes is one of the tantalizing aspects of "The Passage."

Side benefit of reading The Passage is discovering his terrific first (and non-vampire) novel, Mary and O'Neil. (What does it mean when your escapist reading itself requires an escape?)

Disambiguations™ for December 2, 2009

I. Exciting news: Dave Tompkins's decade-in-the-making How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From WWII to Hip Hop. The Machine Speaks is forthcoming from Stop Smiling/Melville House next spring. (A sample of his vocoder musings can be found in an old Believer.)

The book's title, we learn, is "from a mishearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase 'how to recognize speech.' "

A Rousselian distortion! It's a trend: Last week I saw a New Yorker listing for the group Alice Donut, and learned that the band name came from a similar homophonic smudging, of the movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. (The full name was "Alice Donut Liver Henry Moore.")

II. Earlier this year, Richard Polt—not just the esteemed editor of Keeler News (and the founder of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society) but the editor of ETCetera: Journal of the Early Typewriter Collectors' Association—was good enough to set me up with a Lettera 22, which I brought along to the wilds of Wyoming. (I had feared that my laptop would give out on me.) Here is the evidence:

It's a lovely, jade-by-way-of-pea-soup-colored machine that was a joy to use...until last week, when a bit of connective tissue snapped. I plan to get it fixed soon, and in the meantime blame my non-writing on its injury.

Here's Sylvia Plath with her Lettera:



And here's Mark Sarvas mentioning his old Lettera a while back...

And of course, the most recent news: Cormac McCarthy's trusty Lettera 32—is going up for auction. He wrote all his books on it (including three unpublished novels), and estimates an output of 5 million words over the years. As someone in the piece puts it: "It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife."

Cormac McCarthy!

Jenny weighs in...(I was afraid she'd write "Don DeLillo"!)

I like/I don't like

I like: grapes, trashy novels, being lazy, the eighteenth century, irises, yellow freesias, good friends, salted cashews, anchovies, e-mail, miniature things, luridly iced cupcakes, the buttery taste of yellowtail, performing animals, glass eyes, Fabergé eggs, any and all cats, Jameson on the rocks, cold beer, autumn, filet mignon, salt bagels, fruit tarts, primates, blogging, working as hard as I can, the idea of north, training, swimming, running, racing, teaching, reading, writing, cardigans with zippers, nineteenth-century novels, Shakespeare, Chanel lipstick, revenge tragedies, my iPod and what’s on it, Annick Goutal Eau de Sud, making good things happen, New York, cities, the ocean when it’s cold enough to wear a sweater outside, blue aquamarine.

I don’t like: mayonnaise, dill, nutmeg, cellphones, slow elevators, balls bouncing loudly, crackly plastic bags, nostalgia, things that crash my computer (Internet Explorer, electronic letters of recommendation), sleeplessness, second thoughts, having my judgment questioned, being read aloud to, narrative jokes, grading papers, Cormac McCarthy, losing things, loud music in restaurants, unsalted butter, New Historicism, being bored.

The recognitions

Today's entries have a title in common. The first, "American Purgatorio," comes to us from Dizzyhead Laird...



...and the second, "Brief Encounter," is the handiwork of Dizzyhead Jessica:


More in a bit...stay tuned!

Writers revealed — Translating Maugham — In his shoes

Haven't had a chance to listen yet, but Felicia Sullivan's Writers Revealed show has just started—you can download it as a podcast.

My iPod doesn't work!

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Random recent Netflix connexions: Both Pan's Labyrinth and The Painted Veil feature deliberately obscured patrimony!

Anyone know why The Painted Veil was called The Painted Veil? The movie gave no explanation—and that's OK!

(In other Somerset M. news, Maud's recent posts had me dusting off Cakes and Ale...)

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Via Ed, I found Jennifer Weiner's thoughts on the Cormac interview pretty interesting:

I just wonder whether McCarthy's first wife, and first son, were as happy burnishing the myth of the struggling, starving, lecture-fee-spurning artiste as McCarthy himself was. You want to be all stinky-breathed and starving in a forty-dollar-a-week flophouse, do it on your lonesome. You've got a wife and kids? Get over yourself and take a paying lecture gig every once in a while.

Hanging on the telephone

"Now it may be," he typed, "that every other recorded instant of gold made by fire—there are hundreds of them, almost all seeming to be variant on a few themes, like old comedy plots—maybe every one is false, the product of mendacity or wishful thinking or the accumulating errors of multiple transmission, history's game of Telephone that always pushes anecdotes to clarity, wonder, or exemplum. Maybe this is the one and only real one we know about, the one that slipped through the baffle of advancing Time that falsified all the others, to reach us like Job's servant out of the wreckage of the former world: I only am escaped alone to tell thee." —John Crowley, Daemonomania

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. —Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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From a recent game of Telephone:

When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.


(First line of E.B. White's Stuart Little)

After 14 permutations:

When the steward sees this person arrive, they all get very quiet.

The Interview, Part II

O: Is there anything you'd like to tell your new readers?
C: Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever. You might want to think about that.

(Thanks to Dizzies Team Member Hua. For Part I, go here.)

Road rules

We all know about this, right? I'm excited.

O: You spent a lot of time in Tennessee. What was that like?
C: Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

Here's hoping Dizzyhead Rob will have a full report, when the time comes...

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Maybe everybody knows this—Cormac McCarthy's editor on 1965's The Orchard Keeper was Albert Erskine, who'd edited Faulkner. I just learned this here, on a site with more pics of CMcC than I assumed existed!