7 ms·

Cormac McCarthy's Sideline: Freelance copy editor

91 points by samclemens 3y ago

brudgers 3y ago
I am reminded, when something doesn't make sense to me -- the relationship between McCarthy and the Santa Fe Institute -- I have collapsed someone's entire day to day experience into a short phrase. McCarthy did not leverage acclaim into Hollywood work like Faulkner. He worked with people who appreciated his skills directly. McCarthy had a day job. That makes sense. My unease with imagining his playing celebrity was worthy.
- ioblomov 3y ago
  FWIW, pretty sure Faulkner only wrote for Hollywood to pay the bills. Recall a story I wish I could locate about him impersonating a servant when bill collectors showed up at his crumbling family estate. He also had a stint as the night watchman at the University of Mississippi (which, unlike Hollywood, allowed him time to really write). Until The Portable Faulkner was published in 1946 most of his books were already out of print.
metaxy2 3y ago
Man, McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons makes sense in his hard-bitten Western prose, but does it really make sense to have zero semicolons in these nonfiction books? When used properly, semicolons reveal a layer of meaning that occurs in natural speech: when you have two sentences that are grammatically separate sentences but have a link in meaning or make a larger point together. That said, I can't say I would turn down a free copyediting job by Cormac McCarthy even if I had to drop all my semicolons in exchange.
- pasabagi 3y ago
  It's also Kurt Vonnegut's rule, for what it's worth. I think the problem with semicolons is twofold: 1. It allows you to write these horrible long sentences (that thankfully nobody does anymore, but if you look at like a Dickens novel they are everywhere). 2. They're a sort of mark of sophistication and wordiness, probably for reason (1), and it's very much the mainstream of the US tradition to reject that. For all their desperation for simplicity, I don't actually think US novelists are particularly simple writers - Cormac McCarthy is kinda purple a lot of the time. So my feeling is just wanting to get away from wrought sentences and superficial sophistication isn't really worth anything in itself - it just brings you to a different manner of expressing sophistication.
- farleykr 3y ago
  I've noticed that high-performing people often develop idiosyncrasies that shape how they do what they do. I wouldn't use McCarthy's rules about semicolons as a general rule for any writer except maybe as an exercise. Constraints breed creativity. I think the number of successful writers who do use semicolons validates their usefulness. But I would also argue that somehow McCarthy figured out that ditching them was part of what allowed him to write as well as he did.
  - dhosek 3y ago
    McCarthy also was averse to apostrophes and quotation marks. I remember when I had my first iPhone thinking that Cormac McCarthy would hate how it turned dont into don’t.
- munificent 3y ago
  I've done a lot of writing in the past decade and I can honestly say I've never felt the need for a semicolon. I think writers overestimate the finality of a period. If one sentence follows another, readers will understand the implicit connection between them. After all, you put them next to each other.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  Once you write enough you realize most of these all or nothing pronouncements on grammar and punctuation are more like personal vendettas and affectations. Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability. Some people think all non-fiction writing has to abide by technical writing standards, but that's hogwash and pointless hardheadedness once you actually know how to write and use complex sentences to capture complex ideas well.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Ward Farnsworth says it well: > A lapse from a supposed rule of style isn't an offense against nature. It's just a choice with consequences, and sometimes you want the consequences.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability. You are a member of an ever-smaller group of people who feel that way. https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-melancholy-decline-of-the-semicolon/ https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-melancholy-decline-of-the-se... > In 2017, author Ben Blatt discovered that semicolon use dropped by about 70% from 1800 to 2000. The ghosts of several authors are now rejoicing. Writers like George Orwell, who called semicolons “an unnecessary stop”. Or Edgar Allan Poe, who preferred the dash. Or Kurt Vonnegut, who famously advised against their use, saying “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” The symbol is facing the same melancholy fate as the dodo, the dinosaur, and the Soviet Union. Extinction.
    - metaxy2 3y ago
      Maybe "endangerment" is more fair, given that it's still massively popular compared to, say, the interrobang. Also note that two of the three authors cited are known for their bare-bones, economical prose styles; not exactly a cross-section of the literary world. (Poe is debatable--he was probably economical for a 19th century romantic, but not in absolute terms.)
- Finnucane 3y ago
  As a copyeditor myself, who works in academia, I have to say that such 'rules' usually only work for the people applying them to their own work, but that doesn't mean they have no value. Why do it? It clearly provides a kind of discipline that makes you consider what's necessary for clarity. Do these two parts of a sentence really need to be together, or can they be separate? For technical or academic writers who may have difficulty expressing themselves clearly, a little artificial restraint could help.
scop 3y ago
One of the funny things about McCarthy is how he is associated with minimalism. It forces you to really think about what "minimalism" means. While his punctuation is minimal, his writing is not "short". But his writing is distilled. As the article notes, while he has less punctuation than Faulkner he has double the words per mark. How can a writer be minimal when his sentences are longer? It's easy to see when you read him: he paints an image so vividly (even when the image itself is unsure/opaque!), that you can hardly imagine adding or removing a word.
- scop 3y ago
  > On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination allowed them by the chance drop of a seed. - The Orchard Keeper, pg 11 (his first novel) For example, one could easily dice this sentence into multiple sentences or divide it with a semicolon. Somebody could also remove several words. But there is an image so completely captured by the sentence, an image in its fullness, that I can only admire it.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    I have very bad brain fog today, so this might be that talking, but I don't even know for certain how to parse that sentence grammatically. There doesn't seem to be a verb or object, only one long extended subject, unless both "shelves" and "climbs" are verbs, in which case thats some serious Calvin-and-Hobbes verbing, but it works I suppose. In any case trying to understand this sentence required several read-throughs before I came up with the second explanation, and made my headache about two increments worse. I'm not a huge fan. It doesn't matter much to me whether writing is "difficult" in to sense of having a lot of big words, complex sentence structure, or long sentences, but I hate ambiguous writing.
    - scop 3y ago
      Nope you’re not off. I chose McCarthy’s earliest novel because it is him at his most “impressionistic” and indeed many sentences require multiple read through to determine what’s being said. But that’s the artistic pleasure in it: a scene is painted slowly in my mind’s eyes that, once fully formed/comprehended, is hard to find elsewhere in literature. This being art, you are completely free to find it off putting and completely ignore it. But I’ve found beauty in McCarthy that is, well, hard to put into words. His writing, much like technical documentation, can require many readings to get the picture.
kylebenzle 3y ago
I got through most of this but does anyone know why McCarthy famously hated punctuation marks and only, "believed in periods, capitals, and the occasional comma"? Everyone makes a big deal of it but is it really just preference or is the idea deeper, that like a all the meaning should be contained in the words anyway and punctuation is a shortcut?
- idontwantthis 3y ago
  His wildest choice to me is using “could of” etc. I get it’s for pronunciation purposes, but now that it seems on its way to replace the correct spelling, it really jarred me.
  - hndc 3y ago
    Wild? Using it in dialogue seems perfectly reasonable. It's a common malapropism.
    - cheeseomlit 3y ago
      Even in dialogue I would've expected "could've". 'Could of' reads more like a typo
      - giraffe_lady 3y ago
        It's phonetically identical or very near it in most dialects. If anything it's a transcription error, but in this case just a way to imply the spoken cadence of a certain accent. Not any more incorrect than spelling "going to" as "gonna" in dialog.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Very often it's not a malapropism, just a variation on pronounciation.
      - giraffe_lady 3y ago
karaterobot 3y ago
I have wondered what McCarthy's actual relationship to science was. The article quotes him saying, about his tenure at the Santa Fe Institute: > "I’m here because I like science, and this is a fun place to spend time" I would not have drawn that conclusion from reading his novels, or from his essay about The Kekulé Problem. I took The Passenger and Stella Maris to be something like a summary of where he, personally, stood at the end of his life, and they both seemed to take a more complicated stance on scientific progress. Blood Meridian did too. There are plenty of other examples; it's a theme. I don't believe you can fairly draw conclusions about what an author believes based on what they put in their books, but when a consistent trend emerges over time, it's hard to ignore it. I'm not implying that he secretly hated science, I just wonder if he didn't appreciate it in a different way than you might assume given the quote above. Maybe it's the "progress" part of scientific he was cynical about?
- jonnyone 3y ago
  Maybe interested in science, but disliked scientism?
- da-bacon 3y ago
  I'm surprised you find the Kekulé Problem not supporting that he liked science. I think of it more as pointing out that the unconsciousness has been ignored scientifically, but he certainly frames it as a question of science: "The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." "To repeat. The unconscious is a biological operative and language is not." For those who are interested, here is the article https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ As you say, Cormac's relationship with science is a bit hard to get from his novels. But I also think he really did love science, you might enjoy one of the most memorable days during the short time I was at the Santa Fe Institute https://dabacon.org/babel/2023/06/13/cormac/ https://dabacon.org/babel/2023/06/13/cormac/
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    I took that essay to be at least in part about how much of what we think of as a world governed by symbolic logic is really governed by a powerful unconscious world that is resistant to the scientific way of thinking. Not to say it is magical, but that underneath our modern brain is an older brain that works differently. I first read that essay after reading The Passenger, and wanted to connect it to what I took to be one of the themes of that book, which is that humans fundamentally aren't prepared to wield the tools of symbolic thinking, math and language. That they tend toward destruction (atomic warfare in the book) and, beyond that, a kind of insanity. That leads me to think he is fascinated by science, but not in the uncomplicated "fuck yeah science!!!" way.
ilamont 3y ago
Made me think of Gene Wolfe (an engineer and later editor for Plant Engineering magazine) and Orson Scott Card, who continued to write for Compute! even after Ender's Game became popular (see https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/index.php?author=Orson+Scott+Card https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/index.php?autho...) Regarding "McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons" (@metaxy2) there are a number of high profile writers who are very particular about grammar. Example: Stephen King's On Writing shared some opinions about adverbs: “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one in your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day…fifty the day after that…and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.”
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  If only he diverted a little of his rage against the adverb and pointed it toward the exclamation mark.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    I think that's what happens when you see too many adverbs. :)
- beacon294 3y ago
  I think he was also joking a little bit. Profligately is an adverb.
abeppu 3y ago
> Another point they stress: the adventure of wrestling with big ideas and expressing them: “Just enjoy writing,” they say. “Try to write the best version of your paper. . . . You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself.” Miller put two colons into the first sentence. There are four quotation marks wrapping text that isn't actually quoting anyone, in an article about a novelist who doesn't use quotation marks even when characters are speaking. The quoted paraphrase includes an unnecessary ellipsis. Does Miller believe that McCarthy's rules are good ones?
- abeppu 3y ago
  Actually, I was able to get to the Nature article through my library. I had thought the material in quotes was Miller paraphrasing. In fact, he's quoting from two separated points in the article but has changed the punctuation. The original used a colon. > Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can't please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. I think in the context of writing about how a writer uses punctuation, these choices are significant.
pizzafeelsright 3y ago
I have read half of his work. I recall that he would dictate to his wife who would then write. I wondered if the lack of punctuation is just text to speech made manifest.
- kombookcha 3y ago
  What do you know - that actually makes perfect sense for how melodious the writing is. It was sound before it was text!
swozey 3y ago
I found McCarthys style of writing to really frustrate me. I think it really took me out of the book to read and try to piece the way conversations were going. I really, really didn't enjoy reading that book. I read it a LONG time ago, and I know how popular it is and I've read just about every post-apocalypse book I can find, my favorite being A Canticle for Leibowitiz. So I checked out the 1* Amazon reviews and there are some really funny ones written in McCarthys style - https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0307265439/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0307265439/ref=acr_dp... edit: I didn't say what book, The Road. I do believe someone has told me to read Blood Meridian, but I haven't tried.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  The Road is probably his most "accessible" book (it was recommended by Oprah after all), second being All the Pretty Horses, which is a modern and romantic western written in his style. But you might just not like his stylistic tics. His lack of quotation marks is a stylistic move that repeats across all of his books.
- wellthisisgreat 3y ago
  I kinda liked Blood Meridian, but I think I couldn't quite appreciate it. but man, "Passenger" and "Stella Maris" is some of the most bittersweet, heartbreakingly beautiful literature I've experienced. Audiobook is exceptional.
drcode 3y ago
"This conclusion section could really use an aside about a trapper who wore a necklace made of ears"
throwaway81523 3y ago
Obligatory: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-reade... Excerpt: > Now read this from McCarthy's The Crossing (1994), part of the acclaimed Border Trilogy: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." > Thriller writers know enough to save this kind of syntax for fast-moving scenes: "... and his shout of fear came as a bloody gurgle and he died, and Wolff felt nothing" (Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca, 1980). In McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described. And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927), he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992), creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently from you, therefore I am a Writer." > The same message is conveyed by the stern biblical tone that runs through all of McCarthy's recent novels. Parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations abound: "They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire"; "and they would always be so and never be otherwise"; "the captain wrote on nor did he look up"; "there rode no soul save he," and so forth. > The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the effect: "It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching repetition of words ... Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences ... gather to a magic." The key word here is "accumulation." Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
Well, a man's gotta earn a living somehow. I'm sure he never made much from his books - they were too good.
fergie 3y ago
I'm going to stick my neck out here: Sometimes Cormac McCarthy is a bit _too_ minimalist. Sections of his prose can be sparse, ambiguous and difficult to follow, the ending of Blood Meridian being the classic case in point.

91 points by samclemens 3y ago

I am reminded, when something doesn't make sense to me -- the relationship between McCarthy and the Santa Fe Institute -- I have collapsed someone's entire day to day experience into a short phrase. McCarthy did not leverage acclaim into Hollywood work like Faulkner. He worked with people who appreciated his skills directly. McCarthy had a day job. That makes sense. My unease with imagining his playing celebrity was worthy.

ioblomov 3y ago
FWIW, pretty sure Faulkner only wrote for Hollywood to pay the bills. Recall a story I wish I could locate about him impersonating a servant when bill collectors showed up at his crumbling family estate. He also had a stint as the night watchman at the University of Mississippi (which, unlike Hollywood, allowed him time to really write). Until The Portable Faulkner was published in 1946 most of his books were already out of print.

metaxy2 3y ago

Man, McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons makes sense in his hard-bitten Western prose, but does it really make sense to have zero semicolons in these nonfiction books? When used properly, semicolons reveal a layer of meaning that occurs in natural speech: when you have two sentences that are grammatically separate sentences but have a link in meaning or make a larger point together. That said, I can't say I would turn down a free copyediting job by Cormac McCarthy even if I had to drop all my semicolons in exchange.

pasabagi 3y ago
It's also Kurt Vonnegut's rule, for what it's worth. I think the problem with semicolons is twofold: 1. It allows you to write these horrible long sentences (that thankfully nobody does anymore, but if you look at like a Dickens novel they are everywhere). 2. They're a sort of mark of sophistication and wordiness, probably for reason (1), and it's very much the mainstream of the US tradition to reject that. For all their desperation for simplicity, I don't actually think US novelists are particularly simple writers - Cormac McCarthy is kinda purple a lot of the time. So my feeling is just wanting to get away from wrought sentences and superficial sophistication isn't really worth anything in itself - it just brings you to a different manner of expressing sophistication.
farleykr 3y ago
I've noticed that high-performing people often develop idiosyncrasies that shape how they do what they do. I wouldn't use McCarthy's rules about semicolons as a general rule for any writer except maybe as an exercise. Constraints breed creativity. I think the number of successful writers who do use semicolons validates their usefulness. But I would also argue that somehow McCarthy figured out that ditching them was part of what allowed him to write as well as he did.
- dhosek 3y ago
  McCarthy also was averse to apostrophes and quotation marks. I remember when I had my first iPhone thinking that Cormac McCarthy would hate how it turned dont into don’t.
munificent 3y ago
I've done a lot of writing in the past decade and I can honestly say I've never felt the need for a semicolon. I think writers overestimate the finality of a period. If one sentence follows another, readers will understand the implicit connection between them. After all, you put them next to each other.
beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
Once you write enough you realize most of these all or nothing pronouncements on grammar and punctuation are more like personal vendettas and affectations. Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability. Some people think all non-fiction writing has to abide by technical writing standards, but that's hogwash and pointless hardheadedness once you actually know how to write and use complex sentences to capture complex ideas well.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  Ward Farnsworth says it well: > A lapse from a supposed rule of style isn't an offense against nature. It's just a choice with consequences, and sometimes you want the consequences.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability. You are a member of an ever-smaller group of people who feel that way. https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-melancholy-decline-of-the-semicolon/ https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-melancholy-decline-of-the-se... > In 2017, author Ben Blatt discovered that semicolon use dropped by about 70% from 1800 to 2000. The ghosts of several authors are now rejoicing. Writers like George Orwell, who called semicolons “an unnecessary stop”. Or Edgar Allan Poe, who preferred the dash. Or Kurt Vonnegut, who famously advised against their use, saying “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” The symbol is facing the same melancholy fate as the dodo, the dinosaur, and the Soviet Union. Extinction.
  - metaxy2 3y ago
    Maybe "endangerment" is more fair, given that it's still massively popular compared to, say, the interrobang. Also note that two of the three authors cited are known for their bare-bones, economical prose styles; not exactly a cross-section of the literary world. (Poe is debatable--he was probably economical for a 19th century romantic, but not in absolute terms.)
Finnucane 3y ago
As a copyeditor myself, who works in academia, I have to say that such 'rules' usually only work for the people applying them to their own work, but that doesn't mean they have no value. Why do it? It clearly provides a kind of discipline that makes you consider what's necessary for clarity. Do these two parts of a sentence really need to be together, or can they be separate? For technical or academic writers who may have difficulty expressing themselves clearly, a little artificial restraint could help.

scop 3y ago

One of the funny things about McCarthy is how he is associated with minimalism. It forces you to really think about what "minimalism" means. While his punctuation is minimal, his writing is not "short". But his writing is distilled. As the article notes, while he has less punctuation than Faulkner he has double the words per mark. How can a writer be minimal when his sentences are longer? It's easy to see when you read him: he paints an image so vividly (even when the image itself is unsure/opaque!), that you can hardly imagine adding or removing a word.

scop 3y ago
> On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination allowed them by the chance drop of a seed. - The Orchard Keeper, pg 11 (his first novel) For example, one could easily dice this sentence into multiple sentences or divide it with a semicolon. Somebody could also remove several words. But there is an image so completely captured by the sentence, an image in its fullness, that I can only admire it.
- logicprog 3y ago
  I have very bad brain fog today, so this might be that talking, but I don't even know for certain how to parse that sentence grammatically. There doesn't seem to be a verb or object, only one long extended subject, unless both "shelves" and "climbs" are verbs, in which case thats some serious Calvin-and-Hobbes verbing, but it works I suppose. In any case trying to understand this sentence required several read-throughs before I came up with the second explanation, and made my headache about two increments worse. I'm not a huge fan. It doesn't matter much to me whether writing is "difficult" in to sense of having a lot of big words, complex sentence structure, or long sentences, but I hate ambiguous writing.
  - scop 3y ago
    Nope you’re not off. I chose McCarthy’s earliest novel because it is him at his most “impressionistic” and indeed many sentences require multiple read through to determine what’s being said. But that’s the artistic pleasure in it: a scene is painted slowly in my mind’s eyes that, once fully formed/comprehended, is hard to find elsewhere in literature. This being art, you are completely free to find it off putting and completely ignore it. But I’ve found beauty in McCarthy that is, well, hard to put into words. His writing, much like technical documentation, can require many readings to get the picture.

kylebenzle 3y ago

I got through most of this but does anyone know why McCarthy famously hated punctuation marks and only, "believed in periods, capitals, and the occasional comma"? Everyone makes a big deal of it but is it really just preference or is the idea deeper, that like a all the meaning should be contained in the words anyway and punctuation is a shortcut?

idontwantthis 3y ago
His wildest choice to me is using “could of” etc. I get it’s for pronunciation purposes, but now that it seems on its way to replace the correct spelling, it really jarred me.
- hndc 3y ago
  Wild? Using it in dialogue seems perfectly reasonable. It's a common malapropism.
  - cheeseomlit 3y ago
    Even in dialogue I would've expected "could've". 'Could of' reads more like a typo
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      It's phonetically identical or very near it in most dialects. If anything it's a transcription error, but in this case just a way to imply the spoken cadence of a certain accent. Not any more incorrect than spelling "going to" as "gonna" in dialog.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Very often it's not a malapropism, just a variation on pronounciation.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago

karaterobot 3y ago

I have wondered what McCarthy's actual relationship to science was. The article quotes him saying, about his tenure at the Santa Fe Institute: > "I’m here because I like science, and this is a fun place to spend time" I would not have drawn that conclusion from reading his novels, or from his essay about The Kekulé Problem. I took The Passenger and Stella Maris to be something like a summary of where he, personally, stood at the end of his life, and they both seemed to take a more complicated stance on scientific progress. Blood Meridian did too. There are plenty of other examples; it's a theme. I don't believe you can fairly draw conclusions about what an author believes based on what they put in their books, but when a consistent trend emerges over time, it's hard to ignore it. I'm not implying that he secretly hated science, I just wonder if he didn't appreciate it in a different way than you might assume given the quote above. Maybe it's the "progress" part of scientific he was cynical about?

jonnyone 3y ago
Maybe interested in science, but disliked scientism?
da-bacon 3y ago
I'm surprised you find the Kekulé Problem not supporting that he liked science. I think of it more as pointing out that the unconsciousness has been ignored scientifically, but he certainly frames it as a question of science: "The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." "To repeat. The unconscious is a biological operative and language is not." For those who are interested, here is the article https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ As you say, Cormac's relationship with science is a bit hard to get from his novels. But I also think he really did love science, you might enjoy one of the most memorable days during the short time I was at the Santa Fe Institute https://dabacon.org/babel/2023/06/13/cormac/ https://dabacon.org/babel/2023/06/13/cormac/
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I took that essay to be at least in part about how much of what we think of as a world governed by symbolic logic is really governed by a powerful unconscious world that is resistant to the scientific way of thinking. Not to say it is magical, but that underneath our modern brain is an older brain that works differently. I first read that essay after reading The Passenger, and wanted to connect it to what I took to be one of the themes of that book, which is that humans fundamentally aren't prepared to wield the tools of symbolic thinking, math and language. That they tend toward destruction (atomic warfare in the book) and, beyond that, a kind of insanity. That leads me to think he is fascinated by science, but not in the uncomplicated "fuck yeah science!!!" way.

ilamont 3y ago

Made me think of Gene Wolfe (an engineer and later editor for Plant Engineering magazine) and Orson Scott Card, who continued to write for Compute! even after Ender's Game became popular (see https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/index.php?author=Orson+Scott+Card https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/index.php?autho...) Regarding "McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons" (@metaxy2) there are a number of high profile writers who are very particular about grammar. Example: Stephen King's On Writing shared some opinions about adverbs: “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one in your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day…fifty the day after that…and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.”

at_a_remove 3y ago
If only he diverted a little of his rage against the adverb and pointed it toward the exclamation mark.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  I think that's what happens when you see too many adverbs. :)
beacon294 3y ago
I think he was also joking a little bit. Profligately is an adverb.

abeppu 3y ago

> Another point they stress: the adventure of wrestling with big ideas and expressing them: “Just enjoy writing,” they say. “Try to write the best version of your paper. . . . You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself.” Miller put two colons into the first sentence. There are four quotation marks wrapping text that isn't actually quoting anyone, in an article about a novelist who doesn't use quotation marks even when characters are speaking. The quoted paraphrase includes an unnecessary ellipsis. Does Miller believe that McCarthy's rules are good ones?

abeppu 3y ago
Actually, I was able to get to the Nature article through my library. I had thought the material in quotes was Miller paraphrasing. In fact, he's quoting from two separated points in the article but has changed the punctuation. The original used a colon. > Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can't please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. I think in the context of writing about how a writer uses punctuation, these choices are significant.

pizzafeelsright 3y ago

I have read half of his work. I recall that he would dictate to his wife who would then write. I wondered if the lack of punctuation is just text to speech made manifest.

kombookcha 3y ago
What do you know - that actually makes perfect sense for how melodious the writing is. It was sound before it was text!

swozey 3y ago

I found McCarthys style of writing to really frustrate me. I think it really took me out of the book to read and try to piece the way conversations were going. I really, really didn't enjoy reading that book. I read it a LONG time ago, and I know how popular it is and I've read just about every post-apocalypse book I can find, my favorite being A Canticle for Leibowitiz. So I checked out the 1* Amazon reviews and there are some really funny ones written in McCarthys style - https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0307265439/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0307265439/ref=acr_dp... edit: I didn't say what book, The Road. I do believe someone has told me to read Blood Meridian, but I haven't tried.

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
The Road is probably his most "accessible" book (it was recommended by Oprah after all), second being All the Pretty Horses, which is a modern and romantic western written in his style. But you might just not like his stylistic tics. His lack of quotation marks is a stylistic move that repeats across all of his books.
wellthisisgreat 3y ago
I kinda liked Blood Meridian, but I think I couldn't quite appreciate it. but man, "Passenger" and "Stella Maris" is some of the most bittersweet, heartbreakingly beautiful literature I've experienced. Audiobook is exceptional.

drcode 3y ago

"This conclusion section could really use an aside about a trapper who wore a necklace made of ears"

throwaway81523 3y ago

Obligatory: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-reade... Excerpt: > Now read this from McCarthy's The Crossing (1994), part of the acclaimed Border Trilogy: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." > Thriller writers know enough to save this kind of syntax for fast-moving scenes: "... and his shout of fear came as a bloody gurgle and he died, and Wolff felt nothing" (Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca, 1980). In McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described. And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927), he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992), creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently from you, therefore I am a Writer." > The same message is conveyed by the stern biblical tone that runs through all of McCarthy's recent novels. Parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations abound: "They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire"; "and they would always be so and never be otherwise"; "the captain wrote on nor did he look up"; "there rode no soul save he," and so forth. > The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the effect: "It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching repetition of words ... Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences ... gather to a magic." The key word here is "accumulation." Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

Well, a man's gotta earn a living somehow. I'm sure he never made much from his books - they were too good.

fergie 3y ago

I'm going to stick my neck out here: Sometimes Cormac McCarthy is a bit _too_ minimalist. Sections of his prose can be sparse, ambiguous and difficult to follow, the ending of Blood Meridian being the classic case in point.