Ted Gioia, The Final Triumph of Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023):
Given the overall tone of society, we need brutal books that shake us up—but those are precisely the ones that publishers don’t want us to read.
We’re living in a paradoxical time. People and events are pushing us to the brink—and in the most ugly ways imaginable. But at the very same time, a pervasive daintiness and primness has taken over the world of books. It’s gotten so bad, that many books for kids are also marketed to grown-ups and vice versa—perhaps the lasting legacy of Harry Potter.
Sometimes I can’t even tell the difference. I start reading an award-winning new book, and ask myself: Is this targeted at me, or an early teen? Welcome to the Namby Pamby Era in fiction.
Just a few days ago, a novelist withdrew her book from publication—because it was set in Russia in the 1930s. This might hurt feelings (of Ukrainians, etc.). So the book got axed. For better or worse, that’s the literary culture in the year 2023. At this rate, we’ll soon have a new ending for War and Peace, with Napoleon returning from Moscow in triumph. Anything else would be indelicate.
This is why the culture wasn’t ready for Cormac McCarthy’s last works. And it’s also why we need them all the more.
Matthew Boudway, Cormac McCarthy’s Moral Imagination:
Beneath the neuter austerity of McCarthy’s prose, a keen moral imagination is at work, one that finds hints of communion… in unexpected places, including some any sane person would avoid… Perhaps his stories strike the list-makers as too bleak to have anything to do with Christianity. His work is often moving but rarely consoling… Much of the real virtue we observe in the world, as well as in literature, belongs to people who are deeply flawed.
Vimal Patel, A College President Defends Seeking Money From Jeffrey Epstein:
“People don’t understand what this job is,” [Bard College President Leon Botstein] said, adding, “You cannot pick and choose, because among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people. Capitalism is a rough system.”
Jesse Singal, Do You Want Alex Joneses? Because That’s How You Get Alex Joneses:
Sometimes I feel like I’m writing the same post over and over and over. But it’s important to call out misinformation on high-stakes subjects when powerful institutions spread it.
Earlier this week the American Medical Association announced that its House of Delegates had “passed the Endocrine Society’s resolution to protect access to evidence-based gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals.”
Anyone who keeps even one eye on this issue will, upon reading this document, see that it is larded with nonsense.
Unlike most people, who “go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” the “freaks” that interested Diane Arbus “were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” 1 Although this is how Arbus explained her attraction to carnival entertainers, we might imagine her using similar language to describe people of unusually large or small stature, nudists, those with developmental disabilities, drag performers, and many others who appear regularly in her portraits.
Arbus typically gave her subjects the opportunity to present themselves as they saw fit.
For all our faults, one of the redeeming qualities of human beings is that we sometimes work together to do really good things. I enjoyed this:
PS Van Savage and Pamela Yeh, Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper:
For the past two decades, Cormac McCarthy… has provided extensive editing to numerous faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico… Van Savage, a theoretical biologist and ecologist, first met McCarthy in 2000, and they overlapped at the SFI for about four years while Savage was a graduate student and then a postdoc. Savage has received invaluable editing advice from McCarthy on several science papers published over the past 20 years. While on sabbatical at the SFI during the winter of 2018, Savage had lively weekly lunches with McCarthy. They worked to condense McCarthy’s advice to its most essential points so that it could be shared with everyone. These pieces of advice were combined with thoughts from evolutionary biologist Pamela Yeh and are presented here. McCarthy’s most important tip is to keep it simple while telling a coherent, compelling story.