Cormac McCarthy’s seminal anti-Western Blood Meridian isn’t exactly known for visions of peace on earth and good will to man. Still, there’s a strange scene in the book’s final third that subtly recalls (and somehow inverts) the Christmas story. The scene takes place at the end of Chapter 15. The Kid, erstwhile protagonist of Blood Meridian, has just reunited with the rampaging Glanton gang after getting lost in the desert and, in a vision-quest of sorts, has witnessed “a lone tree burning on the desert” (a scene I argued earlier this year was the novel’s moral core).
Glanton’s marauders, tired and hungry, find temporary refuge from the winter cold in the town of Santa Cruz where they are fed by Mexicans and then permitted to stay the night in a barn. McCarthy offers a date at the beginning of the chapter — December 5th — and it’s reasonable to assume, based on the narrative action, that the night the gang spends in the manger is probably Christmas Eve. Here is the scene, which picks up as the gang — “they” — are led into the manger by a boy–
The shed held a mare with a suckling colt and the boy would would have put her out but they called to him to leave her. They carried straw from a stall and pitched it down and he held the lamp for them while they spread their bedding. The barn smelled of clay and straw and manure and in the soiled yellow light of the lamp their breath rolled smoking through the cold. When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and absolute darkness.
No one moved. In that cold stable the shutting of the door may have evoked in some hearts other hostels and not of their choosing. The mare sniffed uneasily and the young colt stepped about. Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer clothes, the hide slickers and raw wool serapes and vests, and one by one they propagated about themselves a great crackling of sparks and each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam’s flank.
The “shroud of palest fire” made of sparks is a strange image that seems almost supernatural upon first reading. The phenomena that McCarthy is describing is simply visible static electricity, which is not uncommon in a cold, dry atmosphere–particularly if one is removing wool clothing. Still, the imagery invests the men with a kind of profound, bizarre significance that is not easily explainable. It is almost as if these savage men, naked in the dark, are forced to wear something of their soul on the outside. Tellingly, this spectacle upsets both the mare and her colt, substitutions for Mary and Christ child, which makes sense. After all, these brutes are not wise men.
I’m finishing up Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and I came to this shocking, weird, gross, Christmasy reference near the end of the book. The context is that, in 1950s America, Sibyl, a white woman, wants the narrator, a black man, to fulfill her rape fantasy. Page 522 of my edition–
J. D. Salinger, 91, American author
Howard Zinn, 87, American historian
Barry Hannah, 67, American novelist and short story writer
David Markson, 82, American writer
Harvey Pekar, 70, American comic book writer (American Splendor)
Tuli Kupferberg, 86, American poet, cartoonist and musician (The Fugs)
David Mills, 48, American author, journalist and television writer (NYPD Blue, The Corner, Kingpin)
Dick Giordano, 77, American comic book artist and editor (Batman, Green Lantern)
José Saramago, 87, Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist, Nobel Prize winner for literature
Lucille Clifton, 73, American poet (Blessing the Boats), Poet Laureate of Maryland
Robert Dana, 80, American poet, Iowa poet laureate
Rajendra Keshavlal Shah, 96, Indian poet
Tibet, 78, French comics artist
Mary Daly, 81, American radical feminist philosopher
Knox Burger, 87, American editor, writer, and literary agent
George Leonard, 86, American writer, editor and educator, pioneer of the Human Potential Movement
Robert B. Parker, 77, American detective writer
Laura Chapman Hruska, 74, American writer, co-founder and editor in chief of Soho Press
Stephen Morse, 65, American poet
P. K. Page, 93, Canadian poet
Bingo Gazingo, 85, American performance poet
Kage Baker, 57, American science fiction and fantasy author
Ralph McInerny, 80, American philosopher (University of Notre Dame) and mystery author
Erich Segal, 72, American professor, author (Love Story), and screenwriter (Yellow Submarine)
Carlos Montemayor, 62, Mexican writer
Violet Barclay, 87, American comic book artist
David Severn, 91, British author
Colin Ward, 85, British anarchist writer
William Tenn, 89, American science fiction writer
Liz Carpenter, 89, American feminist author, press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson (1963–1969)
John Eric Holmes, 80, American science fiction and fantasy author
Ai Ogawa, 62, American poet, breast cancer
Patricia Wrightson, 88, Australian children’s writer
Matilde Elena López, 91, Salvadoran poet, essayist and playwright
Elena Schwarz, 61, Russian poet
Ella Mae Johnson, 106, American social worker and author
Miguel Delibes, 89, Spanish author, journalist and scholar
Sid Fleischman, 90, American children’s writer
Bill DuBay, 62, American comic book editor, writer, and artist
Henry Scarpelli, 79, American comic book artist (Archie)
Alan Sillitoe, 82, British writer (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)
Jan Balabán, 49, Czech writer, recipient of the Magnesia Litera award
William Neill, 88, British poet
Carolyn Rodgers, 69, American poet
Peter Orlovsky, 76, American poet
Leslie Scalapino, 65, American poet, publisher and playwright
Peter Seaton, 67, American poet
Judson Crews, 92, American poet
Hoàng Cầm, 88, Vietnamese poet and playwright
Donald Windham, 89, American novelist
Bree O’Mara, 42, South African novelist
Robert Tralins, 84, American author
Ruth Chew, 90, American children’s author
Randolph Stow, 74, Australian writer
Arthur Herzog, 83, American writer
Peter O’Donnell, 90, British writer
T. M. Aluko, 91, Nigerian writer
Kovilan, 86, Indian novelist
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, 62, Welsh science fiction author
Allen Hoey, 57, American poet
José Albi, 88, Spanish poet
Andrei Voznesensky, 77, Russian poet and writer
Vladimír Bystrov, 74, Czech writer and translator
Suso Cecchi d’Amico, 96, Italian screenwriter (Bicycle Thieves)
Tom Mankiewicz, 68, American screenwriter (James Bond, Superman)
Iris Gower, 75, Welsh novelist
Jon Cleary, 92, Australian novelist (The Sundowners, High Road to China)
James P. Hogan, 69, British science fiction author
Michèle Causse, 74, French lesbian theorist, author and translator
Vance Bourjaily, 87, American novelist
Patrick Cauvin, 77, French novelist
Sir Frank Kermode, 90, British literary critic and writer
Ludvík Kundera, 90, Czech writer and translator
George Hitchcock, 96, American poet and publisher
Jennifer Rardin, 45, American author
Edwin Charles Tubb, 90, British science fiction author
Micky Burn, 97, British writer and poet
Belva Plain, 95, American novelist (Evergreen)
Bärbel Mohr, 46, German author
George Cain, 66, American author
Claire Rayner, 79, British author
Alí Chumacero, 92, Mexican writer and poet
Monica Johnson, 54, American novelist and screenwriter (Lost in America, Modern Romance)
Philip Carlo, 61, American crime author
Adrian Păunescu, 67, Romanian author, poet and politician
Dmitry Gorchev, 47, Russian writer
Richard Stanley “Dick” Francis, 79, a British jockey who later wrote crime novels about horse racing
Stuart McMillen’s webcomic does a marvelous job of adapting (and updating!) Neil Postman’s famous book-length essay, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World was ultimately more accurate than the one proposed by George Orwell in 1984. (Via).
“Idea for a Short Documentary Film,” a very short story by Lydia Davis, from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis –
Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
The New Yorker has published a new George Saunders short story,“Escape from Spiderhead.” Read it here. A sample–
“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“What’s in it?” I said.
“Hilarious,” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.
I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.
“Garden looks nice,” I said. “Super-clear.”
Abnesti said, “Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Drip on?” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.
I sat, pleasantly engaged in these thoughts, until the Verbaluce™ began to wane. At which point the garden just looked nice again. It was something about the bushes and whatnot? It made you just want to lay out there and catch rays and think your happy thoughts. If you get what I mean.
Then whatever else was in the drip wore off, and I didn’t feel much about the garden one way or the other. My mouth was dry, though, and my gut had that post-Verbaluce™ feel to it.
“What’s going to be cool about that one?” Abnesti said. “Is, say a guy has to stay up late guarding a perimeter. Or is at school waiting for his kid and gets bored. But there’s some nature nearby? Or say a park ranger has to work a double shift?”
“That will be cool,” I said.
“That’s ED763,” he said. “We’re thinking of calling it NatuGlide. Or maybe ErthAdmire.”
“Those are both good,” I said.
“Thanks for your help, Jeff,” he said.
Which was what he always said.
“Only a million years to go,” I said.
Which was what I always said.
Then he said, “Exit the Interior Garden now, Jeff, head over to Small Workroom 2.”
From Roberto Bolaño’s July, 2003 interview with Mexican Playboy, collected in The Last Interview and Other Conversations—
Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house, and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.
Sometime last year, during a rare visit to a big chain bookstore, I was disgusted to see what had happened to David Foster Wallace’s amazing Kenyon College commencement speech, “This Is Water.” Wallace’s speech, about 3,815 words, give or take (maybe twelve standard typed pages), was being sold as a 144 page hardback volume with only a sentence or two printed per page. The book was (and is) a nakedly commercial attempt to turn a text that is widely available on the web into the sort of thing that well-meaning uncles give to their nephews or nieces as graduation gifts. Of course, hardcore Wallace fans might want such a book — and I’d never begrudge them that — but it’s hard to imagine that Wallace would have been comfortable with how his book was marketed.
Which brings us to Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, new from Columbia University Press this week. The book publishes the 1985 honors thesis that Wallace submitted to the Amherst College’s Department of Philosophy, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” The essay’s title alone signals a prohibitive level of academic specialization. In his introductory essay to the volume, “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike,” New York Times Magazine editor James Ryerson points out, “Its obscurity is easy to appreciate. A highly specialized, seventy-six page work of logic, semantics, and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart.” Ryerson then warns his reader to “Brace yourself for a sample sentence,” before offering a sample from Wallace’s essay that I do not have the patience or fortitude to type out (it would take me too long to locate all the diacritical marks and special logic symbols). Ryerson concludes the paragraph with this wry remark: “There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a cruise ship.”
Fortunately, the editors of Fate, Time, and Language make every effort to contextualize Wallace’s essay in a way that explains its aims, strengths, and even shortcomings. There’s Ryerson’s lengthy introduction, which provides an overview to Wallace’s life in philosophy. Then there’s Taylor’s “Fatalism” of course, a short, provocative argument combining six presuppositions that led Taylor to declare that humans have no control — none, whatsoever — over any future event. The volume collects four other essays by Taylor on fatalism, as well as eight other essays responding to his arguments, before delivering Wallace’s essay (the longest in the collection). Here’s Wallace—
So Taylor’s central claim, the Taylor problem, is that just a few basic logical and semantic presuppositions, regarded as uncontroversially true by most philosophers, lead directly to the metaphysical conclusion that human beings, agents, have no control over what is going to happen.
I ain’t even gonna front–pretty much everything that Wallace says after this was lost on me; if you want to read and comprehend the details of his argument you will need to have a grasp on the basics of Montague grammar and tensed modal logic. If you lack these skills, there will be skimming. Lots and lots of skimming. So, in short, I have no ideawhether Wallace’s logic is sound, although I find his conclusion (minus all the modal evidence) quite compelling—
This essay’s semantic analysis has shown that Taylor’s proof doesn’t “force” fatalism on us at all. We should now recall that Taylor was offering a very curious sort of argument: a semantic argument for ametaphysical conclusion. In light of what we’ve seen about the semantics of physical modality, I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion.
After Wallace’s honors thesis, there’s a wonderful little memoir essay by his adviser on the project, Jay L. Garfield, who offers up this nugget—
I knew at the time, as I mention above, that David was also writing a novel as a thesis in English. But I never took that seriously. I though of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby.
These little pockets of insight appeal to me most in Fate, Time, and Language, and as such, Ryerson’s essay “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike” is the highpoint of the book. It weaves together Wallace’s personal life, writing career, and academic pursuits into a moving elegy of sorts, although one more rooted in ideas than feelings. He also spells out the book’s mission quite clearly—
For all its seeming inscrutability, though, the thesis is lucidly argued and–with some patience and industry on the part of the lay reader–ultimately accessible, which is welcome news for those looking to deepen their understanding of Wallace. The paper offers a point of entry into an overlooked aspect of his intellectual life: a serious early engagement with philosophy that would play a lasting role in his work and thought, including his ideas about the purpose and possibilities of fiction.
Many of us might shudder at the idea of our college essays being published posthumously. Of course, most of us aren’t Wallace, but there are undoubtedly critics out there who will cry foul at this publication. Fortunately, the team behind Fate, Time, and Language has produced a book of remarkable integrity, one that understands why it exists, readily acknowledges its obscurity without trying to gloss over that obscurity, and makes every effort to communicate with and engage its readers without sacrificing erudition. To return to my opening anecdote, this is not the naked commercialism that motivated a gimmicky edition This Is Water; rather, this is a book delivered by people who genuinely care about Wallace and his ideas. Make no mistake–it’s very dry and very specialized, but fanatics will no doubt want it.
Biblioklept 