continued from PART 1 which is here:

Genuine Cormac McCarthy Scholars (many of whom are current or recovering academics) PART 1. :

4. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the name sometimes listed with his middle initial as L. He got his BA from the University of Notre Dame and his PhD from Harvard University. He is the author of CORMAC MCCARTHY AND THE SIGNS OF SACRAMENT: LITERATURE, THEOLOGY, AND THE MORAL OF STORIES (2015), as well as his most recent book, FORGIVENESS AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT (2022). The former book serves as nice adjunct to the works of Steven Frye (who I discussed in Part 1 of this continuing post).

A Navy veteran and a priest. Potts argues eloquently that McCarthy's many spiritual references "might be coherently held together under a particular sacramental theology, one directly referenced in the novels and deeply indebted to Augustinian semiotics and the theology of the cross." Among his other sharp arguments, for which he gives compelling evidence.

Potts is well read and gives credit to those who came before him, including the numerous significant contributions of the Cormac McCarthy Society core of scholars, such as Edwin Arnold, Dianne Luce, Rick Wallach, Thomas D. Young, Vereen Bell, Linda Woodson, Jay Ellis, Peter Josyph, Nell Sullivan, Allen Josephs, Stacey Peebles, Ty Hawkins, D. Marcel Decoste, Bryan Giemza, Todd Edmonson, Lydia Cooper, Leslie Harper Worthington, Patrick O'Connor, and several others--and now, many others. All of these authors of at least one book on McCarthy's works, and some many more.

I've yet to read his second book, but I notice that he thanks Vanessa Zoltan for being a first reader. We know Zoltan from her own book, PRAYING WITH JANE EYRE: REFLECTIONS ON READING AS A SACRED PRACTICE (2021). Which relates to the McCarthy theme, the world as tale. To Rebecca Mead's MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH. Even to Potts' podcast, HARRY POTTER AND THE SACRED TEXT.

THE WORLD AS TALE - STORIES AND STORYTELLERS - THE PUPPET MASTERS again :

The Passenger and Stella Maris as Nonfiction - Mirroring and Witnessing the Origin and Reality of Ideas :

5. Philip S. Thomas. His book is, IN A VISION OF THE NIGHT: JOB, CORMAC MCCARTHY, AND THE CHALLENGE OF CHAOS (2021), not as well-known as some others here, but it too deserves your attention. Remember it is Job 1:17 that the epilogue of MOBY DICK quotes, that lone survivor motif that McCarthy uses as well. When the man in SUNSET LIMITED is asked if he has read the Bible, he responds: "I have read the Book of Job. " I saw that long ago, but now Thomas has opened up my eyes to new considerations of Job in Cormac McCarthy's works.

Recommended for those who also see the certainties of suffering, and the possibilities of hope.

6. Jay Ellis. Author of the landmark work of McCarthy crit-lit, NO PLACE FOR HOME: SPATIAL CONSTRAINT AND CHARACTER FLIGHT IN THE NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY. I don't know Jay Ellis, ever met him. But after I reviewed his book at Amazon, he emailed me and asked permission to quote my review as a blurb to advertise his book. "Heck, yes," I told him. "Improve on the quote if you want, any way that will promote your outstanding book!"

My review is still there, as are my early reviews of every book of McCarthy crit-lit published back then. I read them and reviewed them, promoting them in every way I could muster--even though there were some with which I did not particularly agree. But Jay Ellis's book surprised and amazed me, over and over. It has held up over time. He predicted things, saw how McCarthy's works was evolving and what was probably coming next. I still keep a hardcover copy of this book on my "most beloved" shelf.

7. Vanessa Keiper. Her book is THE HORSES OF COMAC MCCARTHY'S ALL THE PRETTY HORSES (2021), and it is grand. Keiper is well read, not just in the particular field of Cormac McCarthy studies, but widely. A horsewoman and an original thinker. I especially enjoyed her chapters entitled, "The Horse As Part of a Spiritual Whole," ""Transience and Eternity: The Two Habitats of the Horse," "Compartmentalization and Outside/Inside Within the Narrative Spaces," and "Females In The Border Trilogy."

A wow of a book.

===========

This survey of genuine Cormac McCarthy scholars continues in the next post, Part 3.

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He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

I went through a period listening to a lot of ambient Americana while reading Cormac McCarthy, and there was one artist whose name I can't remember. I really liked their music, and it pains me that I can't remember them. I've combed the Cormac McCarthy playlists on spotify (there are a lot of these lol) but couldn't find.

Some pointers:
- One of their track titles was definitely a pun on drug use... something like 'Amphetameaning of life' or 'Overdosage county'. Not exactly that, but similar.
- I think they were from Texas.
- There was quite a lot of pedal / slide guitar. I think one of their album covers was just a black and white picture of a guitar neck, made to look like a motorway stretching into nowhere.

Not too much to go by, but would appreciate any help!

Have you discovered the perfect large, bald man to play the judge? Do you feel compelled to share erotic watermelon images? Did AI produce a dark landscape that feels to you like McCarthy’s work? Do you want to joke around and poke fun at the tendency to share these things? All of this is welcome in this thread.

For the especially silly or absurd, check out r/cormacmccirclejerk.

I’m not sure if this is considered “low-effort” but I’m searching for a quote from Child of God and it’s driving me crazy. Paraphrasing:

“Every man thinks someone else is beneath him.” … “Even the pedophile days at least he isn’t a race-mixer.”

This quote just really stood out to me and I would like to know the exact wording. If I recall correctly it happened in the latter half of the book and occurred in dialogue (maybe between the two cops?)

I listened to the book on tape so it was very difficult for me to scan to find the quote. So I rented it on Amazon books and scanned each of the words I thought was in the quote to no avail, I can’t even ctrl+F quotation marks because he don’t use em. I liked the book but would rather not re-read it for the sake of a sentence.

(sorry for another post about blood meridian) i had to do a movie poster for a dream project for class. it was either bm or the crossing and i found more stuff for bm so i just went with that.

https://preview.redd.it/1imzoy6q57yd1.png?width=3300&format=png&auto=webp&s=19edcffbafc0162acf4159f798486f7558dbff79

Terribly low-res, but all I could find. Seeking a better quality pic and, more importantly, the source/artist. I first stumbled on it years ago doing a Google image search of “Judge Holden.” I vaguely remember some background info on it at the time; some kind of McCarthy conference or summit. It may have been printed on a t-shirt. Details you can barely see in this pic: he’s holding a smoking gun in his left hand (he’s as eitherhanded as a spider) and doffing his hat with his right. His right hand is covered in blood. His smile is terrifying. Any help is much appreciated!!

This version of the picture was pulled from this article: http://appalachiatoatitlan.blogspot.com/2010/09/judge-holden-in-afghanistan.html?m=1

latecomer to the novel, long time fan of mccarthy. i'm about 2/3rds through the book (just started chapter 7) and every time i read the sections with sheridan i get skeeved out. there's the section where mccarthy talks about him having sex with an underage girl, and it's sort of a throwaway. but the way he talks about women and people makes me think he probably doesn't hide it. do you think the new orleans crowd knows he's a pedophile? is this just a one off thing? i really really hate him and i get that bobby and the guys probably don't give a shit but i'm wondering if it's a thing they know about him. bobby is sort of oblivious but i could see oiler and the others knowing. idk.

In an essay about the broader contemporary trend of therapeutic chatbots, I found this background about ELIZA, the chatbot that Alicia Western mentions four times in Stella Maris, interesting.

The mention of ELIZA didn't stick out to me much when I first read and reread SM, but in the context of the quote below, I think there's an interesting connection to be made between the technical challenge of developing a therapist chatbot and how Dr. Cohen acts in SM.

Researchers have been experimenting with the application of AI to mental health care for more than half a century. In 1966, MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created the first prototype chatbot psychotherapist. ELIZA, named after Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, operated via a branch of AI called Natural Language Processing. While the technology wasn’t very advanced (question marks couldn’t be used when conversing with ELIZA, for example), the ideas underlying much of today’s AI therapy offerings were already present at the time of ELIZA’s creation. In a 1966 paper outlining his findings, Weizenbaum discussed the projection that occurs between a patient and their provider. “If, for example, one were to tell a psychiatrist, ‘I went for a long boat ride,’ and he responded, ‘Tell me about boats,’” Weizenbaum writes, “one would not assume that he knew nothing about boats, but that he had some purpose in so directing the subsequent conversation.” This assumption benefits therapy technology, Weizenbaum suggests, because it means there is less need for an AI to have explicit information about the real world. “ELIZA shows, if nothing else, how easy it is to create and maintain the illusion of understanding, hence perhaps of judgment deserving of credibility. A certain danger lurks there.”

Dr. Cohen doesn't recognize any of the mathematicians Alicia organized her entire life around. Alicia is sometimes insanely condescending to his lack of knowledge, or even his ability to recognize a low-hanging allusion. He seems to be a reasonably effective therapist despite these shortcomings - unless we are to judge him strictly by what happened to Alicia, in which case he could be said to have failed.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-therapist-in-the-machine-mcallen

The Road and No Country are 1 and 2 all-time for me.

I am starting ATPH and hopefully the Border trilogy.

What tones or themes should I look for or expect when reading this? I want to go in rather blindly… but also don’t want to have this expectation of the bleakness of The Road or No Country.

Any nonspoiler feedback appreciated.

1. John Sepich. Sepich chanced to read BLOOD MERIDIAN and grasped its historical footing. Guided by long distance phone conversations with Cormac McCarthy, he traced out and read through McCarthy's multitude of historical sources (first published back in 1993 as NOTES ON BLOOD MERIDIAN). Along the way, deriving a spiritual interpretation from the book, its four of cups, the intention of the kid's mercy to the old woman in the desert, who then collapses into sand.

Sepich is not an academic but an independent scholar. His website (in association with the also astute McCarthy scholar Christopher Forbis) is one of the most valuable for those seeking knowledge of Cormac McCarthy's works. Like me, Sepich is also a horseman, and his memoir, HORSES IN THE BACKYARD, and his book of poetry, IN THE BOUNDARY WATERS, are still available at Amazon.

His website is at this link.

2. Michael Lynn Crews. An associate professor of English at Regent University, Crews researched McCarthy's multitude of literary sources and wrote them up in a single volume entitled BOOKS ARE MADE OUT OF BOOKS (2017). This is not just a list of McCarthy's reading, but an enormously valuable work of crit-lit, recently amended and expanded.

Crews realized early on that McCarthy's great talent was to synthesize his wide reading, to conflate the universals and present them again as new. Scott Yarbrough sought him out and interviewed him at the READING MCCARTHY site, at this link.

Again, this is an amazing work of scholarship, and among the items pointed out in that podcast is McCarthy's concurrence to Flaubert's greatest work, THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY. I wish that Crews had been around back when Edwin (Chip) Arnold and I were both trying to ascertain McCarthy's spirituality.

3. Steven Frye. I've read almost all of the early McCarthy crit-lit (as compiled in a bibliography by brilliant McCarthy scholar Dianne Luce), and I've read much of the more recent critical literature. The early crit-lit ("the hard work," you might say) was well-intentioned but also often far afield. Steven Frye was the first to point out McCarthy's tacit condemnation of addictions--to alcoholism, to envy, to ideology, to war, and to other addictions, again and again in his works. Frye also correctly maintained McCarthy's stature in naturalism and pastoralism.

Frye also sees the synthesis of ideas in McCarthy's works, something seen also by such diverse readers as Harold Bloom (in THE AMERICAN RELIGION, say, among others) and in the works of fellow McCarthy scholar Dianne Luce. The labels often differ, but there is a universality in the ideas.

Frye wrote several books, but the one I most heartily recommend is his newest, UNGUESSED KINSHIPS: NATURALISM AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE IN CORMAC MCCARTHY (2023). You can also listen to him on more than one podcast at READING MCCARTHY, link above.

(to be continued later in McCarthy Scholars, part 2, at this link.)

Whiskey is probably more fitting, but something about tequila just feels right..my first time reading Cormac McCarthy...so damn good!

So - when they meet with Mangas Coloradas and his band of Apaches extorting Tucson, and Glanton's horse bites the ear of an Apache's (Delgadito's?) horse, the Apaches demand a barrel of whisky as payment. The gang respond by fixing a skin around the bung of a barrel, filling the skin with whisky, and then filling the rest of the barrel with water.

Is there any specific reason why they do this? Was there not enough whisky left to pay the Apaches, or did they just fuck them over because they could?

Everyone hates him, even though he's nothing but patient and helpful to others:

• Exposes the imposter reverend in Nacogdoches;
• Modestly claims not to know him (but then, if the man was innocent, why did he run?) no doubt so he doesn't seem too clever a detective;
• Shares the reverend's ill-gotten donations out by using them to buy everyone in town a drink;
• Gets Chambers, Toadvine, and the Kid out of jail in Chihuahua and offers them a chance to become rehabilitated by doing community service;
• Saves the lives of Glanton's posse when they run out of powder and the Apaches are going to kill them;
• Helpfully explains paleontology, geology, and archaeology to the gang even though they mock him for it;
• Is polite and diplomatic to Sergeant Aguilar when Glanton is rude and dismissive;
• Constantly belittled by Tobin who is obviously jealous of his learning and threatened by his atheism;
• Goes out of his way to mentor black Jackson;
• Looks after a war orphan after the massacre at the lake;
• Shares his candy with the local children in Jesús María;
• Provides the Glanton gang with free legal representation;
• Offers David Brown free life insurance;
• Tries to teach puppies how to swim only for Bathcat to shoot them (what the fuck was his problem?);
• Is the first to slide when one of the gang is stabbed in Nacori;
• Makes peace with the Mimbreno Apache when Glanton's horse bites one of their horses;
• Saves the idiot from drowning in the Colorado river;
• Saves the idiot and a Mexican child from the Yumas;
• Gives Toadvine free meat at the well;
• Offers the kid a good price for his pistol;
• Pays Toadvine good money for his hat;
• Tries to make friends with the kid but is constantly rejected, but is still good enough to bail the kid out of prison;
• To cap it all off, the ungrateful little shit turns up when he is minding his own business in Fort Griffin in 1878 and walks in on him taking a dump.

TBH I feel sorry for the guy. Why is he a bad guy again? All he wanted was to do science and learn about the world and instead he's surrounded by ungrateful chawbacons.

I've noticed that I can breeze through some of McCarthys books (for example, the road, child of God, No country for old men) and others take me much longer to read despite being a similar length (all books of the boarder trilogy, blood meridian). I'm about to finish cities of the planes and I'm debating starting the passanger, where would it rank in terms of difficulty/length?

I've heard people say there is some confusing math/physics but also that it's a bit more narrative than philosophical.

Rereading Suttree and at the part where Byrd fights Suttree and others. He’s wearing an ankle pick and using it to kick at people. Researched around and can’t seem to figure out what an ankle pick is. Can someone help define and provide visual examples? Thanks ahead of time.

I am gutted today. Not necessarily because of the fates of any character, but because it’s over. John Grady Cole and Bill Parham were incredible characters that I am bummed I’ll never see again in new stories.

Billy beating a certain antagonist was incredibly cathartic and hands down my favorite moment of the three books where not a lot of good happens to anyone

A visual (and title) evocative of many such scenes in a certain book

https://youtube.com/shorts/soDT-tuL-Z8?si=qH3Yr56Hg1u1BQYn

Thought of you folks when I hear this 😆

Went in looking for that and The Road, but this seems like a good start. Any advice on order I should read them? I've seen the No Country film, but am a total McCarthy noob otherwise.

This is on the inside cover of my copy of Blood Meridian. I want to get it as a tattoo but not sure if it is known for anything else. I've tried googling but haven't found anything about it.

In Stella Maris, Alicia talks about dying without anyone finding out. Like a ghost. Yet we find in The Passenger that she hangs herself from a tree with a red ribbon tied around her waist just so she can be found. Her death was a spectacle, like an angel dying, a hunter even prays in front of her. It seems the exact opposite of what she wanted. I still haven't been able to figure out what that meant. What do you guys think?

One of the most captivating aspects of All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing is the windows they open onto the various cultural dynamics at play in the establishment of modern constitutional Mexico—as I understand it at some remove.

I'm interested to know your recommendations for further reading into this history.

In a very broad stroke, I'm more interested in consciously biased narratives, like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, than canonical documents of record. That, or another historical fiction that is more internal to the geocultural period.

What deepens the view through these windows?