My need to correct people on the internet was far too compelling.
My need to correct people on the internet was far too compelling.
You have to admit, it's quite a funny little exchange.
I had just got in from the pub when I posted last night and I had completely forgotten about this, so he's now inflicted this knowledge on me twice. Utter, utter bastard.
Bunga-bunga's very own Silvio Berlusconi.
RIP to the toppest top shagger.
Cormac McCarthy, wrote the best book of all time. Insane talent.
Assuming it's not the one you're talking about: he also wrote Blood Meridian, the worst thing I've ever read.
Man had range.
It is the one and it is the best. You're welcome. Did it need more dragons in it?
I've just bought Blood Meridian based off the anti-dragon sentiment.
I'd have taken a half-decent story or at least one that didn't need all the punctuation removed to be notable.
Just read an excerpt and I am very much team Ian.
Absolute flanges up in here. Disgusting behaviour.
I bought a copy of Blood Meridian (to be read some time in 2046) just last week. Call me Igor.
"They had struck the shoes from their horses and filled the nailholes in with clay and those who still had tobacco used their pouches to spit in and they slept in caves and on bare stone"
Jesus. Come up for air lad. 300+ pages of that? Nah.
He's a bit miserable/bleak for me but I appreciate the craft nonetheless. Read BM and The Road.
I also thought Blood Meridian was awful. Just page after page of bloody violence.Originally Posted by Ian
What would I go to next? I really enjoyed The Road, despite his awful way of writing dialogue.
The Border Trilogy. Or Child of God if you want his bleakest work.
I tried and gave up on Blood Meridian years ago so +1 for the hate there.
I did finish The Road but I didn't like it. I just don't like his writing style, I think. Like CJ said, the dialogue really grated on me.
No writer has a better way with language but I can see how his style grates. It genuinely blows me away, unmatched.
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." Is still the best line. Sums up the entire Judge character in one go.
Yeah, I'd never deny he's a great writer. I just can't get on with his style.
This is how 9 year olds write.
Fucking fuck me. Absolute batshit mental.
They had struck the shoes from their horses and filled the nailholes in with clay and those who still had tobacco used their pouches to spit in and they slept in caves and on bare stone
OR
They had struck the shoes from their horses. They had filled the nailholes in with clay, and those who still had tobacco used their pouches to spit in. They slept in caves, and on bare stone.
--
Both are legitimate uses of English and I would say the first one achieves a very different and more immediate atmosphere than the second. In fact, in the second one I'm running out of patience for all the things that 'They' are doing.
I think this is a literary version of James in the Music thread.
And and and and and and and.
RL has serious intellectual insecurity.
*superiority
It is not to my taste therefore it's shit. Anyone who likes the thing I don't like is a weirdo try hard. Solid material.
I got into Cormac McCarthy's works after watching No Country For Old Men, which is one of my favourite films. I've now read all his books and really enjoyed them. His style is quite different to most other authors in my collection so it made for a nice change.
I got into Cormac McCarthy's works after watching No Country For Old Men which is one of my favourite films and I've now read all his books and really enjoyed them and his style is quite different to most other authors in my collection so it made for a nice change.
Some of you are idiots.
This is genius.
I've just been reading a load more passages and can't help the feeling this is some elaborate joke. He's so shit.
Blood Meridian is magnificent. So is Suttree, but for different reasons; it's much more approachable and human. True, it's a bit of a culture shock in terms of style and the books often move at a very slow pace, but once you get used to the lack of punctuation I feel there's hardly anyone who compares in terms of atmosphere and turn of phrase.
Please, please give an example of top tier fiction writing.
José Saramago.
Perhaps he's resting in the peace of his home with his wife and his children, if he has any, perhaps, as he was the other day, he is busy at a film shoot, perhaps there is no one in the apartment, the children because they have gone to spend the holidays with their grandparents, the mother because, like so many others, she has a job to go to, either to safeguard a position of real or imagined personal independence or because the household finances cannot survive without her material contribution, for the fact is that, however quickly a supporting actor scurries from small role to small role, however often he is selected by the production company that uses him now on a more or less tacitly exclusive basis, the money he can earn will always be subordinated to the rigors of the law of supply and demand, which is never based on the objective needs of the subject but purely on the latter's real or imagined talents and abilities, those that it favors him with recognizing or those that, with unknown and usually negative intent, are attributed to him, forgetting that he might have other, less visible talents and abilities that might be worth putting to the test.
I maintain the best final paragraph to any book ever written. "He never sleeps. He says that he will never die". Etc. I found it equal parts terrifying and awe inspiring the first time I read it. The Judge is one of the most perfectly written antagonists ever.
The whole book is a perfectly bleak and beautiful treatise on the violent nature of man, it's the ultimate Revisionist Western. Awful, violent men doing awful, violent things because they can. Because (or so Cormac would put forward the notion) it is what we are almost pre-disposed to do.
Not a easy or always pleasant read by any means. I can see why it's not for everyone. Anyone dismissing it because he doesn't always use punctuation "correctly" needs to have a word with themselves though. There is more than one, pre-disposed way to use the English language.
@Bernanke - yup top tier. Has some punctuation so RL gonna be a pig in shit.
It's subjective, isn't it. I get that. Because I would disagree. And I would counter that this is how a 9 year old critiques literature.
Can a 9 year old bench 120kg with no training?
Long run-on and and and sentences with adjectives which look like they were picked out from a thesaurus is literally how children write.
Maybe he tells amazing stories; I'd have to read a full book to tell you. But the writing style is gash and the fact half the people here who are coming out in his defence are having to qualify it with 'once you get used to the writing style' says it all.
If a book tells an amazing story but is horrible to read, then the person who wrote it is a teller of great stories but not a great writer. It's like providing someone with an incredible tasting plate of food but telling them they have to eat it through a straw; ultimately it will still taste incredible but it won't be an enjoyable experience to eat it.
The lack of punctuation, especially in the sprawling dense, multi-page paragraphs flows the narrative beautifully. He goes short and precise when it is required but the Commanche attack scene in Blood Meridian, with the scalping and rapid escalation from peace, to terror, to outright chaos reads as the scene should play. Breathless, relentless.
Its a wall of brutal prose designed to drag you in and grip you tight as violence erupts. Split it in to several paragraphs, precise punctuation. Letting the reader breathe, take a minute, digest - a bsolutely fucking ruins it. Its why most horror, in prose, doesn't work. It lets you step away.
Its a stylistic choice and to say it doesn't work for you, grand. To dismiss it as the level of a nine year old is, frankly, fucking idiotic.
"Oh my god, said the sergeant.
A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.
The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching an he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."
Ready Player One, now that's something we can chuck on the pile of nine year olds.
George Alagiah
Trevor Francis.
Chris Bart-Williams. Only 49. Really shit day for Wednesday and Forest fans.
DMRC
Guessing CM3.
Best player in the original windows version that you could realistically buy.
Sinead O'Connor.
It sounds like she's had a horrible couple of years by all accounts. Assuming suicide.
Sad. A talented women but she always seemed like a troubled soul, even before the stuff with her son.
Music aside, I always think the thing with the picture of the Pope was a genuinely brave thing to do. I think regardless of whether you agreed with what she trying to say or not, it takes a lot of guts to take a stand for something you believe and do something like that knowing what the fallout is going to be like.
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