. Spinning .

In encouraging Bud Parr of Chekhov’s Mistress in his reading of Cormac McCarthy, Mark Allen Cunningham left a link in the comments to this post.  It goes to his essay on The Art of Reading Cormac McCarthy which was published in Poets & Writers in the Sept/Oct 2007 issue. 

It is an excellent guide to understanding and appreciating the power of his stories and the nuances of language that he uses for effect.  As Cunningham states:

To the author’s avid admirers, the mainstream adulation now being heaped upon McCarthy is bittersweet, for they are painfully aware that this attention is long overdue. Consider the almost total silence with which McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (Random House, 1985) was received when it first appeared.

That book, now rightfully recognized as a masterpiece, is a brutal and uncompromising depiction of nineteenth-century bloodlust along the Texas-Mexico border, and deploys the author’s stylistic maximalism and paradoxical philosophy to devastating effect. Harold Bloom has cited Blood Meridian as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. In a list compiled by the New York Times, the book ranked among the top five novels published between 1980 and 2005. It also appears on Time magazine’s roster of the top hundred books of all time.

McCarthy is still one of my favorite writers; he lies perhaps on the extreme edge (maybe over the edge) of pushing the novel further in both elegance and grimey realism while elements of the surreal drop down to cloak the horror in softer form.  I like the boldness with which he describes the natural: the earth and sky and mountains; the depths of man’s nature.

Seems time again to absorb the man through my eyes and hands and mind. To suck some more of him into me.

Dan Green (The Reading Experience) has a further take on Jacob Russell’s "What Purpose do the Literary Periodicals Serve?" that pretty much says what we little guys have been thinking and grumbling about for a while.

In "Becoming Respectable" Dan notes that while literary journals abound–just about every college has one (even I started one) the readers are normally just the writers who want to submit.  The writers published are looking for the literary credentials they get from being published.  The writers who get published are the ones with the credentials already of having gone through a MFA somewhere at one of these universities. 

Ah, it’s a vicious cycle. 

While all of these literary publications sprang from honest intentions to further interest in, and reward the development of literary efforts, they almost consistently have turned into political b.s. that serves not the unloved, undegree-ed writer to get his work read, nor the public, who doesn’t have access to the journals other than via subscription or their library shelves, but rather someone’s resume who already likely has a MFA or Iowa Writers Workshop jaunt or some such validation already.

I’ve given up on this whole submission process myself, though I may try an experiment some day just to prove my point.  It involves a bit of intrigue and dishonesty, but hey, that’s prime fodder for fictional success. 

The question of some form of soul or awareness beyond death always seems to come up when death happens.  And the answer is always the same, for no one knows it.  The handling of the process of reflection and wondering is what is different for each of us.

Mary and Hannah are convinced that they feel Jay’s presence in the house.  For them, it is a comforting phenomenon and real or imagined, it gives them a chance to say goodbye in view of the sudden shock of his death.

"And that even whether you believe or not in life after death," Mary said, "in the soul, as a living, immortal thing, creature, why it’s certainly very believable that for a little while afterwars, this fore, this life, stays on, hovers around."  (p. 146)

Mary’s mother, deaf so that likely she wouldn’t hear any subtle noises, does agree that she feels someone in the house, and Mary’s brother, Andrew, is easygoing enough and emotional so that he too accepts the possibility.  Mary’s father, however, is a more practical sort.

"If you’re right, and I’m wrong, then chances are youre right about the whole damn business, God, and the whole crew.  And in that case, I’m just a plain damned fool.

"But if I can’t trust my common sense–I know it’s nothing much, Poll, but it’s all I’ve got.  If I can’t trust that, what in hell can I trust?"  (p. 147)

The story is no necessarily about religion, though Mary’s faith has brought her to the edge with both her father and her husband when he was alive.  The fact of faith as a possible comfort in the face of the unknown is just one of the ways that the question of life and death is approached.  Those with faith, Mary and her aunt Hannah, appear to accept death more easily if they feel their unproven beliefs offer a "happy ending" to the unhappiest part of life. Andrew doesn’t have a strong faith in God or immortality of the soul, but it suits him to accept it, takes away one of his worries.

But those like Joel, Mary’s father, are the ones who truly question and seek answers.  Likely would love to believe the idea of a God and an eternal life.  Their problem is, they need to have proof.