I Listened to Blood Meridian at Work
I have a job. The job is a summer job. I don’t have a full time job because I’m a college student. The job is working on a farm. I am a farmhand. My boss tells me to shovel dirt in a specific direction and I do it. Sometimes I hoe around Swiss Chard. Other things too. Most of the tasks are pretty monotonous and can several hours to complete. Different workers have their own way of dealing with this. The Skidmore grad chain smokes. The middle-aged Vietnamese man takes piss breaks. I listen to things on my iPod. I’d never listened to an audiobook at work, nor had I read a Cormac McCarthy novel, so I decided I’d kill two birds with one stone and give Blood Meridian a try. It took about three days of work to get through the story. When I started it, I was shoveling mulch from bigger piles into smaller piles. When I finished it, I was sitting down in a field my boss calls “The Plain.”
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June 2nd, 2011 / 6:54 pm
June 2nd, 2011 / 6:54 pm
Ken Baumann—
Gossip until it’s not, but anyway: James Franco to write/adapt & direct As I Lay Dying and Blood Meridian.
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Illustrating McCarthy and Melville
page 67: He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound.
Remember how Zak Smith did that cool illustration of Gravity’s Rainbow? Well now he’s doing Blood Meridian as a collaborative project with Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle.
Also, Matt Kish is doing one for Moby Dick:
Page 048 : Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Talkin’ Blood Meridian: The Harold Bloom Onion A/V Club Interview
Wonder and delight!!!! (Also: Terror and violence!!!!)
Recently The Onion chose Blood Meridian for their Wrapped Up in Books feature, and then they decided to kick things to the next level by calling up Harold Bloom to talk about it with them in an Onion A/V Club interview not to be missed. And what are the first words out of Professor Bloom’s mouth? “I read it on the recommendation of a friend, Gordon Lish, a New York book editor and a specialist in fiction”
It’s Monday morning and I love life, not just because of the above, but the above sure as damn doesn’t hurt. One more money quote (they’re all money quotes) then you need to go click through and read the whole thing.