June 28th, 2012 / 12:10 pm
Snippets
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What was Blood Meridian about again?

23 Comments

  1. Erik Stinson—

      wasn’t there a golden compass with a dark past? 

  2. bartleby_taco—

      i just read it a month or two ago its like lord of the rings except instead of faeries and stuff you have entrails

  3. David Fishkind—

      a dancing bear and a guy

  4. A D Jameson—

      That’s the Chronicles of Narnia

  5. A D Jameson—

      Matt Damon is in it, and they find a bottle of Coke at some point.

  6. tyler lebens—

      have you seen Air Bud? It’s not like Blood Meridian, I’m just curious.

  7. William Owen—

      Love.

  8. Matthew Simmons—
  9. j orloski—

      It’s about 300 pages. Get on it.

  10. Tyler Crumrine—

      Here come the Judge.

  11. Evan Hatch—

      In my opinion, the impossibility of disentangling our violent and savage nature from the human condition, which is something that McCarthy has explicitly indicated his belief in.

  12. Anonymous—

      How seducing and convincing illusions / violence / nihilism are. The enduring fact that these things are not the truth.

  13. Trey—

      I just want to assure everyone that there *is* a joke going on here and, as a person who has read Blood Meridian, I *do* get it

  14. Spenser Davis—

      Horses and shit 

  15. Tom Beshear—

      Drowning a guy in an outhouse.

  16. Craig Ronald Marchinkoski—

      After two days in the desert sun 
      My skin began to turn red 
      After three days in the desert fun 
      I was looking at a river bed 
      And the story it told of a river that flowed 
      Made me sad to think it was dead

  17. Trey—

      no fucking way was it drowning

  18. O—

      Blood Meridian is about Matt Dillon getting a hummer from Diane Lane on the set of Rumble Fish. If you think it’s about anything else you have severely misread the book.

  19. Jonny Ross—

      the difficulty of finding a good barber in pre-industrialized times

  20. reynard—

      it is about judgement

  21. deadgod—

      In common is the god of war, and he kills the killer.

      Iliad 18.309

      Let him exert himself, for truly Ares is common to [all] people.

      Archilochus fr. 38 (D)

      War is father of all and king of all, and these he displays as gods and these, people, and these he makes slaves and these, free.

      Heraclitus fr. 53 (D)

  22. Anonymous—

      I could be very wrong about this but I think I recall a horse with down syndrome in this book.

  23. deadgod—

      Then he opened the rough board door of the jakes and stepped in.

      The judge was seated upon the closet.  He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.

      Except for the reactions of two of the three men who later go to that toilet after the bolt is unlocked (and the judge has left?) – “I wouldnt go in there if I was you[.]”; “Good God almighty[.]” – , that’s it.

      I thought when I first read the book, and still sort of suppose, that the judge had smothered the ‘kid’ in his embrace.  But he could’ve drowned him in pissy shit, I guess, or gnashed his throat open, or vnseam’d him from the Naue toth’ Chops.  (It’s remotely possible that the judge is still doing something to the kid or the kid’s corpse when the other men go out to relieve themselves.)

      Whatever happened to the ‘kid’, it’d have to be something that would horrify these hardened wild-West guys, no?  Choked with his own entrails, flayed, brain drawn out his nose, … –what would alarm these guys??

      Very effective for a book tirelessly specific about gore to leave this detail open.