The horse named Golgotha hung between the trees

Unsurprisingly (or, perhaps surprisingly if you only remember him for his old TV shows and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), Roger Ebert is well read. Scroll way down for his reading of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree:

The most recent time I read those words, it was 10 o'clock at night in the rehab center. Dead quiet, in the dead of winter. My room chilly. I was holding the book while seated in a wheelchair by the side of my bed. The wheelchair tilted back to ease the pain of my shoulders, where flesh had been removed to try to patch the hole in my chin. I had a blanket wrapped around me, even covering my head and the back of my neck.

When I was drinking, I went to O'Rourke's on North Avenue, which was heated in the early days only by a wood-burning stove. Dress warmly and drink in a cool room, was my motto. Now in the hospital those cold, cold words of McCarthys' transported me. At a point beneath desire, I was there on Suttree's leaking houseboat in the hopeless dawn, sharing the ordeal of Suttree, the general, and Golgotha. It was an improvement. I was not trapped in a bed and a chair. I was not hooked up to anything. I was miserable, but I was alive, and McCarthy was still able to write that perfect terse dialogue. That is the thing about McCarthy. He is both the teller and the subject of Suttree. I do not mean anything so banal as that the book is autobiographical. It is the merciless record of a state of mind, the alcoholic state of mind, even when Suttree is not drinking but is white-knuckling it.

Screenplay for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy interviewed:

JH: Didn't you start "No Country for Old Men" as a screenplay?
CM: Yeah, I wrote it. I showed it to a few people and they didn't seem to be interested. In fact, they said, "That will never work." Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn't take long. I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for Best Screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, "Well, I didn't do anything, but I'm keeping it."

He has many more interesting things to say than this, but that was the only moment where I could say, "I knew it!"

Blood Meridian As Miller's 300

I'm about a third of the way through Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and it has occurred to me that I may have been wrong to make fun of Frank Miller last week. In McCarthy's novel we have the same impulse to mythologize history, taking what is known of the infamous Glanton gang and pump it up into a gnostic phantasmagoria. With the grotesque character of the Judge we have Melville's Ahab and Whale rolled into a single horrifying figure who kills without purpose or motive other than his own. He is chaos visited upon the world. Thus far, the character of the Kid is a cypher, a passive figure who like the reader can only witness the various atrocities, while surviving to live another day. It will be interesting to see how this works out. I suspect it will not end well.