Tag: Cormac McCarthy

Followed by Patrick Modiano’s Dog: What I’ve Been Reading, Last Part

27 May 201627 May 2016 SoutherlyBlog

by Luke Beesley Having just finished Cesar Aira’s Shantytown, which in the end was probably my least favourite Aira, I’ve just begun Beauty is a Wound by Indonesian Eka Kurniawan, mostly because of how much I enjoyed the tinge of the absurd in these two sentences, on the second page, which follow other sentences about a character, Dewi Ayu, who has just risen from the grave: “A woman tossed her baby into the bushes and its father hushed a banana stalk. Two men plunged into a ditch, others fell unconscious at the side of the road, and still others took…

“A solitary game without opponent”: mitigating the anxiety of Judge Holden

16 May 201423 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

by Tom Lee In the previous post I quoted from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I suggested that the logic of Judge Holden and his war games was perhaps nothing other than maladapted techniques to mitigate bad affects associated with solitude. War doesn’t predict truth, in the sense that it decides the winners of history, as the Judge would have us believe. War is a romantic quest that protects one from loneliness and boredom. In this post I will consider some ideas for an alternate way to think about solitude. In his recently translated You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk…

The Lonely and Homeless Judge

9 May 201423 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Tom Lee Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in a work of fiction. The Judge is the brains and the brawn of a group of scalp hunters who navigate the hellish terrain of the American South West in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Holden has been convincingly compared to a devilish manifestation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (La Shot, 2009); a god of war, trained equally in martial arts and in the sophistry required to make a case for the inherent truthfulness of the outcomes decided in combat. Holden is a fascinating character, at…