I'm currently reading Cormack McCarthy's Suttree (my first of his novels) — just an exceptional polymath capable of painting complicated scenery with words dozenly scattered throughout paragraphs [0].
My favorite adjective he's coördinated is "burntwing", used to describe moths spiraling downwards after passing through candleflames. If I had crafted such a descriptive contraction, my former styling would've been "burnt-wing", had I even been capable of generating such concise imagery [1].
McCarthy's stylings have helped me to reduce hyphenations in my own writings — reducing their usage mainly to contractedwords which might be all-too-confusing without them.
[0] pg104 has ten words that I do not know their definitions, yet through context they work to advance the storyline of character racists (book is set in 1950s).
[1] decades ago, during college burnout, I was searching for the essense of "burntwing" — reduced to writing a professor about "feeling like a burning airplane in tailspin." My trajectory back then was definitely burntwing.
"You must learn the rules so you can properly break them." —paraphrasing Picasso
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As blacksheep of an intellectual family (lawyers, politicians, engineers), I've spent the majority of my employment around fellow bluecollars.
Despite my education (left medschool, decades ago) it scares my family when I speak in the colloquial jargon of my electrician co-workers. If I don't codeswitch back into the grammatically correct language of our upbringing, my brothers value what I have to say less ("what you said sounds dumb even though I understood you better").
Isn't the whole purpose of language to communicate the realities of World? As their brother, I think they mostly write to obfuscate intentions... I prefer the honesty of pure dumb.
> "You must learn the rules so you can properly break them.”
Paraphrasing a similar remark, I think I pulled from "sed & awk” [1]:
A reference can teach you the rules, but they don’t show you how to really use them. There's the difference between reading the rules of a sport and actually playing the game.
Tangent: I’m beginning to question how broad the line is between a “rule breaker” and an acute student of tradition at odds a sort of institutionalized inertia. Maybe this “Words with Spaces” guy is on to something.
> Isn't the whole purpose of language to communicate the realities of World? As their brother, I think they mostly write to obfuscate intentions... I prefer the honesty of pure dumb.
This may speak to the significance of the court jesters of the past. And perhaps the rise of virtue signaling today?
"You may beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride..." [0]
Copspeak for technically you're correct, but we're still going to fuck with you.
[0] A cop actually said this to me (I asked him whether he was violating a 3rd-party's Fourth Amendment by questioning); handcuffed, he tucked a Miranda Card into my buttondown's shirtpocket, tapping condescendingly about my questioning his authority. And what a ride it was.
> “If the law is against you, talk about the evidence,” said a battered barrister “If the evidence is against you, talk about the law, and, since you ask me, if the law and the evidence are both against you, then pound on the table and yell like hell”
Wait til you read Blood Meridian. The imagery he created with words, some of them his own creations, is just ... beyond compare. I'm reading The Road now, which comes from the same place. I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully.
Another contemporary writer who worked with new words in a very creative way was Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun. Some were inventions using Greek, French, or Latin roots. Others were forgotten terms which he resurrected. Someone compiled a dictionary, Lexicon Urthus, which discusses the origins of certain terms and their placement within the series.
>I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully.
Absolutely. Similarly, I read the Tao Te Ching 4x annually, by reading the same single passage both before and after bed, daily. Both Laotzi's and McCarthy's density of construction is just soooooo human condition.
[Suttree book world] Harrington just found the eyeball in the junkyard vehicle — in a single paragraph humanity just oozes, including his toying with viscosity and shock, and re-toying again. Washes hands. The drunk boss having previously joked "yeah the driver only scraped his shinbones."
I am hooked. McCarthy's books jumped to the top of my bookqueue after reading a HN article a few months ago about his library/collections being catalogued, post-humously.
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I've just read Dave Wallace's three major novels (Jest & King & Broom, ~2000 pages) and McCarthy is absolutely the better author, not requiring hundreds of footnotes to say less with more esoteric bullshit [0]. DFW just seems like a bully to me ("wow I'm so smart"—DFW, probably), and honestly his samizdat is about 800 pages too long (myself a former bored addict prodigy with poor family comms) [1].
Mostly I read DFW because he's my judge-brother's favorite fiction author — it felt like a challenging obligation/chore, much like our personal relationship. With both, I've felt mostly emptiness. For powerful shortform pieces, both are quite capable of emotional stirring (This is Water).
I laugh when I see this book on others' shelves, because they probably haven't read it and it isn't really worth the time to read [all of] it. A few simple questions of the "reader" verifies this. My own bullying is that "I have" [snooty], however much I wish for all that reading time back. Bullies making bullies =D
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By page 100 of Suttree you are hooked. By page 100 of Jest you are bored [2]. I've yet to read more than six pages of McCarthy in one day. For Wallace my eyes would constantly glaze over dozens of pages and just think: what happened here?! why did author include [all of] this!?
Although I am tired after reading either author for twenty minutes, McCarthy's doesn't feel like the author is just wasting my time.
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My McCarthy readlist is structured so: Suttree (current); Blood Meridian; The Road — is this advisable?
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[0] DFW's footnotes == even more of his esoteric bullshit
[1] If you do read Infinite Jest, absolutely use a study guide(s) (specifically Aaron Swartz's incredible breakdown... which can reduce the book just just a few hundred pages). If you've ever suffered an addiction (whether yourself or crazybestfriends's), you probably don't need to suffer through any longform DFWallace.
[2] I understand this is part of DFW's "style" : the frenzied passages of speed addicts, thirty pages into killing a dog (e.g.) when three pages would have done better, more respectful of reader's time (addict or not).
> My McCarthy readlist is structured so: Suttree (current); Blood Meridian; The Road — is this advisable?
If you've read Suttree you could do either one next.
If you were coming new to McCarthy, I would start with Blood Meridian, as there's nothing else like it (The Road invites comparisons with other post-Apocalyptic fiction).
My favorite adjective he's coördinated is "burntwing", used to describe moths spiraling downwards after passing through candleflames. If I had crafted such a descriptive contraction, my former styling would've been "burnt-wing", had I even been capable of generating such concise imagery [1].
McCarthy's stylings have helped me to reduce hyphenations in my own writings — reducing their usage mainly to contractedwords which might be all-too-confusing without them.
[0] pg104 has ten words that I do not know their definitions, yet through context they work to advance the storyline of character racists (book is set in 1950s).
[1] decades ago, during college burnout, I was searching for the essense of "burntwing" — reduced to writing a professor about "feeling like a burning airplane in tailspin." My trajectory back then was definitely burntwing.