True Names, True Walks

That’s what the McCarthy southwest feels like — the world being named with true names. It’s a trope that could so so so easily fall on its face (could so easily (and perhaps does?) induce endless eye-rolling) but because he’s so committed to the conjuring, so fully invested in the tone, it works. That total investment in a mode of working is — to m

All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of rain miles away on the prairie.

This tension between being swathed in the online world and going to a place with “true names” feels like one of the main contentions of anyone doing “deep work” today.

Hell, right now, I had to get out of bed and come downstairs and almost break my toe on a kettlebell to then lean over and type this out in a totally unergonomic posture. But this is

The book is a spell, and the writer has self-ensorcelled in such a way to access this “tone” or “mode” of observing that is so far removed from the normal day-to-day that you sometimes feel drunk emerging from his universe.

All of this brings to mind Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. In some way a spiritual antipode to Blood Meridian — it’s a b

That tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker really knocked me down the other day. A gorgeous observation. Who knows if the phenomenon is true, but it’s enough that one can imagine it and the image astounds.

That’s the trick with Blood Meridian — the book, for me, soars not on the shock factor of the gore, which is so gruesome it’s all you can see