Virgil Has Departed, Do Not Weep Yet

(I put together a little academic-ish essay in order to be systematic with my McCarthy habit. I tried to keep it under 2000 words, which means it’s not as thorough as it could be, but it should hold water.) An Analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree As It Regards Dante’s Use of Allegory by Seth Wieck […]

Taylor Swift Trolls and the Lessons They Impart

Several years ago I posted an illustration by the artist Mark Summers that traced the artistic influence from Jonathan Swift to Taylor Swift. I thought it was funny. It was early on. I didn’t quite understand tumblr. It is by far the most popular post in the history of this tumblr with 194 notes (which […]

Sunrise, Moonset//Sunset, Moonrise

They did not know that they were set forth in that company in the place of three men slain in the desert…The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across […]

Bernini’s sculpture of Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius fleeing Troy, on their way to eventually found Rome. Anchises, the father of Aeneas, grabs the household gods while the city of Troy burns. Aeneas grabs his father, and has the boy Ascanius grab the fire. The boy carries the fire. The old man carries the gods. All […]

Further Out Into McCarthy’s Darkness (In Response to Ms Odradek)

Ms Odradek was kind enough to reply to my last post on Cormac McCarthy’s drive towards the dark by linking to her mini-review of “Outer Dark”. Read her review here.  This response is somewhat of an exploration that her review implicated in me. If Cormac McCarthy is writing tragedy for the purpose of catharsis, then […]

Suttree wiped his plate with a piece of bread and sat back. He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly […]

Beauty & Justice

He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. –  Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf, 1992. […]

In a few minutes the door opened and a young mozo stood there and he and the rider spoke and the man nodded toward the outside and the mozo looked toward the outer door and at the other rider and at the boy and then withdrew and shut the door. They waited. – Cormac McCarthy. […]