e pur si muove: No Country for Old Men

It was finally the time to see the moving picture after having read the book. No Country for Old Men shouldn't be the entrance door to Cormac McCarthy's writing but that's what happened to me and, all in all, it wasn't such a bad thing. This western-thriller seems to be a much easier read than other more elaborate novels, like those of the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing and Cities of the Plain, or other novels, such as Blood Meridian. Enough about Cormac, a bit more about the movie.

First of, it was funny to be chewing on popcorn through the murder of at least forty people. The lady sitting next to me was all huffing and puffing, I'm sure on account of the popcorn and not of the killings. Which is interesting. Then, having read the book quickly and anxiously, I could sit down and relax while other people were enjoying their own fears and anxiety: the movie follows the book very closely, except for the last forth of the story where many episodes are cut or trimmed.

I had found this country/book not to be for girls, but the Cohen story finishes the job started by the writer. The small parts women played in the book were totally erased in the film. Carla Jean plays a tiny role, and is even deprived of her own story, she never gets the chance of saying how she met her husband, how she thought they were destined for each other. Not a story, but just the sketch of a wife, she is denied our symphathy. The same with the sheriff's wive, a symbol of "supper", moral and ethics, stability and true love - in the book, is totally efaced in the movie.

But the worst possible character in the Cohen version is Carla Jean's mother, more of a comic puppet that somebody who is actually dying from cancer. Hers will be a comic relief role, rather than a tragic one: the dying woman who is forced out of her house, the one who had seen that evil things were bound to happen. And that was exactly the biggest surprise for me: the movie, despite the graphic violence, can make you laugh many times. That ability to laught in the strangest of times can knock you down as much as in Fargo, the difference being body temperature. While, after Fargo, I left the movie theater shivering with cold, this time I was sweating under the Texan sun, feeling the desert dust, fearing the border.

In the beginning of No Country for Old Men, the movie, I found it interesting that when the scene of the crime is being showed - the place where the main character will decide his life for the worst - a light falls greyish on everything. When the good policemen, the small heroic counterpart to big scale crime, visits the same place, the sun comes out and fills the screen with a yellowish, warm light of hope.

That hope will not stick. The abrupt ending, mostly disliked by reviewers, is one of tame acceptance of the fact that everything is getting worse. Unlike other novels by the same author, we need to face here the double discomfort: Chigurh is a sign of the present times, for one. But more than that, he's out there, he's out there in the future, somewhere, waiting.

Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy

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Dumbing Down American Readers

Here the whole article because it is so good that I just have to have it to come back to it and read it every time somebody comes with a I-love-Stephen-King babble. From the Boston Globe, 24.9.2003., but originally from the LA Times.

THE DECISION to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon, and others who just can't write. A fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught instead of Shakespeare in many curriculums across the country.

Recently I spoke at the funeral of my old friend Thomas M. Green of Yale, perhaps the most distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature of his generation. I said, "I fear that something of great value has ended forever."

Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this "distinguished contribution" award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac McCarthy, whose novel "Blood Meridian" is worthy of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose "Underworld" is a great book.

Instead, this year's award goes to King. It's a terrible mistake.
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Outro texto, daqui:

[David] Bromwich was saying to me [about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian], “I just can’t stand that book, Harold,” he said, “I have never been able to get through more than thirty or forty pages and you’ve been recommending it to me for fifteen years.” And I said, “But I had that same experience, of what you’re saying. It’s so bloody, it’s so full of gore—horrible massacres and all sorts of atrocities—I just couldn’t bear it, but then when I got through it a couple of times, quite suddenly it started to work upon me.” And I am now absolutely persuaded—I don’t think that there is any literary work by a living American author that touches Cormac McCarthy’s book. You know, you can be the most experienced reader in the world and you might be the most adept reader in the world, but you can’t necessarily trust your first reactions.

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A Cormac McCarthy Bibliography
Here in .pdf, "Tragic Ecstasy: A Conversation with Harold Bloom about
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian"
The Western Canon index!

dark and darker

"There is intense disagreement about McCarthy’s literary status, which his new novel, “No Country for Old Men” (Knopf; $24.95), an unimportant, stripped-down thriller, will only aggravate. Some readers are alienated by his novels’ punctual appointments with blood-soaked violence. (“No Country for Old Men” opens with a prisoner strangling a sheriff’s deputy with the chain of his handcuffs.) Others think his work bombastic, pretentious, or claustrophobically male-locked: McCarthy has a tendency to omit half the human race from serious scrutiny. "
From an interesting review of No Country for Old Men in the New Yorker

That was exactly my oppinion. Not happy about the blood bath, I decided to punish myself a little further and started reading Child of God, a novel that "celebrates Lester Ballard, a man driven to kill young lovers and then copulate with the bodies in his underground lair." (a very good article here, "Cormac McCarthy Crosses the Great Divide", by Don Williams) Promising. I bet this will do it for me as far as McCarthy is concerned. Or may be not.

O que há por agora no youtube:
Entrevista à Oprah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 e 7.

E "Looking for Cormac", a film by Jim Collier, Eric Davies, and John McKay: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Mas o que é que eu tenho estado a dizer? Ouvi toda a entrevista e mudei radicalmente de opinião. É preciso ler de outro modo e ultrapassar as ideias que possam estar acomodadas (a proximidade que estes meios oferecem hoje e que pervertem/perpassam tudo). A lembrar-me muito Heart of Darkness.

"He could hear mosquitoes drowning toward him in the hot silence. He lay there listening. After a while he turned over on his stomach. And after a while he got up and got the rifle from where it stood by the fireplace and laid it on the floor alongside the mattress and stretched out again. He was very thirsty. In the night he dreamt streams of ice black mountain water, lying there on his back with his mouth open like a dead man."

Child of God
Cormac McCarthy

Mamá esto es para tí

Javier Bardem, actor espanhol em terras americanas recebendo um prémio da indústria americana, dizendo desculpem mas isto tem de ser em espanhol: "Mama esto es para ti. Esto es para tus abuelos, para tus padres, Rafael y Matilde. Esto es para los comicos de Espana que han traido la dignidad y el orgullo a nuestro oficio.." A ele não haveria John Howard de mandar falar inglês. Aliás, "à hora de fecho desta edição", uma grande parte dos que levaram óscares eram oriundos de outras bandas. Mal eu sabia que todos os óscares de representação viriam para a Europa. Até o Ratatouille já anunciava Paris. "Esto es para España", disse Bardem.

(Mama, this is for you. This is for your grandparents and your parents, Rafael and Matilde, This is for the comedians of Spain who like you have brought dignity and pride to our profession. This is for Spain and this is for all of you," said Bardem, speaking in rapid Spanish.)

"In an interview, Coppola singled him out as an heir to, and even an improvement on, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and Robert de Niro. After their early successes, these legends became rich and complacent, the director said. But Bardem is ambitious and hungry, unwilling to rest on his laurels and always "excited to do something good".

"It was amazing to hear him comparing me to those major artists," says Bardem. "For you to have an idea [of how amazing], I've always said, 'I don't believe in God, I believe in Al Pacino.'"
When Pacino saw Before Night Falls, Bardem chuckles, Schnabel gave him Bardem's number. Pacino phoned him in Madrid, even though it was the middle of the night there, and left a message on his answerphone saying that he wanted to tell him straight away how much he'd loved the movie. "I keep that tape with me," says Bardem. "It's one of the most beautiful gifts I've ever received. I don't care whether it's a lie or not, whether he was just being nice or not. I have it."

Bardem, now 38, grew up in a theatrical family. His grandparents were actors, and his mother, cousins and two siblings are all in the profession. His uncle, Juan Antonio Bardem, was a director imprisoned by Franco for his anti-fascist films."

Toda a entrevista aqui, no Guardian. Para mais logo, outro Oscar europeu, Pedro e o Lobo. Mas quem disse que a Europa estava morta?

no country for girls either (2)

If they don't get the little Oscar man this evening I will be really surprised, despite the extreme violence.

In No Country For Old Men, the title reveals itself at the end of the book. Old men and their values, a time when the frontier was a place of honor, when men didn't kill for nothing. Or so we are lead to believe. For us outsiders, the American legendary west is still a place where a man could die for nothing, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Luck or lack of it still lives in Cormac's novel but the ending drags on, feeding moral lessons into a very violent story. The bodycount exhausted my energy, I could barely pick up another book after this one.

"The other thing is the old people, and I keep comin back to them. They look at me it's always a question. Years back I dont remember that. I dont remember it when I was sheriff back in the fifties. You see em and they dont even look confused. They just look crazy. That bothers me. it's like they woke up and they dont know how they got where they're at. Well, in a manner of speakin they dont."

No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

"Women are tough. I don't pretend to understand them. I find men don't know much about women and find them mysterious." na entrevista com a Oprah.

E não satisfeita com a experiência, não resisti a comprar Child of God. Como sempre, a primeira página foi a criminosa. Ganhou à Doris Lessing, apenas pelo preço. Mas lá virá a Doris, quando a Fnac decidir alargar o stock. Escrita de barba rija, a de Cormac bem entendido. Mas não faz mal, sempre despoleta um ataque feminista aqui no blogue, o que só pode ser bom.

Um pequeno apanhado: 1911 - A médica Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, viúva e mãe, vota nas eleições para a Assembleia Constituinte, invocando a sua qualidade de chefe de família. A lei é posteriormente alterada, reconhecendo apenas o direito de voto a homens. 1931 - Expresso reconhecimento do direito de voto às mulheres diplomadas com cursos superiores ou secundários (Decreto com força de lei n.º 19694, de 5 de Maio de 1931) - aos homens continua a exigir-se apenas que saibam ler e escrever. 1946 - Nova lei eleitoral, mais alargada que a de 1931, continuando, porém, a exigir ainda requisitos diferentes para os homens e para as mulheres eleitores da Assembleia Nacional 1968 - Lei n.º 2 137, de 26 de Dezembro de 1968, que proclama a igualdade de direitos políticos do homem e da mulher, seja qual for o seu estado civil. Em relação às eleições locais, permanecem, contudo, as desigualdades, sendo apenas eleitores das Juntas de Freguesia os chefes de família (em 1969, A mulher casada pode transpor a fronteira sem licença do marido) 1974 - Abolidas todas as restrições baseadas no sexo quanto à capacidade eleitoral dos cidadãos
1974 - 2008, a liberdade breve.
A história toda, aqui.

"I had no say in the matter. Every moment of your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning."

Preciso mesmo é poder escolher. (Ou comer).

There was not no question in my mind

Carla Jean, the only girl in No Country for Old Men.

When I got out of highschool I was still sixteen and I got a job at Wal-Mart. I didnt know what else to do. We needed the money. What little it was. Anyway, the night before I went down there I had this dream. Or it was like a dream. I think I was still about half awake. But it come to me in this dream or whatever it was that if I went down there that he would find me. At the Wal-Mart. I didnt know who he was or what his name was or what he looked like. I just knew that I'd know him when I seen him. I kept a calendar and marked the days. Like when you're in jail. I mean I aint never been in jail, but like you would probably. And on the ninety-ninth day he walked in and he asked me where sportin goods was at and it was him. And I told him where it was at and he looked at me and went on. And directly he come back and he read my nametag and he said my name and he looked at me and he said: What time do you get off? And that was all she wrote. There was not no question in my mind. Not then, not now, not ever.
No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy

The Invisible Woman in the Modern Western em Cinema Without Borders.



Blogging can many times be a sort of package fast-food of clichés and popular culture. Anything that you think of writing has been written before by others, many times and much better. Or you can be the first one but you're still sure someone else will come and do it better, sooner or later. In the meantime, the outthere swells with information and waste and just plain people. But so it is, and it's still great.

What could I possibly say about this book? It doesn't lend itself to comment, or to the average-blog-post: image, couple of clichés supposedly loaded with "meaning", youtube to finish it off and a few links. I can say what comes to my mind as the plot unfolds. Still convinced this is nothing but an excellent thriller that sucks from the great desert/bad seed mythology, I see a connection with old time epics, references to larger-than-life heroes and a certain good vs. evil look. Chigurh stands for fate, he stands for what comes inevitably after a man looses his soul. The gigantic male characters and idealized women drink from the Iliad, but any comparison other than context would be totally abusive. Still, the greatest book for a boring weekend.

look at me

Look at me, Chigurh said.
The man looked and looked away again.
Do you speak english?
Yes.
Dont look away. I want you to look at me.
He looked at Chigurh . He looked at the new day paling all about. Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in the squandered world. He shoved the pistol in his belt and looked back up the street once more. Then he picked up the bag and slung the Uzi over his shoulder and crossed the street and went limping on toward the hotel parking lot where he'd left his vehicle.
Em No Country for Old Men de Cormac McCarthy

Chigurh fará sem dúvida parte da galeria de vilões famosos do cinema.
Poucos parágrafos conseguem ser tão horríveis como este.

No country for girls either

(photo by Eric Ogden for Time)

Reading No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy before the film comes and wipes everything out. Supposed to be one of the great Americans along with Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, I didn't find this book to be more than a very well written western/thriller that sent me back to voracious hours of John Sandford. The setting and characters come from a long tradition of bad seeds and frontier country, Americans still trying to justify their nationhood. The land remains dangerous and alluring, an eternal Eldorado.

"He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Windgrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away."
No Country for Old MenCormac McCarthy

A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men