/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16694654]

The man stood at the bank of the river. He watched the water, opaque like iron. Burbling silently, turning in a lifeless serpentine coil about a rock in the riverbed like the unknowing and godless flow of the black cosmos beyond as it circles a dead planet in some distant nethersphere no different than our own. A can of tuna sat upon the bank. He reached for it and looked inside for tuna but there was none.
What was in the can, Papa?
Nothing. Nothing was in the can or in the world entire save the blackscorched earth and the futile scrabblings of degenerate prophets clawing themselves through the darkness, blind save the sight of their own hands digging before them which they also could not see, digging a grave into a greater void than that from which they came, a pit yawning into nothingness which knows not the struggles of man though yet it must.

[Anonymous No.16694989]

yeah. Top-tier novel. I personally would have done something different with the ending, however.

[Anonymous No.16695036]

>>16694989
Was my imitation convincing? How do you think the ending should have been?

[Anonymous No.16695044]

[Anonymous No.16695050]

>>16695036

i was perplexed at the commas. He doesn't really use those.

[Anonymous No.16695053]

>>16695050
Ah, true. It's the little details that get you.

[Anonymous No.16695062]

>>16695036
lmao, that was your imitation? Pretty excellent, man. It's a bit too bony with the commas, like >>16695050 said.

[Anonymous No.16695119]

>>16695062
>>16695053

ye it was really good. I was rather wondering if you were reciting it out of memory or for some reason wanted to make it more easily readable with the commas. Good work.

[Anonymous No.16695143]

>>16694654
>Cormac Mcarthy
Ah, Blood Meridian. Monsieur, that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. Our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like Argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. We scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like Archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw The Judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

[Anonymous No.16695147]

>>16695036
Its a bit on the nose. I thought it was one of McCarthy's worse passages and made a thread to mock him.

[Anonymous No.16695153]

>>16695147
*You made a thread

[Anonymous No.16695196]

He's a pariah, just like all other genre fiction "writers." If you ever publish a piece (and I do mean piece) of genre fiction, it's pretty much the kiss of death as far as real writers are concerned. You're consigned to the kiddie table from then on, and will forever dwell in that ghetto. Hacks simply aren't invited to the parties. What serious artiste would ever address an envelope to a name like King or Steel or Brown? Well, I do have one story. I once attended a cocktail party in the French Riviera hosted by a indomitable poetess. Several of the big name novelists were in attendance, including many of my fellow Oxford alumni. The mood was merry until a certain hack (in)famous for writing horse stories decided to gatecrash the villa. He was no doubt emboldened by a recent prize he won for (wait until you hear this) a post-apocalyptic survival horror novel. Sorry, just let me catch my breath. The moment this lost soul stepped under the veranda the entire party went dead silent and everyone turned to look at him with a single united look of disgust. The poetess, ever the angel, swooped in an engaged the poor fraud in his level of conversation. The talentless nobody was already sopping drunk, of course. No doubt he'd needed courage to even approach the door, and so decided to "party rock" from a flask in his tiny rundown rental car outside. She graciously asked him if he was working on a new horse novel, and he replied (and I'll remember these words until the day I die), "No, a crime screenplay." The entire villa erupted in laughter and the sad little nothing was so mortified he simply slunk away. Only then did we return to our shimmering conversations about the craft. Who do these people think they are, really?

[Anonymous No.16695200]

>>16695196

>artiste

Stopped reading this pretentious faggotry right there.

Is this some stale pasta i've missed?

[Anonymous No.16695225]

>>16695143
Always fresh.
Some of those words are entirely made up.

[Anonymous No.16695232]

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

[Anonymous No.16695236]

>>16695232
His finest work

[Anonymous No.16695490]

>>16694654
lol so this cringe mediocre prose is why reddit loves it...AHAHA

[Anonymous No.16695526]

>>16695232
I've been looking for this quote for ages

[Anonymous No.16695528]

>>16695143
cant stop laughing.... i fucking hate mccarthy lmao

[Anonymous No.16695539]

>>16695490
I wrote that, not McCarthy.

[Anonymous No.16695607]

>>16695539
why? are you some special kind of retard?

[Anonymous No.16695623]

>>16695607
I found the exercise amusing.

[Anonymous No.16695729]

>>16695200
>Is this some stale pasta i've missed?
probably. it's a little too much even by lit's standards.

[Anonymous No.16696042]

>>16695036
No. It’s too over the top and wordy.

[Anonymous No.16696377]

[Anonymous No.16696384]

>>16696377

[Not him but No.16696421]

>>16695623
As did I however please be careful, see picrel

[Anonymous No.16696428]

>>16696421
W. B. Yeats

[Anonymous No.16696840]

>>16695036
it was convincing other than the lack of fauna descriptors and some words need to be replaced by the most obscure counterpart available in a thesaurus

for instance : prophet -> heresiarch

[Anonymous No.16696846]

>>16695143
I am such a sucker for McCarthy that I even enjoy this parody

[Anonymous No.16696962]

Lads, almost finishing up on The Crossing. Loved it but feel like the deeper ideas are going over my head. Is there something to help with it?

[Anonymous No.16697326]

>>16696962
try this
https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/diverging-equity-the-metaphysics-of-cormac-mccarthys-western-nove