Why James Ellroy HATED Cormac McCarthy
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- čas přidán 22. 06. 2024
- James Ellroy did not like Cormac McCarthy's "The Border Trilogy" and today we're going to be breaking down Ellroy's critique of "McCarthy."
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Lmao, that remark about Cormac not using quotation marks had me dying.
Ellroy's 'My Dark Places' is one of the best books of the 90s, I would say.
Man I love Ellroy. He is a menace.
He means what he says when he talks about literature, but he’s talks like a prizefighter.
hahaha my guy took some time to trash his ex while discussing mccarthy's writting style
Yeah, he did.
I'm so happy Teacher loves one of my absolute favorite writers and storytellers, Mr Ellroy.
How about Pedro Paramo? Lots of interesting punctuation in there and very difficult to figure out.
Demon Dog was promoting This Storm around the time he broke the literary internet space dogging McCarthy. At the time I agreed. Had my own struggles with McCarthy that I moved past just last summer. When the Dog came to my town I asked him about the drama. He feigned ignorance but we bonded a bit over our mutual dislike and he called McCarthy "pretentious bullshit". Love the Dog.
Awesome video, Ian!
Would love to see you do a Sentence Imitation series where you pick a uniquely crafted sentence from one of the greats and then have fun playing with the exact structure of it with your own words and content while giving us some pointers along the way.
Keep up the Great Work 🔥
Before I read Mccarthy I remember sometimes when I was reading a long dialogue and there where a lot of “he said-they said” between every character’s utterance it seemed repetitive and redundant and somewhat cacophonic. When I read McCarthy there where no such interruptions on the flow of the images and the sound of the dialogue. It was like a movie. It’s really hard to pull off but when he does it right its great!.
Tolstoy had French written sections in War and Peace (that were translated into the target language along with the rest of the novel)
this is way, way off topic.....but.... have you read William T. Vollmann ?.....i haven't (yet)......just wondering where to start.....
Just finished Butterfly Stories. Really wild book. Post-Burgess Malayan whoring at its finest
Great video. I got hooked on McCarthy about thirty years ago when I randomly picked up Child of God and couldn’t believe you could get so immersed in a story so brutal. Didn’t even notice the lack of punctuation til a decade later when I heard people complaining about it. I think it was a great idea on his part.
As far as the Spanish, I use an app to translate every word. I don’t think it would be the same without it. It feels more authentic. If it wasn’t a good book I likely wouldn’t but McCarthy didn’t write any books I didn’t like and I’ve read them all.
I also live in the Southwest not far from Mexico. We’ll go to Rocky Point occasionally and I agree with your perspective on that.
Looking forward to watching many more of your videos. Great job.
Regarding writing words in a different language. I’ve taken inspiration from Cormac McCarthy’s inclusion of Spanish in his novels. In my novel (still working on the second draft), I have some conversations amongst characters in the Russian language and plan to use Cyrillic lettering in the final version. To me the Russian language is so ugly when written as it sounds in English. My goal is that readers can determine what is being said based on the context, maybe use their imagination on how the Russian language sounds or even do research as to what is being said.
Being married to a woman who’s first language is Russian, this language fascinates me and I want to include it in my work where it makes sense.
Just finished "lot 49" by pynchon and instantly thought of him when you talked about all those commas and semicolons
Could you do a video on great crime novelists? Ellroy, James M Cain, Elmore Leonard etc?
Good point about living so close to your neighbor, yet not speaking their language, but expecting them to speak ours. I love stumbledrunk distance from Naco and go their often. I try to speak Spanish but it's rather pathetic. I see most of the people that live over there, working or shopping over here. Language, never an issue. Nacos rough but it's making a comeback. One thing I've noticed when I attempt to pronounce , say chicken. Id always say " polio"....my waitress or whomever always corrected me with a smile. Saw her in front of me a t the local Safeway. The next day. There is definitely something to be said for living close to the border.
I haven't seen all your videos, but quite a few, and I'm surprised I've never heard you mention Denis Johnson. I know he's dead, but imo, he and DeLillo were the best that I've read at balancing all this stuff you talk about, especially sentence structure, flow, etc. I know Wallace was a fan.
denis johnson is amazing
Ellroy is correct. McCarthy was just a neurodivergent with an incredibly dark mind and a bleak outlook. The Road, although his most accessible, was so somber that you needed an antidepressant just to finish it.
Once I heard a saying about composers: genius almost never understands genius. I think it also applies to accomplished authors
"James Ellroy's Feast of Death" is a fascinating documentary and an interesting portrait of Ellroy, his life and his work and the relationship between both.
It's about 90 minutes, free on CZcams.
Great tip. Thanks.
Sure. You're welcome.
I've watched it a few times, and it's great. Very informative.
“Cormac was the Docta!” - Joey Diaz
That really makes me wonder who are your top 10 living authors today, considring I also love McCarthy and Ellroy, contradictory that may be
I’m 100 pages into Blood Meridian and I only know half of what’s going on. The question thing is throwing me off. Don’t remember it being a big deal in The Road, but far less characters might have something to do with it
Ellroy's my favorite living writer (assuming that Pynchon might not be around).
He's trashed Camus, Orson Welles, Kubrick, Scorsese, David Mamet, Richard Price, Bukowski, etc....
I think most of it is just to fuck with people, because he'll say something contradictory if you wait long enough.
His biggest WTF statement although. might be the claim he's never read John Dos Passos ... completely ridiculous to me.
Theses two authors have their own unique writing styles: Cormac doesn't use puncation, which can be confusing , like you said because you don't know which character is talking. Why does he do that? Is he trying to be clever. I read a couple James Ellroys novels, and I enjoy the stories of 50s Crime noir set in Los Angeles, but his style of writing short sentences, and jargon can be off putting. I wish he would write more longer sentences because the stories are very entertaining.
Whoa! Awesome. Thanks.
What is this overuse of punctuation? Semicolons come to mind, but that's about it. In life, if you have a nail, you need a hammer. If you have a screw, you need a screwdriver. If you have an interrogative, you need a question mark. If you have a series of things, you need a comma. If you have finished a thought, you need a period. Life comes to us in quanta, discrete bundles, as in quantum mechanics. Therefore, I don't understand the purpose of eschewing punctuation, which constitutes discrete, assimilable thought. Nor can I comprehend how such a writer became popular, save maybe in the vein of Joyce, where the writer attempted to get at a prelapsarian, irrational stream of consciousness. I prefer civilization, where people exchange thoughts denoted by quotation marks.
Just finished Ellroy's biography. He reads modern fiction.
As a German that can barely cuss in Russian, I wish I would spend more time learning languages than watching video on y...
As a Spanish speaker, I love the lack of subtitles. It felt far more immersive. As a non speaker, I guess use google translate lol.
I mean I use a pdf of translations of the Spanish parts, since I don’t speak Spanish.
About the Spanish included in the novel, I, a Spanish-speaker (mother tongue), believe it's in extremely poor taste, bordering on the offensive, to insert a foreign language into your text if you, or the publishers, do not provide a translation. Most editions in English (and Spanish) of Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" leave pages and pages of French untranslated, and it's annoying even if I can read enough French to understand. Edmund Wilson's "Memoirs of Hecate County" does the same, at least in its English original, and I don't know of any edition that provides a translation. "War and Peace" has several segments in French (it starts in French), but most modern editions do provide translations to the target language.
It was a common affectation for authors before the 20th century to include passages in Greek or Latin and expect readers to deal with them. Also, many times before the 2nd half of last century, editors and/or translators would translate racy passages into Greek or Latin so that the masses would not be titillated by "improper situations."
Ellroy is on record as a conservative author. Maybe he's not at the level of the current right-wingers in this country today, but he most definitely is a right-winger. Maybe what he hated the most about the inclusion of Spanish is that it was Spanish. Idk, but it would not surprise me given his political views and the general concept among the right in the US that Spanish-speaking people are just inferior.
Overall, good video. Thanks.
How important is to speak different languages!! I'm born and raised in Argentina and most of us speak at least English as a 2nd lingo. From mid-low class upwards.
Elroy was being literal.
No taste?
I think he wrote the passage in Spanish without a translation so the reader would be as lost as if they were there, immersed, and not able to speak Spanish. There in the story.
Who needs quotation marks? I don't have birds hovering around my lips when I speak.
Birds??
Ellroy is a like a carnival barker. He's got incessant schtick. He's got his rap. "The demon dog with a hog log" is how he describes himself. He knows that most of the time he's full of shit.
And McCarthy didn't have a schtick? Come on.
@@SamElliottsStache don't know. What was Mc Carthy's shtick?
@@brandonkindt1205 Southern patrician pessimism. Haemorrhoid country.
@@IanSinclair11021949 🤣
james ellroy's a pretentious weirdo, like quentin tarantino but worse..
Ellroy likes Ellroys books, and only Ellroy books. I read all his books. The last book I put away after 20 pages. Maybe he thinks he is Russian. 30 personalities presented in one chapter. Don‘t do this Again to me James E. or I tattoo some quotation marks onto your forehead.
I like that you brought up Faulker. Lots of roads lead there, I guess, but with the Sound and the Fury he uses that slanted text and all sorts of confusing tactics of communicating who is speaking or when. But that was a real joy to figure out what was going on.