Famous Last Words: A Congeries of Reflections

Page 7 January–February 2008 Famous Last Words: A Congeries of Reflections continued on next page Charles Alcorn on Blood Meridian (#78) “Who is this guy?” I asked, referring simultaneously to the unknown author and his singularly savage creation, his seven-foot force of nature in Johnny Cash black—the judge. “And where in the Faulknerian Hell is he from?” I mean, I was stunned.Alone on a lumpy couch, under pale lamplight, huddled in the whistling winter dark of a shotgun rental in Big Spring, Texas. Mesmerized by page after page of McCarthy’s Old Testament thunder. I’d recently finished the debut efforts of fellow twenty-somethings Brett Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero [1985]) and David Leavitt (Family Dancing [1984]), and was encouraged by a fellow newspaperman to read Blood Meridian by this guy McCarthy, who, the newspaperman said, had just migrated from Knoxville to his western-most hometown of El Paso. I’d just purchased a Vintage paperback of Bright Lights, Big City (1984), but decided it might be best to give the vapid urban a rest, try to embrace my new home on the High Plains with a little more sincerity. White-line fever with Jay McInerney’s Bolivian Marching buddies could wait. As I moved through the opening chapters, the difference between McCarthy’s Borderlands masterwork in style, tone, and gravitas and the It Boy’s brand of navel-gazing melodrama was boggling. I could hardly grasp that my so-called peer’s polished pop lit was being produced in the same century, much less the same year (1985), as the otherworldly prose of the savant from Tennessee. McCarthy’s blood-red revision of a Texas history that I’d gulped down Kool-Aid style was fascinating—unexpectedly thrilling. Six months of sportswriting in the Permian Basin had made me a believer in McCarthy’s characters; only men as ornery and unapologetically evil as the depraved soldiers, bandits, and buffalo skinners of Blood Meridian could thrive on the sage-brushed moonscape of 1860s Texas. The unrelenting aridity of the badlands required every ounce of stoicism a man could muster, and McCarthy had miraculously captured on the page the “machismo” I felt in every small-town stadium and oilfield café. Halfway through, I knew Blood Meridian was genius, but could not begin to parse its magic. On I read, enthralled, pruning my way through the curious thickets of McCarthy’s diction, tracking the irresistible Kid as he came of age in The Evening Redness in the West. And at journey’s end, there danced Mephistopheles. And when the amazing McCarthy wrote, finally, of the judge, “He says that he will never die,” I believed. Man, did I ever believe. Charles Alcorn received his MA in English/fiction from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and his Ph.D. from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is the managing editor of the American Book Review. Mark Amerika on Don Quixote (#76) Kathy Acker’s novels have influenced a wide network of contemporary art practitioners. This past summer, while I was living in Cornwall which, it should be noted, is where the pirates used to hang out, I kept meeting Cornish, Scottish, Irish, and British artists who—out of the blue—began telling me how Acker was their first hero or, as the case may be, antihero. These contemporary artists influenced by Acker are not just novelists: they are also net artists, live A/V performers, critical theorists, and digital filmmakers. What did Acker have that they all needed? A no-bullshit philosophical vision that she was able to port through an infectious narrative practice. Acker the writer pulled no punches and maintained a pirate’s vision of the world, a world where everything beautiful had been stolen away by the ruling elite. The last line of Don Quixote eclipses the deconstructionist trends of the day, trends that she was not only part of, but found clever ways of inserting into Don Quixote itself through her megamix of memoir, fiction, and something we now call pseudo-autobiography. Being the devoted hacker that she was,Acker found ways to smuggle into...