Ex umbris in veritatem. Crossing the Tiber. Punk at heart, conservative by conviction. Christ is King. https://teapawt.net/t.co/miLwst3nZz
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A week of Cormac McCarthy, the obscure side.
He was one of six kids in an Irish Catholic family that moved to Knoxville in 1937 because his father became a TVA lawyer. At Knoxville Catholic High they called him Charlie McCarthy. His yearbook hope was to be as good a shortstop as Harvey.
The love of writing started at UT on a dull project, re-punctuating 18th century essays for a textbook.
Suttree took him about 20 years to write. The Passenger he started drafting in 1980, per the Cambridge Companion, and it came out in 2022.
Then there's the part nobody puts on the back cover. He spent decades at the Santa Fe Institute among physicists, and the place kept what its president called a furtive tally of the science hidden in his prose.
All week I'm following the strange corners of his life and books.
ALT Black and white portrait of a young Cormac McCarthy, Suttree jacket photo, 1979. Photo: Dan Moore, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
All Saints lands on a Sunday this year. The feast started in a pagan temple in Rome, and the date we keep came centuries later. Short thread for anyone keeping it at home
ALT A crowd of haloed saints in bright red, blue and gold robes, bishops in mitres among them, from a 15th century altarpiece. Detail of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin; photo: Gsimonov, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
Keeping All Saints at home, save this one:
Sun Nov 1: livestream Mass, it's Sunday anyway. Litany of the Saints at noon
Sun night: read one martyr's story out loud
Mon Nov 2, All Souls: rosary for your dead, write their names down
All week: pick a saint who shares a name with someone you lost
Whose name goes on your list this year?
One more wrinkle: Sicard of Cremona, writing around 1200, credited Gregory VII with dropping the May date for November 1. The history here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saβ¦
Halfway through McCarthy week. Here is the story so far.
Part 1: The Irish Catholic kid from Knoxville they called Charlie McCarthy.
Part 2: The pawnshop Olivetti he typed about five million words on and never serviced.
Part 3: The one piece of nonfiction he ever published, The KekulΓ© Problem, and where he says language came from.
Three parts still to come, Thursday to Saturday.
Part 1: teapawt.net/RecusantX/status/21146β¦
Part 2: teapawt.net/RecusantX/status/21150β¦
Part 3: teapawt.net/RecusantX/status/21155β¦
Cormac McCarthy wrote exactly one piece of published nonfiction, and it wasn't about cowboys or the apocalypse. It was about where language came from.
It ran in Nautilus in April 2017 under the title The KekulΓ© Problem. The name comes from the chemist August KekulΓ©, who was stuck on the structure of benzene, fell asleep in front of the fire, and dreamed of a snake with its tail in its mouth. He woke up knowing the molecule was a ring.
McCarthy's question is the strange part. If the unconscious understands language well enough to grasp the problem, why didn't it just tell him? Why the snake?
His answer is that the unconscious is far older than speech. In his words, "the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." It ran our lives for a couple of million years before anybody talked, so it prefers pictures and doesn't much trust words. He goes further and says "language is not a biological system." He calls it something closer to a parasitic invasion of the brain, and says the institute's president had the same idea.
He says the answer finally came to him while emptying a wastebasket, the morning after one of his ten hour lunches with physicist George Zweig. Zweig calls the unconscious the Night Shift.
This is the man who met Murray Gell-Mann in 1981, the same year he got his MacArthur, and spent more than 20 years as a senior fellow at SFI. The institute keeps what its president called a furtive tally of the science hiding in his novels.
That November he published a follow up.
Cormac McCarthy wrote exactly one piece of published nonfiction, and it wasn't about cowboys or the apocalypse. It was about where language came from.
It ran in Nautilus in April 2017 under the title The KekulΓ© Problem. The name comes from the chemist August KekulΓ©, who was stuck on the structure of benzene, fell asleep in front of the fire, and dreamed of a snake with its tail in its mouth. He woke up knowing the molecule was a ring.
McCarthy's question is the strange part. If the unconscious understands language well enough to grasp the problem, why didn't it just tell him? Why the snake?
His answer is that the unconscious is far older than speech. In his words, "the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." It ran our lives for a couple of million years before anybody talked, so it prefers pictures and doesn't much trust words. He goes further and says "language is not a biological system." He calls it something closer to a parasitic invasion of the brain, and says the institute's president had the same idea.
He says the answer finally came to him while emptying a wastebasket, the morning after one of his ten hour lunches with physicist George Zweig. Zweig calls the unconscious the Night Shift.
This is the man who met Murray Gell-Mann in 1981, the same year he got his MacArthur, and spent more than 20 years as a senior fellow at SFI. The institute keeps what its president called a furtive tally of the science hiding in his novels.
That November he published a follow up.
He came back to it that November with a follow up. He'd met Murray Gell-Mann in 1981, the same year as his MacArthur grant. nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-β¦
St Jude's short name is a translation choice. English Bibles trimmed Judas to Jude to keep him apart from Iscariot, and most other languages never bothered. On his feast day the patron of lost causes is still the apostle people mix up with the worst one.
ALT Painting of the Apostle Jude Thaddeus by Anthony van Dyck. Image: Anthony van Dyck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Armenian Church counts him, as Thaddeus, with St Bartholomew as its patron saints. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_tβ¦
1954. A psychiatrist tells the Senate that horror comics breed delinquents, and publishers write themselves a Code that bans even the walking dead. In 2012 a librarian went through his papers and found fabricated evidence. How many panics since ran on data like that?
ALT Portrait of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham (1895 to 1981) by E. B. Bratner. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The librarian is Carol Tilley at the University of Illinois. His papers at the Library of Congress were unsealed in 2010. As a psychiatry dropout this one bugs me more than most. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredriβ¦
One million people filed past a Montreal doorkeeper's coffin in 1937. Brother AndrΓ© could barely read, spent decades as a college porter and built Canada's largest church. In 1973 his heart was stolen from it. A criminal lawyer helped get it back.
ALT Black and white photo of Brother André Bessette in his religious habit, about 1920. Photo: Frère Denis, c.s.c., public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Canadian Museum of Civilization).
His pastor sent the frail orphan to the Holy Cross brothers with a note that read: I'm sending you a saint. The church he built is Saint Joseph's Oratory, and Benedict XVI canonized him in 2010. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%Cβ¦
McCarthy typed about five million words on one pawnshop Olivetti over fifty years and never had it serviced. he blew it out with a service station airhose. teapawt.net/RecusantX/status/21150β¦
In the fall of 1958 he walked into a Knoxville pawnshop and bought a light blue Olivetti Lettera 32. He'd been to UT, done his Air Force years, and come back.
He kept that one portable for fifty years. By his own count he typed about five million words on it.
The maintenance plan is my favorite part. There wasn't one. He wrote that it was never serviced. Now and then he blew it out with an airhose at a service station. Five million words of McCarthy, and the only tune-up was the gas station hose.
When he finally let it go he wrote a letter to go with it, and in that letter he mentioned that three of the books typed on it weren't published yet. So the machine left his house with unpublished McCarthy still sitting in its keystrokes, books the rest of us hadn't read.
The reason he let it go at all was John Miller, his friend at the Santa Fe Institute. Miller bought him a replacement and suggested they auction the old one to benefit SFI. It sold in December 2009 at Christie's in New York.
So the typewriter that followed him from a Knoxville pawnshop to a science institute in the New Mexico desert ended up funding the physicists he spent his days talking with.
One machine, fifty years, never serviced. He only got a new one because a friend bought it for him.
In the fall of 1958 he walked into a Knoxville pawnshop and bought a light blue Olivetti Lettera 32. He'd been to UT, done his Air Force years, and come back.
He kept that one portable for fifty years. By his own count he typed about five million words on it.
The maintenance plan is my favorite part. There wasn't one. He wrote that it was never serviced. Now and then he blew it out with an airhose at a service station. Five million words of McCarthy, and the only tune-up was the gas station hose.
When he finally let it go he wrote a letter to go with it, and in that letter he mentioned that three of the books typed on it weren't published yet. So the machine left his house with unpublished McCarthy still sitting in its keystrokes, books the rest of us hadn't read.
The reason he let it go at all was John Miller, his friend at the Santa Fe Institute. Miller bought him a replacement and suggested they auction the old one to benefit SFI. It sold in December 2009 at Christie's in New York.
So the typewriter that followed him from a Knoxville pawnshop to a science institute in the New Mexico desert ended up funding the physicists he spent his days talking with.
One machine, fifty years, never serviced. He only got a new one because a friend bought it for him.
His letter about the machine says three of the books typed on it weren't published yet. SFI's John Miller bought him a replacement. christies.com/en/lot/lot-527β¦