Fall, 1978.
A man arrived in Nashville, down on his luck and broke, hunting for work. He had a mean streak, but he could build. Carpentry, stonemasonry, architectural design. His hands had mastered it all, and lucky him, Mack Lipsey needed a hand building a great room. The man’s name was Cormac McCarthy, and he wrote Suttree in the evenings after construction.
McCarthy was living off of hot credit cards, three novels into his career. Something to keep in mind if you’re a struggling artist or just plain struggling. You know his story, so you know that he died one of the greatest novelists who ever lived. You can read the full story about that in The Cormac McCarthy Journal.
I didn’t make the connection between McCarthy’s roughing it and the current political moment, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, until after I had wrapped my talk with
, a contributor to Vanity Fair, and the author of Barney’s Rubble.
He’s been on the show before, and I was glad to have him back. We opened with McCarthy, then transitioned into a longer talk about the assassination of Kirk and its meaning. Vincenzo and I start in different places along the political spectrum but end up in the same spot: we agree that the vision of America, and Americans, being ripped apart is a nightmare, and anyone championing that, taking advantage of fear and anger, is an utter fool or worse.
Some people think we’ve passed the point of no return, or crossed the Rubicon, a term I’ve heard a lot over the last few years—and used to use myself. I’m not convinced. Americans are more resilient than riverine rhetoric. I think about McCarthy and how the man simply refused to quit, finding a path through sheer grit and ingenuity, that distinctly American way.
I hope that you enjoy this talk with Vincenzo and check out our previous conversation if you missed it. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Do LLMs Dream of Electric Muses?
“No sane person would sit down and write a novel,” said Cormac McCarthy, who sat down and wrote many novels touched by the searing genius associated with the luminously insane.
