Monthly Archives: September 2023

Child of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God is set in the mountains of eastern Tennessee around 1965. It opens with the county auctioning off Lester’s home. “Lester Ballard never could hold his head right after that.” Then he’s falsely accused of rape. After several days in jail, the sheriff determines Lester is not guilty (he’s certainly not innocent) of this particular crime and he’s set free.

You might think Lester is a little pissed off now, and you’d be right. But not to worry, Lester is a “child of god much like yourself perhaps.” And like you perhaps, Lester becomes unmoored, feral – though in fairness he was probably always feral. He starts collecting things: stuffed animals from the fair, women’s clothing, female corpses. You know, the standard stuff anyone would collect after losing everything.

So the sheriff gets involved again, but Lester has disappeared into the mountains. The sheriff represents what passes for civilization in this “dead and fabled waste.” This is obvious because he wears “pressed and tailored” chinos, and his name is Fate (no one ever accused Cormac McCarthy of light-heartedness or subtlety). So Fate is chasing Lester in a place the “good lord didn’t intend folks to live in.” Some things just don’t change in Cormac Land, and when the sheriff is asked if he thinks people are meaner now compared to the old days, he responds predictably. “I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”

Lester is a precursor to McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. He’s just not as compelling as those superbly nihilistic killers. These novels share other Cormac tropes too: wild and brutal landscapes, men comfortable with random acts of violence, and civilization fighting a losing battle against viciousness.

But back to Child of God. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise, but people die. And when someone dies, we call it fate even though fate had nothing to do with it. So fate does eventually catch up with Lester, but Fate doesn’t.

What makes men like Lester Ballard, Judge Holden, and Anton Chigurh so vicious? Is it the inhospitable environment? Something inside them? The devil? I hope you aren’t so naive as to think Cormac McCarthy is going to answer that for you.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Precious Little Useless Things

What do we call the innocent?
Those precious little useless things
we honor with large words
and then largely ignore.

As we do ethics.  Or courtesy.

Better yet -
those prophets of doom 
with science degrees.
What do we call them?

Oh, yes, we call them fools.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

Down by the River: Not your Great-Granny’s Ireland

Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River opens ominously with a road in a verdant and decaying rural Ireland. “The road is silent, somnolent yet with a speech of its own, speaking back to them, father and child, through trappings of sun and fretted verdure, speaking of old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood.” Hey, wait one hot second, Gladiola! Yes, dear reader. This is all wrong. My great-grandmother was born in Ireland, and I went there last year on a golf trip. Where are the wee folk and the pints of Guinness? The songs about unicorns? My apologies, dear reader, but this is a story by Edna O’Brien. She’s Ireland’s William Faulkner. Or, perhaps better put, William Faulkner is America’s Edna O’Brien. She writes about Ireland in all its melancholy and sordidness, so fear and superstition appear on every page – song too, but no wee folk; no unicorns.

Mary (that’s a loaded name in a predominantly Catholic country) is 14 years old. Her father is James. He loves horses, but he’s a cruel man who believes in “might before right.” He’s been raping Mary for quite some time now, and she is desperate to get away from him. She and her sister, Elizabeth (another loaded name), visit a remote shrine and pray for their father to be cured of his “epilepsy”. They speak in code, because the truth is too awful to say, even to God.

There’s another truth too awful to say: birth can be a brutally violent act. Mary witnesses this when her father helps a mare give birth. “Mare and foal, though of the same flesh, are warring, two warring things, not like a mother and its young, each fighting the other, except that the foal is stronger, her energy and her thrusting prodigal now.” Soon after, Mary becomes pregnant. When James finds out, he attacks her with a broom stick trying to cause a miscarriage. He was kinder to the horse and foal.

This is Ireland in the 1990s. Abortion is illegal. Bishops control the medical profession, and society decries the “abortion holocaust” taking place in England. Mary concludes suicide is her only option. Betty, an older cousin, rescues Mary from the river and figures out her secret. She helps Mary get to England, but a neighbor discovers the plan and alerts the authorities. Betty and Mary are brought back to Ireland before the abortion occurs.

Now the bishops and lawyers get involved. Mary becomes public property, and the public presumes to know what is best for the born and unborn. But the public only knows Mary as the “Magdalene” so how could they know best.

Time is relentless, and a decision must be made. But who gets to make it. Everyone demands to be heard, but whose voice should be heard? It’s telling we don’t hear Mary’s voice until the end. It’s beautiful.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Crows

I like how you describe that poem
more than the poem itself.
You see things I don’t,
and the things you see have deep meanings –
deeper perhaps than the poet intended.
You see birds symbolizing change.
The young leave the old
and neither knows the impact of the parting.
Shockingly this lack of comprehension is of no consequence
because there is love in the leaving.
Even after reading the poem several times,
I see crows.


I am not sure you are right,
but I know you are not wrong.

I would like to see that poem as you see it.
But whenever I see you and me in a mirror,
I am reminded:
you have poor eyesight and a temperament that is too tender.
They are your most egregious shortcomings,
and I have benefitted from both.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

High Fidelity – Music and Misery

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity is narrated by Rob, a list maker whose love for music made him think it would be a good idea to purchase a failing record store. That’s the least of his troubles. He can’t commit to anything, which frustrates his girlfriend, Laura, so much she leaves him, though it would be more correct to say he drove her away. Recounting his other break-ups, he wonders “What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?”

He believes he’s a decently average guy, but he’s a man-child who believes a lot of stupid things. Proof no.1: he thinks “it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” Proof no. 2: he’s concerned that it’s not “possible to maintain a relationship and a large record collection simultaneously.” But the stupidest thing he believes is that he’s a decently average guy. He’s just a selfishly average guy, and that’s hard to like – though oddly women do seem to like him. It strains credulity, but here we are: expected to care whether Rob succeeds in winning Laura back. It’s a big ask, because Laura clearly should keep running.

Here’s the problem. Rob’s self-inflicted wounds and failures to launch would be more understandable and relatable if he was 25, but he’s 35. Gradually, he realizes that “it’s not what you like, but what you’re like that’s important.” Why did it take him 35 years (no, I’m sorry, he’s now 36) to reach this rather prosaic conclusion? Why is he stunted? Do we care? Why is this book 323 pages long? Haven’t these issues been examined ad nauseam for 100 years at least?

Granted, the story was published in 1995, and it’s set in the mid-1990s when slackers were as cool and interesting as they were ever going to be. But they’re rather dated and stale now. They don’t hold up 25 years later. We still have self-absorbed and selfish people, and they’re still annoying and exhausting; we just give them a different label. Here’s one: uninteresting. Rob’s journey towards self-discovery is funny at times. He does have excellent taste in music and books. But it’s a long journey, and the path has been traveled many times before and since.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor