Cormac McCarthy Sighted in Santa Fe
Yesterday I received a breathless and semi-frantic voice-mail message from Plaza Rat Press illustrator, editor, and confidante Mike Brown. It ran thusly, "dude, man, I'm almost finished with my epic novel. Yesterday I met Cormac McCarthy in a used bookstore and it was like the planets were aligned! He quoted passages of 'Finnegan's Wake' at me and I almost pissed my pants! Cormac McCarthy, one of the world's greatest living writers, in the bookstore where I was buying books! I'm gonna finish my book, man, and we're going to publish it and it's going to be just fucking great and now I know it!!!"
Writers need little signs like that - I get them from time to time when I receive e-mail from one semi-famous friend or another that they've read something and dug it. (Honestly, it doesn't happen often enough, so if you could take the time to write me something...) But still the question demands to be asked:
"What the fuck was Cormac McCarthy doing in a used bookstore in Santa Fe?"
Well, according to the Wikipedia, Mr. McCormac actually *lives* here. You heard right - the master of southern gothic fiction, inheritor of the Faulknerian legacy, lives in the land of red'n'green chile where the most notable author (other than him) is probably John Nichols, (and by gum, he has no website!) author of the New Mexico trilogy.
Makes you stop and think, huh? If one of the best there is is actually living here - then maybe lightning could actually strike for the rest of our writer-folk in the City Different.
6 Comments:
so i was at one of the used bookstores on my route today and i was paying for my books and there was a package on the counter and it had cormac mccarthy's name and address on it. so i asked the guy behind the counter -- what did cormac mccarthy order? and the guy said: why don't you ask him, he's standing right next to you.
And i turned and there he was, about five foot ten in cowboy boots, jeans, and plaid buttondown with the sleeves rolled up. and i said i was a huge fan and he said i had good taste and then i said i'd heard he lived here in santa fe but that i never thought i'd meet him and he said he was just there for the institute. and he asked me my name and shook my hand -- his handshake was relaxed, not as firm as i thought, but his skin had some callousy toughness that indicated that he works with his hands sometimes. he was very soft-spoken and polite and looked very fit and lucid for his age. so i asked him if, being up at sfi there, he was into nonlinear dynamics and he said that there were a lot of interesting things and people going on up there and i said that murray gell man seemed like an interesting dude and that i liked how he had named the quark after a passage from finnegan's wake and how i was a big james joyce fan and then mccarthy quoted the passage that it was from. by this point i was giddy as a schoolgirl, and had i had my wits about me i might have asked: is the epilogue to blood meridian also a reference to the eversower from the wake? Did he deliberately devise a consistent set of symbols inspired by ancient myths from around the world and use them in all of his books? did he remember the self portrait he'd drawn for the strand bookstore in nyc and what was the symbolic significance of the imagery? did he want to go out into the desert and look for skulls? and more importantly -- could he get me into the freemasons or get me a macarthur fellowship? but of course i didn't ask him any of those things. i just said that i lived over by the plaza and that i had a manuscript coming out in the next year or so and to keep an eye out-- he asked me the name and i told him and he gave me a funny look. it's a neologism, i explained. then i got very nervous and i said i'm really nervous and then i said i can't wait to email my friends and tell them. and i said keep up the good work and have a good one and hurried out with my books, one of which was a dictionary of archaisms used in the king james bible that it would have been really cool to have him sign. but that's okay i'm not really into collecting. all in all it was very exciting and i was glad that he seemed very healthy, was calm and engaging and was friendly and polite. and even though i didn't get to ask him any of the questions that i have about his work i did memorize his address off of the package so that i can send him my book when it comes out. so i guess that's it. totally awesome.
mikeyb
7:20 AM
Great story! I heard about someone running into him in El Paso, TX. Looking at his own books!
8:38 PM
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3:21 AM
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8:09 AM
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