Blood Meridian Now

We have reached the end of the middle of the novel and we discuss everything from carnival, spectacle, hard-boiled writing Bahkin, Joyce and beyond in Chapter 13. Thank you for joining us on this adventure. Thanks you for listening!!!

Thank you for listening! This episode we read listeners emails and... We discuss the disturbing...and poetic chapter 12 where the gang ambushes a community for scalps.  And...we notice significant dates in the novel. We have a Substack page and we have created a list of dates and astronomical movements/descriptions. It's free to subscribe and read! Blood Meridian was published only ten years after the Vietnam war effort of the USA. A lot of movies centered on the Vietnam experience were produced in the late 1970s but especially in the 1980s. Some of those movies were... The Deer Hunter Streamers Birdy 4th of July Full Metal Jacket Platoon Hamburger Hill Good Morning Vietnam Bat*21 The Expendables (yeah we were surprised that was an 80's movie too!) Rambo Air America John Woo's Bullet In The Head Dogfight For The Boys Forrest Gump Dead Presidents  

The judge tells a story and we talk about it. Thank you so much for listening! If you want to tell us a story email us at: bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com

Queer powder, brokeback malpais, merestone and a storytelling feat. We love Chapter 10.  Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for following us on Podbeam and Instagram and Substack. Don't be shy leave us a review...we can take it...even a bad one! Again we are so glad you are joining us on this adventure with the Glanton Gang. "[…] scientific corporations might well become independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world […] The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment." Bernal, The World, The Flesh and The Devil 1929 "Language is always ambivalent. Its forms mutate and connect in unexpected ways. It's hard to instrumentalize language. But I think it's better to explore linguistic potentials than to keep on using language that's past its expiration date." McKenzie Wark " Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume." Erich Fromm

"A writer is a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into a radiant body of everliving life." Portrait of The Young Man As An Artist by James Joyce. JVH and Candy discuss Chapter 9 of Blood Meridian including lice, louse, antiwarriors, inversions, alchemy and Chamberlain's source material MY CONFESSION. You can find supplementary content on our substack page here: https://bloodmeridiannow.substack.com   Email us at bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com   or find us on instagram.  

Welcome to our discussion of Chapter 8...thank you for listening!!! This is a bit of a long episode and we appreciate you for even beginning to listen to it. We found some concerns including sacrifice, ceremony, identity, capitalism, redistribution festivals, gambling, and even a brief hint at Moby Dick...we may or may not have got to them, ha! "Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines." Ahab   Excerpt from TRICYCLE magazine, 2007,   From interview with poet M.S. Merwyn...   "The paintings in the Paleolithic caves? Those aren't art; they weren't there for an audience. Except the great halls, which were initiation places. But the tiny figures that were 25 feet up inside a cleft where nobody could ever see them, an animal that someone built in there? Those animals are part of the person who put them there, and that person came down knowing something, and this is the ultimate vision quest. And it didnt even begin with Cro-magnon man. We found five years ago in Southwest France a place quite near Lascaux with a history of it's own that has never been published because the scientist who discovered them- the government of France would not let him go on with his excavations. So he said "ok well I won' t publish my findings, then." And he hasn't. He's kept them going for years, and I talk to him on the telephone. What he found sixty feet down was a burial. It was not Cro-magnon. It was Neanderthal. It was probably, he thinks, 19,000 years older than Lascaux. (It) was a Neanderthal skeleton and beside it the skeleton of a bear. And the bear's legs and the mans legs were exchanged so that the man had bears legs and the bear had mans legs. And they were surrounded by fossil pollen. It was a ritual burial. That's a great scoop, and it hasn't even been published yet. But the reason i'm telling you this, is that this is already saying that the link between the imagination-which to me is the great pinnacle of humanity, the imagination that makes the arts and makes compassion- is in our species and goes way back. And it's never been separate. And when you get any aspect of the culture that tries to separate it, it's destructive and suicidal.    Take them away, names like Buddhism. I'm impatient with them. There's something beyond all that, beneath all that, they all share, they all come from. They are branches from a single root. And that's what one has to pay attention to. And of course the words in The Diamond Sutra that grabbed me were, when Tathagata (the Buddha) says, "boddi, does the Tathagata have a teaching to teach?" And Bodhisattva says," no, lord, Tathagata has no teaching to teach." At that point I got chills right down my spine.   And Tathagata says, " because there is no teaching to teach, it is the teaching." I thought this is it, you know. Here we go. I think that goes as far back as shamanism. I mean, what did those guys find up in those clefts? In the caves? There was no teaching to teach. They knew something, but they knew it from then on. And it was something distinct, and it was something to do with connection, with following, with what came before and after, and they couldn't express it in any other terms. But they were obviously guides to their people after that. Because you know, the animals that they were depicting were not the animals. I mean, they may have eaten a few of them. But that was not what it was about. It was about following, it was about the fact that these were the elders. They knew where they were going. The humans did not know where they were going."  

Chapter 7 has so much for us to talk about!!! Like every chapter the synoptic headers can keep a feller up all night researching. We find many things here. Another chapter on blackness. Deaths of magic and the history of science. Legal motifs like crazy...some we didn't even get to. After all Cormac McCarthy had a few people close to him in law...so it shouldn't be a surprise he has words like "some vortex in that waste apposite to which mans transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate." We read a couple of listeners comments too. Thank you for listening! Please write a review on  Spoitify or iTunes we would love that. And check out our supplementary content on our Substack page. Did you know a regular decks of cards relates to the tarot deck in some ways? Did you know, that a deck of cards is calendrical? Yep both decks have temporal allusions like this wonderful novel.   All art has elements of time-related allusions. A still life is one tiny moment frozen in an image. So is a photograph. A film is 24 frames per second.  A regular deck of cards has 52 cards, like 52 weeks in a. year. The cards are black or red, like day and night. 4 suits like 4 seasons. Spades, summer. Hearts, Fall. Diamonds, Winter. Clubs, fall. And each suit has 13 cards to represent the lunar cycles. Jokers can help with tracking a year...with adding the numbers of all the suits you get 364...use 2 Jokers for leap year!   Tarot cards also have calendrical qualities. Of interest for Blood Meridian there are 78 tarot cards in a deck. Minus 22 Major Arcana and you have 56 cards. 78 cards might relate to the several 7's and 8's in the novel 7x8 is 56.   But meanwhile...   Monday-The High Priestess Tuesday- The Tower Wednesday-The Magician Thursday-Wheel of Fortune Friday-The Emperess Saturday-The World Sunday-The Sun   Aries-The Emperor Taurus-The Hierophant Gemini-The Lovers Cancer-The Chariot Leo-Strength Virgo-The Hermit Libra-Justice Scorpio-Death Sagitarius-Temperance Aquarius-The Star Pisces-The Moon

"for years now there had been no country here but the war." “How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?” Dispatches, Herr   Thank you for listening. Chapter 6 might not have many pages but we found a few things to think about JVH finds some source material. Candy changes lead into gold. The phrase "in country" can be found in Michael Herr's brilliant book DISPATCHES. It's also in Dennis Lehane's novel SMALL MERCIES.... “Right now the sun shines during the day, but it’s pretty gray seven months out of the year. Or maybe, I dunno, it was just gray in my house growing up. I think of my house after my mother died—maybe even when she was still alive—and it just feels like everything was the color of the sidewalk, even the air. But in-country? Vietnam?” He looks around the circle. “You’ve never seen the color green until you’ve seen Vietnam.”

"Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things." Walter Benjamin “Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.” Georges Bataille In this episode we talk about a few ideas and influences including T.S. Eliot, a little about allegory, the Baroque of Walter Benjamin, the Mexican basin, bats, climate, geography (hell) the strained relationship of Sproule and the kid, a little of the humour.   We would love to hear from you please email us at: bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com   Or check out our supplementary content on Substack...it's always going to be free for you to subscribe.   We also have some fun images on Instagram.   Some cultural references in this episode: El Topo by Jadorovsky, The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot.Versalles, Vatican City art work, Baroque. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, The Mushroom At The End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jim Morrison, Lovecraft, vampires, elitist portrayal of food and street markets, and the potential intelligence of the kid.

The novel becomes quite exciting and seems to enter a different form of descriptives...why do we feel what we feel reading this chapter? Ready. Set. Action. Simile, allegory, pagination, tools and hints of a secret architecture.  We forgot to mention how funny the line from Hayward praying for rain was..."Lord, we are dried to jerky down here." And goddammit it rained! Thank you for listening!!!!!

Very little has been written about the epigraphs in Blood Meridian, especially looking at all three of them together. We fix that. Are the epigraphs misleading? Are the epigraphs another example of the art of misdirection? Thank you for listening. Please consider writing a review or subscribing to this podcast. Email us at: bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com Bohme April 24, 1575-November 17, 1624 (another 117 or 1117?) Shakespeare April 23, 1564-April 23, 1616 (like the kid born and died on same date?)

Welcome to Chapter 3 and we are so glad you made it this far! Thank you! This chapter offers a few moments of foreshadowing including the quote for this episode by the Mennonite...who hints at something we will hear from the judge and has become an iconic quote from this novel, "War was always here, before man was, war waited for him." Is that the wrath God has lying waiting? We think about the humour, and developing prose, and historical aspects to this chapter.  Let us know what you think of the podcast by leaving a review. We will randomly send out a gift, Blood Meridian related, to a reviewer.    Again thanks for listening.   We have supplemental content on our substack page too.    

We are so glad you found us. Candy's husband said there are lots of podcasts on Blood Meridian and she replied yeah but any with JVH and a woman's perspective? He said you two are like Deadpool and Wolverine. Who is who? Welcome to our discussion of Chapter Two in Blood Meridian. We would love to hear from you! Find us on social media or email us: bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com Please consider writing a review of our podcast. We will randomly pick a review and send a gift! Good or bad reviews!  :) Thank you. You can find us on Instagram too. We have a Substack page with extra content too.    

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Blood Meridian into the culture JVH and Candy introduce the two titles of the novel, some historical context and share their love of this epic novel. This is a special bonus episode to support the main body of this podcast which is going through each novel per episode. The plan is to publish a new episode on consecutive episodes every  week. And of course some special bonus episodes because everyone loves some extra.   Thank you for listening. You can email JVH and Candy at: bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com Please consider writing a review on your podcast app of this series. We will pick random reviews and send authour a gift. Yay! We have a Substack page with lots of extras too.    

Welcome to our podcast dedicated to the epic novel by Cormac McCarthy and his masterpiece BLOOD MERIDIAN. We are so excited to reach out to other fans of this novel and talk everything we can about it. We are planning on one chapter per episode...with some extra episodes thrown in for fun. We are dropping this first episode on Feb 8 to align with the Alpha Centaurids meteor shower. Thank you for listening and we would love to hear from you...you can email us at: bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com Or leave comments at our social media pages. Or leave a review in the podcast apps. We will randomly choose a review and send a cool gift to you! We also have a Substack page with extra and supporting content.