I have a new theory about The Office. A literary theory.
I was reading Cormac McCarthy’s famous novel, No Country For Old Men, when I came across a familiar punchline.
That’s right, it’s everyone’s favorite repeating inappropriate joke from The Office. What’s it doing in a crime thriller/postmodern Western written by a literary genius? Continue reading
I returned recently to a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West), because it had a lot to teach me, in a literary way, about masculinity and violence.
I was brought to those words when I thought of the pattern of violence in schools, and how not only the tools of these massacres a pattern, but also the boys and men carrying them out. Here are ten gleanings, drawn mostly from the words of the antagonist, Judge Holden: Continue reading
Recently Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, published a novelization of the game Minecraft.
While I haven’t read the novel, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if great American author Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, were to narrate the world of Minecraft.
Say no more. We’ve just found an early draft of his novelization:
For his birthday we will sit at a picnic table under a lone tree burning in the desert, a heraldic tree the passing storm had left afire, a solitary pilgrim drawn upon before it traveled far and knelt in the hot sand and held its numbered hands out while all about in that circle.
I’d like to make him a birthday cake like a bloodstained stone, the marks of steel upon it, his name carved in the corrisible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells, with a serrated horizon of the Cascade Range stenciling a purple jag-toothed saw blade before the incadnadine residue of a sun recently gone to its reward. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters.
I would light a candle and have him make a wish of the dreams of some world that never was or some world that never will be, encased upon the blades of men.
I would wrap his present with wrapping paper decorated with small owls that crouch silently and stand from foot to food and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and same.
He would tear his present open and find the peregrine bones of a prophet. And silence. And the gradual extinction of rain. And the coming of night.
Happy Birthday, Cormac!
[all language above is taken directly from or adapted from the works of Cormac McCarthy. They are not my words. Except for the “happy birthday” part.]
CALEB COY 