Wow what a load of left wing tripe. I could deconstruct this absolute nonsense. The American agrarian tradition comes from the archaic Greek tradition. It’s not merely christian or conservative but Homeric. The idea of the individual, the warrior, the man of action is not merely American but Western. He doesn’t go back far enough. Heraclitus is as much as a influence on this as Homer or Milton. The idea that the cowboy is some left wing or communistic agent is absolute ridiculous. If anything McCarthy explores many right wing ideas in his novels that he most likely privately agreed with. He’s reactionary in man you levels.
A very interesting if slightly all over the place and less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts talk. Not sure what the audience made of it turning into a book reading for the last 10 minutes but I guess it's only a workshop...
this is almost unbearable to watch/listen to. just share the link to his article so we don't have listen to his godforsaken voice. And then we'll not click the link either.
I love the american gothic genre. But I have to say, ai could barely get through Hawthorns elaborate prose of every single detail ( that did nothing except add pages to the story) He had to describe everything with at least 300 words and it was really annoying to me because ai would get list in these extremely long winded descriptions
Shagur doesn't represent liberal relativism he represents complete amorality. He doesn't believe morality exists at all. Same thing with the Judge in BM. The Judge literally says morality doesn't exist at one point. Its something more akin to nihilism than relativism. 29:00 was the most egregious misrepresentation of the work in this entire lecture. You know dam well that the varied appearances of the commanches is to represent the universality of evil and not some corrupting effect of liberal pluralism. That's why one of them was wearing broken glass as if to say you are looking at your own reflection in the commanches and why one had the centuries old spanish armor on as if to say it's a timeless phenomenon.
You using the word ‘disgusting’ to describe people talking about a book is really interesting. You could say your ‘structure of feeling’ challenged, but I wonder if you made it that far in the video to know what I’m even talking about.
I randomly read these Bible passages in Corinthians and thought perhaps it explains part of what the Judge is in Blood Meridian, or what McCarthy envisioned him to be. "1 Corinthians 2:15: He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man, for who hath known the mind of the lord that he may instruct him?" The Judge is an extremely twisted representation of spiritual enlightenment, if the truth was that all in the Universe is violence and chaos. He tells the gang "God is War" which I think is quite the literally the idea with no mystery behind it. The Judge is not war itself, as he himself says that war was always here before mankind, but he is a kind of human spirit that represents our part in it. He can't be judged because he is so attuned to what the universe is. He has transcended by being utterly evil implying that this is the nature of reality or the mind of God. If we look at Blood Meridian as a twisted Biblical style parable this makes sense.
I haven't seen such laughable garbage and cherry-picking since I suffered through lectures by the lefty, Marxist pushing professors I had in college. What a load of pure crap.
I'm at the 18:00 mark and he still hasn't made one substantial claim about the relation between the novel and political temperament. For God's sake man, get to the point!
The books were written before 9/11. Think they had nothing to do with “neoconservatism” (stopped keeping track of how many times that was said: maybe more than “they rode on”
For a novel thats about the pointless of violence, and wriiten with such vagueness that it boaders on narcissistic or fetish poetry... Why are we putting so much meaning into it?
Pretty weak and cynical pseudo intellectual take of Blood Meridian. So forced and effortful trying to weave it through the needle of the leftist lens. Connecting it to 9/11..lol. Okay bud. And the viewer spat.
I personally believe that the judge actually did NOT kill the Kid but instead made love to him to finalise his dominance, then they both killed the little girl. Remember when the Kid was in prison and the judge came to visit him, he said he always loved him and tells him to come closer to him so he can touch the kid but the Kid refused. When the Kid finally arrives at the bar with the dancing bear, this is perhaps the judge confirming to himself that the Kid truly does love him by returning to him. The judge did not kill the Kid because the judge simply loves him but in a real sinister way.
I see this is pretty old, but I was going to reread this as it is one of my favorites and started looking at videos about it, so I checked out this one. I almost shut it off halfway through when everything quoted wasn't even Blood Meridian and it was tied to politics? I was an English major in college, and it just reminded me of making up BS to write papers on novels and come up with some different take than anyone else. The scene he quoted was the Comanche attack. That is literally how the Comanches were. I know he's trying to do some 'white guilt' thing, but the Comanches were the most feared and deadly group in the country at that time and until they were conquered, there was no westward expansion as they controlled the middle of the country. Read "Empire of the Summer Moon" and there are plenty of historical fictions about them. People want to romanticize the natives, but the fact was they were neolithic pagans and were quite violent on their own without help from the white man. They would exterminate any Apaches they found. They tortured, raped, pillaged, and killed anyone not Comanche. Some of the most horrific tortures I ever heard about came from the Comanche. This passage also is purposely done in the Biblical style of and...and...and..., but an 80s political message? Nah, but I would still give him an A.
I have just read Blood Meridian and I looked at many of the analysis and comments online and on RU-vid. I have many American close relatives but I do not live there. However I am utterly shocked at how many American commentators seem to find The Judge almost an attractive if not at a least compelling character. This combined with the gun worshiping and capitalist greed accepting attitude of so many in America to many of us in the civilised world is simply astonishing and repulsive. Americans have never come to terms with the fact that they took the land and murdered the people of the americas. It’s simply a fact and your comment about the Comanches is simply an effort to villainies them and a nihilistic justification for their murder, mistreatment and land stealth. You live in a country where a word like ‘socialism’ is an insult. McCarthy’s book points out the vile history of America but in the end it points no where and leads to nothing. It’s stylistic but empty.
Yes, ok, we know. Native American tribes in the past could be violent too! Wow! You are maybe stuck in the early 2000's with this backlash rhetoric. We ALL know this. Thanks for the lesson in....what? "Both sides do it" nonsense. So bland.... Politics is in everything, I think. Every side does bad things. Your point?
Since the gentleman's obviously done his homework, it's perhaps possible that black cowboys were such a tiny minority, it would be inappropriate to mention them as if they were commonplace. There were, no doubt also the odd Chinese cowboy, woman cowboy, etc., but so few as to make it indefensible to mention them.
Blood Meridian was published during the Regan Admin, but it was devised and written in the 1970's. Modern leftists, particularly those with institutional power like this clown, share far more with Judge Hoden's belief on war than they'll ever now. Cunning deceivers at worst, hapless morons who obfuscater truth at best.
Truly grasping at straws here. This is pseudo intellectual at its most pretentious. Dude wrote a western about a gang of scalp hunters, based on true events. Not everything has a hidden meaning. Mccarthy is not a secret leftist.
I am a writer, unpublished. All my stories are direct representations of dreams I have had that were really long, really vivid & for some reason carried a strong straightforward & cohesive storybook narrative. Epic stories that wrote themselves in matter of moments. In my opinion an anomalous occurrence that must be recorded. Anyway... One time after i had first began my Blood Meridian obsession in high school i had a dream I was at the movies where showed a trailer for a Blood Meridian movie. I remember feeling very excited & nervous & then waking from fear. The details i recall is that it had a morbid mutation of Lonesome Dove meets John Wayne epic vibe, like corny & epic tone with very dark & brutal asthetics. It was being narrated/marketed by a theatrical old movie-man voice like a trailer for a western from the birth of color television. Then my dream turned nightmarish as it went on showing saddening montage of clear genocidal imagry with the beauty & production quality of the old American classics. The ending tag line of the trailer was: "Americans will never feel more ashamed" Then I woke up. I'm conservative.
Trying to shoehorn BM into post Marxist critical theory is as dim witted as it is insulting. This fool ought to be a sociologist rather than a literary critic 😂
This entire lecture is such a reach you’d need go-go-gadget arms to make it effectively. Trying to link Salvadorian death squads to BM because… why..? Erm, they are similarly violent? Just like the massacre at Nanjing! Therefore Blood Meridian should be seen through Japanese-sino relations in the 1930s!
Incoherent and incredibly dull. Of all the things you can plan a discussion on as an intellectual, how on earth can you come to this and the belief it is interesting? It's simply staggering to me this person's avocation is to teach other humans anything. You're _reallly_ reaching here and grasping the air at every pass.
@@earnthis1yeah its pretty irritating watching a pretentious retard grasp at straws for an hour and a bunch of morons clapping like seals. So quick to jump on the a pseuds wagon if they tell you everything you want to hear
I did think it rather amusing that the guy doing the lecture on the most violent book I have personally ever read most likely has never shot a gun in his life and most likely couldn't start a fire out in the wild.
Yes!!!! Jingoism!!! lolololol Or is it appeal to authority? Either way it's a dumb comment! lol But hey, listen or don't listen to whoever, bro! Freedom!!! lol
@@shawnlinnehan7349 I've done those things, so does that mean I could do the lecture? Clown.... lololol He's a writer talking about a writer! lololool You're flexing like this book was written for you and others can't understand it! lololool So dumb, kid.
I am a bit old fashioned...but i don't mind carrying the fire for the old timers nowadays...especially when it comes to the argument of the aesthetic vs the politic. i guess, some would say, that, in itself is a political statement...but in this world in which Dr Holloway would have us live...all artists would first be made to stand and give a full and accurate account of all their political leanings...every corner, nook and cranny investigated. A full disclaimer about what they think, entirely and with no reservations- before ink hits paper, or digital devices powered up...and then...after we, whoever 'WE' are...can wholly and unequivocally verify that the artist is indeed, one of US...only then may they then proceed to write a novel, paint a picture, write a poem or play a tune. to quote bella lugosi...bullshit!
Not sure I’d make the comparison with 80s right wing Republicans. They won’t read this book or get it if they do. I also would not be quick to lionize the “democratically elected,” pro Soviet regimes that sprang up in Latin America in the second half of the 20th Century. Atrocity in war is committed by all sides, and all ideologies. I also wonder who the U.S. should have supported if they favored democracy for those countries. There were 2 choices, the Catholic Right or the Communist Left. Neither one had much use for democracy, so the U.S. took the only one that kept the Soviets out of their continent
There are always interpretations to be found in poetry and literature that were never put there or intended by the author. I remember listening to a lecture by Robert Frost who said, "Some people think that 'Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening' is a death poem. It is not a death poem. It's about stopping in the woods on a snowy evening." As for Blood Meridian, if I were to assign political leanings or motivations to characters, I would say that the Judge is the quintessential Democrat (better, leftists of various stripes), and the kid is a typical Republican (or better said, conservative). The Judge, like your typical leftist (Marxist, communist, Democrat, Progressive), think that all that they do is imbued with the scientific method, and therefore is historically inevitable. They absolutely love war! At least in the US, all 4 of the 4 major wars of the 20th century were started with Democrats in office (Wilson, FDR, Truman, Johnson). They feel justified in their imposition of war on anyone of their choosing, because those people upon whom they make war are merely obstructions to their important ends of creating a more perfect world. They think that whatever they know is at the edge of all knowledge, all knowing, (like the Judge) and if you are not in accordance with them and their point of view, then you will be made to suffer for your recalcitrance. As for the kid, he generally goes along with and partakes in the violence, but like a somnambulist, is internally apart from the doings, an internal rebel against the war status quo, but unaware of his motivations and impulses. He has a tendency to mercy (or he is learning it), which is anathema to the Judge. He would (like a typical conservative) like to be left alone to his own devices. He is violent, true, with a real potential for violence, but would be content living without violence. We see this in the scene on the plain, where he is reluctant to kill the young kid until forced to do so. The Judge would have had no such compunction.
You are right, there are always interpretations...but this one is particularly odd and disconnected from sociopolitical and historical fact or context.
The Judge is certainly a revolutionary being. The thing about him in the text of the novel is that he cannot be divided into his constituent parts and therefore cannot be known by reducing him to, say, the origins of his clothing, an accent, a blood-line, a story of his upbringing. Instead, he is singular and without origin. To me, McCarthy clearly made the Judge transcendent of all the juvenile concerns of modernity, especially politics--concepts that are like toys in the palm of the Judge's intellect. He wanted to construct an entity on par with God Himself. This requires a code of language that is incredibly meticulous in its calculation. As each passage goes by, the reader is lulled into acceptance of the supernatural, preternatural, and inscrutable existence of the Judge. The Judge is the extreme Right and the extreme Left and he is the ruination and antithesis to both. He cannot be reduced to such a puerile and miring notion as modern politic as he simply isn't quantifiable by such false and mutable pretexts. He is greater than such things and cannot be contained by them or viewed through their cracked lenses. This is why he is a monster. This is why he is so horrific. He is Cain and he grapples with Satan, and from their unholy coupling, birthed from the meridian of their courtship, is civilization.
