Reading Blood Meridian | Dr. Dan O'Hara | And So The Judge Returns Workshop 

Now this is one Limey who really gets my homeland of 'Murica. Corrmac McCarthy gets my vote for the greatest American writers still alive and publishing new work. He's got a reputation as a highly esoteric storyteller with an intimidating vocabulary but I find his prose endlessly gorgeous worthy of reading and rereading and re-rereading. He's one of the only writers alive today whose biblical prose doesn't automatically come off as pretentious, he makes it all feel natural whether it's a 19th century southern gothic novel like Child of God, a modern day crime thriller with No Country for Old Men, a 20th century western nostalgic for a long gone mythical old west in The Border Trilogy, or a nightmarish trek through the dystopian apocalypse in The Road.

Wonderful points of analysis and thought... Blood Meridian is a true treasure that has only just begun to be excavated. Peace

never understood the imagery of the coin. absolutely amazing.

I just read Blood Meridian after loving McCarthy's The Road, and this is a brilliant talk!! Thanks for sharing

I love this post a lot thanks for sharing, really moving finish from McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy has an aggressive novel there. That Blood Meridian, it is explosive, but it is also healthy to read as long as the violence in it does not make its way into any nation. Thank you for uploading Dr. O’Hara’s workshop talk. He is bright.

It seems to me that there is some confusion over what the cowboy initially represented. I think the original appeal was that he represented the promise of the American individualism. Europe was still embroiled in its class system where if you were born a serf you would die a serf. If you traveled to America you'd still probably work as a farmer, but there was nothing stopping even the most simple minded person from choosing to hop on a horse and drive cattle out west and seek other opportunities. I feel that "fear of the mob" stems less from communism and more from caste/ class systems.

Thank you British Jim Norton!

Check out Harold Bloom’s writing on Blood Meridian.

This lecturer could pass for Judge Holden if he was 7 foot 2 and 340 lb. . Like if you took more pigment out of his skin and if he had W.W.E. legend & W.W.E. official Kane's massive , hairless body .

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.

he fucks up the pace of the last passage at the end, it needs to be fast, man, fast!

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...

Those boots 😂😂😂

What was the logic in mentioning Hephaestus? It seemed like making a reference for the sake of making a reference. Hephaestus was a god that forged the weapons of other gods. This passage talks about a lowly cold forger pressing out coins in the shadow of the Judge, like some slave. It seems in no way related to Hephaestus.

did Kenneth Williams use a bowler hat to hide his bonbons in during the great pistachio wars of the Iron Age?

Number one issue: do NOT read Harold Bloom's preface. Bloom tries to spoil this work of art in the worst way possible, and he did hurt "Blood Meridian" for me. Such a great book, though, that Bloom did not kill it.

This was not bad. The English have a few sneers and blinds pots with Americans.

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

Has mccarthy been banned yet

Dr. O'Hara sounds very like Jonny Ive

And black. Cowboys were also black

Agree Cormac McCarthy is An extraordinary gifted writer but O’Hare has imputed into Blood Meridian O’Hare’s flowery language and his entire educational background in literature, philosophy, economics and sociology. His review of the novel speaks of O’Hare’s ideology and political orientation not McCarthys. Alsoi nteresting when one wears a hoodie and leather jacket in a lecture.

Lissun Gene Simmons. Is the judge.

I appreciate the background, but it did little to shade in my understanding of the judge, especially in the light of the passage(s) read. I feel the easiest comparison to the judge isn't Milton's Satan or even any such archetype, but The Joker, from Batman. His abilities make his vices irrelevant, and his pleasures exist at a mental height that make them more or less impossible to void. If the Kid had blown the judge's brains out in one of his many opportunities, no one would have been happier than the judge. I think this connects to why Tobin was so unsettled by him - you can't threaten such a man. Psychotic? Possibly. Immortal demon? No, not at all. In fact I find the judge gratuitous, and as such, kind of uninteresting. He's a sort of evil Mary Sue. Tobin, Glanton, and even the Kid, poor traumatized mess that he is, are far more compelling. On the whole, the passive voice in the face of tremendous violence tells the American story, not the story itself. The Kid's encounter with the buffalo hunter summarizes the great privilege and institutionalized prejudice of Glanton's entire enterprise, the darker side of the coin of American history. I still enjoyed Blood, will definitely read again, but I didn't think it was the instant classic I was told about.

that was a waste of my time, he brought little to nothing new

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.