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Funniest part of the book I think

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>>25297074
The image of dead bats with their shrivelled, howling, and toothed faces looking up to meet the policeman's gaze being compared to all the damned screaming mute in agony and longing toward the silver city has long stayed with me.

>>25297059
"policeward" is such a funny adverb here. nice levity before casually hitting you with such a beautifully composed sentence

ngl, this seems like a pretty exhausting style. Is the whole book like that?

Harrogate was kino

>>25297217
Yes

>>25297281

Fucking ESL bullshit man. I want to read McCarthy, not in translation, but that's pretty intimidating.

>>25297284
There is no point in reading McCarthy in translation. There are very, very few authors who are as dependent on their linguistic talents as he is. With a lesser style, Suttree would be a mediocre novel at best.

Suttree went on. A mute and shapeless derelict would stop him with a puffy hand run forth from the cavernous sleeve of an armycoat. Woadscrivened, a paling heart that holds a name half gone in grime. Suttree looked into the ruined eyes where they burned in their tunnels of disaster. The lower face hung in sagging wattles like a great scrotum. Some mumbled word of beggary. To make your heart more desolate.

In the evening he would cross Vine Avenue hill on his way homeward, past the old school he’d attended in his infancy, morguelike with its archives of bitterness, past the church with her pawnshop globes of milkglass lightly decked each with a doily of coalsoot and past old brick apartments where in upper windowcorners a white hand might wipe the glass and glazed in the sash a painted face appear, some wizened whoreclown, will you come up, do you dare? He never. Maybe once. Crossing the Western Avenue viaduct he’d stop and lean upon the concrete balustrade where polished riverstones lay in the cracks and gaze down at the broad sprawl of tracks in the yard and the tarred roofs of railcars, a lonely figure framed against the gray pales of the city’s edges where the smokestacks reared against the squalid winter sky like gothic organpipes and black and tuneless flags of soot stood down the wind.

One night he came upon a house aflame and took a seat beyond harm’s way to watch. People coming to the front door like ants out of a burning log. Carrying their effects. One struggled with an old man in a nightcap who seemed bent upon incineration, tottering about and mouthing gummed curses backward at the fates so long familiar.

Lights appeared up and down the street. Neighbors in their flannel robes came out to watch. An upper window sagged and buckled and collapsed. Sheets of flame ran up the clapboards and they blistered and curled in the heat. A hot blue light crackled through the orange smoke.
How’d it start?
Suttree looked down. A little man was leaning to him with the question.
I dont know, said Suttree. How all things start.
He rose and went on.

>>25297059
Harrogate and Bevins. The two funniest and most cursed characters in all of McCarthy?

A thousand hours or more he’s spent in this sad chapel he. Spurious acolyte, dreamer impenitent. Before this tabernacle where the wise high God himself lies sleeping in his golden cup. He eased himself into the frontmost pew and sat. By his knee on the pewback a small brass clasp springloaded for the gripping of hatbrims. A little bracket containing literature. Long leatherpadded kneebenches underfoot. Where rows of hemorrhoidal dwarfs convene by night.

He looked about. Beyond the chancel gate three garish altars rose like gothic wedding cakes in carven marble. Crocketed and gargoyled, the steeples iced with rows of marble frogs ascending. Here a sallow plaster Christ. Agonized beneath his muricate crown. Spiked palms and riven belly, there beneath the stark ribs the cleanlipped spear-wound. His caved haunches loosely girdled, feet crossed and fastened by a single nail. To the left his mother. Mater alchimia in skyblue robes, she treads a snake with her chipped and naked feet. Before her on the altar gutter two small licks of flame in burgundy lampions. In the sculptor’s art there always remains something unsaid, something waiting. This statuary will pass. This kingdom of fear and ashes. Like the child that sat in these selfsame bones so many black Fridays in terror of his sins. Viceridden child, heart rotten with fear. Listening to the slide shoot back in the confessional, waiting his turn. Light pierced, light fell from the pieced and leaded glass of the windows in the western wall, light moteless and oblique, wine colors, rose magenta, leached cobalt, cinnabar and delicate citrine. The stainedglass saints lay broken in their panes of light among the pews and in the summer afternoon quietude a smell of old varnish and the distant cries of children in a playground. Memories of May processions, a priest in a black biretta rising from his carved oak faldstool to shuffle heavyfooted down the aisle attended by churlish and acnefaced striplings. The censer swings in chains, clinks back and forth, at the apex of each arc coughing up a quick gout of smoke. The priest dips the aspergillum in a gold bucket. He casts left and right, holy water upon the congregation. They pass out the door where two scullery nuns stand bowed in fouled habits. There follows a troop of small christians in little white fitted frocks. They bear candles. They are singing. Cornelius has set Danny Yike’s hair on fire. An acrid stench. A flailing about the boy’s head by a dracular nun. Patch of blackened stubble at the base of his skull. The boys laughing. The girls in white veils, white patentleather shoes with little straps. Snickering into the roses they hold in their prayerclasped hands. Small specters of fraudulent piety. At the foot of the steps a pale child collapses. Her rose lies dwindled on the stone. Some others taking cue drop about her. Folk rush about these spent ones, fanning with folded copies of the Sunday Messenger.

I can't participate in this thread, but I feel glad that I purchased Suttree and it arrived just a few days ago. So maybe next time.

>>25298439
You can't be spoiled on Suttree. There literally is no plot whatsoever

>>25297059
This is embarrassing. I hope this is fake because I've been meaning to read McCarthy for a long time. He's writing on the level of a teenager aiming at as many pseudo-poeticisms as he can use like bombastic language, a vaguely iambic pattern, alliteration, etc. It's so unbelievably cliched. It's almost like someone who had grown up reading comic books was attempting to recreate Milton in modern language in a modern fashion in prose. I don't think I'm ever going to read McCarthy if it's all this try-hard, performative and lacking in all true substance and syntactical intelligence. I'll stick to Browne and De Quincey.

>>25298449
Just say I was filtered.

>He must have fallen foul of yet other hands afterwards because when he woke in the hospital he had a broken finger, three broken ribs, a mouthful of loose teeth and one missing. He tried to move but the jagged ends of bone in his chest were like scissors. His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it. He raised his eyes and felt the dried blood crack across his forehead. Lights kept rising one by one and after a while he realized that they were bulbs in a corridor ceiling and that the periodic squeaking sound was a caster on the cart that was wheeling him. The emergency room was filled with people bleeding. Grumous battlers with misshapen heads. All watched over by hordes of police. They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.
>Friends row by row watched his passing and waved at him with their fingers and whispered among themselves. Who’d spoke of disorders of the soul and news of night. When you asked for the shop of the heart’s apothecary we thought you mad. We saw you took down to the brainsurgeon’s keep, deep in the cellar, under the street. Where saws sang in stoven skulls and wet bonemeal blew from an airshaft in the alleyway. Out there in the blue moonlight a gray shecorpse being loaded into a truck. It pulled away into the night. Horned minstrels, small dancing dogs in harlequin garb hobbled after.
The night is cold and colder, a fog moves with menace in the streets. Malefic stirrings underfoot, a foul breath rising visibly from the pierced sewerlids. The watertruck goes by like a nightbeast, its drum-shaped brush clanking. Water wells inkblack in the streets repeating the polelamps in glozy rosettes that dish and slide in the wash like radiolarians pale with phosphorous on a midnight sea. The sweepers broom the trash along the flooded gutters, their yellow slickers bright with wet. They leap to the truck and ride with brooms aloft like figures done in lacquered wax, like hortatory gnomes. The hotel nightlights shine behind the drawn Venetian blinds and the slatted patterns on the curbside cars give them the look of anchored smallcraft with lapstrake hulls. Out there in the winter streets a few ashen anthroparians scuttling yet through the falling soot. Above them the shape of the city a colossal horde of retorts and alembics ranged against a starless sky. Uneasy sleeper you will live to see the city of your birth pulled down to the last stone.

>>25298456
>Just say I was filtered.
Uhh, you were filtered into thinking McCarthy is a good writer???? I don't know what to tell you, this is all just the same style and my criticisms still apply. If you have a memory for the history of the English language, classical and pulp, this all reads like a mixture of educated cliches orchestrated with the sensibilities of a teenager. Reading 'Grumous battlers with misshapen heads' offers a simple and vulgar pleasure, the same type of pleasure that is offered by comic book language, slightly elevated with the grafting of showy and overused poetic diction. It's literally iambic pentameter. McCarthy is a post-Pound 20th century novelist reverting to traditional poetic diction for decoration and emotional vividness. Do you realise what a loss that is? It is a capitulation to civilisational decline. It is laziness, giving up the attempt to continue the advancements of modernism and instead being content with an inferior imitation of styles that had already been dispensed with. And on top of that it is very clearly the putrefaction of the realist novel. When realism is not enough mere decoration, apparent brilliance, has to come to the fore, quite expectedly with an impoverishment of the novelistic virtues. And when you get below all the superficial dazzle, this isn't good prose, it's sometimes really quite bad prose. There used to be standards in the English language. There's nothing wrong with enjoying this, but it doesn't offer much in the way of intellectual or aesthetic value. Necessarily it reflects rather badly on someone, would be bad for their education and mental self-betterment, were they to love it. Maybe McCarthy writes better in other places, but I've only read the quotes you've provided itt and I'm starting to suspect McCarthy readers actively love the pleasures of reading vulgarity of language with a mind unconscious and incapable of dissecting its style. This prose is a definite enemy to high culture. If all McCarthy is like this I don't want to read anymore of it.

>>25298442
ideally I would have read at least the first page before engaging in a discussion

>>25298558
This is a lot of waffle and you don't really understand style and its advancement. A lot of empty gesturing to say nothing. What writer in antiquity or pre-19th century wrote like this for this style to have been dispensed with? McCarthy’s insistence on germanic roots was a modernist development, against the likes of latinate leanings that Milton had forced onto English prose. Your much loved Dequincey is a mummy using old forms, not Cormac.
>muh high culture
You don't even know what that is.

>>25298558
You wrote all that and you don't seem to know what the two primary dictions in English are.
>le comicbook language
Comicbook language is Hodgson, whose latinate mazes were closer to Henry James than Cormac McCarthy. If you weren't a retard, you could see that the passages posted here not embellishments. McCarthy is not transfiguring the landscape anymore than any so called "high culture" writer does. He is impressing it upon the page. The exotic diction is there to capture the details of a physical world meticulously, not any different than James' or Browne's sometimes turgid vocabulary in expressing their opinions. Its turgid to stupid people because their eyes glaze at anything that doesn't appease to their myopic tastes and comprehension.
>McCarthy is a post-Pound 20th century novelist reverting to traditional poetic diction for decoration and emotional vividness.
Retard, McCarthy’s prose is entirely anglo-saxon. It has little to no bearing on the turgid latinate borrowings of much of the 18th and 19th century writers. Pick up Joyce for once; or Amy Lowell. The turn came with the 20th century, and had for its primary inspiration old English, the one unstained by the Normans and the French. McCarthy’s prose is ironically one of the more positive developments in English prose in a long time.

>>25298615
>>25298629
There are so many confused assumptions in these two posts, both in respect to what I've said and to general culture. I never said McCarthy wrote like a 19th century author, which would go against my entire point. I only identified that in writing prose poetry or prose of a poetic kind he has consistently relied on traditional qualities of English poetry. This is not only in his vocabulary but also in his construction of phrases. The wellspring of this sensibility is of course his continual reliance on an iambic rhythm which you neglected to acknowledge. In a similar way as in Melville, an author perhaps not coincidentally beloved by McCarthy fans, metre creates style. You seem to be under the illusion that poetic diction can only be Latinate, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what poetic diction is. In my first post, you'll see my claim that it was like someone trying to recreate Milton 'in modern language in a modern fashion', in other words without any resemblance to his Latinisms. Insulting De Quincey for being a traditional author is only to admit that you dislike all traditional authors. I must remind you that the greatest artistry, in all times and cultures, has always been the product of well-defined traditions. Modern people delude themselves into thinking their mere subjectivity is a good enough measure for deciding quality. In regards to 'comic book language' you have a similar confusion as with poetic diction, unnecessarily bringing in the distinction between Latin and Germanic vocabulary. I've never read Hodgson but if you think comic book language bears any resemblance to 'Latinate mazes' or Jamesian sentences then you're terribly confused. I was referring the bombastic and crudely exciting language found in popular writing, whether in comic books or in pulp fiction. You are also mistaken that there are two primary sources for vocabulary in English. There are three. There is a major distinction between medieval French and Renaissance Latin. We can divest our language of the Latin, but we cannot do so with the French without doing serious harm. However, I don't see a serious attempt at divesting either from the McCarthy quotes you've posted. It's completely false to call it 'entirely Anglo-Saxon'. Where did you even get that idea? What I do see is occasional reliance on bombastic language which also brings his prose into resemblance with traditional poetic diction, sometimes of an explicitly Latinate character. It's related to 'multitudinous seas incarnadine', only it offers far less pleasure in a 20th century novel than in 17th century poetry. I'm aware that I've spent most of this post pointing out your misunderstandings than providing my own claims, but how else are we supposed to continue a discussion with so much confusion in the way?

>>25298629
Now, I warn you, I don't want a seething, irrational reply that fails to properly comprehend my post. I've clearly stated my views, you're free to disagree but let's at least attempt to have a productive discussion. You do your author's reputation no benefits if you resort to petty insults and avoiding a serious engagement in his defence.

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>>25298679
>>25298680
>ESL screeching
I have no time for your stupid presumptions. I'll only say that Anglo-saxon diction can be bombastic, you clearly had that wrong. Dequincey and Browne are bombastic in a completely different way than McCarthy is. Not all Anglo-saxon writing is salt of the earth regionalisms. It seems you hate bombastic writing altogether, but if you actually bothered reading those passages, they are not bombastic descriptions at all. It only seems that way to you because the density of the exotic diction is throwing you off. Pic related is "comicbook" language. It has nothing to do with bombast alone. It is bombast turned on completely nugatory things. It gives them a false life as something of more significance than they actually are. McCarthy on the other hand is aiming for visual acuity. To capture things as they "appear in the moment".

It's also clear everything you said about history of English prose is bullshit. You thought McCarthy is going for some old traditionalisms then backpedalled once caught. For your information, McCarthy’s style of writing would file under polyphonic prose, which also became prominent only in the early 20th century (the term having been first used by poet Amy Lowell).

>>25298679
>misunderstandings
Said the fucking ESL inventing bullshit on the fly lmao

>>25298679
>You seem to be under the illusion that poetic diction can only be Latinate, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what poetic diction is. In my first post, you'll see my claim that it was like someone trying to recreate Milton 'in modern language in a modern fashion', in other words without any resemblance to his Latinisms
More falsely presumed BS. You're the one who is utterly confused. Constantly shifting the goalpost once your back has been put against the wall. Besides, using metre in prose is not a vice anyway. Moreover, it's clear that McCarthy only injects these where he needs them. Pretending as if entire passages can be set to metre is stupidity.

A warm splatter broke across his face, his chest. He twisted his head away, waving one hand. He was wet and he stank. He opened his eyes. A black hand was putting away a limber hosepipe, buttoning, turning. An enormous figure toppled away down the sky toward the mauve and glaucous dawn of the streetlamps.
Sot’s skull subsiding, sweet nothingness betide me.
I’d like these shoes soled I dreamt I dreamt. An old bent cobbler looked up from his lasts and lapstone with eyes dim and windowed. Not these, my boy, they are far too far gone, these soles. But I’ve no others. The old man shook his head. You must forget these and find others now.
Suttree groaned. A switchengine shunted cars in a distant yard, telescoping them in crescendo coupling by coupling to an iron thunder that rattled sashwork all down McAnally Flats. By this clangorous fanfare dull shapes with sidling eyes and pale green teeth congealed with menace out of the dark of the hemisphere. A curtain fell, unspooling in a shock of dust and beetlehusks and dried mousedirt. Amorphous clots of fear that took the forms of nightshades, hags or dwarfs or seatrolls green and steaming that skulked down out of the coils of his poisoned brain with black candles and slow chant. He smiled to see these familiars. Not dread but only homologues of dread. They bore a dead child in a glass bier. Sinister abscission, did I see with my seed eyes his thin blue shape lifeless in the world before me? Who comes in dreams, mansized at times and how so? Do shades nurture? As I have seen my image twinned and blown in the smoked glass of a blind man’s spectacles I am, I am.

>>25298710
>>25298679
Moreover, pulp writers like Lovecraft had his home base in the latinate stylings of your beloveds, which is why I brought up Hodgson.
>To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.

>Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me, the fact that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Paleozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess; but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion.

>Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth pattern—but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and colored their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become colored and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state?

Only someone of a low rank of mind would presume that all prose that aspires to a certain register is supposedly bad. It's not the register, it's the quality of writing. Not that these passages were particularly bombastic anyway.

>>25298710
Again, so many assumptions, and irrational anger simply because I dared to criticise your favourite author.

>I'll only say that Anglo-saxon diction can be bombastic, you clearly had that wrong.
I don't even know what you're trying to say here. Where did I say Anglo-Saxon words cannot be used bombastically? That would contradict so much of what I've said.

>It seems you hate bombastic writing altogether
I quoted Shakespeare to demonstrate. It should be obvious I am not opposed to pompous words in the manner of 17th century poetry, which Shakespeare always used beautifully and usually with profound expression, occasionally falling into the vagueness common at the time. That is the point of difference. Elizabethans used the excesses of their language with at least decorative beauty and at best an ingenious poetic sense for etymology, as a truly new style in the English language. With McCarthy it is not beautiful, it is only pseudo-poetry (not a derogatory phrase), and often painfully unoriginal (that is a derogatory phrase) in the 20th century.

>they are not bombastic descriptions at all. It only seems that way to you because the density of the exotic diction is throwing you off.
I don't think you know what bombastic means. Bombastic does not necessarily mean bad or unnecessary. You, on the contrary, are so dazzled with the 'density of the exotic diction' that you fail to recognise that exoticism of diction is the chief source for the bombastic.

>Pic related is "comicbook" language. It has nothing to do with bombast alone. It is bombast turned on completely nugatory things. It gives them a false life as something of more significance than they actually are. McCarthy on the other hand is aiming for visual acuity. To capture things as they "appear in the moment".
I fail to see how you aren't conceding the resemblance between McCarthy and comic book language in this statement. Just because you think that kind of language is justified by McCarthy using it with more serious subject matter and talent does not mean the resemblance is not there. Even you must recognise that this is a feebly subjective means of differentiating.

>You thought McCarthy is going for some old traditionalisms then backpedalled once caught.
Where did I backpedal? I've repeatedly asserted that McCarthy's 'poeticisms' (and that almost always refers to traditional poetry) are a major feature of his style. As a consequence a continual resemblance to the phrases and sensibility of traditional poetic diction makes itself apparent.

>>25298723
>metre in prose is not a vice
I never said it inherently was.

>Pretending as if entire passages can be set to metre is stupidity
It's a constant in every paragraph I've read. It's metrically loose, varying between iambic and anapestic and the occasional clash of stresses, but it's really surprisingly consistent. More consistent than free verse.

>>25298764
When I initially referred to 'comic book language', I meant literally children's picture books/comics. As a style it is distinct from pulp, but since I had also identified a resemblance to the latter in McCarthy there was no point explaining to you that a comic book is not pulp fiction in my vocabulary. Maybe you're an esl? Because, as a native English speaker, I don't know anyone for whom 'comic book' means anything other than children's superhero comics and the like.

>>25298769
>With McCarthy it is not beautiful, it is only pseudo-poetry (not a derogatory phrase), and often painfully unoriginal (that is a derogatory phrase) in the 20th century.
Can you break down an excerpt of McCarthy’s prose and show how this distinction is obvious? Genuinely interested to see this elaborated

>>25298769
So much waffle to say nothing again.
>irrational anger simply because I dared to criticise your favourite author.
Lmao. My anger is because you're retarded, not that you are "criticizing" McCarthy. You're not criticizing him, because you're not speaking sense to begin with.
>That is the point of difference. Elizabethans used the excesses of their language with at least decorative beauty and at best an ingenious poetic sense for etymology, as a truly new style in the English language. With McCarthy it is not beautiful, it is only pseudo-poetry (not a derogatory phrase), and often painfully unoriginal (that is a derogatory phrase) in the 20th century.
As I said, only someone of a low rank of mind can suppose that all decorative writing is of the same kind and there is no possibility of doing anything new with it. Even worse, when it has already been demonstrated in the thread that the lineage McCarthy is coming from was developed as opposition to the Victorians and their turgid latinate stylings. It seems you are thrashing your arms simply because you're incapable of separating diction and, again, your eyes glaze at anything you are not able to keep up with.
>you fail to recognise that exoticism of diction is the chief source for the bombastic.
I can only call you delusional now, because you have made it abundantly clear that you have no idea what the word bombast means.
>Just because you think that kind of language is justified by McCarthy using it with more serious subject matter and talent does not mean the resemblance is not there.
You think that reads like McCarthy? Or is even trying to be like that? Talent alone doesn't distinguish them. They are separated by a gulf in both temperament and diction. McCarthy’s subject matter is as circumstantial but his temperament towards it is not bombastic. It appears bombastic to you because you're stupid and don't even understand what bombast means. Don't you have too many opinions for being a poorly read ESL?
Additionally, you must now concede that your beloveds like Dequincey are essentially pulp tier stylists in the context of the 20th century because their heirs are pulp writers like Lovecraft>>25298764 surely the resemblance is not lost on you. Do what you preach, boy.

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>>25298775
>Because, as a native English speaker,

More backpedalling again.

>>25298780
He hasn't even read it. And it's clear that once you go beyond workmanlike diction, you may as well be the same as Shakespeare and homer or Chaucer for this fucker. Utterly incompetent

>>25298769
>Just because you think that kind of language is justified by McCarthy using it with more serious subject matter and talent does not mean the resemblance is not there.
Do you unironically think that Grant Morrison's prose is similar to McCarthy’s? Is this supposed to be a troll attempt or what? You write all academically but can't seem to get over the first obstacle at understanding styles. Is Proust also the same as Lovecraft? Is Henry James as well?

>>25298800
>Is this supposed to be a troll attempt or what?
If it is then this is deeply embarrassing. You’re supposed to expend the least amount of effort for the greatest reaction. Same effect ITT could have been achieved by simply calling McCarthy a Faulkner imitator.

>>25298769
>often painfully unoriginal (that is a derogatory phrase) in the 20th century.
How many writers write like this for this to be """painfully unoriginal""? Can laymen tell apart your Dequincey from a Hazlitt on distinction of just one passage? Absolutely not. They can tell McCarthy though. It seems that your are selectively being specific or broad depending upon your agenda. Both Browne and Dequincey may very well be the same writer by the standards you have applied to McCarthy. How can anyone read Hardy or Thackeray or Dickens and think that they wrote this same way? With McCarthy your sights are set on anything that might rise above an 8th grader's diction, so are you saying that the only way to write in the 20th century is dry, workmanlike prose with no ambition for poetic effects? Basically Hemingway, but even he had his restrained poetic rhythm. I know that is not what you're clamoring after. It seems you had already decided to dislike McCarthy and are filling in the details of your disagreements as you go along.

>so much gnashing of teeth itt

In just spring the goatman came over the bridge, a stout old man in overalls, long gray hair and beard. Sunday morning before anyone was about. A clicking of little cleft hooves on the concrete and the goats in their homemade harness drawing tandem carts cobbled up out of old signs and kindlingwood and topped with tattered canvas, horned goatskulls, biblical messages, the whole thing rattling along on elliptical wheels like a whimsical pulltoy for children. Loose goats flowed around the man and the wagon. A lantern swung from the hinder axletree and a small goat face peered from the tailboard, a young goat who is wearied and must ride. The goatman strode in his heavy shoes and raised his nose to test the air, the cart rumbled and clanked on its iron wheels and they entered the town.
Come on honey, the goatman said to the nanny that stood sleeping in the traces. She opened one eye, a cracked agate filled with sly goat sapience. The goatman patted her rump where bones reared up beneath the hide that you could hang a hat on. A puff of dust. She moved. They passed the policeman in a sedate trundling. Little goat peering from the wagon. The goatman calling. Hoo now. The tiny clatter of goathooves in the silent Sunday morning and the goats and the cart and the goatman going on in a penumbra of sunlight, a cartwheel trapped and squealing in the trolleytrack till he stoops to lift it out, stout goatman, strange hat in one hand, the company swinging out and down Market Street toward the river, a bunched and sidling halfcircle of goats starting and checking and wheeling past the goatman down the steep hill and the goatman himself with his back to the cart to check its descent.
Suttree woke in late morning with the cabin filled with sunlight, light lapping on the farther wall where it played off the water, a faint bleating of goats. He rose and went out to the deck in his shorts, stretching in the sabbath noon, a dreamy tranquillity. The river lay empty of traffic and the sawmill’s small skylights winked in the sun crossriver with their crooked glass. He propped himself on the rail and looked about. The field between the railroad and the river was filled with grazing goats and there was a small strange hooded wagon there and a rigid windless spire of smoke standing in the bright air.

>>25298629
>Retard, McCarthy’s prose is entirely anglo-saxon. It has little to no bearing on the turgid latinate borrowings of much of the 18th and 19th century writers. Pick up Joyce for once; or Amy Lowell. The turn came with the 20th century, and had for its primary inspiration old English, the one unstained by the Normans and the French. McCarthy’s prose is ironically one of the more positive developments in English prose in a long time.
Incorrect
See William Morris

>>25297284
Its not easy even for advanced readers, he uses insanely esoteric words and I regularly have to restart sentences because I'm not getting the cadence right. But once you slow down and enjoy the writing it is second to none. I would say McCarthy is the great American author

>>25298943
No one read him though. Gerald Manley Hopkins is a better example. His work was rediscovered about when germanic diction was becoming popular among modernists.

>>25298785
You've succeeded at derailing this discussion into hairsplitting dialectics. Instead of trying to get back to the actual differences between our views, you ask ridiculous questions projecting strawmen that I have to explain as a misunderstanding, then you ask other questions with new strawmen and this is going to go on forever. You've ceased to respond to any productive subject matter of this discussion. Just for example, in this post of yours, you claim that I think all decorative writing is of the same kind. I never said that. What I did say was that there is a resonance, among many other things, of poetic diction in McCarthy. Instead of responding to that claim, you make up the aforesaid ridiculous strawman. Immediately next to that strawman you provide another, claiming that I don't believe there is any possibility of doing anything new. Despite the fact that my entire arguments has been describing what McCarthy is doing new. Call me insane but I do not believe something is automatically good because it is new, which is the implied argument of such a line of reasoning. Either you are too insincere or too retarded to acknowledge that cliches can belong to an original context. Etc. Etc. It's such ridiculously simple common sense as this that you're arguing against. And then you make this ridiculously ignorant claim that Lovecraft is an heir to De Quincey, when he's just writing in a style that is generic to the late 19th/early 20th century and doesn't resemble him in any specific qualities let alone in his excellence. It doesn't relate to any argument I ever made when critiquing McCarthy. Your entire post is just sad attempts at smart refutations that fall flat.

>>25298948
>Its not easy even for advanced readers
All of the excerpts posted itt have been very easy to read. There's an occasional specialist word but you should know most of his vocabulary as an adult that's been reading all your life. Those 'advanced readers' must be the same university students that had trouble parsing the opening of Bleak House.

>>25298965
>when germanic diction was becoming popular among modernists
This is a fictionalisation. There is a tendency to use simpler, more straightforward diction but no one was consciously purifying their language of Latin and French language. You can see McCarthy use them itt.

>>25298999
Mhm k you done?

>>25298824
>How many writers write like this for this to be """painfully unoriginal""?
What does 'like this' mean? I was referring to specific echoes in his writing, not him as a writer on the whole. I am not claiming that McCarthy lacks a distinctive style. Obviously that would be nonsense. I just do not believe that style to be a substantially valuable one, largely serving to distract from inferior novel writing qualities that would be apparent were he writing in a plainer style. I am not saying that a plainer style is necessarily better. The fact that I love Browne should be obvious that I'm not a fan of plain language. I've already been rather explicit in my earlier posts explaining my view. At least my view of what I've seen itt. I am at the mercy of anyone who wants to post an excerpt that diverges from the very repetitive style I've seen displayed so far.

>>25298994
>>25299020
Will you stop prattling, boy?

>>25298999
The opening of bleak house is way easier with way easier diction though.

>>25298994
>And then you make this ridiculously ignorant claim that Lovecraft is an heir to De Quincey, when he's just writing in a style that is generic to the late 19th/early 20th century and doesn't resemble him in any specific qualities let alone in his excellence.
Just because you think that kind of language is justified by Dequincey using it with more serious subject matter and talent does not mean the resemblance is not there. Even you must recognise that this is a feebly subjective means of differentiating

>>25299044
We weren't talking about McCarthy resembling a specific author, but a general style. The equivalent with Lovecraft would be, as already said, a generic late 19th/early 20th century style. Something quite different from the early 19th century prose that De Quincey was writing. So many bizarre arguments that make no sense yet you keep trying.

>>25298729
>Amorphous clots of fear that took the forms of nightshades, hags or dwarfs or seatrolls green and steaming that skulked down out of the coils of his poisoned brain with black candles and slow chant. He smiled to see these familiars. Not dread but only homologues of dread.
How can anyone read this without being struck at the utterly pubescent sensibility behind the words? There is nothing inherently wrong with the description 'Amorphous clots of fear', but it is typical bombastic and exaggerated writerly language, unoriginal and of a lower order than great literature. The only real difference between this specific excerpt and a typical pulp novel is the hackneyed gimmick of using metre. This is what I meant when I originally said McCarthy is orchestrating a mixture of cliches. Everywhere I turn there's some echo of an overused style that people fail to identify because the superficies of the paragraph or sentence is so distractingly showy.

>>25299066
>>it's le okay when my oneitis does it
Stfu, boy.
>>25299067
>how can anyone[..]
By not being a retarded ESL such as yourself. You sure like the word pubescent but your comprehension and command of the language barely registers as PRE-pubescent. As shown itt the pulp writers write more like Dequincey.

>>25299066
"It's soooooo different from Lovecraft xD"
>Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast halls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers of a frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable existence, and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and his power have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a frailty, by comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race seems to have a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in which a single week, a day, an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of a memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels faster than the flying showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musician scatters sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the self-same tongue, in the self-same minute; in which the sun that at noon beheld all sound and prosperous, long before its setting hour looks out upon a total wreck, and sometimes upon the total abolition of any fugitive memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked, or a wreck to be obliterated.
Halls of man's fraility?
A lower deep yawns? (Can find this in Tolkien btw)
Now gloomy chambers of fraility?
Pleasurable existence?

And I can keep going. This is just a random excerpt from Dequincey. If this is the mediocrity that you champion then it is quite clear, as was before, that your problem is just the case of an ESL unable to comprehend the registers and dictions of prose that read lapidary to a native speaker. 'Amorphous clots of fear' is a far better description than anything here in Dequincey. But your ESL sensibilities can't understand.

>>25299076
>As shown itt the pulp writers write more like Dequincey.
That's a ridiculous claim and it was never demonstrated. We are speaking of tendencies of style that define pulp, even in two stylistically quite distinct authors. It is that tendency that repeatedly makes its appearance in McCarthy. Some pulp authors will stylistically resemble the 19th century more, others will resemble the middle 20th century more. That is obvious. Unsurprisingly you chose for examples pulp authors with the styles most typically 19th century in an attempt to prove that McCarthy doesn't resemble pulp authors. But that's all beside the point, even ignoring the many pulp authors closer in time to McCarthy and thus closer in style. It is the same sensibility across different styles that is in the construction of phrases, not entirely unrelated, but vastly inferior, to poetic diction. Wordsworth's critique of viciousness of style and its appeal to uneducated youths applies a thousandfold to McCarthy.

>>25299083
Unsurprisingly there aren't enough distracting gimmicks to grab your attention in the well written prose of De Quincey. Unlike McCarthy, to be properly appreciated it requires you to actually comprehend the syntax and the sentence within the paragraph and the argument being advanced across it. There's certainly little in the way of showy words or emotional exaggeration to sustain a pubescent attention. And yet, at his best, De Quincey is a profoundly sensual writer. You've already demonstrated your tastelessness in regards to traditional prose and rhetoric, no need to go on.

>>25299083
The construction of these sentences are more artful and involved than anything posted by McCarthy itt. McCarthy just adds 'and' and his sentences keep on going. De Quincey uses the natural words and phrases directly out of his vocabulary to communicate something definite. McCarthy uses words like a monkey performing a party trick. McCarthy did not speak how he wrote, because he would be foolish to do so. We know that De Quincey spoke exactly how he wrote, as the honest expression of his great intelligence and erudition. McCarthy dazzles with painted colours, artificial and clownish. De Quincey is the product of a unified culture with a unified sense of language, built upon hundreds of years of tradition.

>>25299097
>>25299110
You have proven yourself to be long winded charlatan who, as was evident, has absolutely nothing to say.
>muh dequincey
That excerpt from Dequincey is the perfect example of bombastic writing. He gets in his own way of expressing his opinion. It's the dictionary definition of bombast. McCarthy gives us way more unique features with relatively much fewer words embellished on each. But aww the ESL not likey, stop the fucking presses! All of you have done here is backpedal each time and hyprocisy. Show me one pulp writer from McCarthy’s period who writes like him. Futile exercise. Your ESLness will not even let you differentiate between registers, yet I am wasting my time on such a retard.
Kill yourself.

So much arguing. It's clear the ESL dude fancies himself some scholar understudy and therefore any writing that indulges in the primary emotions of fear, anger, anguish that are not diluted by some limpwristed essayist's windy orations is not to be thought of as literature. That's what you get for being a shut-in still stuck in 18th century aspirations.

>>25299097
>>25299110
There is a very clear aesthetic reason why McCarthy’s writing indulges in the physical world entirely without any of the inward peeking styles that you're clearly biased towards, even if you deny it and keep harping on how some registers are not allowed in English (this coming from an ESL no less!). But you don't seem worth the time for that. Your sensibilities are too outdated to have it explained to you. Get to the 20th century first, and no i don't mean the buffoonery you imagine it to be from the vantage point of an 18th-cent wannabe

>>25299097
>We are speaking of tendencies of style that define pulp, even in two stylistically quite distinct authors.
I think you're just retarded and unfamiliar with gothic prose, which has had far greater reach than pulp (Conrad, Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Melville, Hardy all wrote under the banner to varying degrees). You'll try to weasel out again but the same sensibilities of your favorites are not protected from pulp writers neither:

>And so full am I of the knowledge of that Place, that scarce can I believe that none here know; and because I have such difficulty, it may be that I speak over familiarly of those things of which I know; and heed not to explain much that it is needful that I should explain to those who must read here, in this our present day. For there, as I stood and looked out, I was less the man of years of this age, than the youth of that, with the natural knowledge of that life which I had gathered by living all my seventeen years of life there; though, until that my first vision, I (of this Age) knew not of that other and Future Existence; yet woke to it so naturally as may a man wake here in his bed to the shining of the morning sun, and know it by name, and the meaning of aught else. And yet, as I stood there in the vast embrasure, I had also a knowledge, or memory, of this present life of ours, deep down within me; but touched with a halo of dreams, and yet with a conscious longing for One, known even there in a half memory as Mirdath.

Waiting on your waffle how this is totally different from Dequincey yet somehow grant Morrison is similar to McCarthy’s.

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>>25299140
>There is a very clear aesthetic reason why McCarthy’s writing indulges in the physical world entirely without any of the inward peeking styles that you're clearly biased towards, even if you deny it and keep harping on how some registers are not allowed in English (this coming from an ESL no less!). But you don't seem worth the time for that. Your sensibilities are too outdated to have it explained to you. Get to the 20th century first, and no i don't mean the buffoonery you imagine it to be from the vantage point of an 18th-cent wannabe

>>25299279
You're ESL and retarded but at least you aren't pompously delusional

i liked all of cormac's other books why did i hate this one so much?

>>25299279
Sometimes there's cringe, so suddenly.

>It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior. His inferior may over-estimate him in enthusiasm; or, as is more commonly the case, degrade him, in ignorance; but he cannot form a grounded and just estimate. It is sufficiently evident that there is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude; it is absurd to tell me that they collectively respect what they separately scorn, or that the feelings and knowledge of such judges, by any length of time or comparison of ideas, could come to any right conclusion with respect to what is really high in art.

>The question is not decided by them, but for them; — decided at first by few: by fewer in proportion as the merits of the work are of a higher order. From these few the decision is communicated to the number next below them in rank of mind, and by these again to a wider and lower circle; each rank being so far cognizant of the superiority of that above it, as to receive its decision with respect; until, in process of time, the right and consistent opinion is communicated to all, and held by all as a matter of faith, the more positively in proportion as the grounds of it are less perceived.

>But when this process has taken place, and the work has become sanctified by time in the minds of men, it is impossible that any new work of equal merit can be impartially compared with it. And therefore obstinate when once formed, except by minds not only educated and generally capable of appreciating merit, but strong enough to shake off the weight of prejudice and association, which invariably incline them to the older favorite. It is much easier, says Barry, to repeat the character recorded of Phidias, than to investigate the merits of Agasias. And when, as peculiarly in the case of painting, much knowledge of what is technical and practical is necessary to a right judgment, so that those alone are competent to pronounce a true verdict who are themselves the persons to be judged, and who therefore can give no opinion, centuries may elapse before fair comparison can be made between two artists of different ages; while the patriarchal excellence exercises during the interval a tyrannical — perhaps, even a blighting, influence over the minds, both of the public and of those to whom, properly understood, it should serve for a guide and example.

----John Ruskin on art

moonlight melonmounter

>>25298710
Nta but is writing fluently in English an ESL marker?

Harrogate gathered the night fish. Carrionfall with poison cloud. Two blacks waded in shallows. Stuffing a jar they floated on a string. The boys yipped, their lid absent the riverrun. Harrogate paddled overladen with foul catch. One started cursing as the other splashed in desperation. Grasping the jarlid in flailing hands. Harrogate paddled. Suttree watched. Dark shapes drown down a milkmoon sky.

Morning the boatload sackfulls emptied on inspection dockside. The blue man turned the twisted corpses with a heavy stick of yew.
About them niggers?
Harrogate responded
Only nigger bats here sir, dont be knowing nothing bout no swimmers, these are flyers see.
He lifted wingspread demons smiling in a grimace of beatifice, his artist smile a brushstroke on a guileless face.

you can take literally anything he wrote (which is always flowery bullshit) and make it more exciting, interesting, amusing and add more character in literally 5mins. oh and you can cut about half of the word length. mccarthy is a hack, in the long standing tradition of irish alcoholics. doesn't even have horny stuff like joyce, just weird repressed pedo energy.

>>25300147
Writing edwardian English while having a debate on an imageboard sure is. ESLism isn't just poor grammar. It's in the feel.

>>25299116
There's nothing bombastic about literary qualities that were universally normal at the time and came naturally to self-expression. Bombast can only be bombastic if the pomposity of expression is recognised as pompous, if it is unnatural in certain respects. There is a distinction between a high, refined style, universally idealised and imitated by all men of high refinement, and unnatural affectations in the attempt to appear high and refined. Unless you want to deny the possibility of literary high culture, you must concede this point. I've never backpedaled once, and when I've asked you to show where I have you've failed to identify it. As I've already said a thousand times, I am not talking about McCarthy's general style when I say that pulp authors write like him, but specifically in the sensibility governing his diction and construction of phrases. And I repeat, I am a native English speaker. I presume you think me to be an ESL because you have trouble parsing my simple English sentences, and rather than attributing that difficulty to your own ignorance you attribute it to my handling of the English language. Your repetitive mentioning of registers is a rather pathetic giveaway of dilettantism. Yes anon, everyone has heard of registers, there's no need to actually use that word when discussing literature.

>>25299127
>>25299140
You suffer from a lowbrow insensitivity to classic prose. But I enjoy the prose of many 20th century writers, including Joyce, Celine, Nabokov and Waugh. I don't care about McCarthy 'indulging in the physical world' in his writing. That's never been touched upon by my criticisms and is irrelevant to what we're discussing. If you think it's exciting and captivating, good for you.

>>25299147
I've already explained that, firstly, you confused comic books with pulp literature, and secondly, pulp literature covers an endless variety of styles, making it rather meaningless and unsurprisingly biased for you to choose excerpts. When I followed you in your misunderstanding, I had in mind the pulp aiming to express violence and energy, such as Conan the Barbarian. My claim was that McCarthy resembles pulp in the specific construction of phrases (and also characters if the Judge is what I now imagine him to be). Whereas Hodgson resembles De Quincey only in the most generic qualities inherited over a century, so how is he relevant? Hodgson is not recognisably 'pulp' in his phrasing or language, but in the general insipidity, unoriginality and dullness behind his writing.

>ESL retard is still seething
Imagine hating bombast and liking another ESL like Nabokov lol. He wrote in an 18th century diction because that's what was taught to him. Imagine having the audacity to criticize McCarthy.

>>25300770
>Imagine having the audacity to criticize McCarthy.
Here's a tip, schmuck, almost no authors are above criticism. Your infatuation with McCarthy, reacting like a lover whose girl has been insulted, is unhealthy and unnatural.

>>25300643
Wait till you figure out what gothic is, ESL. Hodgson and Lovecraft's constructs are also very similar to dequincey. They are writing with a similar sensibility with a different subject matter. You have nothing but your poor ESL's sensitivity to other English registers to stand against it. Again you're moving the goalpost. You're so retarded you think waffling nonsense will allow you to get away from the fact that you have tinkered the definition of bombast half a dozen times already. You suffer from an ESL's deluded insensitivity to nuances and details. It mustn't appease the so called 18 century "high mind" where nothing beyond the confines of your basement, then study room, is allowed to be included in books. McCarthy’s prose has obvious gothic qualities but it is precisely his diction and sensibilities that separate him from pulp. You're just too retarded to get it. You're incapable of comprehending nothing that you haven't read in one of your outdated books about style. An ESL writer like Nabokov is far more guilty of bombast, that's why he always had to hide behind mad, ironic narrators who have to tell the reader from the beginning that their style is fancy. It is insincere and will only appease to ESLs as an ideal style of prose.

>>25300783
As previously said, it's not about criticizing McCarthy, multiple people here have called him a hack and got away with it. It's because an obvious and obviously dumb ESL who barely understands styles of English prose is being insufferable over a writer he has never read (and perhaps cannot hope to read without shortcircuiting his low ESL brain). It's not that McCarthy writes like pulp, but pulp is all you have read as far as gothic prose is concerned. One can, as shown, easily level the same accusation on your beloved old fart on account of Lovecraft and Hodgson.

>>25300459
Yes because I myself am trying to shake it off.

Upriver he could see a hazy swatch of cold blue light where the sun was rising through the river fog but it was no light much and no warmth at all. He took the basket of coal and toted it back up the plank and went in. He didnt even bother to shut the door. He put the basket by the stove and took up the coalscuttle and shook it. Jacking open the cold stove door with his foot he tipped the scuttle, the coal clunking in, dry ash stirring upward. Suttree peered down the iron gullet, prying at the slag in the stove’s belly with the poker. He crumpled a newspaper and dropped it down alight and held his hands to the fleeting warmth. The newspaper curled up in a tortured ash that rose in the stove’s mouth, a charred gravure whereon lay gray news, gray faces. Suttree hugged himself and swore. An icy wind was singing in the cracks. He fetched the lamp from the table, removed the chimney and unscrewed the brass wickpiece and emptied the lamp oil into the stove. A white smoke rose. He struck a match and dropped it in but nothing occurred. He snatched up a piece of newspaper and lit it and poked it in. A ball of flame belched up. He did a few stiff dancesteps and went out to relieve himself.
Ice lay along the shore, frangible plates skewed up and broken on the mud and small icegardens whitely all down the drained and frozen flats where delicate crystal columns sprouted from the mire. He hauled forth his shriveled giblet and pissed a long and smoking piss into the river and spat and buttoned and went in again. He kicked the door shut and stood before the stove in a gesture of enormous exhortation. A frozen hermit. His lower jaw in a seizure. He cast about and got his cup and looked into it. He turned it up and tapped it and an amber lens of frozen coffee slid forth and went rocking and clattering around the basin. He took down the frying pan and set it on the stove and spooned the stiff gray grease. From his packingcrate pantry he selected two eggs and tapped one smartly on the rim of the pan. It rang like stone. He threw it against the wall and it dropped to the floor and rolled oblong and woodenly beneath the bunk. He hung the pan back on the wall and stared out the window. Frost ferns arched from the sashcorners over the glass and the river slouched past like some drear drainage from the earth’s bowels. Suttree buttoned his coat and went out.
All the weeds were frozen up in little ice pipettes, dry husks of seedpods, burdock hulls, all sheathed in glass and vanes and shells of ice that webbed old leaves and held in frozen colloid specks of grit or soot or blacking. Wonky sheets of ice spanned the ditches and the ironcolored trees along the wintry desolate and bitter littoral were seized with gray hoarfrost.

Suttree crossed the brittle fields to the road and went up Front Street. A parcel of black children came by from the store towing a child’s wagonload of coal, chips and dust scavenged from a railsiding, going along quietly and barely clothed and seemingly dumb to the elements. Suttree’s underjaw chattered till he had thought for his teethfillings. He crossed the street and crossing the store porch read the tin thermometer on the wall at zero or near it. He entered and went directly to the back without answering Howard Clevinger’s courtly matin greeting. An old black widow was crouched by the grocer’s stove on an upturned basket watching the fire through a jagged crack in the hot iron. She seemed to be in tears, so thick dripped the rheum from the red underlips of her eyeholes. She had a club foot and wore boots sewn up from an old carpet, blue balding pile with mongrel flowers, an eastern look about her, mute and shawled. She kneaded her hands each in each in their cropfingered army gloves and mumbled a ceaseless monologue. Suttree standing there inclined his head to hear, wondering what the aged dispossessed discuss, but she spoke some other tongue and the only word he knew was Lord.

It ended on the Clinton Highway at the Moonlite Diner, Billy Ray smiling and going among the tables while the band played country music. He had his hands in his pockets when the barman confronted him. Small, vicious, quiet. He said: Red, you been stealin money out of them girls’ purses.
Callahan rocked back on his heels with his hooligan smile and looked down at his assassin. His pockets were full of the stolen change spoken, he’d drunk their drinks. You’re a damned liar, he said goodnaturedly. In the act is wedded the interior man and the man as seen. When he was shot he had his hands in his pockets. The last word came out lie. The roar of the pistol in his face chopped it off and the size of the silence that followed was enormous. Billy Ray was standing there with a small discolored hole alongside his ruined nose. A trickle of thin blood started down his face. The band had finished their set and the people going to the tables paused and looked toward the bar where a small cloud of pale smoke hovered above Billy Ray’s shaggy head. They saw him lurch and topple.
Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.
He was lying on his back with one leg doubled under him. He was bleeding from the ears and from the nose and from the hole in his face and he was breathing deeply and regular and he was looking up at the ceiling. The murderer had put the gun back in his pocket and stood looking on like any other spectator. A number of people had already started for the door and when Suttree came up Gary was squatting down looking at Billy Ray as if he did not know what to make of his lying there like that.
Oh my God, said Suttree. Callahan’s eyes closed slowly. His whole face was blue and he closed his eyes so that you could not see death come up in them like a face at a window. Suttree pushed through the people and ran for the telephone at the back wall.
They pulled a blanket over him but Suttree drew it back from his face.
Cover him up, said the ambulance attendant.
He’s not dead.
They gave Suttree a look much like a shrug and lifted the gurney into the rear of the ambulance and Suttree climbed in and sat on the little banquette at the side and the door closed after him.
Shrieking through the streets of Knoxville, the red domelight sweeping the near walls in narrow places, the windows, faces in cars. Billy Ray turned his head once and arched his neck. The pad beneath him grew black with blood. All through the town tonight are folks lie dying. Sirens in the city like the shriek of jackal birds.

Prolapsed and waterstained ceiling, the sagging coffers. He turned, a vain figure in the ruins. Blind parget cherubs watched from the high corners. Hello, he called. A voice that went from room to room and back again.

Gods and fathers what has happened here, good friends where is there clemency?

One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike with harsh breath and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and bunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail.

He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man’s flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?

He moved along the hall toward the dining room. Paint on these old paneled doors crazed and yellowed like old porcelain. Something more than time has passed here. In this banquet hall. Scene of old heraldic feasts. Suttree in silent recognition of the somewhat illustrious dead. Large companies seated. A fat marcassin to adorn the board. The male bonecoupling rearing white and steaming up from the broken meat. Eyes watch. A malediction for those belated on the road and now commence. Mad trenchermen in armed sortees above the platters, the clang of steel, the stained and dripping chops, the eyes sidling. Yard dogs and starving palliards contest the scraps among the straw. There is nothing laid to table save meat and water. There is no sound of human speech. Beyond the muted clamor at the board there is a faint echo of another chase. Far hue and cry and distant horns and hounds in pain with eagerness. The master of the table has looked up. Down murrey fields another hunt has cried the stag. The master wipes his fingers in his hair and his rising says that the feast is done. Outside darkness has begun and the hounds’ voices are chimes in the distance that toll seven and cease. They wait for the waterbearer to come but he does not come, and does not come.

Suttree went out through the kitchen and through the ruined garden to the old road. Reprobate scion of doomed Saxon clans, out of a rainy day dream surmised. Old paint on an old sign said dimly to keep out. Someone must have turned it around because it posted the outer world. He went on anyway. He said that he was only passing through.

In the morning he put her on the bus, kissing her there at the steps where the driver stood with his tickets and his puncher and the diesel smoke swirled in the cold, Suttree smiling to himself at this emulation of some domestic trial or lovers parted by fate and will they meet again? She went along the aisle with her overnight bag and sat by the window and made elaborate gestures of enticement at him through the glass like a whore mute or in such outland port as christians reck no word of speech there. Until he blew her a kiss and hunched his shoulders to say that it was cold and went up the steps.
Now at noon each day he wakes to the gray light leaking in past the gray rags of lace at the window and the sound of country music seeping through the waterstained and flowered walls. Walls decked with random flattened roaches in little corollas of oilstain, some framed with the print of a shoesole. In the rooms the few tenants huddle over the radiators, flogging them with mophandles, cooking ladles. They hiss sullenly. The cold licks at the window. In the bathrobe and slippers she has bought for him and carrying his pigskin shavingcase he goes along the corridor like a ghost through ruins, nodding at times to chance farmboys or old recluses with skittish eyes emerging from assignations in the rooms he passes. To the bathroom at the end of the hall that no one used save him, the yellow bowl spidered with cracks, the paintstained tub, the diamond panes in the window looking out on a ledge where pigeons crouched in their feathers lee of the wind. A gravel roof where a rubber ball lay rotting. The city a collage of grim cubes under a sky the color of wet steel in the winter noon.
Down the half wrecked stairs to the lobby where he’d get the morning paper from a rack and nod to the dayclerk and with his coatcollar up step into the brisk street with the wind cool on his shaven cheek.
J-Bone was still in Cleveland. Others from McAnally gone north to the factories. Old friends dispersed, perhaps none coming back, or few, them changed. Tennessee wetbacks drifting north in bent and smoking autos in search of wages. The rumors sifted down from Chicago. Jobs paying two twenty an hour.
The neon rigging went up early, wan ornaments adorning the bleak afternoon. From the hotel window he watched the traffic and he could see through the shelled brickwork of the Cumberland Hotel half razed across the street the rain falling on the dim jungled shacks of the black settlement along First Creek. The sound of the factory whistles in the long dead afternoon seemed sad beyond all telling. Suttree a sitter at windows, a face untrue behind the cataracted glass, specked with the shadow of motes or sootflecks, eyes vacuous. Watching this obscure and prismatic city eaten by dark to a pale electric superstructure, the ways and viaducts and bridges remarked from gloom by sudden lamps their length and the headlights of traffic going through the plumb uncloven rain and the night.

To come in half drunk at a late hour from the Huddle or what worse place and lie suspended in the bed in this house of derelict pleasures where half the night all through the cardboard chambers doors exchanged and brief ruts spent themselves in the joyless dark and the only sounds ever of desire the sometime cries of buckled tribades in the hours toward dawn when trade was done.
In the middle of the week Dick gave him an envelope postmarked Athens with a loveletter from her and two naked hundred dollar bills inside. He took from behind the cashregister the section of broomhandle the key was tied to and went to the toilet and took out the money and looked at it, such exotic tender with the values printed bold and green. He folded them and put them in his pocket. Tuesday she sent three more. He would lay out the five bills on the bed and he and the stuffed ape would look at them without really understanding them at all.
She arrived in the dark of early Sunday morning in a taxi she had taken from Athens and she was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas and a trenchcoat and she had the plastic overnight bag filled with money. She was slightly drunk. She pushed open the door and stood there framed against the orange and burntlooking hallway in a classic hooker’s pose and said: Hey big boy. Suttree rolled over in the bed to see what was happening, and she said: How would you like to get fucked?