In memory of Cormac McCarthy, who reportedly
died today, here is a phrase by John Jeremiah Sullivan
in a NY Times review of McCarthy's 2022 novel
The Passenger —
"a reminder (just in time) of the elegance and force
of good McCarthy."
Sullivan also writes well. For instance, see the "pretty horses"
of this post's title.
A New York Times piece today on author Donald Antrim:
“The next project is a novel ‘about’ (having loosely to do with)
his father, Harry, a T. S. Eliot scholar who wrote a well-regarded
monograph on the poet.”
— John Jeremiah Sullivan
From Harry T. Antrim’s 1967 thesis on Eliot:
“That words can be made to reach across the void
left by the disappearance of God (and hence of all
Absolutes) and thereby reestablish some basis of
relation with forms existing outside the subjective
and ego-centered self has been one of the chief
concerns of the first half of the twentieth century.”
An epigraph selected by Sullivan for a 2002 Harper’s Magazine
article, “Horseman, Pass By“—
Far back, far back in our dark soul
the horse prances.
— D. H. Lawrence
A related image from pure mathematics
(a source of Absolutes unrelated to theology):
See April 9, 2004, for a post on the “Horseman” article.
Triple Crown, Part II
(See previous entry.)
The winner is Mike Sullivan, far and away.
An essay, by Sullivan's son,
from Harper's magazine, Oct. 2002 —
Horseman, Pass By:
Glory, Grief, and the Race for
the Triple Crown
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Far back, far back in our dark soul
the horse prances.
— D. H. Lawrence
"As opposed to the typical sportswriter, who has a passion for the subject and can put together a sentence, my father's ambition had been to Write (poetry, no less), and sports were what he knew, so he sort of stumbled onto making his living that way….
Two years ago, in May, I sat with him in his hospital room at Riverside Methodist, in Columbus….
I asked him to tell me what he remembered from all those years of writing about sports, for he had seen some things in his time…. This is what he told me:
I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73, the year before you were
I wrote that down when I got back to my father's apartment, where my younger sister and I were staying the night. He lived two more months, but that was the last time I saw him alive."
Thanks to the New York Times for today's review of John Jeremiah Sullivan's new book, which includes the above.
See, too,
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