“You should see this place. Man, it’s so beautiful. I mean a Wednesday afternoon at 3:47 is fall-down-the-stairs stunning. We learned to see this. We watched the fireflies come out on the porch and missed the new CSI. Truthfully, we barely look at the television anymore. It’s a side effect of the new place—there’s just so much to do and we’re scared if we let ourselves get distracted we’ll miss the fireflies. We can only take so much tragedy, you see.” — “We’re not from around here,” Cold Antler Farm
The WSJ talks with Cormac McCarthy:
“Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.”
And on productivity, “Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, ‘Because I was good at it.’ And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, ‘The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.’ And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.”
I didn’t get along so well with All the Pretty Horses (punctuation!), but this makes me want to read The Road.
It was inevitable, the sad, sad day I broke down and joined Twitter, years and years after every possible variation of my legal given name has been registered and abandoned to the weeds. At least the reason behind it is irrefutable: it’s Charlie Day.
A novel in a month? Not a chance. But 2100 words of a short story in five days when buried under with work… well, I guess that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Hello, November.