Reading McCarthy Scott Yarbrough and Guest Hosts

The guest for our 50th episode is the OG himself, the redoubtable RICK WALLACH, who joins us for a rousing discussion of No Country for Old Men.  Somehow both Batman and Godzilla are referenced as we consider both the novel and the Coen Bros. film.  Rick Wallach has recently retired from teaching English at the University of Miami.  He is a founder of the Cormac McCarthy society, the senior and primary editor of the Cormac McCarthy Society casebook series, and editor of the two-volume collection of essays Sacred Violence as well as Myth, Legend Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, and co-editor with Lynnea Chapman King and the late James Welsh of From Novel to Film: No Country for Old Men. He is currently working on a new book called "In Search of Godzilla: Myth, History, and Politics in Ishiro Honda's Masterpiece."  
As always, readers should beware: there be spoilers here.
Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the music for READING MCCARTHY.  The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society, although in our hearts we hope they’ll someday see the light.  We appreciate favorable reviews on your favorite podcasting platform.  If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt. 
To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Despite the evening redness in the west Reading McCarthy is also on Twitter.  The website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino.
Support the Show.
Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast will accept minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...

In this episode we head across the border one more time for a consideration of the Border Trilogy as a whole.  How does knowing how the story begins and ends change how we read any of the different parts?  My guests on this filibuster over the border include Dr. Nell Sullivan, a Kentuckian who earned her BA in English from Vanderbilt University and earned her PhD from Rice University.  She is currently Professor of English at University of Houston-Downtown, where she teaches courses in American literature and the literature of the American South.  A former editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, she has published extensively on gender and class representation in McCarthy’s novels, and has also published essays on Katherine Dunn, William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen, among others.  Her work has appeared in numerous essay collections and in such journals as Genre, Critique, The Southern Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, and African American Review.  
 She’s joined by long time contributor Dr. Stephen Frye.  Steve Frye is professor and chair of English at California State University, Bakersfield and President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. He is the author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Univ. of South Carolina Press) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, and Cambridge UP’s Cormac McCarthy in Context. He has written numerous journal articles on Cormac McCarthy and other authors of the American Romanticist Tradition.  Additionally, he is the author of the novel Dogwood Crossing and the book, Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy, University of Alabama Press.
 Bringing in a breath of non-academic fresh air is Marty Priola. Voracious reader, a sometime critic, and book collector, Marty attended the Christian Brothers University of Memphis, the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver, and earned his J.D. at the University of Memphis.  Marty’s website for McCarthy appreciation became the first website and a foundational part of the formation of the Cormac McCarthy Society, and he still maintains the Cormac McCarthy webpages and forums.  He has written two entries on McCarthy for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. His writing is also featured in exchanges with Peter Josyph in Cormac Mccarthy’s House: Reading Mccarthy Without Walls and The Wrong Reader’s Guide to Cormac Mccarthy: All The Pretty Horses, which he edited and published in its first (ebook) form.  
 As always, listeners should beware: there be spoilers here.
 Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the music for READING MCCARTHY.  The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society. We appreciate favorable reviews on your favorite podcasting platform.  If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt. 
 To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.comThe website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino.
Support the Show.
Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast will accept minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...

The guest for this episode is Dr. Nick Monk, who joins me for a consideration of perhaps McCarthy’s most idiosyncratic work.  The 90s were an exciting time for McCarthy fans.  In 92 he published the award winning All the Pretty Horses, followed two years later by the next installment in the Border Trilogy, The Crossing. Before he would go on to close out the trilogy in 98, however, in 1995 he also published a strange and fascinating play, The Stonemason. The play is about the Telfairs, a family of Black stone masons in Louisville, Kentucky.  The play examines the mystical and perhaps metafictional notion of stone masonry.  Using experimental techniques, we follow Ben Telfair in his worshipful relationship to his 100 year old stonemason grandfather, Papaw.  
The play was canceled both figuratively and literally before it was ever fully produced.  Was it shut down because of McCarthy’s appropriation of Black life? Or because the novelist included elements in the play which are more or less impossible to stage?  Both? 
Dr. Nick Monk is the author of True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity, published in 2016 by the University of New Mexico Press, and he edited the collection Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings from 2012. Nick has also published on McCarthy and the ‘Desert Gothic,’ Native American literature – particularly Leslie Silko – intercultural communication, identity, and teaching and learning in higher education. Nick is currently Director of the Center for Transformative Teaching, and Honorary Professor in the Department of English, at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
As always, readers should beware: there be spoilers here.
Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the music for READING MCCARTHY.  The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society, although in our hearts we hope they’ll someday see the light.  We appreciate favorable reviews on your favorite podcasting platform.  If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt. 
To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Despite the evening redness in the west Reading McCarthy is also on Twitter.  The website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino.
Support the Show.
Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast will accept minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...

Episode 47 of READING MCCARTHY considers the author’s references to and uses of disability in its many forms.  My guest DR BRENT CLINE.  He has published articles and chapters involving disability on Walker Percy, James Agee, and Daniel Keyes. His review  of The Passenger/Stella Maris was published with The University Bookman. He teaches a seminar on McCarthy every two years.
As always, readers should beware: there be spoilers here.
Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the music for READING MCCARTHY.  The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society, although in our hearts we hope they’ll someday see the light.  We appreciate favorable reviews on your favorite podcasting platform.  If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt. 
To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Despite the evening redness in the west Reading McCarthy is also on Twitter.  The website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino.
 
Support the Show.
Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast will accept minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...

In this episode we ride to the end of the road in the last episode of the Border Trilogy, CITIES ON THE PLAIN.  My guest for this foray is Dr. Bryan Vescio, Professor and Chair of English at High Point University in North Carolina.  A guest on former episodes on faith and Suttree, Dr. Vescio is the author of the 2014 book Reconstruction in Literary Studies: An Informalist Approach, as well as numerous articles on American authors including Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, and, of course, Cormac McCarthy. 
As always, listeners should beware: there be spoilers here.
Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the music for READING MCCARTHY.  The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society, although in our hearts we hope they’ll someday see the light.  We appreciate favorable reviews on your favorite podcasting platform.  If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt. 
To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Despite the evening redness in the west Reading McCarthy is also on Twitter.  The website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino.
Support the Show.
Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast will accept minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...

This is our final of 3 tribute episodes in the wake of Cormac McCarthy's passing this past June.  Guests on this final tribute episode include:
 Dr. Steven Frye, professor and chair of English at California State University in Bakersfield.  Steve has just stepped down as President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. He is the author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Univ. of South Carolina Press) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, and Cambridge UP’s Cormac McCarthy in Context. His book Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy was released this past summer.  
Dr.  Nell Sullivan earned a BA in English from Vanderbilt University and earned her PhD in English from Rice University.  She is currently Professor of English at University of Houston-Downtown, where she teaches courses in American literature and the literature of the American South.  A former editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, she has published extensively on gender and class representation in McCarthy’s novels, and has also published essays on Katherine Dunn, William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen, among others.  Her work has appeared in numerous essay collections and in such journals as Genre, Critique, The Southern Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, and African American Review.
Dr.  Bill Hardwig is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. His book Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2013.  He has written and published various essays on McCarthy and is currently working on a book-length study of McCarthy’s fiction tentatively titled How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style.  He is also creator of the website Literary Knox (www.literaryknox.com), which presents the rich literary history of the city in which he lives and works, Knoxville, Tennessee. 
 Rick Wallach is one of the founders of the Cormac McCarthy society, and recently retired after some few years teaching English at the University of Miami, He is senior editor of the Cormac McCarthy Society casebook series, and editor of the two-volume collection of essays Sacred Violence as well as Myth, Legend Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, and co-editor with Lynnea Chapman King and the late James Welsh of From Novel to Film: No Country for Old Men. He has written widely and extensively on numerous topics in literature, film, media and contemporary music. 
 As always, listeners beware: there be spoilers here.
 All music for Reading McCarthy composed, performed, and produced by Thomas Frye.  The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society.  We appreciate favorable reviews on your favorite podcasting platform.  If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt. 
 To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com.   The website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino, or you can support us at www.patreon.com/
Support the Show.
Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast will accept minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...