dostoyevsky-official

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Valentin de Boulogne, Judith with the Head of Holofernes

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René Magritte (1898 – 1967) , Untitled

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I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse.

[...] I don’t pretend to understand women,” McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey in 2007, commenting on the lack of them in his novels—despite the fact that he was married three times. And for decades, readers took him at his word.

Upon McCarthy’s death, however, the mystery of his personal life has drawn close enough for us to unravel assumptions into their opposites: Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt. A cowgirl whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had “trouble coming to grips with.”

[...] It’s monsoon season, and lightning bobs and weaves in the corner of your eyes all day like floaters. There are three separate storms to the south, delicately wind-tilted on the horizon. Lightning races them in a stitchless thread, and to the north rain shimmers through the sheerest rainbow, stamped perfectly horizontal against the mountains like the execution line on a document.

[...] Britt says she lived a normal life until the age of 11. That year, and for reasons she never quite understood, her family moved from the snowy plains of North Dakota to the border town desert of Tucson. This is where the muse’s novelistic question mark emerges. An origin story beginning on an ellipse. Something hideous happened to her in the desert. Something traumatically violent. Something that destroyed her family.

Every time she was hit, whether by her father or a foster parent, she would disappear inside herself. It could take weeks, months to reemerge. It got to the point where if it happened again, she didn’t know if she’d ever come out. And she could no longer live like that.

“So I’ve decided I’m not going to be hit anymore,” she told McCarthy at that motel pool. Here she pauses, and you must imagine the sweetest voice you’ve ever heard—a sweetness that isn’t afraid to pull triggers first and ask questions later. “I’m just going to shoot anyone who tries.”

“ ‘Well,’ ” McCarthy said, “ ‘That would explain the gun.’ ”

“And that was so Cormac,” Britt laughs. “And I thought, Thank God this man gets it.”

Just imagine for a moment: You’re an unappreciated literary genius who has not even hit your stride before going out of print. Your novels so far have circled around dark Southern characters who do dark Southern things. You’re stalled on the draft of a fourth novel, called Suttree, which features an indeterminately young side character named Harrogate, not yet written as a runaway. You’re sitting by a pool at a cheap motel when a beautiful 16-year-old runaway sidles up to you with a stolen gun in one hand and your debut novel in the other. She reads in her closet to stay out of violence’s earshot. To survive her lonely anguish, the wound she’s been carrying since age 11, this girl has only literature to turn to: Hemingway, Faulkner, you. She flickers with comic innocence yet tragic experience beyond her years and an atavistic insistence on survival on her own terms. She has suffered more childhood violence than you can imagine, and she holds your own prose up to you for autograph, dedication, proof of provenance.

[...] After learning Britt wanted to be a nurse, McCarthy also introduced a character named Wanda to Suttree, an underage love interest Suttree meets in the month of August. Wanda reads stories about nurses and steals away to Suttree’s tent in the small hours of the night. She is also Britt’s debut death, crushed under a rockslide.

[...] Posting an essay on my favorite writer to Substack on April Fool’s Day, receiving a cryptic comment from his secret muse, and now driving with her to see her horses feels more miraculous than fate. And yet there is something so natural about spending time with Britt. There is a shimmer of recognition with her, an intimate equidistance. After all, I’ve been reading about her for half my life. And now here she is, in the flesh.

[...] The first thing you notice about her, leading Scout and Jake up a dormant streambed to their stalls, is how novelistic she is. She is a woman of compelling themes, tragic patterns, hooks, plot, question marks. She says things like “Cormac warned me I couldn’t hide forever” and “That was back when we had one eye out for the law.”

[...] That’s the muse for you, full of equine wisdom, horse sense. And while she certainly has a way with words, words also have a way with her, as McCarthy found out in 1976. As do landscapes.

[...] He was 43, she was 17. The image is startling, possibly illegal. At the very least, it raises questions about inappropriate power dynamics and the specter of premeditated grooming. But not to Britt—who had suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of many men in her young life—then or now.

[...]One measure of fame is how suddenly cognizant one becomes of the looming biographer, archivist, or graduate student peering over posterity’s shoulder at your personal correspondence. But McCarthy began writing his love letters to Britt when he was out of print, and they brim with an unusual voice—that of Cormac McCarthy in true love’s perfect candor. They’re less like sketches for a painting and more like confessionals. They are written by a man infatuate.

For the first few days of my stay in Tucson, the letters sit in the same Converse shoebox they’ve been stored in since the ’70s. I’ve been giving them a wide berth. To a McCarthy fan, they’re like the Holy Grail. It somehow doesn’t feel right reading the blue ink meant for her blue eyes. What will they be like? Joyce’s encrusted epistles to Nora? Nabokov’s letters to Véra? Or more like letters to a Lolita?

[...] We can expect a writer to be different in person than on the page, but Cormac was very different on the page to Augusta. He was clearly in love, clearly “gone on the subject” of her, from the start. He ends each letter with an “I love you” or something synonymous. (He ends the ones after their romance cooled the same way.) But what we appear to have with lines about pressing “my face between your thighs” is a writer with his nose pressed into the pure perfume between the open thighs of a book.

Then, sometime in the ’80s, McCarthy sends her the manuscript for All the Pretty Horses. “The first thing I see, obviously, is the title. And I thought, Oh my gosh. I started reading it, and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me. It was so confusing. Reading about Blevins getting killed was so sad. I cried for days. And I remember thinking to myself that being such a lover of books, I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?

“I was trying so hard to grow up and to fix what was broken about me. I still thought I could be fixed. And this felt the opposite of fixing me."

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That’s the muse for you, full of equine wisdom, horse sense. And while she certainly has a way with words, words also have a way with her, as McCarthy found out in 1976. As do landscapes.

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Ferdinando Noulian (1891-1984)

Fountain with Owls

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there are any number of crazy literary love stories you can pull out of your mind if you have even a passing knowledge of literature that are better than "an author groomed an abused, beaten teenager, knowing exactly what he was doing and what a sin it is, and then used her words in his books, uncredited"

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@replicated i'd read the paraphrased allegations in detail and a lot of posts on how poorly written it is, but nothing prepared me for opening the article on the train. took a deep breath and closed it

cormac mccarthy groomer article beginning with "i'm about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history" is fucking crazy

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cormac mccarthy groomer article beginning with "i'm about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history" is fucking crazy

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листенинг энд лернинг

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day 1000 of the 3 day war

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e lucevan le stelle and vissi d'arte, best arias in all of opera

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gen z is not falling for media propaganda because we have alternate independent sources of information! look at this video:

[2 minute tiktok full of conspiracy theories, racism, and history distorted like a pretzel]

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Argentine academics flee austerity drive a year into Milei’s rule

Protests in Buenos Aires against university cuts in April were so large that some surveys reported that up to a quarter of the city’s population had claimed to have taken part. The salaries of academics have lost up to 50 per cent of their real-terms value amid the spiralling inflation that Mr Milei was elected to bring down, and his “shock” dose of austerity has squeezed public universities’ ability to compensate staff for this, with many fearing that the thousands of scholars who have left their roles since the election are just the start of a much larger exodus. Junior academics have been hit hardest, according to Valeria Levi, deputy dean of the School of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. The average monthly salary for a teaching assistant position is about $620 (£480), and the pay freeze has left many unable to cover basic expenses such as rent and food, she said. “Public universities are experiencing a massive loss of human resources,” said Dr Levi. “People are resigning with sadness because, despite their passion for their work, they simply cannot survive on such low salaries. “At my institution, we have already lost close to 10 per cent of our staff. If this situation persists, we will not have enough instructors to teach in the coming years.” [...] Mr Milei has not, however, totally dialled down the public attacks, recently saying “so-called scientists and intellectuals believe that having an academic degree makes them superior beings”. “If they think their research is so valuable, I invite them to go out into the market like any ordinary person, publish a book and see if people are interested, instead of cowardly hiding behind the coercive power of the state,” he told a right-wing conference. “Long term, I think this will be very destructive for the Argentine scientific community, and I already see a big exodus in the works. Anyone that can leave is leaving. This, sadly, is not the first time in Argentine history,” said Matías Vernengo, professor of economics at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and a former senior research manager at the Central Bank of Argentina.

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So we have a pedophile sex trafficker for AG, an end-times evangelical for ambassador to Israel, a Putinist/Assadist for national intelligence, and a dude who doesn't believe in germ theory for secdef.

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i smile every time i look at the map of illinois congressional districts. so beautiful, so perfect, and so painterly. a work of art. sublime