Cormac McCarthy, one of the most extraordinary prose writers of our time, spends his days in an office at the Santa Fe Institute, where he types his novels on an Olivetti. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, his involvement at the scientific research institute has deepened: McCarthy copy-edited one of his colleagues’ books. “He made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature,” says Lawrence M. Krauss, whose 2011 book Quantum Man, a biography of Richard Feynman, got the McCarthy treatment.

I started thinking about the equally extraordinary Richard Feynman and his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, whose title would suffer at least one obvious chop if McCarthy got his hands on it. McCarthy loves dialogue without much attribution or explanation, and his furious-yet-controlled prose—"He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees"—as well as his propensity for extraordinary violence are a far cry from Feynman's excitable, jocular tone: "He didn't know I didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works!"

But how would the author of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road have edited Mr. Feynman’s book? We offer a suggestion below.

ALL THE PRETTY DISBELIEVERS

OR THE EVENING MERRIMENT IN MR. FEYNMAN'S QUARTERS

1. The Child Fixes Radios by Thinking.          

See the child. He is eleven or twelve, he sets up a lab in the house. It is nothing more than a wooden packing box into which he has set shelves, and he has a heater wherein he stokes hogfat and cooks french-fried potatoes day upon day. He also possesses a storage battery and a lamp bank.

     The lamp bank he builds with sockets he screws down to a wooden base. When the bulbs were in series, all half-lit, they would glow. Sublime, splendid.

     He lights up the bulbs and drives burnished iridescent daggers into the naysayers who come upon his lamp bank. The dead lie by the lamp bank in a great pool of their communal blood. It has set up into a sort of pudding crisscrossed with wires from the storage battery. It has seeped into the floorboards and in between the grooves of the child’s boots. The child surveys the blood and the room and the long slow land around him.

     This is great, says the child, and it’s a seller’s market and those lamp banks are only the beginning. Now it’s time to try my hand at radios. He sheathes his dagger bloodred and silvery and walks into the world and is black in the low-set sun, the shadow of evil stretching ever onward behind him.

     It was okay, he foams. It was great. It works.

Image: wwnorton.com (sepia effect added)

Note to David Foster Wallace fans: do not blast AC/DC if you don't want to offend your idol.

Though if you're a dude, you may want to trade in the AC/DC for something that won't stir any violent tendencies.

If you need to relax, make like Cormac McCarthy and go into science copy-editing.

You may even end up like Woody Allen and be nomimated for a Nebula Award, quite an honor in science fiction.

But nothing is as sci-fi as the thought of computer-generated stories replacing real-life writers.

Or is the thought of writers replacing fashion designers even more scarier?

Whatever you end up doing, don't be afraid to go bankrupt. It'll probably result in a good idea for a novel.

But if you're not that extreme, you could just use Kickstarter as a publisher instead.

Who knows? You may even have the honor of having your junior high diaries archived in the Ransom Center one day.

Image source

Cormac McCarthy has finished and sold his script for The Counselor before finishing the novel, and I find the whole situation out of control. Sure, McCarthy has time to finish the novel before the film goes into production, but what if he doesn’t care? What if, by finishing the script, he has created a dead plot for himself that he now only fills in with scribbles and kittens?

On the other hand, how can this script not be the best script ever? From Deadline: “Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.’”

Most disturbing and powerful? Muscular and masculine? Wit and humor make “the nightmare” scarier? How are my bodily fluids even contained right now?

In order to calm down just a little bit and try to find a little focus, I decided it might be nice to come up with a couple of casting ideas. Without even the slightest hint about what these female characters are like, I would like to suggest four women I think would be brilliant. My suggestions are based on who I think would survive in a Cormac McCarthy landscape. You know: can they hack an animal to death? Can they fashion tourniquets out of sheets? Can they kill a man with their silence?

Image: mubi.com

In the film Movern Callar, Samantha Morton played a woman who hacked up her dead boyfriend’s body in the bathtub while listening to the Velvet Underground. Movern Callar is not a horror film. Done.

Image: deadline.com

Because Carey Mulligan looks so damn sweet all the time, everyone thinks she’s child-like and needs protecting. So when she’s quiet for just a little too long, not smiling, there’s an intensity and depth that’s disturbing. Like Kelly Macdonald in No Country For Old Men, Carey Mulligan knows what the hell is going on.

Image: moviespad.com

Have you seen We Need to Talk About Kevin? Yes, it’s the worst title for a film ever, but Tilda Swinton rocks it as the kinda psycho cold-ass mother to the totally psycho wacked out kid. Tilda Swinton could skin babies alive. I don't doubt it for a second.

Image: tvguide.com

Years after the horrifying Requiem for a Dream, my adoration for Ellen Burstyn was renewed in her stunning portrayal of a harsh, clinically upsetting suburban matriarch in Another Happy Day. Have you seenAnother Happy Day? Get out your depression shoes and start walking down sad street. No one alive could kill Ellen Burstyn before Ellen Burstyn kills them with her contempt.

Cormac McCarthy image: twitchfilm.com