And, in kind of the oddest and coolest news I got, if you listen right here, you can hear Bob Dylan introducing the Louvin Brothers song “Satan Is Real” on his radio show. Which is very cool, of course. But even cooler is that Mr. Dylan has requested a copy of the book Satan Is Real. I don’t know what that means, but I love that he has a copy in his hands.

Also, in Pike news, it looks like the French edition from Editions Gallmeister will be available in September. I won’t pretend I’m not blown away by joining an author list that includes Ed Abbey, Craig Johnson, Larry McMurtry, Tim O’Brien, and Tom Robbins.

We’ve also got some details on Noir at the Bar, which I’ll be attending in about three weeks. This from Mr. Bar, Jedidiah Ayres:

Oky-doke kiddos, here’s the official lineup for the N@B double header coming your way late in February. Two nights of walking on the dark side in St. Louis. First up, February 21st, Robert Randisi has been added to the the lineup alongside Benjamin Whitmer, Sonia Coney and Jason Makansi, so that’s fantastic. How many people do you know who’ve read over five hundred books, let alone written that many, let alone published that many? Sure, somebody in the near future will probably take a big ol’ dump all over the internets with their self-published titles and get up into the hundreds like that, but Randisi has done it the hard way, the ultimate pulp writer kids. That cat goes through keyboards faster than I go through underwear, and tossing ‘em when he’s worn the letters off the keys. Take that, James Patterson.

As I understand it, we’ll be meeting at the Meshuggah Cafe in St. Louis. Again, cannot wait.

And I think that brings me up to date on my doings. At least for the most part.

On the non-career related side, I’ve been getting back to doing a little shooting. 3×5 cards up at Left Hand Canyon. And I know I keep saying this, but I can’t get over how solid my 1911 has been since I put in the Ed Brown Hardcore extractor and tensioned it. I haven’t had a problem of any kind, not one, and it’s been well north of 1,000 rounds. (Probably more than 2,000.) I clean it about every 300-400 rounds, keep it oiled, and it just keeps banging along. I’m having so much fun.

And, of course, I’m reading and writing. I finally read Johnny Shaw’s Dove Season and highly recommend it. This is crime fiction the way I dig crime fiction: a strong, individual voice rooted in place and character. I loved it. And I gotta post the cover, because it’s just as great as the writing inside:

I also want to give a huge shout out to Matthew McBride, whose Frank Sinatra in a Blender was picked up by New Pulp Press this week. He gives the lowdown here in a wonderfully titled post, “How To Get A Book Deal In 3,285 Days.”

That’s all I got.

And look what I found. The whole goddamn thing.

This internet shit, it’s the best.

For better or worse, all my favorite protest songs are country songs. Most of ‘em are Kristofferson songs.

And, speaking of which, John Trudell does a pretty good job of speaking for John Trudell.

So, hell, from the hundreds of texts which McCarthy drew on to create his pastiche masterpiece, here’s my favorite (and, yeah, I’ve probably shared this before — but cut me some slack, it’s a holiday):

Also, it sure as hell was nice to find myself mentioned in this company on today of all days.

It’s one of my favorite albums of all time, and if you’re a Cormac McCarthy fan, you’ll find it popping up here and there in his work. My favorite bit comes in Blood Meridian when McCarthy riffs on the line “There Ain’t No God in Mexico.” As Waylon sings it, “there ain’t no way to understand how that border crossing feeling makes a fool out of a man.”

That’s about the long and the short of it, whether McCarthy’s pulling lines straight from William Faulkner, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings, or exploding the tropes of nineteenth-century scientific imperialism, his books are great pastiche amalgamations of their sources.

Of course, then Bloom goes on to say one of the dumber things he’s ever said in his career: “I don’t think McCarthy was interested, at least at that point in his career, in moral judgments, any more than Melville was involved in moral judgments.”

Melville wasn’t interested in moral judgments? Has Bloom ever read Typee? Omoo? Certainly not White Jacket, which was instrumental in changing the navy’s policy on flogging. That’s a profoundly stupid thing to say, and it negates the majority of those influences to which Blood Meridian owes itself: the literature and propaganda of the declaredly imperial US western expansion. The reason this is never brought up vis-à-vis Blood Meridian isn’t because it isn’t there, or, as Bloom meaninglessly opines, “Blood Meridian is too grand for that” — whatever the hell that means — it’s because there are very few literary scholars who know much about the subject. Unlike McCarthy.

This isn’t to reduce Blood Meridian to some kind of anti-imperialist tsk-tsking, but McCarthy does wear his sources on his sleeve,and there’s no way of disentangling those sources from a commentary on imperialism. An example? Here’s a big one: Regeneration Through Violence, the first volume of literary historian Richard Slotkin’s frontier history trilogy. It was published in 1973, and unless Cormac McCarthy is directly channeling Slotkin’s worldview through some metaphysical means, he read it. Hell, the title’s even evoked by Michael Herr in the blurb that’s graced the front cover of the Vintage International Edition for as long as I’ve been aware of the book: “A classic American novel of regeneration through violence.”

I’ll post more on this later. If you’re seriously bored in the meantime, I have a review of The Road over at The Modern Word which touches on some of the pastiche stuff. I’ll also have an essay about Blood Meridian in this book about art and genocide sometime in the fall.

Update: A big RIGHT THE FUCK ON to the Onion for their discussion of Cormac McCarthy, by the way. Best news on the planet, and some of the best books coverage, too.

Update II: For more on this, start here.