{"id":2433,"date":"2017-08-25T23:34:45","date_gmt":"2017-08-25T17:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=2433"},"modified":"2017-08-25T23:34:45","modified_gmt":"2017-08-25T17:34:45","slug":"in-the-country-of-no-country-for-old-men-and-on-the-trail-of-cormac-mccarthys-blood-meridian-what-i-did-for-my-summer-vacation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/08\/25\/in-the-country-of-no-country-for-old-men-and-on-the-trail-of-cormac-mccarthys-blood-meridian-what-i-did-for-my-summer-vacation\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Country of "No Country for Old Men" and On the Trail of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian": What I Did for My Summer Vacation"},"content":{"rendered":"

So late July found me (and my family) in (mythical) Cormac McCarthy country, at the Three River Petroglyph site near Three Rivers, New Mexico, which is a cool (and hot) place to be. We camped there for three days, watching thunderstorms that evoked these lines from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian<\/em>: \u201cAll night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear\u201d (47). <\/span>
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\nThe petroglyphs are impressive. On a hot afternoon, we hiked along a ridge above the plains or “malpais,” which figures directly in Blood Meridian<\/em>, and the petroglyphs (or some of them, at least) are believed to have been made by the Jornada Mogollon people a thousand years ago. Animal figures predominate, as this example of a raven and a Bighorn sheep attest, complete with arrows in the sheep:<\/span>
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\nNext week I’ll be giving a lecture at the Cormac McCarthy Society’s annual convention, on a comparison of Cormac McCarthy’s and Leo Tolstoy’s views of history, so in a way you could argue I was doing research. <\/span>
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\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So late July found me (and my family) in (mythical) Cormac McCarthy country, at the Three River Petroglyph site near Three Rivers, New Mexico, which is a cool (and hot) place to be. We camped there for three days, watching … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,29,30],"tags":[55,66,85,178,181],"class_list":["post-2433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booksfilm","category-cormac-mccarthy","category-the-west","category-tolstoys-war-and-peace","tag-book-reviewing","tag-cormac-mccarthy","tag-fiction-writing","tag-the-west","tag-tolstoys-war-and-peace"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t