ode to the giant of james laughlin
by Roger Mugs
dr. jay ellis says you should
have kept your job as an edit-
or and never have moved into
the world of writing but he
was one of eight self proclai-
med cormac mcarthy-ists and we
all know how much that validat-
es his opinion but i wish that
i could invite you back from
the grave to come and stop by
my local barnes and noble and
do a simple reading of your fine-
est work and share with us just
how brilliant each of your well
picked words was and laugh at
those who’ve survived you like
one mccarthy-loving-poetry-hate-
ing-extremely-sad-and-confused-dr.
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I had Ellis in a class briefly; I was waitlisted, and the department that year was cracking down on over-enrollment, so I couldn’t get in. He was nice, but he introduced me to Cormac McCarthy, for which I can never forgive him.
i’m afraid it was the same for me… I took the class because the name for the course sounded interesting and then turned out to be in no way related to what we actually studied. Frustrated I put my head down and tried to just make it through…
I got my first and only C all throughout college and then he pulled me aside and told me that he really enjoyed having me in class and I should consider taking one of his other classes…
after he gave me a freaking C.
ridiculous
also we had to ready like three mccarthy books and I never wanted to die so much in my whole life (except this one time when I had the hershey squirts at an indian food restaurant in china… long story), and I was reading the sparknotes because I couldn’t survive the first 100 pages of all the pretty horses.
He only assigned us “Blood Meridian,” which I thought was interesting but also boring. I went to three classes, and Ellis talked about McCarthy in every one. I can do without the quotation marks when people are speaking, even though I think it’s asinine, but I can’t abide his distaste for apostrophes. I cant stand it.
“Blood Meridian” took forever, but “The Road” was nice because, even though it’s truly one of the worst books I’ve read in the past three years or so, it was a quick read. I haven’t read “No Country,” but I did like the film. It’s nice that we are finding ways to disparage McCarthy in these poems.
it must be done somewhere