Reading McCarthy
READING MCCARTHY is a podcast devoted to the consideration and discussion of the works of one of our greatest American writers, Cormac McCarthy. Each episode will call upon different well-known Cormackian readers and scholars to help us explore different works and various essential aspects of McCarthy’s writing. (Note these episodes try to offer accessible literary criticism and may contain spoilers from different McCarthy works.)
Reading McCarthy
Episode 25: They Rode On: Plumbing the BLOOD MERIDIAN with Stacey Peebles
Our returning guest for READING MCCARTHY is Stacey Peebles. On this 25th episode of the podcast we venture out into the Darkening World to Come and Ride into the Evening Redness in the West. Yes, that’s right—this is our first full-length consideration of McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. Dr. Peebles is Chair of the English program, Director of Film Studies, and the Marlene and David Grissom Professor of Humanities at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She is the author of Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (2011) and Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (2017). She is editor of the collection Violence in Literature and, with Ben West, is co-editor of the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy, published this year. She has published widely on the representation of contemporary war and on McCarthy, and has been editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal since 2010.
Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the theme music and interludes for READING MCCARTHY.
To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Find us on Twitter and Facebook; the website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the page to buy the show a cappuccino, or you can support us at www.patreon.com/readingmccarthy.
Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast began accepting minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...