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and Oprah, Revisited  January 16, 2012, 3:16 PM  Five years ago
this June, Cormac McCarthy appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Given McCarthy’s legendary reticence (he had done only one major
interview in the past, with the New York Times in 1992) and
exalted literary stature (he has won every major American book
award; Harold Bloom has called Blood Meridian the preeminent
novel by a living American), this was one of the greatest “gets”
in the history of television. It was also one of the strangest.
Staged at the Santa Fe Institute for advanced scientific
research—where McCarthy apparently goes to relax—it evoked a
collision between opposing subatomic particles: a smashing
together, by sheer force of will, of mass media and solitary
art.  To be fair, that distinction is never absolute, and both
Winfrey and McCarthy had b