What I did Midsommar.

Originally entitled "Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL: important update from your CFR captain, James Crotty," I sent this previously in July as an email to subscribers. I now open it up for all to read.

Dear Friends, Countrymen, Subscribers:

Greetings from beautiful historic Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I just finished my annual week at St. John’s Summer Classics. It’s my 26th year attending St. John’s College Santa Fe. From 2000 to 2002, I earned my Masters in Liberal Arts here. For 24 years since, I have attended St. John’s Summer Classics, which always blows my mind in new ways while rebooting the stroke-compromised Crotty brain. Aphasia, I hate you!

In the morning seminar last week, we discussed Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridien. Many of you have seen the movies The Road or the Cohen Brothers’ classic No Country for Old Men. McCarthy wrote the books that birthed those films. Blood Meridien will soon be made into a major motion picture. Screenwriter John Logan (The Aviator, Gladiator, Skyfall) is onboard. Australian helmer John Hillcoat (The Road, Lawless) will direct. I can’t wait.

Let me warn you: Blood Meridian is unrelentingly violent and shocking. Just like the great books guru Harold Bloom, I had to stop reading halfway through. I could not stomach the barbarism, cruelty, and elaborate desecration of human and animal flesh, but I slowly got over my skittishness. As the book makes clear, this is how The West was really won.

Fittingly, the psychological shocks of the book got mirrored in the seminar room. As I continue to wrestle with the experience, I still can’t fully separate which from which!

Blood Meridian is, nevertheless, a modern classic, telling the epic story of Americans murdering Indians, Mexicans, and each other in Northern Mexico, Southern New Mexico, Arizona, and California just after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ostensibly ended the U.S.-Mexican War. While gory, perverse, and at times gratuitously macabre, the writing is gorgeous, the characters unforgettable, and the descriptions of the Wild West terrain like nothing I’ve encountered. It’s also a surprisingly deep meditation on horror, place, and one’s truth. Students of The Bible and Dante’s Inferno will find a lot to wrestle with here.

I group the recently deceased McCarthy with Flannery O’Connor in his creation of piercing, inimitable characters delivering a harsh dark message; with Herman Melville in the stunning poetic grandeur of his writing; and with filmmaker Quentin Tarrantino in his indulgence in the aesthetics of violence. Soon, I plan to journey along the path of Blood Meridian. If want to join The Crotty Man down Chihuahua way, ping me. Bring your gun, some posole, and a sharp bowie knife!

In my afternoon seminar, I chose the very topical “AI in Film.” I’ve written previously about my investments in direct and indirect artificial intelligence––and the three-legged theory behind them––including Apple (AAPL), Cameco (CCJ), Constellation Energy (CEG), Nvidia (NVDA), Palantir (PLTR), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Tesla (TSLA), and Vistra Corporation (VST). I wanted to discover whether I was enabling the triumph of the The Borg and the destruction of mankind, or whether AI, like most technological advancements, will turn out to be 51/49 on the positive side of the ledger (thank you Russell Tiller for that insight). As true with any classic works, the films in this seminar provide no easy answers.

We spent three days on the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and one day each on the underrated Blade Runner and Her. My conclusion from a deep “reading” of these film classics is that we are already inching close to some of the dystopian dehumanism and alienation––and technological addiction and dependency––these films project. But these films can also be read as slightly utopian, reaffirming my hope that humanity can remain in control even as AI runs roughshod over sundry sectors of investing and human life. Watch them again and let me know what you think.

On the sausage-making front, I’ve hired a savvy creative team working inside the Monk Media Lab at Monk Space to ascertain new ways to deliver and market content that mesh well with today’s rapidly evolving media landscape. I think you will be blown away once this content appears on your favorite platforms. Once such project––the resurrection of Monk: The Mobile Magazine––is already live. You can purchase back issues of the peripatetic perzine (personal zine) at www.monkmagazine.com.

Finally, I wanted to gently remind you to review three recent posts that have gotten some traction outside of Substack.

Assassination attempt on Trump: my first reaction. Never trust a man who cries in his Crius, but you might make an exception here!

Joe Biden, thank you for your service. It’s my latest, and likely futile attempt to build love, respect, and unity across the partisan divide.

And now this puppy: Does the Coronation of Queen Kamala solve Democrats’ key electoral problem? You likely received it in your inbox prematurely. I scheduled a send before I’d finished the thing. It is now finished and worth your time as you evaluate the rapidly evolving state of the most important election in decades.

Okay, that’s it. Please, if you can afford it, consider becoming a paid subscriber to the Crotty Farm Report. If you can’t easily see how to do so on your end (the best way is to check the end of any post), you can learn how to do so here.

From my temporary Santa Fe redoubt, I send you love and hopes for an anxiety-free remainderer of the year, no matter what transpires in our always entertaining republic!

Your peripatetic pal,

—James Marshall Crotty