| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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Watch what he does: p. 486: "When he heard eleven strike tonight he was sitting with his back against a tree inside the broken gate, while behind him again the house wwas dark and hidden in its shaggy grove. He was not thinking *Maybe she is not asleep either* tonight. He was not thinking at all now; thinking had not begun now; the voices had not begun now either. He just sat there, not moving, until after a while he heard the clock two miles away strike twelve. Then he rose and moved toward the house. He didn't go fast. He didn't think even then *something is going to happen. Something is going to happen to me*" or even p/442: "He does not say even to himself: 'There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life.'" I love that. I love how he writes that the character *doesn't* do something in such a way that it serves the character development and plot while giving the reader the appropriate thoughts to think. Faulkner keeps one eye on the story and one eye on us. Other little good things: This sentence -- "And he cannot look at her, and he sits there on the stacked lumber when it is too late, and he could have bitten his tongue in two." -- I love the rhythm of that, and the finality and weight of the final phrase. This passage -- "There were some photographers waiting out in front, with the cameras all set up and their heads under the black cloths. The minister had evidently expected this. Because he emerged from the church with an open hymn book held before his face. But the camerament had evidently expected that too. Because they fooled him. Very likely he was not used to it and so was easily fooled, they told Byron. One of the cameramen had his machine set up to one side, and the minister did not see that one at all, or until too late. He was keeping his face concealed from the one in front, and next day when the picture came out in the paper it had been taken from the side, with the minister in the middle of a step, holding the hymn book before his face. And behind the book his lips were drawn back as though he were smiling. But his teeth were tight together and his face looked like the face of Satan in the old prints. The next day he brought his wife home and buried her." The minister Gail Hightower is a wonderful character. Just as there are people you meet in real life that make you feel heavy and sad when you're around them for no apparent reason, Faulkner makes Hightower like that. Everything becomes grave when he appears in a scene. You can even see this in his speech: he doesn't use contractions. I think I'll read "As I Lay Dying" next. I didn't finish it the last time I picked it up. |
You've inspired me to pick up "Light in August" again, thank you. I love this part of his acceptance speech for his Nobel prize, which I purloined from a biography: "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance" |
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My literary tastes have stagnated. I can only read authors I already trust. Faulkner's on that list. |
When I re-read the passages above, the passages concerning Joe Christmas, I pictured Frank Cotton. Frank Cotton, the guy who opens the puzzle box and tries to escape from the Cenobites in the movie "Hellraiser." Can you smell that? That's the scent of my brains leaking out of my ears. |
what you said about faulkner writing about what a character doesn't say made me think of what i like about kafka, especially in "the trial." he has a way of phrasing passages - like a description of a look or a way a character said something - with an "as though" or "seemingly," or else has the main character struggle interpret something, going through alternatives, that keeps the mystery in the story palpable. there's no truly omniscient narrator, things are unknowable. kafka characters stuggle against forces that are beyond their reach and ability to confront directly. |
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I tried to read "the Bear" but gave up. I liked "Old Man." "The Sound and the Fury" is one of my favorite books, but I just couldn't get into "Absalom Absalom." Not enough suffering. |
Weep for me. |
i'm really looking forward to the next lakers-kings game. |
I suppose its a similar (do or die) situation for the Lakers. |
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i love to give the TV shit and my friend, who is not a hockey fan foudn it interesting as my choice of words implied i wanted the goon-squad 4th line to come on the court and rough things up, to get the homecrowd and team going. im like "crash the net crash the net" and he's like, what do you want, cross-checking and boarding too? uh. yeah. the penalties in basketball are somewhat a distraction because they can often be so damned subjective and they slow the game down. |
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His enchantment with Rachel fades when he discovers, alas, her corporeality: at one point she wets the bed, at another she sprouts a pimple and finally, from certain clues, he deducts that like everyone else she--defecates! With passing regret, he gives her over to a bumbling American, DeForest Hoeniger, and braces for the journey through Oxford." im SO there on this book. thanks drOUIppppppy |
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I'm reading "War and Peace" and A.S. Byatt's "The Game" right now. |
i read "r. papers" in high school. a friend of mine gave me that book and "confederacy of dunces." both of the main characters were monomaniacs convinced of their own genius, one trying to have sex, one trying not to. last night i was out with some friends and drank a lot. then i came home and went to bed. i dreamed something about being in a store or a mall, and i think a grocery store. i don't know what i was supposed to be doing. then i dreamed i was up in a tree, i think a tree house, really high off the ground where i was looking down into a park filled with kids. i often go around with a harmonica, and i pulled it out and started making noises with it. if i blew in the upper register, it sounded like a siren. if i blew on the lowest note, it sounded like a gun. so i was leaning on a rail making these noises and the kids were running around screaming, but i don't know if it was because they thought it was a game or if they were actually frightened and thought there was a massacre going on. then i stopped and sat down in the branches and got terribly depressed. i woke up for a while, then fell back asleep. the next dream had jay leno in it. i am in a lecture hall, sitting in one of the seats in one of the middle rows. there's a single podium on the stage and jay leno appears and goes over to it. he starts talking about thanksgiving, don't fucking ask me why. as he talks he starts changing into baby blue tights and a jerkin - you know, like robin hood and all that. every so often you catch a glimpse of his genitals in silhouette; he's hung like a porn star. when he's got the costumn on, the jerkin doesn't cover his crotch and you can still see his package. he turns around and there's a back half of a turkey protruding from the backs of his knees. it's a replica of a turkey from the shoulders back hanging made from wicker and real feathers. he turns back around and starts fiddling with his penis, knotting it and tying it with string; then he does something to make his balls hang low. then he turns around you can see him from the side and a woman in the audience starts laughing shrilly and hysterically. the tied-up penis makes a head and beak and testicals a wattle and, with the turkey body sticking out of the back of his legs, it looks just like a turkey. the performance is over and i wake up. so the rachel papers ain't nuthin' to me. |
I'll tell you: poorly. I've never read "Northanger Abbey," though I have read "Right Ho, Jeeves." I've read "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves" more than once....God, I love Wodehouse. His books make me giggle and snort. I've seen many of the PBS "Jeeves and Wooster" episodes, too. I've also read Stephen Fry's novel, "The Liar." You might like "The Liar." It's confusing and full of sex. |
i laugh that i misspelled testicles. i just found an old vanity fair with tom waits interviewing a writer named j.t. leroy. |
I think I got that phrase from "Anne of Windy Poplars." Maybe not. |
he's quite the recluse. he never does his own readings, he has others read. the big deal here was that he was goingto attend this reading, but he never came out from the back. he supposedly wears obscuring hats, wigs etc and dodges all photos. |
they say he was a child prostitute. the description of him reminds me of oswald. he has an easy-going, humble way of talking and says things like "wow, thanks" when he's complimented. tom waits' writing sounds likes his songs: "j.t.'s stories are like stitches, like exit wounds, dispatches, depositions. he is brilliant, gifted, and a profound fly on the wall. you'll need handkerchiefs and novocain to get through his new book." |
interview in the Onion A/V club this week? |
the more i think about that harmonica dream - when i first started blowing on the notes, they just reminded me of bullets, and the kids were just playing along. but the more i played the more real the bullet sounds became. when i blew a note, i could hear a real gun sound faintly underneath. then i'd blow more notes and the gunfire sound grew and grew until it was louder than the notes and the fear in the kids went from play-acting to real. that was it. |
She's very much like me, the way I was when I was younger. She's very constrained and reserved, fixated on maintaining her dignity and preserving herself from humiliation, and humorless. She had a religious conversion in her late teens, fueled by her innate violence that she sublimates into spiritual fervor. She falls in love with a strange skittish young man who's also very religious and obsessed with snakes. Listen: ************ She wrote: 'It was kind of you, Father, to write as you did of my nightmares and fears. As you will have guessed, I have regretted intermittently what I told you of this. It was a moment of weakness'.... She paused agan.... Father Rowell had expressed only a imited understanding, and what he had said was not entirely untroubled. She should have said nothing: she had lost dignity, exposed herself, forfeited, perhaps, some of his respect. ....(much later) Cassandra regarded her letter with slight distaste. It was a distaste already familiar.... It seemed to her that she was capable of only two kinds of approach to me: a constrained dignity, an an overwrought and vague appeal for help of some kind. And her undignifed outbursts produced, invariably, from those to whome she exposed herself, a defensive professional reaction. I am not a woman, she thought sharply, her intelligence restored by renewed sense of her own isolation, to be comforted in that tone of voice. ********* God, how I know that feeling. The whole book is full of frighteningly familiar feelings and ideas. In the end, her fantasy world, which she had shared with her younger sister as a child and called the Game, is developed into a novel by the younger sister and published. She is humiliated, and kills herself. You know how I'm living by myself after July? When I lived by myself in college, I was very unhealthy. I became withdrawn, and wouldn't speak for days, and lived in my head, in my own world I created, where I was someone else. I'm afraid of that happening again. God preserve me. |
novels. *As I Lay Dying,* *Requiem for a Nun,* (which is a sequel to Santuary) and*Absalom! Absalom!* Of those three, I enjoyed Absalom the most, but *Light in August* is still my favorite. So much so that I intend to read it again over winter break because there were parts I read too quickly. I am also going to read *Sanctuary* because I haven't yet and I just looked over on my shelf and saw that I must have purchased it for this class I am taking even though I don't remember doing so. I do not like studying Faulkner. Although I did enjoy the class discussion we had on the books, the kind of reading required is not how Kazu should be reading Faulkner. Although all the recreational reading I do has a critical edge, it's not always academic. I must say that *Requiem for a Nun* lends itself to a critical, rather than recreational read. It's actually kind of boring otherwise. But it has one of the greatest lines ever: STEVENS: Any of them? You dont have any idea who its father was? NANCY: (looks at stevens impatiently) If you backed your behind into a buzz-saw, could you tell which tooth hit your first? Beautiful. Right now, for the same class, I am reading Cormac McCarthy's *Blood Meridian* which is really well written but otherwise extremely disturbing. I know that Spider posted that she didn't like it. Anyway, I like disturbing, for the most part. But I prefer a more invisible, cerebral, haunting kind (think Beloved) than this kind of blood and guts. True, Beloved is bloody, but terrifying in so many other ways. *Blood Meridian* is so far just violent. I'd still recommend it though, because it's really nicely written. It makes me want to read more of his work. I don't want to do any work today, but I've wasted so much of the weekend already. |
(That's my reply in a nutshell. YES.) But, yes. I'm reading both "Absalom! Absalom!" and "Light in August" now, and I skimmed "Sanctuary" (I'll read it for real soon), and I will read "Requiem for a Nun" after "Sanctuary." I am giddy in love with Faulkner, and I'm so excited that you're reading his works, Kazu. Yay! And, right, I didn't like "Blood Meridian" -- the language was very beautiful, but the story line was unpleasantly disturbing and so full of random, unrepentant violence that it was boring. The plot was uninteresting, the characters were undeveloped...there was nothing to hold to hold my interest except the poetry of the language, which isn't enough. I should probably read it again, but not when there's so much Faulkner in the world. |
Man, I told you I identified with that character. |
Have you guys read "the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"? It's totally awesome. |