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November 26, 2007
Reading List
The Unvanquished--William Faulkner. Faulkner, like Hawthorne, is notoriously under-read and his humor under-appreciated. Perhaps it is the difficulty of plumbing the depths of his prose. If so, The Unvanquished should prove a satisfying, if perhaps slight, entry point into his work. (I don't know whether or not it is slight, I'm not a Faulkner expert--and all of Faulkner works to one end any way, most of the works sharing a dynasty of characters, or even more importantly for a work of southern fiction a continuity of place. (I plan to follow up with Absalom! Absalom!, Intrude in the Dust, and the collected short stories. I've already read and really enjoyed The Sound and the Fury (much falls into place in the beginning of Benjy's first section when you remember that his sister's name is Caddie) and As I Lay Dying. (What I most recall with this one is Vardeman's assertion after Addie's death, or perhaps just prior to it, that "My mother is a fish." You have to read this mordant study to get it--it's one of those places where Faulkner is at his finest talking about the foibles of humankind.)
Map of Bones--James Rollins--I don't know why, but I don't find this book nearly as compelling as The Judas Strain or The Black Order. You'd think the theft of the bones of the magi would be a matter of great interest, but somehow it just isn't really compelling.
Soul Provider--Yep, you haven't seen a final review because I didn't want to rush through and end the experience of the book. It has been enormously helpful, insightful, and meaningful, taking the abstruse and difficult thought of ancient asceticism and applying it in a meaningful way to how we live our lives today. Truly a book to savor and enjoy again and again. I will never read St. John Climacus in exactly the same way again--which is a good thing--pawing through desert dust for a kernel of insight is hardly rewarding, but realizing that what is said has relevance for people who do not live in the same circumstances--that we're not pawing through desert dust, but walking through the living water of the love of God.
The Purgatorio--Dante. Don't know if I'll end up finishing it this month, as so little time is left, but I'll give it a try if other things move out of the way.
Lined up are a biography of Louis Mayer and other assorted delights from my local library and my personal collection. We'll see how it all works out.
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Motion Toward Freedom
A beautiful and moving passage from Faulkner in which he describes the movement of the emancipated slave population of Yoknapatawpha County toward the river, the crossing of which symbolizes for them freedom.
from The Unvanquished
William FaulknerWe began to see the dust almost at once and I even believed that I could already smell them though the distance between us did not appreciably decrease, since they were travelling almost as fast as we were. We never did overtake them, just as you do not overtake a tide. You just keep moving, then suddenly you know that the set is about you, beneath you, overtaking you, as if the slow and ruthless power, become aware of your presence at last, had dropped back a tentacle, a feeler, to gather you in and sweep you remorselessly on. Singly, in couples, in groups and families they began to appear from the woods, ahead of us, alongside of us and behind; they covered and hid from sight the road exactly as an infiltration of flood water would have, hiding the road from sight and then the very wheels of the wagon in which we rode, our two horses as well as Bobolink breasting slowly on, enclosed by a mass of heads and shoulders--men and women carrying babies and dragging older children by the hand, old men and women on improvised sticks and crutches, and very old ones sitting beside the road and even calling to us when we passed; there was one old woman who even walked along beside the wagon, holding to the bed and begging Granny to at least let her see the river before she died.
But mostly they did not look at us. We might not have even been there. We did not even ask them to let us through because we could look at their faces and know they couldn't have heard us. They were not singing yet, they were just hurrying, while our horses pushed slow through them, among the blank eyes not looking at anything out of faces caked with dust and sweat, breasting slowly and terrifically through them as if we were driving in midstream up a creek full of floating logs and the dust and the smell of them everywhere and Granny in Mrs Compson's hat sitting bolt upright under the parasol which Ringo held and looking sicker and sicker, and it already afternoon though we didn't know it anymore than we knew how many miles we had come. Then all of a sudden we reached the river where the cavalry was holding them back from the bridge. It was just a sound at first, like the wind, like it might be in the dust itself. We didn't even know what it was until we saw Drusilla holding Bobolink reined back, her face turned toward us wan and small above the dust and her mouth open and crying thinly: "Look out, Aunt Rosa! Oh, look out!"
And what happens next falls into the realm of tragedy or bathos as the Yankees, for inscrutable purposes of their own, destroy the bridge but fail to stem the tide of yearning. And then, a moment of redemption with a compassionate Yankee officer coming to the aid of Granny--an officer who allowed her to protect her two charges in a previous episode, even while he denied their existence.
This book is Faulkner, pure Faulkner, and yet immediately more accessible and comprehensible than say The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. And it is enjoyable--a visit to the roots that gave rise to the blossom of Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor.
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Faulkner's Humor
It's out of context, and it may be hard to situate, but Ringo is Bayard Sartoris's best friend, brother, slave. Ringo has been sitting and drawing a picture of the Sartoris House before the Yankees burned it to the ground. Looked at in the present of the text, the house consists of four chimneys and a yardful of weeds growing out of the ruins. As this excerpt begins, a Yankee officer is speaking to Ringo; Granny has been using a variety of names to steal donkeys back from the Yankees, sell them and split the proceeds with the needy of the town.
from The Unvanquished
William Faulkner"All right," he said. "Who lives up there now? What's her name today, hey?"
Ringo was watching him now, though I dont think he suspect yet who he was. "Dont nobody," he said. "The roof leaks." One of the men made a kind of sound; maybe it was laughing. The lieutenant started to whirl around the then he started not to; then he sat there glaring down at Ringo with his mouth beginning to open. "Oh," Ringo said. "You mean way back yonder in the quarters. I though you was still worrying about them chimneys."
This time the soldier did laugh, and this time the lieutenant did whirl around, cursing at the should; I would have known him now even if I hadn't before; he cursed at them all now, sitting there with his face swelling up.
It's played so straight that it is funny, and it is a detail that could easily have been left out of the narrative--but what a robust richness it lends to the tale--what a sense of versimilitude. I have always loved Faulkner, even while I struggle sometimes to understand where he's going. His wordplay and his ability to get into his characters and convey something real and yet something nearly surreal are astonishing.
Oh, and for those who have asked--no, I don't read these things because I'm supposed to, or trying to show off, or anything of the sort. At my age, to paraphrase the great Dr. Johnson, "No one but a blockhead reads for anything other than the desire to do so."
I've spent too much time reading things that simply don't have the substance to warrant having read them. And yet there is much joy in reading both the bad and the great. And the great is even greater when set beside the mediocre or poor. Some say that Faulkner can't write, and my usual reaction is polite silence as I think, "Some people can't read." Faulkner or Dan Brown, let me think a moment. . .
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November 28, 2007
The Unvanquished
Having already begun the inextricably intertwined premier book of this civil war diptych (Absalom, Absalom), gives some perspective on this work of William Faulkner. This is, by far and away one of the most accessible of Faulkner's works. While there are some subtleties and complexities in the prose, the stream of consciousness approach is filtered through the mind of a highly educated adult, even in the early parts of the book which are told from the point of view of a child between the ages of 10 and 12.
The novel originated as a chain of short stories published during the time Faulkner was writing Absalom, Absalom, and people more knowledgeable about Faulkner as a writer and a person might say that this book is, in a sense, a inner response of Faulkner to the harsh portrayal of the south found in Absalom, Absalom. In The Unvanquished, the South comes out looking fairly good--not admirable in all respects and bearing the brunt of the responsibility for the horrors of the war. The main character, Colonel John Sartoris is, in some ways, the Civil War equivalent of a Mrs. Jellyby--his attention focused completely outwards toward the war and his own accomplishments within it, things at home are left to run more or less on their own, with the disastrous results which often follow when anyone shirks their primary responsibilities.
By turns poignant, touching, sad, hilarious, and horrifying (often within a ten-page stretch), the novel charts the progress of Bayard Sartoris (son of John), Marengo (his friend/brother/slave/servant), Granny, and a host of other characters familiar to those who have dipped into Faulkner's world before. We meet the ancestors of Quentin Compson, even if only peripherally, Colonel Tom Sutpen, and Ab Snopes, progenitor of the generally useless Snopes clan. In the trajectory of the stories we are able to compare and contrast the fates of Grumby (a man responsible for one major moment in the book) and Redmond (the man responsible for another, similar major moment in the book.)
The last chapter, "The Odor of Verbena," is often read as a separate short story and is a moving account of the real coming of age of Bayard Sartoris, made more powerful here by its juxtaposition with the story of Bayard, Ringo, and Grumby.
To get a sense of scope, in this one book, we learn about the Sack of Vicksburg and vicinity, the exodus of the Mississippi slave population with predictably disastrous results, Granny's mule trading--in which she confiscates, sells back, and reconfiscates a number of United States Army Mules through clever forgeries of an original licit document, Drusilla's stint in the Army in Virginia with Colonel Sartoris, her forced marriage to said Colonel as a result of the suspicious minds of the neighbors, and John and Drusilla's interference in the first (monumentall ill-conceived) reconstruction elections, Granny's assistance and support of the poor of Yoknapatawpha County, the utter destruction of the countryside as the Union troops withdraw from Mississippi, and a legion of other events. Most importantly one learns that, in Drusilla's words, verbena is the only scent that can overpower the smell of horses and courage.
The book is short, easy to read (for Faulkner), and powerful. It is the "up side" (and not much of one) of Faulkner's vision of the Civil War South. It provides an insight into how one can still find something to respect despite the fact that the war was fought for all the wrong reasons and for far longer than it need have done. (This point leads to a very interesting turn around in the course of the book in which at one point Bayard sees the wisdom of women as supporting and pushing the war effort forward, and toward the end sees that same wisdom as having given up on the war effort years before the men realized that they should have done so.) Read in juxtaposition with Absalom, Absalom it provides the positive print to the negative that is exposed in the latter work.
But the most powerful thing to come out of the book isn't about the South at all--it is about people struggling to be human and humane in the face of tremendous obstacles, difficulties, misunderstandings, and completely correct understandings. It is about the courage to defy expectations or fulfill them and how, where moral certainty is lacking, the circumstances must help us understand, how our circumstances help us feel the way to the (often incorrect) conclusion. It is a story about how we understand and fail to understand one another and how we can, despite ourselves and our surroundings, learn to understand each other better.
By all means, pick this up and read it. Faulkner is not so difficult as we might have come to believe from premature exposure in high-school or college. He is by no means easy and light reading; however, reading his prose is both a challenge and a deep pleasure and delight. It is a break from post-modernist brokenness and escapist fictional flights (against which, I should note, I have no gripe). Do yourself a favor and read it--not because it is good and classic and expected, but because it is enjoyable in a way that few other things are. There is here the enjoyment of accomplishment (having read Faulkner) and the enjoyment of a good set of stories well told, full of sound and fury, and yet signifying much. The tale told by an idiot is best saved for a time when one has become more acquainted with Faulkner by way of more accessible works.
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Compare and Contrast
A couple of days ago, I gave an excerpt from The Unvanquished which serves well to set against this excerpt from Absalom, Absalom!.
from Abasalom, Absalom!
William Faulknerit was a summer of wistaria. The twilight was full of it and the smell of his father's cigar as they sat on the front gallery after supper until it would be time for Quentin to start, while in the deep shaggy lawn below the veranda the fireflies flew and drifted in soft random--the odor, the scent, which five months later Mr Compson's letter would carry up from Mississippi and over the long iron New England snow and into Quentin's sitting-room at Harvard. It was a day of listening too--the listening, the hearing in 1909 even yet mostly that which he already knew since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 (and, on Sundays, heard even one of the original three bells in the same steeple where descendants of the same pigeons strutted and crooned or wheeled in short courses resembling soft fluid paint-smears on the soft sumer sky); a Sunday morning in June with the bells ringing peaceful and peremptory and a little cacophonous--the denominations in concord though not in tune--and the ladies and children, and house negroes to carry the parasols and flywhisks, and even a few men (the ladies moving in hoops among the miniature broadcloth of little boys and the pantalettes of little girls, in the skirts of the time when ladies did not walk but floated) when the other men sitting with their feet on the railing of the Holston House gallery looked up, and there the stranger was. He was already halfway across the square when they saw him, on a big hard-ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine in the middle of a tired foxtrot--face and horse that none of them had ever seen before, name that none of them had ever heard, and origin and purpose which some of them were never to learn. So that in the next four weeks (Jefferson was a village then: the Holston House, the courthouse, six stores, a blacksmith and livery stable, a saloon frequented by drovers and peddlers, three churches and perhaps thirty residences) the stranger's name went back and forth among the places of business and of idleness and among the residences in steady strophe and antistrophe: Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen
One long paragraph, and still only half the length of the normal "period" of motion in the book. What is wonderful is the mechanism whereby we are moved from the here and now present of the novel (1909) into the world of 1833 and the beginning of the saga of Thomas Sutpen in the village of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County. We move from the present smell of wistaria into the future (five months later) and then smoothly into the past in one long singing, rolling phrase.
The sentences are not difficult, but they are like Latin--before the real sense of each becomes clear, the entire sentence must be taken in and disassembled and the constituent parts placed in proper relation to one another. It is, undeniably, work. And yet it is a work that has such a fine pay-off--one comes to know the mind of the narrator and one enters the time and the world of Faulkner's fiction in a way that rarely happens in light fiction treating of similar subjects. There is substance here that goes beyond the status of "literature" or "classic" and enters the world of simply satisfying--solid, grounded and grounding, substantial--the author has authority (ever wondered about the similarity of the two words) and the world is authentic. To read Faulkner is to enter a world that is accessible in no other way (the same is true of every author worth his or her salt), but there is a pleasure in reading Faulkner that comes from acquaintance with a master. Too bad our early experiences cause us to shy away, often thinking that the work is beyond us or ill-conceived, or otherwise not available to us. In their enthusiasm and desire to introduce us into these new realms some of our early literature teachers do inestimable harm. But stop blaming them and avail yourself of the wonders of great prose despite those bitter early memories. You'll be glad you did.
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Kindle Reviews
Check this review or the slashdot review roundup to correct a few misconceptions about the availability of "outside" material on the Kindle.
Excerpt:
At the end of the day, Amazon's DRM applies only to books you actually buy - everything else works natively or with minimal hassle.
It's surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it shows up as a hard drive. I drop .txt and .mobi files into the "Book" folder and they show up. I convert a handful of PDFs to .mobi files using Mobi Creator and they work perfect, Tables of Contents and all. Sweet.
And, I'm noting that others seem to agree with me in one of the great ironies of recent time: Amazon, the great online retailer, needs a brick and mortar presence to get these into the hands of people who might use them. I know I'm disinclined to purchase another pig in a poke.
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Supercool Human Assist Devices
An exoskeleton to help in military operations, but what might it mean for people with debilitating disaeas such as ALS or MG?
As one correspondent noted to me: "The takeover has begun." We are Borg. But in this case borg may mean significant improvements in the lives of those stricken with horrible illnesses. Not today, not tomorrow, but in the near future. What a wonderful, terrible thing the human imagination can be.
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Moving toward Connectedness
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November 29, 2007
In the Court of the Crimson King--Redux
A reader very kindly sent me this link to an in depth "reading" of the King Crimson Album, In the Court of the Crimson King. This particular section seems to be a "close reading" of "21st Century Schizoid Man" and looks at it from a psychoanalytic and Christian perspective. Go and enjoy.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More on Kindle
From somone who seem to have spent the time, effort, and energy to get acquainted with the publicity and some of the features. However, I would note that the reviewer, as thorough and as balanced as he is does not appear to hold one of these in his own hands yet. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Nevertheless, some interesting points are made and I am very curious about the device, being an inveterate e-book reader myself and have thousands upon thousands of e-book files (unfortunately in palm format--but it is of little consequence to go and convert them to TXT or to get them once again--or even dig the original files out of the massive archive I have.)
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NYT Picks the Ten Best of the Year
And, of course, I haven't read a single one of them.
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A Theory of Reading
Those of you who read this blog frequently know that I am neither a very profound or close reader. I don't spend my time thrashing through the text in search of subtexts, symbols, extended metaphors, semiotic signposts, hegelian dialectic, or any number of the other quixotic treasures hunts often engaged in by professional readers of literature.
Nevertheless, you might also note that I don't shy away from books, either great literature or not-so-great bestseller thrillers. LIke Michael Dirda (a hero of sorts) I enjoy all sorts of books for all sorts of reasons, and some of those reasons might help the reader understand what sorts of books. (Why nonfiction makes up such a small portion of my repertoire.)
For a book to interest me if must have compelling examples of one of three things--magisterial and innovative use of the English language to a purpose (even if the purpose is only pyrotechnics--and I don't think "deconstructing our sensibilities" ranks anywhere at all in a theory of purpose. Frankly, I don't need my sensibilities deconstructed, I'm perfectly happy with them as they are), great story, plot, characters, gimmick, or information that is highly useful to me.
If the book is of the latter form, I've come to expect very low quality prose--writers who have three handsful of thumbs when it comes to any sense of nuance or beauty in the language. And perhaps that is all to the good, because after all the intent is not to dazzle with prose but to convey information. Obviously there are exceptions to the expectation, and each of those is greeted with great joy on my part. (The most recent in my recollection was Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
The thrillers, mysteries, much of the science fiction, fantasy, and historical novels fall into the second category. If there isn't anything there for me in story, plot, gimmick, or character, it can all go away. I read innumerable thrillers and am often disappointed at the conclusion of them. For example, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Cloud have produced a long line of thriller from Relic to the most recent--the title eludes me now, and I read every one of them hoping that the conclusion will be somewhat better or more satisfying than the last such. Hélas, too often it is not so. The same was true for Dean Koontz, up until my fortuitous discovery of the Odd books (thanks Julie).
When it comes to literature, I experience another kind of handicap. Quite frankly, I don't much care what it says about the human condition or society or the plight of _________ (fill in the blank), or humanity's relationship with ____________. Ecclesiastes kind of nailed it, "There is nothing new under the sun." What I care about is the aplomb, finesse, panache, élan, you name it with which it is said. "Ozymandias" is magnificent to me not so much for what it says, which, if one thinks about it, isn't really a new or powerful message for our day--in fact, a true classic will breath out a truth that is for all time and is powerful because it is universal, and therefore, the particulars, the trappings, the environment are what I find compelling and interesting. Taking a recent example--does Faulkner have anything to tell me that is new or different about the human condition? Nothing that hasn't been said since Gilgamesh--but oh, what language he uses to tell me. What a magnificent, rolling, magisterial prose--imbued and soaked in the rhythms and intonations of that Jacobean Classic that has informed so much of English and American literature.
Does Jonathan Edwards have anything different to say to us from preachers and prophets from the time of Melchizidek on? No, not really. And yet those orotund phrases, that rhythm, that high and precise and colorful and powerful and authoratative use of the language. Images that grab the attention and hold it.
It is for these reasons that I find many of the supposedly great books largely inaccessible to me. Dostoevsky may be fantastic, but I am often reading him through a glass seven inches thick--the translator faced with the double bind of conveying the original authors intent and style, often leaves me astounded and exhausted with their own lack of command of the language into which they are translating. I've done some of this myself and so I deeply sympathize with translators, it's a darned difficult task. But the fact that I recognize that does not immediately make the work that I'm trying to read more enjoyable or accessible to me. The only language other than English that I have full enough command of to be able to say anything worthwhile about quality is French. And even there, I fail to see the often sited magnificence of Flaubert or Balzac, while I am still able to appreciate the works and stories in their original tongue.
The point of this--my enthusiasm for great works comes from my engagement in the way the story is told--not so much the elements of the story, which often are as old as the Greek Myths from which they spring. As such, I don't tend to be a profound reader, pulling apart the prose to reveal to the reader the clockwork ticking of the interrelated symbolism. In fact, if it is overt enough for me to notice it, I often find that it is mechanical in the extreme. When on first reading I can say to myself, that is a symbol, it is like a magician whose slight of hand is just a little too slow--the magic is gone and all I can see is the fumbling. Modern works, ironic in the extreme, tend to make a show, a parade of their endless symbols, references, and meanings tend to be spectacular show pieces of the technical skill of the author. (I'm thinking here of cute and coy ploys like the e-mail address in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections --gaddisfly. Franzen so desperately wants to belong to that group of litterateurs associated with the Gaddis circle, it is pitiful to see.) Unfortunately, technical skill without heart doesn't give a reader much of a reason to read.
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