The Nature of Things

  “. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.” - William Faulkner writing of Light in August I try to read at least one Faulkner book every year if only to remind myself of where I come from. Light in August certainly accomplishes that.  I have read a number of Faulkner's books, some of them multiple times, but I had never read this one before. Most of his books deal in some way with the racism that was pervasive in the Mississippi that he knew, but often the references are oblique or are buried in the narrativ...

Do you ever get the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something? It's a sense that comes to me not infrequently when I'm in my garden or I'm watching wildlife. Both have much to teach me. And it's an intuition that comes to me often when I am reading books. In the last several months, no less than three books that I have read and that have touched me deeply have made reference to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Clearly the universe was saying to me, "READ THIS BOOK!" I resisted at first because I had, in fact, read this book many years ago and I thought I remembered it fairly well. But after I read Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones in February, I knew I had to read what many consider to be Faulkner's masterpiece once again.  As I Lay Dying tells the story of the dirt-poor Bundren family, led by their patriarch Anse, surely one of the most feckless, worthless, good-for-nothing characters in all of fiction. There are five Bundren chi...

For the next several days, I will be on the road with no time for blogging, so I have scheduled some reposts from the past, starting with this one from June 2012. I hope you enjoy. *~*~*~* During our visit to Mississippi last week, we spent a day in historic Oxford, home of William Faulkner and many other quite famous writers through the years. We visited the wonderful  Square Books bookstore on the town square.  It's an outstanding independent bookstore that carries a wide variety of books but specializes in Mississippi authors. There are a lot of them. While at the store, I purchased a couple of autographed first editions of John Grisham and Ace Atkins, as well as two paperback mysteries by Carolyn Haines, a writer whom I had not read. My "to be read" shelves are beginning to groan under the weight of all the books there. We could not be in Oxford, of course, without visiting the home of the most famous Mississippi author of them all, William Faulkner, so we headed out ...

William Faulkner September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962 Long, long ago in another lifetime, I read  Absalom, Absalom!  during my "Faulkner Period." I found it to be an amazing work, but dense, complex, and sometimes unintelligible. It was, in short, a daunting read. This is the book which many critics pick as Faulkner's masterpiece. Moreover, it was greatly influenced by that other acknowledged masterpiece of the early twentieth century, Joyce's  Ulysses . An essay that I recently read about   Absalom, Absalom!  in  The New York Times  - which, in fact, impelled me to read the book again - said of the two works that "each in its way is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man trying to awaken from history." As one of the few and the proud who has actually read both books, I find that a very apt description.  In fact, Faulkner has been on my mind since we visited his home, Rowan Oak , when we passed through Oxford, Mississippi on a road trip last ...

During our visit to Mississippi last week, we spent a day in historic Oxford, home of William Faulkner and many other quite famous writers through the years. We visited the wonderful Square Books bookstore on the town square.  It's an outstanding independent bookstore that carries a wide variety of books but specializes in Mississippi authors. There are a lot of them. While at the store, I purchased a couple of autographed first editions of John Grisham and Ace Atkins, as well as two paperback mysteries by Carolyn Haines, a writer whom I had not read. My "to be read" shelves are beginning to groan under the weight of all the books there. We could not be in Oxford, of course, without visiting the home of the most famous Mississippi author of them all, William Faulkner, so we headed out to the house called Rowan Oak. Faulkner had bought the house, a primitive Greek Revival structure that was built in the 1840s, in 1930 and had named it after the rowan tree, a symbol of sec...

I saw an interesting article in the online magazine Slate today. It seems that David Milch of "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood" fame has signed a deal with HBO to develop several of William Faulkner's works for television.  Since Milch does have a known - and successful - track record in television, Faulkner's works would appear to be in good hands. Moreover, HBO has a long lineage of doing quality series, so the addition of Faulkner to that lineage is something to look forward to. The story didn't specify which of Faulkner's many novels or short stories might be showing up on our home screens at some point in the future. Of course, several of his works have been adapted for the big screen in the past. Some have been successful adaptations, some not so successful, but Milch certainly should not be bound or influenced by any of that history. One hopes that instead he will look at the works with fresh eyes and with the thought of translating them for an aud...