Tag Archives: William Faulkner

A Wheel Upon the Earth

While living for six years in the New South at the turn of the millennium, I was struck by a certain I-don’t-know-what-ness.  Underneath the smothering yet genuine gentility and kindness there was still an undercurrent of “sticking to your own kind” – and it wasn’t just down lines of race, but down political, religious and social class lines.  Birds of a feather should flock together.  This certainly isn’t unique to the New South.  This undercurrent (sometimes seen as a tidal wave) has always existed to varying degrees across the world.  But what made it unique in my eyes, and positively Southern, was that it was coupled with this melancholic and melodic nostalgia for a time before that was better than now – yet it was a time that was not clearly defined, only dreamt about, perhaps having never really existed and only ever dreamt about.  It begs the questions, when exactly was it better?  What about the good ol’ days of Jim Crow?  Was it better during the Great Depression?  Was it better during the days of Slavery?  Or maybe it was better before any white or black men set foot on the land and there were only trees, beasts and Native Americans? 

Yet even I found the milieu intoxicating…the whole “Country Time Lemonade” commercial-ness of it all – lazy Sunday afternoons on the porch, Ma and Pa sipping on sweet tea, the kids running barefoot through the tall grass - the kind of laid-back twilight feeling that “once upon a time…it was always like this…it could always be like this…if only….”  And for the better part of those six years I yearned to let my North East jackass-ery and uptight-ness slip away into a world of Yes, Sir’s…No, Ma’am’s…and Thank You Kindly’s.

I think maybe writer director Robert Persons was trying to capture that I-don’t-know-what-ness of the New South in his troubling yet haunting experiment, General Orders No. 9, which exists as an amalgamation of poetic voice-over, ambient music, stunning images verging on still-life, animated maps and an overall “otherworldliness” of bygone times set to the crawling cadence of 72-minutes on film. Continue reading →

Upstate Royalty

The Proctor Boys are a strange lot – three grizzled old men who have spent their entire lives in stifling isolation on a dairy farm in Upstate New York.  When the eldest, Vernon, winds up dead one morning in the bed all three shared, the youngest, Creed, gets swept up into accusation while the emotionally crippled simpleton (and middle brother), Audie, barely grasps the gravity of the situation.

Jon Clinch’s second novel, Kings of the Earth, was inspired by actual events.  Clearly fashioning himself a 21st century William Faulkner, Clinch spans his book across generations and voices.  Each chapter is titled by a year and a character’s name – with POV’s shifting from 1st person to 2nd person to 3rd person, but never omniscient – eerily reminiscent of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.  Those not familiar with the style may find it a challenge, while fans of Faulkner will probably favor it as a nice homage, but it pales in comparison to the master.  This isn’t to say Clinch hasn’t achieved something memorable nearing mythic stature here. Continue reading →

Of Al Capone, The Thief Maker and Death by Baklava

On a whim this Saturday I decided to take a friend on a Thief Maker Reality Tour by visiting the famous Philadelphia neighborhood where the majority of my book was set, touring Eastern State Penitentiary and dining at one of my all-time favorite restaurants.  

It had been a well over a year (maybe even two) since I had been back to the Art Museum District centered around Fairmount Avenue (and I’ll be there again next weekend for the Late Renoir Exhibit at the PMA).  Though I’ve only ever been a visitor to the area, it was like returning home as it had lived in my imagination for so long and served as the inspiration for the primary setting of my “first” novel, which now seems like such a distant memory.  It was great stomping around my old haunts, and for the first time, I played the part of a true tourist by paying to enter the famed Eastern State Penitentiary – former home of Al Capone. Continue reading →

William Faulkner’s Two Soldiers Shall Not Perish

Making the rounds at the local art-house has been the trailer for the Robert Duvall/Bill Murray starring, character-study, period-piece Get Low – as in, “it’s time for me to –”.       

      

Along with the indie darling Winter’s Bone and Christopher “Fritz” Nolan’s mega-budgeted, high-concept thriller Inception, Get Low ranks as one of the summer’s most anticipated films in my neck of the woods.  Come to find, the writer director Aaron Schneider won an Oscar a few years back for a short film, which just happened to be a an adaptation of what surely is one of my all time favorite short stories…William Faulkner’s “Two Soldiers” – the classic tale of a young boy desperately wanting to join his older brother as he heads off to war.      

Low and behold I shot that thing right up to the top of my Netflix queue, and before I knew it was rereading the tale and watching the film.  Continue reading →

Light in September

In the Deep South of Faulkner Country it might be the Light in August that casts an inspirational glow, but in the Northeast nothing compares to the light in September.  On my annual daytrip out to Batsto Village, I was struck by how the light changed and undulated under the shade of the trees and passing cloud cover, casting an aura over the scenery that really only could’ve been appreciated with a continuously tracking camera that would capture all the nuances.  It’s times like these when I realize the limitations of the snapshot…but that’s not to say I didn’t capture as many of those moments and changes of light as I could.   Some of the photos around Batsto may appear as remakes or re-imaginings of shots from last year’s visit, but I also stopped at an ancient cemetery along Route 542 that boasted graves as far back as the mid-1800′s, and another picturesque graveyard in Hammonton along the White Horse Pike where new images were found. Continue reading →

A Review of Toni Morrison’s “A Mercy”

Orphans of the Storm

In Toni Morrison’s A Mercy we see life through the eyes of people physically and emotionally abandoned, orphans with names like Lina, Florens, Jacob, Rebekkah and Sorrow.  The storm is the clashing of cultures in pre-Revolutionary War America where the laws are not yet defined, everyone and everything is for sale, and all are threatened with annihilation by God, the environment or each other.  Europeans looking for a promised land of unending wealth or escape, Natives living through an apocalypse, indentured servants and slaves from Europe and Africa bound to barbaric institutions are all brought to a slow, simmering boil in the torrid fog rolling in over Mary-Land and Virginia…colonies ironically named for women but that are unmerciful and cruel to those females who come to their shores. Continue reading →

Bring Out “The Dead”

 

CAPTION:  Man dies from boredom on Dublin’s Ha’Penny Bridge while reading a very long novel.  *Photo courtesy of  Philip Pankov (www.philpankov.com) and www.thenocturnes.com.

Kurt Vonnegut once said of novels that “reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody else knows or cares about.”

I couldn’t agree more while I find myself in a laborious relationship with The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl.  The novel is a fictionalized account of a Baltimore lawyer’s quest to solve the mystery behind the death of Edgar Allan Poe.  This is one of those books with an interesting concept ruined by the author’s insistence on telling the story in the static, unimaginative style of prose from the stuffy time period in which the novel takes place.  It’s makes for a dry, boring read.  Much like Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, I fear I may never finish it.  I’m currently stuck at about the 100 page mark.  I should’ve known better when I saw Carr’s glowingly positive blurb splattered on the cover of Matthew Pearl’s magnum opus.  Though I find the topic of Poe’s death fascinating, reading Pearl’s novel makes me feel…well, dead.

And that brings us to James Joyce and “The Dead.”  Thankfully for every bad novel I torture myself with, there are dozens of short stories I can read in between chapters that are as Vonnegut once described, “Buddhist catnaps.”  Short stories provide perfect little meditative escapes from everyday life and respite from bad novels.  Occasionally, I come across one that reaches the level of art.  James Joyce’s “The Dead” is one such story.  It’s possibly the greatest short story I have ever read.  Continue reading →

The Greatest Novels of All Time

Halloween always brings to mind that classic of gothic literature, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Dracula1st.jpeg

This is a novel that has so enamored me over the years I once took a class dedicated solely to the study of it line by line.  The mythology it created is still alive and well today (witness the recent box office champ 30 Days of Night), and there have been a myriad of stage, film, and television adaptations that always seem unfaithful.  Over the years Count Dracula has been romanticized and made an object of sympathy, whereas in the novel he was always kept at arm’s length as a monster, and we learned of his story through a series of diary entries, letters, and notes from those in and around his inner circle of victims.  The book’s perversion of Victorian Era social mores and its inversion of the Christian sacraments made it an instant and subversive classic.  Its subtexts concerning child sexual abuse and modern man’s irrational fears of women’s liberation make it a point of controversy to this day.  Its lasting influence on future generations of writers and mythmakers will be bleeding and frightfully alive for years to come.  Does this make it one of the greatest novels of all time?

It made me wonder is it even possible (or practical) to make a list of the greatest novels of all time?  Continue reading →

My Summer with Graham, Kurt, and William

I feel the work of art displayed below, “On the Way, Open Book” by Quint Buchholz accurately displays the mindset I was in this summer while reading and writing…

 

During this long, hot seemingly endless summer while nursing the early stages of a new novel into being, I also dug deep into the classics for inspiration and went on a wild reading spree.  I caught up with some of Graham Greene’s lesser known novels, the short stories of Kurt Vonnegut, and for the first time ever, tackled William Faulkner.  Taking a queue from Oprah (say what you will about the woman–I know no one in the public eye more passionate about spreading literacy and serious literature), I picked up her personally endorsed box set of three of Faulkner’s works.  Faulkner is one of those writers, like Shakespeare, who people endlessly study and write about–reading him is a daunting task that you should only take if you are truly prepared and ready.  I doubt I would’ve appreciated him had I read him in college.

Here’s the rundown:

Graham Greene:

After watching and loving the film adaptations of his End of the Affair and The Quiet American, I snatched up his gargantuan short-story collection and devoured it.  Now having read two more of his novels, he is hands-down my favorite writer.  Every time I visit the book store, I snatch up another one of his works.

The Tenth Man.  I read this twisty convoluted tale of switched identities and the things men will do to survive in times of war while on the North Carolina beach in late May.  It’s a shockingly effective and tense little thriller that would’ve made a great story for an Alfred Hitchcock film.

A Gun for Sale.  This deliciously wicked and psychologically complex ”noir” tells the tale of a hired killer paid with stolen banknotes who hunts down the man who scammed him while trying to elude the police and the sharp-witted young showgirl who gets tangled in his web.  Greene called this one of his “entertainments,” clearly thinking less of it than his standard and more serious-minded work, but he did for the thriller here what Hitchcock did for the rote suspense flick during the same era–he raised it to the level of art.

Kurt Vonnegut:

Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction.  Vonnegut is the master of sparse, no-nonsense, modern prose full of satire, humor, the wonders of technology, and an exploration of the social mores of the Baby Boom Generation.  He’s also good for those ironic twists, which after reading four or five of his stories in a row become more apparent and predictable.  My favorites from this collection include “Any Reasonable Offer,” “The Cruise of the Jolly Roger,” and “A Present for Big Saint Nick.”  There’re some great bits in the introduction where Kurt discusses the need for the short-story form and offers some witty advice to writers.

William Faulkner:

As I Lay Dying.  Faulkner’s tale of the Bundren family’s tragic trek made to bury their mother in her hometown is an aggravatingly brilliant tour-de-force.  It features all of the hallmarks that make Faulkner so beloved and hated: roving 1st-person narration, often incomprehensible train-of-thought, dialogue in Southern dialect that is often unreadable, and long-winded flowery prose that occasionally reaches the level of transcendence.  A short work just over 200 pages, this is best read quickly and straight through.  If you stop and try to understand everything or attempt to dissect a piece, you’ll drive yourself mad.  I got the gist of it and moved on. 

The Sound and the Fury.  Oddly, the novel most quoted as his defining piece of work, I found to be the most un-involving as I didn’t particularly care for any of the characters in this tale of the highly dysfunctional Compson clan.  That isn’t to say there aren’t moments of shear stupefying literary brilliance, especially towards the end where he vividly describes the servants going to Church and the passionate sermon delivered by a visiting preacher.  Ultimately the novel goes nowhere, signifying, well, fancy that, sound and fury.

Light in August.  This represents Faulkner’s most traditionally structured and plotted work.  His hallmarks are all here, but kept in check: the flowery prose sprawling but intoxicating, the Southern-style dialogue used for great purpose to further the plot, and the train-of-thought kept to a minimum resulting in maximum effect.  He masterfully intertwines the tales of a young pregnant woman hunting down her baby’s father, a criminal haunted by his mixed ancestry, a fallen preacher, and many others in this epic treatise on life in the South in the 1930′s.  Light in August is a stone-cold masterpiece.

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Next up: The Orient Express by Graham Greene and the collected short stories of William Faulkner.  If anyone has any suggestions for a contemporary best-seller with literary merit, please feel free to leave your recommendations in the comment field.

Written by David H. Schleicher