two umbrellas

Thanks to Condalmo, I can listen to William Faulkner reading As I Lay Dying. I already have audio of him reading his Nobel Prize speech. It always feels a bit surreal to listen to authors read, especially one of my favorites (not to mention, dead). It alters the relationship that was already created between myself and the text, although not always in a negative way.

Guernica has an interview with Junot Diaz:

Well, I mean, I’m writing about the Caribbean. The reason we’re all in the Caribbean is because bodies were enslaved and bodies were made into machines and bodies were made into incubators and bodies were turned into permanent—at least for people who were living in the moment’bodies were turned into permanent destiny. Our bodies were used to enslave us and were reason to slay us. And I think that the way that the body has worked in the Caribbean is very important historically. I mean, for God’s sake, it was a matter of life and death, beyond just what it normally is every day. If you woke up and you suddenly had black skin, that meant that that was your fate for the rest of your life and it would be to your death, in some ways still. But you know I was also interested in the object, the deep historical thing, that we’re talking about a place where in the local culture, in certain sectors of the local culture, people are embodied in really weird ways. You know, it’s like, every time you hear anyone talk about the Caribbean, whether it’s Caribbeans themselves or people outside, there’s always talk about women’s bodies. Talk about this voluptuousness, this kind of stereotype of what a Caribbean person is. And I think these are stereotypes that even people inside the culture, we actually sometimes claim them and we’re very proud. And look, nothing reminds us—beyond just any Caribbean nonsense and any sort of old ancient history nonsense—the body is what reminds us on a daily basis that we’re human. The body defies us, it betrays us, we have to struggle with it, you know. And it reveals in curious and in abiding ways how we are not perfect. I think that if you’re writing about the human condition, my God, you’ve got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.

happening at the FLP coming up and into the fall:

• Ralph Nadar
• Lorrie Moore
• Marjane Satrapi
• Howard Dean
• Richard Russo
• Richard Dawkins
• Jeanette Walls
• Jonathan Safran Foer
• Lydia Davis
• Lydia Bastianich

If you’re in Philadelphia, be sure to check out the calendar. Where ever you are be sure to support your local library!

Happy Bloomsday! Colum McCann has an essay on reading Ulysses.

The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

I recently finished Damion Searls’ What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going**, which I loved. Amazon’s book blog, Omnivoracious, has an interview in two parts. I highly recommend it.

**Update: Here’s my review over at WFTC.

NYT posts the entire episode of the Dick Cavett Show with John Cheever and John Updike together as guests.

I’ve been quite busy lately with freelance work that I am slacking a bit on original posts/content. So here’s more from around town…

• A “crisis of belief”: The WSJ wonders “Will this crisis produce a ‘Gatsby’?” and discusses literature, the Depression, and Sherwood Anderson:
  

  In particular, Anderson found the people he met to be imprisoned by what he called the “American theory of life” — a celebration of personal ambition that now seemed cruelly inappropriate. “We Americans have all been taught from childhood,” Anderson wrote, “that it is a sort of moral obligation for each of us to rise, to get up in the world.” In the crisis of the Depression, however, that belief appeared absurd. The United States now confronted what Anderson called “a crisis of belief.”

  (via ALD.)

• DFW in The New Yorker with more and more (via kottke.) I am now sorely missing The New Yorker.
• Guernica interviews Bernard Henri-Levy (from 2008-Nov), who was recently on a roundtable discussion on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, which is one of the few shows that attempts to discuss issues and not politics.

Over at the Guardian AL Kennedy is blogging about “why it’s pointless telling anyone that writing isn’t worth it”.

I set off on my wonky career path during the Thatcher years when unemployment was so massive that a non-proper job didn’t seem any more foolish than, say, working in a bank. Now that so many of us dream of bitch-slapping bankers up and down the high street and there are, once again, no safe havens, new writers may feel they have nothing to lose by taking the plunge into typing. I’m a creature of extremes, I’ll admit, but surely it is generally better to live a life that tries to find its own edges and push them a bit, rather than simply settling for habitual numbness.

And more good stuff to come: apparently she will be posting every two weeks.

My favorite sentence in Light in August by William Faulkner is the first of Chapter 6: Memory believes before knowing remembers. Time has always been such an important factor in Faulkner’s novels – Sound and the Fury is a book of time, haunted and shaped by its passage and inevitability – but here it seems that this idea is becoming more concrete (to an extent) in that the characters are less influenced by time but become personifications of it. Maybe I am putting time and memory under one umbrella but I feel that the definitions, at least in these novels, are blurring together. The rest of the first paragraph of Chapter 6 is as follows:

Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimney streaked like black tears.

These orphans, including a five year old Joe Christmas, are the personifications of the memories of their pasts – but then again, aren’t we all just the sums of our pasts? – and yet are so bombarded with the ‘bleak’ realities of their present that they become past and present personified in which the difference is negligible. Those who are allowed to move forward, meaning those who will shape the future in this continuum, are those who move.

Lena Grove, who is quite pregnant, comes to Jefferson on foot by way of Alabama. She is looking for the man who got her pregnant and gave her the false promise of a stable life. She is on the move and she arrives in Jefferson armed not with the memories of her Lucas Burch (aka Joe Brown) but with ideas about what her future life. She is the personification of the now, which gives us hope for the future, one that not all will be haunted by the ghosts of their past:

A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.

Lena is a stark contrast from the other characters in the book because of her defiance of this. She is constantly moving, constantly proving the endurance of life.

I first read Light in August when I was in high school* and I remember thinking that this is it. What that ‘it’ was I am not sure I could explain – and even now I am struggling to come to terms with this book. It is hard to think about specifics as it has become a part of my psyche**.

asides:

* I often wonder how my high school English teacher is doing. I would really love to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette with her.

** For some reason when I typed the word psyche it didn’t look quite right, so I decided to look it up in my dictionary application on my mac. Here’s the entry:

psyche

noun

the human soul, mind or spirit: I will never really fathom the female psyche.

I must admit I’m a little bothered by this. Why is it so interesting that women are mysterious? Who finds them mysterious? I find myself to be mysterious but I also find all people in general to be mysterious? Who knows what goes on in other people’s minds? There is a continual connotation of inferiority because no one – not even women themselves – can ‘fathom the female psyche’.

Oh so long ago now, I started a project where I intended to read all of William Faulkner’s novels in chronological order. I have had my ups and downs with this project, a few pit stops, but I have soldiered on. My intention was to attempt to get inside the writing: hear the voice, feel the rhythms and cadences, understand the sense of place and belonging that I felt in his work. I am not sure why I am surprised that the opposite happened.

The other night I woke up in the middle of the night in a state of shock. Before bed I had been reading A Light in August, a book that I have read at least twice already. It was towards the end when the reader learns how Joe Christmas becomes an orphan. It is an uncomfortable section of the book, though many sections have that feel. I didn’t think too much of it, so when I got sleepy enough, I closed the book, thought nothing more of it, and fell asleep. When I woke I was paralyzed with fear. I had the worst nightmare I have EVER had. I won’t – no, I can’t – relay its contents in writing. I didn’t know what to do. I did not move for what seemed like hours trying to decide if I should wake mr. twoumbrellas to tell him. I didn’t know if I could repeat it. The rational part of my brain was trying to take over, telling me that it wasn’t real but there’s that other part, the part that dreamed this horror – how could I even think such things! – that kept reminding me what happened in an awful Clockwork Orange kind of way. Somehow, mr. twoumbrellas woke up and I told him I had a terrible dream and broke down in tears. When I told him what happened, I think even he was a little shocked. As I was recounting the nightmare, I realized straight away it was because of William Faulkner. He has the ability to write about humanity’s evils (even uses the word evil over and over again in Light in August, which in itself becomes a mantra of terror) where you are compelled, forced, intrigued, and disgusted to continue reading because you must, must go on and somehow the writing is still beautiful (see also in Sanctuary).

Instead of me getting inside the work of Faulkner, he was able to get inside my head and thoroughly fuck with it.

I needed a break. As soon as I finished it, I took the Parasol to the library to find something new, light, possibly even funny. I found Then We Came to the End (which doesn’t sound very funny – and wasn’t as funny as I hoped) and The Lazarus Project (which is next).

Something will draw me back. I know it will. I can’t give up on this project yet. I’ve been so committed until now. I just need some time off to recover.