Issue #18 – Faulkner
ISSUE #18:
This week in MUSE: Faulkner, and a little more …
CONTENTS:
• Unforgotten
• Resonance
• Blood Simple
• Upcoming
• Dante, and not…
NEWS AND NOTES:
Some of you noticed – I took a month off. It’s spring here (the season of my birthday), and I wanted nothing more than to be outside, welcoming and being welcomed by all things natural. On top of that, two new lecture series began, with Mark Scarbrough. So March and April together have been a contemplative and restorative time.
Recommended:
As a lighthearted (but insightful) accompaniment to Blood Simple, Why Women Aren’t Funny; by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, January 1, 2007.
Tacoma Narrows Bridge: video of the 1940 collapse.
I Love Dick (Amazon series): for a racy, edgy, provocative take on the man-woman thing.
Image Credits:
Cover art: Magnolia in Bloom, photo by D. Zervas.
Unforgotten: The Mississippi River Flood of 1927.
Resonance: Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 1940.
Blood Simple: Sunlight in a forest. unattributed (modified)
Upcoming: Road Signs, digital template (modified).
Dante, and not… Iraqi/US Conflict 1991, Laura Rauch, AP.
Unforgotten
I am attending a new seminar with Mark Scarbrough, this time up in Salisbury Connecticut, a town in the northwest corner of the state. The ride is another half hour beyond Washington (where we read Emily Dickinson with him), and not all of it as pleasantly rural as Route 63, but two hours with Mark is worth the roundtrip, in time and environs. The end-of-winter landscape – dirty snow, ratty leaf litter, and crumpled plastics –
Resonance
I am spinning, floating, suspended after Mark’s two lectures on If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem, while all of life conspires to conflate and converse and heckle and cheer. Mark has added many layers of understanding to my read of the book – the whole of Faulkner’s work, really – bringing in contexts and criticism pertinent and rich with the meanings of transactional economics (wrought by industrial capitalism), regionalism (exalted and reconfigured,
Blood Simple
We are reading four of Faulkner’s novels with Mark, and the second is Light in August, which I read years and years ago. I didn’t recall any of the story upon this read, but I do remember being surprised, shocked, in wonder – I’d say amazed, if it weren’t such an overused word – upon reading it the first time, due to its subject and unromantic portrayal, and also at the unfamiliar craft and power of Faulkner’s writing.
Upcoming
My birthday is at the end of March, and this year we celebrated with Keith and Emilia, two of the four friends most dear to me. (Printha and Addie the other two, my god-grandchildren who stopped by too, with hugs and chatter.) Bruce made a Buckwheat Pancake and Mimosa Brunch, they brought flowers and a Crown and lovely card. I have waited forty years for friends like them – we are all so matched and complemented in interests and outlook and intelligences it matters not a bit that they are thirty + years younger.
Dante, and not…
Mark is giving another lecture series, on Dante’s Inferno, which partially overlapped Faulkner, though on a different day of the week, in different libraries of different towns. Our work schedules didn’t allow for attending both and we had to choose. After four weeks of heady Faulkner we decided to try the lighter fare, and so missed The Sound and the Fury. But we went back to Faulkner, after two lectures on Dante,
