Summer Reading

As in more recent summers, much of my time is spent under the butterfly bush reading. Last month I started Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1931), but the novel proved so slow that I started Lucia Berlin's selected stories A Manual For Cleaning Women (2016) as a respite. I am now in the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, in the head of Quentin -- the older and dead male Quentin, as opposed to the young girl Quentin I started with -- and what at first was a refreshing change from the voice of Benjy (played by Faulkner chomper James Franco in the 2015 film) is now its own overgrown jungle of plain text and italics, hidden secrets and handless watches.

There is an interesting play on binaries on pages 81-82, the most prominent being Southerners and Northerners and [B]lack people and white people. Some of what Faulkner has written would never be published today; not only his propositions, but the words he uses to construct them:

"I used to think that a Southerner had to always be conscious of [n-word]s. I thought that Northerners would expect him to. When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of them as coloured people not [n-word]s, and if it hadn't happened that I wasn't thrown with many of them, I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, [B]lack or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realized that a[n] [n-word] is not a person so much as a form of behaviour; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among. But I thought at first that I ought to miss having a lot of them around me because I thought that Northerners thought I did ..." (81-82)

The passage "... not a person so much as a form of behaviour" was a book I wrote and published in 2009, called 8x10. Another book that would never be published today, but for different reasons.