{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Michael Purdy", "home_page_url": "http://michaelpurdy.org", "feed_url": "http://michaelpurdy.org/feed.json", "description": "Write an awesome description for your new site here. You can edit this line in _config.yml. It will appear in your document head meta (for Google search results) and in your feed.xml site description.", "icon": "http://michaelpurdy.org/assets/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png", "favicon": "http://michaelpurdy.org/assets/favicons/favicon.ico", "expired": false, "items": [ { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2021/09/05/debord-emory-gap/", "title": "DeBord and Emory Gap Falls at Frozen Head State Park", "summary": null, "content_text": "The DeBord Falls trail at Frozen Head State Park is one of our regulars. It’s not long, perfect for families with small kids. I’ve never seen it too crowded and the trails are well maintained.Finding the trailhead is easy. Just drive past the campground until you dead end at Panther Branch Trail. One great thing about this walk is that there are clean bathrooms near the campground where you can stop before you hike.There are actually two waterfalls on the trail. DeBord Falls and Emory Gap Falls. The trail to DeBord Falls is about as flat as you can get in East Tennessee. Generally, there are a few roots and maybe some muddy areas but the trail is wide (more of an old jeep road) and well maintained. Once you reach DeBord Falls (only about a half a mile in), there’s a steep staircase down to the pool.But if you want to see Emory Gap Falls, I recommend skipping DeBord and continuing on, especially if you are with children. They’ll never want to leave the DeBord Falls pool. But don’t worry, you can hit DeBord on the way back.Past DeBord Falls the trail gets markedly more technical and steeper. It’s by no means difficult though, and Emory Gap Falls is only three-quarters of a mile past DeBord Falls. At Emory Gap, be prepared to view the waterfall from afar, or get ready to scramble up some rocks.On the return trip be sure to stop at DeBord Falls of course, and bring some swim shoes for the kids. There is a large shallow pool below the falls that is perfect for hunting salamanders and crawfish.", "content_html": "
The DeBord Falls trail at Frozen Head State Park is one of our regulars. It’s not long, perfect for families with small kids. I’ve never seen it too crowded and the trails are well maintained.
Finding the trailhead is easy. Just drive past the campground until you dead end at Panther Branch Trail. One great thing about this walk is that there are clean bathrooms near the campground where you can stop before you hike.
There are actually two waterfalls on the trail. DeBord Falls and Emory Gap Falls. The trail to DeBord Falls is about as flat as you can get in East Tennessee. Generally, there are a few roots and maybe some muddy areas but the trail is wide (more of an old jeep road) and well maintained. Once you reach DeBord Falls (only about a half a mile in), there’s a steep staircase down to the pool.
But if you want to see Emory Gap Falls, I recommend skipping DeBord and continuing on, especially if you are with children. They’ll never want to leave the DeBord Falls pool. But don’t worry, you can hit DeBord on the way back.
Past DeBord Falls the trail gets markedly more technical and steeper. It’s by no means difficult though, and Emory Gap Falls is only three-quarters of a mile past DeBord Falls. At Emory Gap, be prepared to view the waterfall from afar, or get ready to scramble up some rocks.
On the return trip be sure to stop at DeBord Falls of course, and bring some swim shoes for the kids. There is a large shallow pool below the falls that is perfect for hunting salamanders and crawfish.
", "url": "/2021/09/05/debord-emory-gap/", "date_published": "2021-09-05T00:31:13+00:00", "date_modified": "2021-09-05T00:31:13+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2019/03/11/the-potlikker-papers/", "title": "The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South by John T. Edge", "summary": null, "content_text": "Saying that food is deeply ingrained in culture is so commonplace of a cliché that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Food has meaning. It is personal. And it’s something that unites us all.I’m never sure how to classify books like these. It’s not really a history book, but it works as a history book. It tells the story, through food, of how the American South has changed over the past six decades.It describes race relations during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and it covers the farm-to-table movement of the 1970s. It delves into gentrification of the 1980s and the artisanal chef movements that followed.Along the way, it’s filled with interesting tidbits, from stories about Southern Living magazine to the founding of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s all tied together by the framework of food culture and is immensely readable. And it all rolls back around to the south.It should be noted, this is not a book to pick up and dig into expecting a deep exploration of a particular topic. It skips around, with mini-biographies of folks like Colonel Sanders, Craig Claiborne, and Mahalia Jackson. In the end, Edge is using food and food culture to explore what it means to be southern, and how to talk about southern culture.", "content_html": "Saying that food is deeply ingrained in culture is so commonplace of a cliché that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Food has meaning. It is personal. And it’s something that unites us all.
I’m never sure how to classify books like these. It’s not really a history book, but it works as a history book. It tells the story, through food, of how the American South has changed over the past six decades.
It describes race relations during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and it covers the farm-to-table movement of the 1970s. It delves into gentrification of the 1980s and the artisanal chef movements that followed.
Along the way, it’s filled with interesting tidbits, from stories about Southern Living magazine to the founding of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s all tied together by the framework of food culture and is immensely readable. And it all rolls back around to the south.
It should be noted, this is not a book to pick up and dig into expecting a deep exploration of a particular topic. It skips around, with mini-biographies of folks like Colonel Sanders, Craig Claiborne, and Mahalia Jackson. In the end, Edge is using food and food culture to explore what it means to be southern, and how to talk about southern culture.
", "url": "/2019/03/11/the-potlikker-papers/", "date_published": "2019-03-11T00:31:13+00:00", "date_modified": "2019-03-11T00:31:13+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2019/02/08/the-marvels/", "title": "The Marvels by Brian Selznick", "summary": null, "content_text": "If you have never read The Marvels, I will not give too much away, because I would not want to take the experience away from you. But The Marvels exemplifies this. It took me by surprise. I knew nothing about the book when I picked it up. I was not expecting to be moved the way it moved me.When my son was very young, I somehow came across The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I really enjoyed it, not just for the story but for the artwork. I loved the way the book played with the format of a book. It’s a thick book. It looks intimidating and massive (and awesome) on your shelf. Of course, when you open it, you realize it’s full of illustrations.And to be clear, I do not mean the illustrations are illustrating a scene in the book the way you would typically see illustrations in a book. Instead, the drawings are telling significant portions of the story. Imagine reading about the lead up to a chase scene, and then a series of illustrations describing the chase scene and hero’s escape. That’s how the book tells the story, partly in prose and partly in pictures. If my description is not working for you, do yourself a favor and check out Hugo.Brian Selznick followed up Hugo with a book called Wonderstruck. You can spot the two books next to each other a mile away at any library (they’re likely thicker than any of the other books in the juvenile section). Together, they really make a statement. I checked out Wonderstruck once, fully intending to read it but never got around to it. However, my son did and says it’s good so I’ll take his word.That brings me to The Marvels. One day, I noticed it on the shelf and decided to give it a shot.Here, Selznick plays with his format just a bit. Instead of sections of the story being illustrated, the entire first part of the book is a story told in pictures, before switching to a completely different story told in prose. The conclusion of the book turns back to illustrations.The format is admittedly a bit odd and is a slight departure from his first two books. But the story is amazing and, as I say, took me by surprise.The illustrated part of the story describes a family of actors. Beginning in 1766, and following the family generation after generation, all the way up to a tragic fire in 1900.The book then switches to prose and skips ahead to the 1990s. A boy runs away from his privileged home, seeking his uncle in London. He’s never met his uncle and is not sure what to expect. It turns out that his uncle is something of an eccentric who lives alone in a house that he operates as if it is still the nineteenth century. The house is lit by candles and warmed by fires. It is as if time has stopped.You cannot help but wonder how the word story with the uncle and the picture story with the theater family relate and what is the secret connection between these two stories. And that conceit does drive a great deal of the story’s momentum. And as I promised, I will not reveal much except to say that in the end, it does not matter. There are simply more important things to talk about in this book.That is the heartbreaking part of the book, and what really took me by surprise. It really moved me. Families are complicated, and very few are perfect. In real life, not every family is drawn exactly the same, but love for one another binds us all the exact same way. This book hammers that home most delicately.On the surface, this seemed like a simple book. I was not expecting it. And I applaud Brian Selznick.", "content_html": "If you have never read The Marvels, I will not give too much away, because I would not want to take the experience away from you. But The Marvels exemplifies this. It took me by surprise. I knew nothing about the book when I picked it up. I was not expecting to be moved the way it moved me.
When my son was very young, I somehow came across The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I really enjoyed it, not just for the story but for the artwork. I loved the way the book played with the format of a book. It’s a thick book. It looks intimidating and massive (and awesome) on your shelf. Of course, when you open it, you realize it’s full of illustrations.
And to be clear, I do not mean the illustrations are illustrating a scene in the book the way you would typically see illustrations in a book. Instead, the drawings are telling significant portions of the story. Imagine reading about the lead up to a chase scene, and then a series of illustrations describing the chase scene and hero’s escape. That’s how the book tells the story, partly in prose and partly in pictures. If my description is not working for you, do yourself a favor and check out Hugo.
Brian Selznick followed up Hugo with a book called Wonderstruck. You can spot the two books next to each other a mile away at any library (they’re likely thicker than any of the other books in the juvenile section). Together, they really make a statement. I checked out Wonderstruck once, fully intending to read it but never got around to it. However, my son did and says it’s good so I’ll take his word.
That brings me to The Marvels. One day, I noticed it on the shelf and decided to give it a shot.
Here, Selznick plays with his format just a bit. Instead of sections of the story being illustrated, the entire first part of the book is a story told in pictures, before switching to a completely different story told in prose. The conclusion of the book turns back to illustrations.
The format is admittedly a bit odd and is a slight departure from his first two books. But the story is amazing and, as I say, took me by surprise.
The illustrated part of the story describes a family of actors. Beginning in 1766, and following the family generation after generation, all the way up to a tragic fire in 1900.
The book then switches to prose and skips ahead to the 1990s. A boy runs away from his privileged home, seeking his uncle in London. He’s never met his uncle and is not sure what to expect. It turns out that his uncle is something of an eccentric who lives alone in a house that he operates as if it is still the nineteenth century. The house is lit by candles and warmed by fires. It is as if time has stopped.
You cannot help but wonder how the word story with the uncle and the picture story with the theater family relate and what is the secret connection between these two stories. And that conceit does drive a great deal of the story’s momentum. And as I promised, I will not reveal much except to say that in the end, it does not matter. There are simply more important things to talk about in this book.
That is the heartbreaking part of the book, and what really took me by surprise. It really moved me. Families are complicated, and very few are perfect. In real life, not every family is drawn exactly the same, but love for one another binds us all the exact same way. This book hammers that home most delicately.
On the surface, this seemed like a simple book. I was not expecting it. And I applaud Brian Selznick.
", "url": "/2019/02/08/the-marvels/", "date_published": "2019-02-08T00:31:13+00:00", "date_modified": "2019-02-08T00:31:13+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2016/08/12/the-reivers/", "title": "The Reivers", "summary": null, "content_text": "When I began this project with Soldier’s Pay I knew little about The Reivers, except that it was Faulkner’s last novel and that it’s not highly regarded. That’s it. I’ve reached the last book. Twenty novels. I read them all.I had decided to read all of Faulkner’s novels in hopes that something in the creative process would reveal itself. It was heartening to see that everyone starts somewhere and a pleasure to see that indeed, Faulkner improved. It’s fair to say that Faulkner is highly regarded and is frequently referred to as one of the best writers in the English language.I knew there were highs and lows, of course. The Reivers was not his best work, but I enjoyed it. It’s told straightforwardly, and I would certainly qualify it as one of his ‘easiest’ novels.Lucius Priest—a young, sheltered, wealthy boy accompanies Boon Hogganbeck to Memphis. To get there, Boon steals Lucious’ grandfather’s car. On the way, they find that Ned, a black man who works with Boon on the farm, has sneaked along.Boon is wanting to get to Memphis to meet a prostitute he wants to woo. While they stay at a Memphis brothel, Ned disappears to the “black part of town.” Ned trades the car for a horse with a plan to race the horse and win enough money to buy back the car and a bit more to help some of his kin.I could elaborate on much more of the plot, but the point is that Lucius comes of age as he tries to reconcile the world he grew up in with how the wider world actually is. The story has an uncharacteristically upbeat ending for a Faulkner novel, with Boon marrying the woman, Lucius learning a bit about life, and Ned outsmarting them all.It’s an odd one to end with. I suppose everyone wants their last effort to be their best, but there are few artists who can achieve that. However much I enjoyed reading this book, I doubt this would be the book Faulkner would choose to have signed out on.Looking back on all the books I’ve read on this project, I can say undoubtedly that reading them all was worth it.When I began this project, I wondered if I would be able to piece together the process by which Faulkner built up such a rich world. Would consuming them in the order he wrote them, reveal anything new? When I began this project, I wondered if there would be a little light shed on how such a rich story developed. I wondered if Yoknapatawpha County would seem to emerge fully-formed, or if it would seem a little immature at first, developing over time. I wondered where the highs and lows in such a long career would be–would it peak, never to again reach the same height? or would the quality wax and wane over time?I’ve now completed the project and I feel now that even if I don’t have those answers assuredly, I at least am a bit closer to understanding a career’s worth of creative work.", "content_html": "When I began this project with Soldier’s Pay I knew little about The Reivers, except that it was Faulkner’s last novel and that it’s not highly regarded. That’s it. I’ve reached the last book. Twenty novels. I read them all.
I had decided to read all of Faulkner’s novels in hopes that something in the creative process would reveal itself. It was heartening to see that everyone starts somewhere and a pleasure to see that indeed, Faulkner improved. It’s fair to say that Faulkner is highly regarded and is frequently referred to as one of the best writers in the English language.
I knew there were highs and lows, of course. The Reivers was not his best work, but I enjoyed it. It’s told straightforwardly, and I would certainly qualify it as one of his ‘easiest’ novels.
Lucius Priest—a young, sheltered, wealthy boy accompanies Boon Hogganbeck to Memphis. To get there, Boon steals Lucious’ grandfather’s car. On the way, they find that Ned, a black man who works with Boon on the farm, has sneaked along.
Boon is wanting to get to Memphis to meet a prostitute he wants to woo. While they stay at a Memphis brothel, Ned disappears to the “black part of town.” Ned trades the car for a horse with a plan to race the horse and win enough money to buy back the car and a bit more to help some of his kin.
I could elaborate on much more of the plot, but the point is that Lucius comes of age as he tries to reconcile the world he grew up in with how the wider world actually is. The story has an uncharacteristically upbeat ending for a Faulkner novel, with Boon marrying the woman, Lucius learning a bit about life, and Ned outsmarting them all.
It’s an odd one to end with. I suppose everyone wants their last effort to be their best, but there are few artists who can achieve that. However much I enjoyed reading this book, I doubt this would be the book Faulkner would choose to have signed out on.
Looking back on all the books I’ve read on this project, I can say undoubtedly that reading them all was worth it.
When I began this project, I wondered if I would be able to piece together the process by which Faulkner built up such a rich world. Would consuming them in the order he wrote them, reveal anything new? When I began this project, I wondered if there would be a little light shed on how such a rich story developed. I wondered if Yoknapatawpha County would seem to emerge fully-formed, or if it would seem a little immature at first, developing over time. I wondered where the highs and lows in such a long career would be–would it peak, never to again reach the same height? or would the quality wax and wane over time?
I’ve now completed the project and I feel now that even if I don’t have those answers assuredly, I at least am a bit closer to understanding a career’s worth of creative work.
", "url": "/2016/08/12/the-reivers/", "date_published": "2016-08-12T00:31:13+00:00", "date_modified": "2016-08-12T00:31:13+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2016/06/20/the-mansion/", "title": "The Mansion", "summary": null, "content_text": "When I began this little project, I was just wondering if reading everything Faulkner wrote in the order he wrote it would give a little insight into how he wrote. What I didn’t expect was for Faulkner himself to weigh in on the discussion. The Mansion opens with this statement: This book is the final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925. Since the author likes to believe, hopes that his entire life’s work is a part of a living literature, and since “living” is motion, and “motion” is change and alteration and therefore the only alternative to motion is un-motion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four year progress of this particular chronicle; the purpose of this note is simply to notify the reader that the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will—contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then. — W.F.I don’t know that I can add much to that.I read the Snopes trilogy years ago, and I remembered it as something of a trudge. I must have gotten bogged down in The Town, because I greatly enjoyed this conclusion to the Flem Snopes saga.In short, The Hamlet tells the story of how Flem Snopes moved to Jefferson as a tenant farmer, and ends up a shopkeep. Rising above the shop owner’s own son, he eventually marries the shop owner’s daughter. By the end of the book, he’s swindled three townsfolk into buying a mansion for much more money than it’s worth. The Town continues the story, with Flem rising up to running the town’s power plant and eventually he takes over as president of the bank. At this point, he has completely supplanted the town’s established hierarchy.The Mansion finishes the story. Flem has risen to a place of prestige high enough to have no real worries, except that one day his cousin Mink will be released from prison. In The Hamlet, Mink Snopes was sent to prison and felt betrayed by Flem. In The Mansion Mink is released, and indeed seeks revenge. The conclusion of The Mansion story ends the way you’d expect. Flem pretty much sees it coming.In the preamble, Faulkner admits to “discrepancies and contradictions”. And he concludes this is because over the course of thirty-four years, authors learn new things and minds and hearts change. The Snopes Trilogy paints a vivid picture of a fictional town dealing with change. And here, at the penultimate book that Faulkner wrote, he has indeed created a living literature that is still relevant with a story that is still in motion.Read all of the Faulkner Reviews.", "content_html": "When I began this little project, I was just wondering if reading everything Faulkner wrote in the order he wrote it would give a little insight into how he wrote. What I didn’t expect was for Faulkner himself to weigh in on the discussion. The Mansion opens with this statement:
This book is the final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925. Since the author likes to believe, hopes that his entire life’s work is a part of a living literature, and since “living” is motion, and “motion” is change and alteration and therefore the only alternative to motion is un-motion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four year progress of this particular chronicle; the purpose of this note is simply to notify the reader that the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will—contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then. — W.F.
I don’t know that I can add much to that.
I read the Snopes trilogy years ago, and I remembered it as something of a trudge. I must have gotten bogged down in The Town, because I greatly enjoyed this conclusion to the Flem Snopes saga.
In short, The Hamlet tells the story of how Flem Snopes moved to Jefferson as a tenant farmer, and ends up a shopkeep. Rising above the shop owner’s own son, he eventually marries the shop owner’s daughter. By the end of the book, he’s swindled three townsfolk into buying a mansion for much more money than it’s worth. The Town continues the story, with Flem rising up to running the town’s power plant and eventually he takes over as president of the bank. At this point, he has completely supplanted the town’s established hierarchy.
The Mansion finishes the story. Flem has risen to a place of prestige high enough to have no real worries, except that one day his cousin Mink will be released from prison. In The Hamlet, Mink Snopes was sent to prison and felt betrayed by Flem. In The Mansion Mink is released, and indeed seeks revenge. The conclusion of The Mansion story ends the way you’d expect. Flem pretty much sees it coming.
In the preamble, Faulkner admits to “discrepancies and contradictions”. And he concludes this is because over the course of thirty-four years, authors learn new things and minds and hearts change. The Snopes Trilogy paints a vivid picture of a fictional town dealing with change. And here, at the penultimate book that Faulkner wrote, he has indeed created a living literature that is still relevant with a story that is still in motion.
When I think of Faulkner, I have always thought of the Bundrens or the Compsons or the Sutpens, but the saga of the Snopes clan is likely what Faulkner is most famous for. The Town is the second book in the Snopes trilogy and is often bound together with The Hamlet and The Mansion and published as Snopes.
That’s not to say you can’t just ready any of the three. They all stand alone. Perhaps some literary nerd out there has a Machete Order version you could follow, but I would suggest you read them in the order of The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion.
I can’t say much about The Town. It’s classic Faulkner. The story of the Snopes family moving into Jefferson is told from the point of view of several unreliable narrators—all of whom we’ve met before. This is a technique Faulkner knows and loves, and at this point has mastered.
The country sewing machine salesman, Ratliff, the erudite lawyer Gavin Stevens, the young Charles Mallison, all take turns telling the story of Flem Snopes taking over the town bank. They watch and conjecture–each from their own perspective–Flem’s motives. Sometimes they’re wrong, sometimes they’re right.
The symbolism is plain. Jefferson (representing the Southern United States) is changing (in the aftermath of the civil war). More and more Snopeses are moving in. The white aristocrats of the town are losing their position–much to the chagrin of the white aristocrats.
The plot is not important. The story telling is. Let’s face it, I’m eighteen books in, and I’m having a hard time finding something new to say. The interesting thing is thinking back on Soldiers Pay and Mosquitoes were fun but a bit rough around the edges. As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury by contrast felt wild, experimental and exciting.
Now, Faulkner is at the end of his career writing The Town. The wildness and the experimental are gone, replaced by refinement and attentiveness.
Faulkner has grown, as all writers should. This book may not have been as marvelous as The Sound and the Fury. It did not come out of the blue like Absolam, Absolam. It simply was a writer showing that he had mastered this style, and had created a fully fleshed out world in the process
The first Faulkner story I ever read was a short story called A Rose For Emily. I read it from a college literature anthology. It wasn’t assigned, but a friend had recommended it. As you can guess, I was hooked. I turned immediately to As I Lay Dying, before following it with The Sound and the Fury.
I loved Faulkner’s odd (to me) point-of-view. I loved the shifting perspectives. I loved the altered timelines. I loved the imaginary world he built. I loved the stories.
When I committed to reading all of Faulkner’s novels, I wanted to learn more about how he grew as a writer. I wanted to see how that imaginary world was built. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about the development of his world from this project.
But, I’ve read 17 of his novels in a row (three more remain) and as you can imagine, I’m starting to become almost too accustomed to his style. His voice has become familiar.
A Fable would have to really be something to surprise me. And it did. Before I began this project, I had already read many of Faulkner’s novels; A Fable was not one of them. I knew little about it. It did not come with the customary set of characters, as it’s not set in Yoknapatawpha. It is set in Europe during World War I.
A regiment of the French Army refuses to take part in an assault against the German Army. The Germans likewise refuse to attack. This non-violence spreads, and it turns out a lone French corporal is spreading the gospel of non-violence.
Well, he’s not exactly a lone French corporal, he has—you guessed it—twelve followers. This of course does not go well with the higher ranks whose job it is to wage war. They find out about the saintly corporal from a Judas—I mean traitor—among the twelve followers.
This gives most of the characters a lot to think and talk about. A Fable is a dense and somewhat rambling novel filled with symbolism and allegory. Although my description of the story may seem straightforward, I assure you the book is not. It is a difficult read.
The few Non-Yoknapatawpha books on this list I have not enjoyed as much as the Yoknapatawpha stories. A Fable is different. This is a terrific book, clearly my favorite of the Non-Yoknapatawpha stories. I’m sure I didn’t pick up on everything, and I sense that there is a lot more to enjoy upon second-reading. I’ll read it again someday.
My friends and I frequently like to quote “My mother is a fish,” but “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” is probably Faulkner’s best-known line. And it appears in Requiem for a Nun. And that is all I knew of Requiem for a Nun. I had in my head that it must have been one of the odd Faulkner books that do not take place in Yoknapatawpha County. However, it is thoroughly Yoknapatawpha.
This book simply somehow escaped my attention. I expressed a bit of disappointment in the previous book, Intruder in the Dust because it lacked much of the typical wacky narrative structure that most Faulkner books have. Requiem for a Nun makes up for it.
After picking it up from the library, my wife opened the book before I got to it. She furrowed her brown and cracked a smile: “Well, this looks like a doozy.” She then explained that it was a not a novel, it was a play.
Indeed, the main story line is presented as a drama, complete with instructions on how the lighting should be and explanations of what the staging symbolizes. Of course, the book doesn’t open as a play. It opens as a novel. The first fifty or so pages are about the building of the Yoknapatawpha Courthouse. We then switch to drama-mode, which is the main narrative, and learn that this book is actually a sequel to Sanctuary.
Temple Drake is now married and has two children. One of which has just been murdered. Sanctuary is dark and has a plot that’s off-putting and disturbing, to say the least. I would not want to say that Requiem for a Nun is any more pleasant.
Rather than rehash the storyline here (which I actually found implausible, and much of the book was lost on me), let me talk about the narrative structure. The opening scene, which details how the county courthouse came to be was a delight. It mostly involved finding a proper lock to fit a jail cell door and was appropriately light-hearted and filled with humor. Each of the sections written in prose, concern the history of the county. The drama section of the novel takes place in the county’s contemporary time.
The majority of the novel, and the main narrative, was presented as a play. And it mostly worked, as long as the characters were speaking. However the long passages of action were written as stage directions, and reading them becomes tedious after only a short while.
But it makes one marvel at the how effective the dialogue is at telling the story with emotion and depth. And knowing that Faulkner was writing scripts for movies at the time, I cannot help but wonder what influence that day job had on Requiem for a Nun.
In any case, I would call Requiem for a Nun a flawed book with a depressing story. But at this point, it’s good to see Faulkner “playing” with writing again.
So far in this little experiment, Intruder In The Dust has turned out to be the hardest of the books to write about. Not because Intruder In The Dust is bad, or good, or mediocre, or hard to understand, rather because it’s the fourteenth Faulkner novel I’ve now read in a row. I think I’ve reached a point where the books (at least momentarily) have ceased to surprise.
Again, this is no condemnation of the book. I enjoyed Intruder In The Dust quite a bit. I just don’t know that I have much to say about it.
So, let me talk about someone completely different from Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock is one of my favorite movie directors, and no one could make a plausible argument that he isn’t one of the most highly regarded directors of all time. He was a working director. The IMDb credits him as having directed 69 films. No artist—commercial or otherwise—produces that many works and have every one be a masterpiece.
Topaz, for example, is an Alfred Hitchcock movie that is not all that great. Sure, you can argue that even bad Hitchcock is better than most movies. But if you never saw Psycho, or Rear Window or North by Northwest, and you knew Hitchcock only through Topaz, you may wonder what all the hubbub is about.
So it goes with Faulkner. He wrote throughout his life. It’s how he earned his living. As such, not every thing he wrote was a working of staggering genius.
Slight tangent: My copy of Intruder In The Dust notes on the back cover that it was published six years after his previous novel–the longest period Faulkner went without publishing a new novel. This is due to the fact that at the time he was trying to earn money by writing movies in Hollywood. Novels don’t pay all the bills.
Intruder In The Dust breaks no new ground with Faulkner. He’s not experimenting with form—although I suppose a few passages could be called stream-of-consciousness—nor is he flipping the story around out of chronological order.
It’s a good book. It’s not his best. But it’s not bad. This is what happens when you keep making new stuff.
As writers mature, they often become less experimental. They’ve learned what works, and they stick to it. Faulkner’s no different. His early books—such as Soldier’s Pay and The Sound and the Fury—would suddenly switch voices, tones, and styles. They generally gave the reader the sense that Faulkner was playing around with words–a lot.
As I get into the books he wrote later in his career, I’ve noticed significantly less experimentation. There are fewer and fewer three page italic sentences or sudden jumps backward in time. The later novels like The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms, or The Hamlet have all been pretty straight forward in regard to their storytelling techniques. (Absalom, Absalom! is the notable exception).
And that’s why Go Down, Moses was such a surprise to me. Go Down, Moses is a novel, at least that’s what Faulkner claimed it to be. It’s usually (and perhaps more accurately) called a collection of short stories. But I’m willing to take it as a novel. The stories—although wildly different from one another in time period, point of view, and style—tell one cohesive story. After reading several straight-forward books (and a couple I didn’t particularly enjoy) this was a nice change.
Go Down Moses tells the story of both the black and white branches of the McCaslin family. It explores the relationships of whites and blacks, and specifically interracial relationships. It clearly should be regarded as one of Faulkner’s masterpieces.
It’s impossible to talk about this book without addressing race. This book is essentially about race. The first story, Was, is about a white family trying to recapture an escaped slave named Tomey’s Turl. We learn later in the story, Turl frequently escapes because he wants to visit the woman he loves, who is owned by a neighbor.
The book contains seven short-stories, the longest and most famous is The Bear. Although Faulkner often keeps the mood as light as one could, with a bit of humor here and there, the rest of the book is just as heartbreaking as Was.
A particularly poignant and painful scene takes place in The Bear; a young man reads through an old ledger. The ledger notes the purchases and sales and brief genealogies of slaves his family has owned. This scene also reveals the nature of who Tomey’s Turl is… but I won’t spoil it here. Suffice it to say, that this little scene alone could act as a damning critique of the evil institution of slavery and equally evil American South for allowing it to happen.
The scene is near the end of the novel, and its placement in this part of the book is brilliant. You’ve already read 200 odd pages and you’ve gotten to know characters. You’ve seen the characters interact and seen the struggles they’ve had through different eras and told through different points of view. And after all this, you read their names in a ledger book, being bought and sold. It’s brilliant writing and devastating to read.
I’m not going to go in to detail about all the plot lines and how each story seems to stand on its own, yet they are all clearly part of a whole. I’ll simply ponder this: Faulkner could not have written this book earlier in his career. I don’t think he had the chops yet. This is Faulkner at the top of his game, having learned from some stumbles. And knowing when to experiment, and knowing when to unveil things.
If you’ve seen the 1958 film The Long Hot Summer with Paul Newman you may think you have an idea about this story. The opening titles (if memory serves) mention that it’s based on Faulkner’s The Hamlet. But if you know anything about adaptations you know there’s usually a lot to cut out and change in order to make it a suitable story for screen.
I’m not meaning this as a dig at The Long Hot Summer; I’m merely saying that it’s nothing like the material upon which it’s based. Faulkner’s book is a small epic telling how an entire clan of no-good Snopes moves into a town and disrupts the social order. Over the course of the book you see family dynamics shaken, horse trading swindles, rises to power, falls from power, fake confederate coins used to sell a house, a very fine sewing machine salesman and double crosses involving murder and, well, more horse trading. It doesn’t all fit into a movie, and if it did, it wouldn’t make sense.
I imagine it would make a great mini-series though. I could see it running on Masterpiece Theater, but somehow Dickens, the Brontë Sisters and Jane Austin seem to have a lock on the classic literature made into television miniseries market.
I’m not sure why the English tales get all the PBS love. Faulkner’s stories have just as many torrid family histories and secrets-that-are-best-kept-secret, powerful men fearing a fall from stature, and all the satire of social order you could want. Plus, in a Faulkner story you may get the occasional sickly horse that’s blown up with a tire pump in order to be made to appear plump. You don’t get that with Brontë sisters.
It also should be noted that The Hamlet is the first of the Snopes Trilogy. A trilogy that would be completed with The Town and the The Mansion. I read them all years ago and remembered them as being a slog. I remembered wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed The Hamlet. It’s funny, it’s sad, it tells a meaningful and interesting story. It shines a little proverbial light on a past era and struggles with class.
The Snopes clan is painted generally as villains, although I root for them. They’re the outcasts of the South. They’re the new order, coming in and tearing down the old aristocratic society (even if they are terrible people).
Perhaps as I get into the next books in the trilogy (coming later) the Snopes’ story will begin to be a bit of a slog as I remembered it. But for now, it’s good to have good Faulkner back, especially after reading The Unvanquished and The Wild Palms.
When I began this project (reading every Faulkner novel in chronological order) I imagined noting the half-way point. Faulkner wrote twenty novels, and the The Unvanquished would have been the half-way point. But that milestone came and went and it slipped my mind.
It’s just as well. This is the post on The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem], and I do not have much to say about this book, so let me note that we’ve crossed the midway point.
When I began reading these novels, I wasn’t sure what I’d learn. Would it diminish my feelings on Faulkner’s writing to see more clearly the progress of a writer? Would some kind of mystery be revealed that ruined the magic? Or would it show how his writing developed and give me renewed appreciation?
I cannot say that I think of Faulkner’s writing to be any better or worse. It is clear that he improved through his career (at least so far). His writing became freer (I cannot say tighter or more concise), more experimental, yet at the same time, more controlled. The early novels really read like early novels. The writing, although not easier or tighter is more refined. And it has been a pleasure to see the progress.
Faulkner’s writing is notoriously difficult. The sentences are long and complex. He uses fairly obscure words (I admit to consulting a dictionary at times). An oft-quoted line from a Wes Anderson movie comes to mind: He writes in a kind of obsolete vernacular.
And the obsolete vernacular works for the Yoknapatawpha stories. The language does sound kind of obsolete. The dialog does seem to use lots of vernacular. And the obsolete vernacular takes you to a place that seems mythic and historical… in an odd way.
This, I think, is why I find the non-Yoknapatawpha stories so odd. The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] is not set in Yoknapatawpha County, and the Faulknerian style of writing just seemed terribly tedious in this “real-world” setting.
The book is two stories. Told side by side in alternating chapters. The first (The Wild Palms) involves a couple having an affair and traveling the country together. The woman is pregnant. The second (Old Man) involves a prisoner who is forced to rescue victims of a flood. The prisoner rescues a pregnant woman. Obviously, these two stories are related and become intertwined.
The story is not so different from one that could have taken place in Yoknapatawpha County. So why does it seem so incongruous? I don’t know. Perhaps I only like Yoknapatawpha County. Perhaps the only thing I like about Faulkner is the mythical world he built. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Faulkner. But, I’m past the half-way point.
Picking up The Unvanquished after putting down Absolam, Absolam felt like picking up some light summer reading. Imagine it: a tale told in chronological order by a reliable narrator. At this point in the project, it seems absurd.
But that is what The Unvanquished is, a straightforward story told by one narrator. And to be honest, it was kind of a breath of fresh air. It took considerable less brain space to get through and understand.
The Unvanquished has seven main sections, and is essentially a bit of an adventure story. It is a story of the Sartoris family who we first met in Sartoris (and the name has been mentioned in several Yoknapatawpha County books since then.) Another name that has appeared several times is Snopes, and the character Ab Snopes is a main character in this book.
Let’s take a step for a moment out of our chronological Faulkner project and consider what we know in the fullness of time. In the mythology of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the Sartoris family represents the old South’s upright aristocracy and the Snopes family represents the new South’s shady, greedy, amoral capitalists. The Unvanquished is the first time this duality gets really played up. One wonders if at this time Faulkner had already created these characters or if they are simply coming more into focus as he writes these books. In The Unvanquished, the tension between the Sartoris and the Snopes is clearly defined, and it is getting better developed.
The Unvanquished is a story that takes place during the Civil War. The opening scene is of two twelve-year-old boys—one a black slave, one the son of the other’s owner—playing together in the dirt. The book not only takes place during the Civil War, but the Civil War itself seems to be a character. It ravages towns, leaving the characters to happen upon burned houses. It causes families to have to flee and take risks. It drives much of the action… which brings me to matters of race.
You cannot speak long on Faulkner without needing to speak on the issue of race. It’s a theme that shows itself repeatedly though Faulkner’s work. From time to time, the language Faulkner uses gets uncomfortable. But for his time Faulkner had progressive or liberal views on the matter of race; and it is the progressiveness of his thinking that makes The Unvanquished seem a bit out of sync with his other books. It is disappointing at times.
With the exception of Ringo, most of the black characters are stock characters without much depth. Many of the slaves seem to be happy and contented to be slaves. Although there are poignant moments (for instance a scene where the main characters meet a group of fleeing slaves) any discussion of race seems more than a bit off in this book.
Outside of the race issues, the book is quite good. I don’t like to go deep into story-lines, but here’s the gist of it. It begins as an amusing story how an elderly lady (the narrator’s grandmother) cons the union army out of thousands of dollars and horses. She ultimately meets her demise at the hands of a villainous confederate, and the story shifts into a revenge tale.
The Unvanquished seems to occupy an odd space in the order, following Light in August and Absolam, Absolam. If I had not known better, I would have assumed The Unvanquished came much earlier in his career. The style of writing and themes seem a bit less mature.
It is one of the few Faulkner novels with a driving plot. It is not Faulkner at his most enlightened, but I suppose it is nevertheless a fascinating (if sometimes uncomfortable) look at Civil War-era race relations.
I imagine that as a child everyone heard stories about some particular person. Maybe it was a crazy uncle, maybe it was a neighbor who had a breakdown, maybe it was a town kook. Everyone knows someone they’ve never met. Everyone knows someone only through stories. Everyone has someone they seem to understand only because the stories about them are so vivid. Absolam, Absolam tells the story of Thomas Sutpen much like that…
Wait. Let me start over.
Every time I read Absolam, Absolam I try to imagine it as a movie and cannot. The only way to make a movie from this story would be to have the main character out of focus the entire time…
Wait. No. Let me start over.
I was mid-way through the book and on the third page of a sentence when I realized how unsatisfying the picture of Thomas Sutpen really is. The clearest description of the man is told by two college students in the second half of the book, and Thomas Sutpen had been long dead before these two were born…
Wait. No. Let me start again.
I’ve read Absolam, Absolam many times. I lost count a while back. I remember struggling through it the first time and walking away rather unimpressed. It’s difficult. It’s confusing. It’s unpleasant. It’s not good bedtime reading, it simply requires too much energy. But, I returned to it. I think out of pride. I didn’t want to be so utterly lost in a book.
What I didn’t realize the first time through was that the entire story is told in the first three pages. The following 200 or so pages are different characters trying their best to understand it and fill in the missing pieces.
Superfluous to say at this point, but the story is not linear. Thomas Sutpen moved to Yoknapatawpha County nearly a century before the “present.” He cheats a native american out of 100 acres of land which becomes known as Sutpen’s Hundred and he promptly leaves. He returns later with slaves that do not speak English and builds a house on his land and leaves again. He returns later with furniture and goes into town to find a wife. The ruthlessness with which he pursues his “design” still haunts the town.
The book opens with “Miss Rosa” calling Quentin to her home to tell her version of the story. We then hear the story from Quentin’s father. Later, Shreve (Quentin’s roommate at Harvard) tries his best to piece together the fragments of the story Quentin has told him. We’ve met Quentin before (in The Sound and the Fury) and are already familiar with his academic, meandering, and philosophical way of telling a story. Shreve and Quentin hash out the story in Boston more clearly than anyone else.
About the fourth time I read Absolam, Absolam I realized something about the Shreve and Quentin conversation: it must take place only months before Quentin’s suicide in The Sound and the Fury. And Quentin is quietly beginning to expound on the issues that clearly trouble him in The Sound and the Fury.
Thus, Absolam, Absolam is when Yoknapophwa County first feels like a real place. There is something about the half-remembered stories the characters tell that makes the history seem fully realized. This is the book where Faulkner’s collection of stories become greater than their sum. His writing becomes myth.
I will not go into great detail here about the themes in the story. I could go on forever. It’s brilliant. Thomas Sutpen obviously represents Southern plantation life itself. And this book chronicles its rise and fall. Among about a thousand motifs, the book touches on incest and dives deep into racism. Sutpen’s fall is deserved, as was the south’s. And Absolam, Absolam pulls no punches.
I’ve admitted to reading this book many times, so it seems needless to point out that I love it. It’s one of my all-time favorite stories and the desire to drone on about it for pages is strong. I don’t even know how to end this.
No. Wait. Can I start over?
Let us for a moment consider the sequence. I just finished the masterful Light in August and I know the next book is Absalom, Absalom!–one of my all-time favorite books. In this era, Faulkner was clearly at the top of his game, writing some of the greatest American books of the twentieth century. And in between two of his masterpieces is Pylon.
I had never read this book. I knew nothing of the story. I knew the book only by reputation. It’s one of the few that is not set in Yoknapatawpha county and it is generally regarded as his worst or second-worst book.
But I found myself being fascinated by how a book like this could exist in this place in the bibliography. Through As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary and Light in August you see a writer gaining his voice and writing with increasing confidence. And you see him developing recurring themes that would bind all his work together into an anthology of stories that would ultimately be greater than the sum of its parts. And then there’s Pylon out of nowhere.
Consider Sanctuary. Faulkner himself called it a cheap idea. He was needing money so he wrote a sensational novel that would be sure to at least get some attention. But in Sanctuary Faulkner stays within his own style and although the story may seem cheap, but the novel at least seems like it belongs. And then there’s Pylon out of nowhere.
Coming off of the deeper themes of Light in August, he must have been stewing on what would become Absalom, Absalom!, Pylon must have been an attempt to have a little bit of fun. Unfortunately it comes across as an odd-ball in all of Faulkner’s other work.
None of that is to say that Pylon is a terrible, unreadable disaster. Through a lot of the book it is downright entertaining, if not just a wee bit forgettable. The story involves a pilot, Roger, and his unconventional family. The “family” consists of himself, his wife, his child and his “jumper” who live off his winnings as an airplane racer and barnstorming. The novel opens with them needing money from an upcoming race.
Family lives paycheck to paycheck (which do not come at predictable times), earning just barely enough to survive. To make matters worse, Roger’s airplane is a bit out of date. Consider Jiggs, the mechanic’s, words:
“We might if they would let us fly it in the two hundred cubic inch,” Jiggs said. He took three quick draws from the cigarette stub like daring a stick at a snake and snapped it through the stillopen door as a though it were the snake, or maybe a spider, and opened the paper. “Ship’s obsolete. It was fast two years ago, but that’s two years ago. We’d be O.K. now if they had just quit building racers when they finished the one we got. There aint another pilot out there except Shumann that could have even qualified it.”
Roger makes up from having out-of-date equipment by taking extrordinary risks. He stays competitive in races by rounding markers (pylons) in tighter corners than fellow pilots dare.
Racing aside, the family are barnstormers and put on exhibitions. His wife is a former jumper. And the current jumper is his wife’s lover. This ménage à trois living arrangement attracts the attention of a local reporter who wants to revitalize his floundering career with a story about the group.
The reporter (whose name I forget, he is almost always referred to as “the reporter”) follows the family for a bit, and his study and the relationship between the group makes up the bulk of the story. Normally, Faulkner pays relatively little attention to action sequences, instead choosing to explore relationships, human nature, social justice and society. This is where Faulkner usually excels, however, in this book the opposite is true. The exploration of social taboos falls flat, but the airplane races are exciting. Seriously, I genuinely enjoyed the action sequences.
Far more interesting than the book is conjecturing what Faulkner must have been thinking and feeling at the time. It’s a well-known fact that he was obsessed with aviation. He joined the British Armed Forces (and claimed to have joined the Royal Flying Corps) during the first world war, but never saw action. He wrote his first novel about fighter pilots returning from war. Pylon should seem like a natural fit.
Every author, musician or artists deserves the right to try something a little different every now and again. He could have been simply “worn out” from such an emotional heavy book like Light In August. Maybe he really was wanting to return to a simpler subject.
And I should certainly not give him a hard time. He wrote four straight novels that were excellent, but then there’s Pylon out of nowhere.
Curious, curious, curious.
If you know nothing else about William Faulkner, you probably know this, he wrote about the southern United States. And he wrote about the relationships between class and race. And Light in August is the book where he takes these subjects head-on.
In some ways, Light in August could be called the quentisential Faulkner. The book dispenses with strict chronology, telling most of the backstory in a flashback, with a couple of shifts in narrator. The story ends in disturbing violence. And he speaks about the way whites treat blacks in the south in the thirties.
I read Light in August a decade or so ago. I remembered most of the storyline and that it was good. I was surprised this time around just how good it is. Faulkner found his stride with The Sound and the Fury. Now, three novels later he is sprinting with what seems the lightest of ease. Every sentence seems a pleasure to read, and sometimes to parse (and it being Faulkner, many of the sentence require a great deal of parsing).
Take the opening of chapter six.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. 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 of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
The personification of Memory and Knowing continues through most of the book, making appearances here and there. Faulkner also peppers the book with compound words like thightall and childtrebling and sootbleakened. I also noticed a lot of em-spaces after sentences, indicating pauses in speech or in thought, or changes of tense. I believe I remember seeing some em-spaces mid-sentences, but thumbing through it now, I don’t see any. I can only imagine the editor must have kept a bottle of aspirin close by when working on this book.
Faulkner is not easy on the reader here either. There are no wild shifts in time and space as there are in The Sound and the Fury. There are no stream of consciousness experiments. Punctuation does not fall away to create pages long sentences. But Light in August is difficult nonetheless. The sentences are long and take some time (at least for me) to break down and understand.
The plot is dark and violent. There is enough foreshadowing to tell early on that it will not end pleasantly. There are many characters. A young, pregnant woman looking for the father of her unborn child. Byron Bunch, a preachy moralist who acts as a protector to Lena. Lucas Burch, a bootlegger who is the father of the child and lives with Joe Christmas in a cabin. And a disgraced former minister.
But the story centers around Joe Christmas. Christmas is a mysterious fellow who shows up in town and gets work at a planing mill. In a long flashback, it is revealed that Christmas is an orphan. He knows nothing of this background, but because of an incident in the orphanage he has reason to believe he has black ancestry.
Much of the story I will not reveal here. It’s best to read it for yourself. But Faulkner uses this set up to write a book that touches on race, class and gender. A very real conflict in Christmas’ mind is his own struggle to find an identity.
Many of the characters have backgrounds that haunt them. Many back stories are expanded in flashbacks, and all these characters suffer from legacies and complex personal histories. So many of the characters are loners, running from things that haunt them.
Light in August is clearly focused on race and class, but it is a lot more than that. Every character is fleshed out and complex themes bind them together.
Coming off of Sanctuary, Faulkner must have been wanting to run off some pent up energy. Light in August is bursting at the seams with symbolism, social commentary and fun wordplay.
I read this book years ago, and I remember liking it. But after this reading, I have to reassess it. It iss not a book I like. It is a masterpiece.
Sanctuary is possibly Faulkner’s most controversial (or at least infamous) novel. I had read this book years ago and I remember thinking that it was easy to understand and a quick read, for a Faulkner novel. In this chronological reading project, I looked forward to it as a nice break from the difficult stream-of-consciousness and untrustworthy narrators of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. It was Faulkner’s first commercially successful book and Faulkner himself called the book a potboiler.
But, there was no getting around the subject matter. The plot is inherently horrific and at times truly terrifying. I knew it was not going to be ‘light reading,’ as opposed to ‘easy’ reading. As I made my way through the first five novels, I knew I would be getting to this rotten stuff sooner or later.
On a date of sorts, the young debutante Temple Drake and local bachelor Gowan Stevens are in a car accident—Stevens is an alcoholic and has decided to stop the date to search for moonshine. After the accident, they are discovered by Popeye, an extremely dangerous and sinister man who escorts them to the bootlegger’s house. Stevens spends the night at the house—getting more and more drunk—despite Temple’s pleading to leave. Over the course of the night, Temple meets a variety of characters, and there is enough foreshadowing to know that things will not end well for Temple.
Perhaps because I’ve gotten older. Perhaps because I see the world a bit different these days. Perhaps it was simply the mood I was in. But this time round, I had a hard time getting through the first quarter of the book. And to be sure, the first quarter is strangely terrifying. Faulkner paints a terrible and menacing picture and seems to do so with glee.
A murder happens and other horrifying events unfold. And the book takes on the plotting of a detective novel. A lawyer, Horace Benbow, becomes interested in the case and involves himself. Sanctuary takes the structure of a fine legal thriller. And in a strange twist, the hero (Benbow), who typically would be saving the day, turns out to be a terrible attorney. He loses the case. Even though this ends the novel, trust me, I’m not spoiling anything.
Midway through the book a minor subplot develops. On the grounds that it will give his establishment a “bad name” a hotel proprietor throws out the bootlegger’s common-law wife, Ruby. For a couple of chapters Horace attempts to find a place for Ruby and her child to stay. A sad commentary about society and classism emerges. For fear of developing a bad reputation, no one will give shelter to Ruby, even for the sake of a baby. This relatively minor subplot was compelling, sympathetically written and absolutely heartbreaking—classic Faulkner.
To say all this may sound like Sanctuary is a terrible book. It’s not. It’s quite good, both technically and artistically. But I found it oddly off-putting this time around. Faulkner never shies away from dark material, so I cannot say it was purely the violence that turned me off, but rather something about the gleeful menace of this story. But then again, that is probably the whole point of the story and why the book works so well as a thriller.
Faulkner is like wine, jazz or comic books. If you’ve ever been in a room with wine-snobs you know what I mean. Wine enthusiasts can throw out phrases like “a corpulent wine with a finish of currants and raisons.” I’ve heard jazz cats wax poetic about time signatures and argue about the merits of bebop versus modal. I’ve yet to understand the comic book geeks.
Don’t get me wrong, I love every minute of these discussions. And I recognize the fact that in order to talk about things, you must have words for things. Jargon is bound to arise. I secretly wish I could rise to these heights of jazz and wine appreciation. However, the culture of high-level appreciation—and the ten-dollar words associated with it—can unintentionally cause the subject to become intimidating to a new-comer. We get too fixated on finding the right bouquet in a wine and forget that we’re simply supposed to be enjoying how it tastes.
The literary world can be a bit highfalutin as well. Southern gothic literature may not take up a lot of space on the shelf, but it’s a sub-genre that weighs a lot for its size, and William Faulkner casts a long shadow on southern literature. His writing is famously difficult. He experimented with Stream of consciousness writing. He spoke about race-relations in a time of rapidly changing culture.
We can get fixated on these literary aspects—you could even argue that these aspects are the meat of what makes Faulkner cast his long shadow—but we run the risk of missing out on the fact that Faulkner can just be fun to read. As I Lay Dying is a great example. Southern country accents are spelled out so precisely you can practically hear them. The relationships between the “country folk” and the “city folk” is played out in vivid detail. But let’s not talk about that here. Let’s talk about the fact that As I Lay Dying is a fun—and downright comical—book to read.
The Sound and the Fury had four sections, each told from a different point of view. As I Lay Dying takes the concept a bit further. It has 59 chapters, each told by one of 15 characters. None of which can be considered a reliable narrator. Indeed, the fun part of reading the book is simply sussing out who to believe.
I feel obligated in these posts to explain the story of the book. However, with As I Lay Dying this seems disingenuous. To me, the story is not the important part. It’s the characters, and the way the story is revealed that makes the book fun. Also, to tell the story would be to give the impression that the book is dark, heavy and tragic. It is dark and tragic, but it’s also very funny.
The story concerns the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to bury her in Jefferson, a few miles away. The story is told from the point of view of each of the family members and by the neighbors and the townspeople who encounter the Bundrens along the way.
Almost all of the Bundrens have ulterior motives for the trip. One son is using it as an excuse to drop his tools off at a church—so he can stop and do some carpentry work on the way back—and to buy a record player while in town. Another son hopes to buy a toy train and eat some bananas (bananas being unavailable in the country). The father, Anse, himself is hoping to get “some new teeth” so that he can “eat god’s victuals as He intended.” I won’t reveal what the lone daughter is seeking, as that may spoil a bit of the story as it unfolds.
Darl (Addie’s second oldest son) narrates more chapters than anyone else. Much of the story involves a sibling rivalry he has with his younger, illegitimate brother, Jewel. Darl and Jewel are the only members of the family who are going purely to bury their mother.
To say the family encounters troubles along the way would be an understatement. Much bad luck befalls them. But a lot of the bad luck is brought upon themselves due to Anse’s stupidity and laziness.
That is the story, but reciting the story misses the point. The real joy in reading this book is learning the motivations of characters who may be hiding them.
After finishing As I Lay Dying, I read the section in the back called Editor’s Notes. Reading the editor’s notes of a Faulkner book is always a treat. They usually just explain why they, for example, chose to use two consecutive em dashes to represent the passages where Faulkner seemingly just hammered away at the hyphen key. Editing Faulkner must have been a nightmare. Correcting previously published text to accurately reflect Faulkner’s intention must be pretty tedious as well.
The editor’s notes opens:
This volume reproduces the text of As I Lay Dying that has been established by Noel Polk. The copy-text for this novel is William Faulkner’s own ribbon typescript setting copy…
Typical academic stuff. Deeper into the notes, however, was a little nugget I had not realized:
203.24 Yoknapatawpha county] The first appearance of the name of what Faulkner would call “my apocryphal county.”
There, on line 24 of page 203 was the first mention of Yoknapatwpha county. This was the third book set in the county. But this was the first mention of the county by name. I’m not quite sure how I hadn’t noticed that before.
I can only image that things only get richer from here.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree.
So begins “April Seventh, 1928,” the first section of The Sound and the Fury. It is one the most Faulknerian things Faulkner ever wrote. Commonly refered to as “Benjy’s Section,” this is arguably Faulkner’s most famous opening, and rightfully so. Benjy is a mentally disabled man who will narrorate the next 75 pages[1].
Having just read Faulkner’s previous three novels, this book packs quite the wallup. The first three books show that there is something just below the surface, simmering. The Sound and the Fury is where it finally boils over. Faulkner called it his favorite book and it is widely regarded as a masterpeice.
I’ve read The Sound and the Fury many times so it’s hard for me to be totally surpised. But having read his first three just prior it took me by surprise just what a leap it was. The quality of writing and storytelling is an incredible improvement.
The opening of Quentin’s section, for example, is one of favorite paragraphs ever written:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather exruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
The book is divided into four sections:
In typical Faulkner fashion, there are no reliable narrators. Benji is a mentally disabled man who will tell you how he is feeling at any given point in time, normally not in chronological order. Indeed, Benji seems to have very little sense of time, so feelings and events will be told to the reader in no discernable order. Jumps of twenty years can happen in a single sentence, usually indicated only by italics.
Quentin is a confused and suicidal intellectual, dismayed by his sister’s emerging sexuality. Quentin also jumps around in time, and he quite literally tries to stop time by breaking his father’s watch. Quentin’s logorrhea and abstract metaphors are a sudden shock after reading seventy five pages of Benji’s short sentences and limited vocabulary. I remember having a sense of relief having made it through the hard-to-understand Benji section, only to be surprised that Quentin’s section is also very hard to follow.
The third section is narrated by the terribly vengeful, bitter, petty, greedy and wholy unsympathetic younger brother of Quentin and Benji. Jason’s section stays pretty much in the present and follows a straight-forward narrative. If you’re reading this book for the first time, Jason’s section is where things start to make sense. But Jason is an unpleasant person. The opening line of his section sets the tone quickly:
Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.
The last section is finally straight-forward is the only section you can really trust. The first three are filled with the emotions of the narrators and their perspectives are very skewed. The fourth section follows Dilsey, the black servant of the family, as she cares for Benji, prepares breakfast for the family and then attends an Easter Sunday service.
The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil.
The Sound and the Fury is classic Faulkner. The story concerns the Compson family and its downfall. The Compsons were, before the Civil War, an aristricratic family. The grandfather was a Civil War colonel.
But the family is crumbling. The father has died. The oldest son is mentally disabled and has been castrated. The second son has commited suicide. The daughter has been run out of the family for having a child out of wedlock. This is quentissentially Faulkner. And he will revisit this theme many times. A successful family’s decline.
The striking thing about reading these novels chronologically is huge leap in quality that comes with The Sound and the Fury. All of Faulkner’s novels so far have been entertaining. None have been bad. You get a tangible sense that a writer is slowly finding his voice. And that voice begins to roar in The Sound and the Fury. It is considered a masterpiece of American literature for a reason. From the opening lines, all one can think is, “Wow.”
[1] I am referring to the 1992 Modern Library Edition with the corrected text and Faulkner’s appendix.
", "url": "/2014/07/04/the-sound-and-the-fury/", "date_published": "2014-07-04T14:47:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2014-07-04T14:47:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2014/03/18/flags/", "title": "Flags in the Dust", "summary": null, "content_text": "In the third novel, Faulkner introduces Yoknapatawpha County. The southern setting he’s famous for. The world that he would write about for the rest of his life.Sartoris was Faulkner’s third published novel. But, in fact, it was a novel called Flags in the Dust that he wrote in 1927. He took it to his publisher. The publisher was vexed and refused to publish it without a great deal of editing. Flags in the Dust was cut by about eighty pages and published as Sartoris.You can guess how this goes. After Faulkner died, someone dug up his original story and in 1973 Flags in the Dust was published.Originally I had planned on reading Sartoris for this little project. But after thinking it through, I decided that since my original intent was to see the writer grow through each novel. I think the original, unedited, novel would be the best way to see this.I cannot blame the editor for cutting this novel. I enjoyed it greatly, but it is untamed, sprawling and unwieldy. There are a lot of words. It is Faulkner. And I can see an argument for this book being a good introduction to his work. But there are a lot of words.Reading this book was a treat. Characters and places we know will make more appearances later, appear for the first time here. Peabody—the portly country doctor who is too late to save Addie in As I Lay Dying—recommends not cutting a growth off of Bayard’s face in Flags in the Dust. Samson, a farmer many readers would know from As I Lay Dying, and Flem Snopes are also mentioned. I dare say several other characters are introduced in Flags in the Dust that make their way into Faulkner’s later fiction.This is why reading Faulkner is so much fun for me. Any one of his books is fun, but as a whole, the world he created becomes a lot more interesting.In this, his third novel—but first of the Yoknapatawpha County stories—the Sartoris clan is a formerly aristocratic family in decline. John Sartoris was a larger-than-life confederate officer whose descendents are struggling to live up to. The story takes place just after the Great War.Bayard Sartoris (John’s great grandson) served in the airforce during the first World War. His brother is killed during the war and he blames himself. The rest of his life is a tragedy. Faulkner does a wonderful job juxtaposing the Civil War with the First World War, and you can see that he’s still mulling over themes from Soldier’s Pay.But the most remarkable thing to me about this book is on page 181. A short paragraph that has little to do with the storyline of Flags. A paragraph that made me pause. “Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” she asked. This Snopes was a young man, member of a seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten or twelve years had been moving to town in driblets from a small settlement known as Frenchman’s Bend. Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day and without making a ripple in the town’s life, behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country people. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he led his family piece by piece into town. Flem himself was presently manager of the city light and water plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handy-man to the city government; and three years ago, to old Bayard Sartoris’ profane surprise and unconcealed disapproval, he became vice-president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a bookkeeper.There, in one paragraph, in the first Yoknapatawpha book he wrote, Faulkner tells the entire plot of the Snopes Trilogy. The first book in the trilogy is The Hamlet, which is not published for another ten years.Although this snippet of information paragraph has little to do with the story in Flags, it is not at all out of place in this book. As I said earlier, there are a lot of words, and Faulkner likes to talk. I now wonder what other odd snippets I may have missed.I find it remarkable that, seemingly by accident, Faulkner so quickly laid a foundation from which he could draw a career’s worth of stories.Read all of the Faulkner Reviews.", "content_html": "In the third novel, Faulkner introduces Yoknapatawpha County. The southern setting he’s famous for. The world that he would write about for the rest of his life.
Sartoris was Faulkner’s third published novel. But, in fact, it was a novel called Flags in the Dust that he wrote in 1927. He took it to his publisher. The publisher was vexed and refused to publish it without a great deal of editing. Flags in the Dust was cut by about eighty pages and published as Sartoris.
You can guess how this goes. After Faulkner died, someone dug up his original story and in 1973 Flags in the Dust was published.
Originally I had planned on reading Sartoris for this little project. But after thinking it through, I decided that since my original intent was to see the writer grow through each novel. I think the original, unedited, novel would be the best way to see this.
I cannot blame the editor for cutting this novel. I enjoyed it greatly, but it is untamed, sprawling and unwieldy. There are a lot of words. It is Faulkner. And I can see an argument for this book being a good introduction to his work. But there are a lot of words.
Reading this book was a treat. Characters and places we know will make more appearances later, appear for the first time here. Peabody—the portly country doctor who is too late to save Addie in As I Lay Dying—recommends not cutting a growth off of Bayard’s face in Flags in the Dust. Samson, a farmer many readers would know from As I Lay Dying, and Flem Snopes are also mentioned. I dare say several other characters are introduced in Flags in the Dust that make their way into Faulkner’s later fiction.
This is why reading Faulkner is so much fun for me. Any one of his books is fun, but as a whole, the world he created becomes a lot more interesting.
In this, his third novel—but first of the Yoknapatawpha County stories—the Sartoris clan is a formerly aristocratic family in decline. John Sartoris was a larger-than-life confederate officer whose descendents are struggling to live up to. The story takes place just after the Great War.
Bayard Sartoris (John’s great grandson) served in the airforce during the first World War. His brother is killed during the war and he blames himself. The rest of his life is a tragedy. Faulkner does a wonderful job juxtaposing the Civil War with the First World War, and you can see that he’s still mulling over themes from Soldier’s Pay.
But the most remarkable thing to me about this book is on page 181. A short paragraph that has little to do with the storyline of Flags. A paragraph that made me pause.
“Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” she asked. This Snopes was a young man, member of a seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten or twelve years had been moving to town in driblets from a small settlement known as Frenchman’s Bend. Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day and without making a ripple in the town’s life, behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country people. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he led his family piece by piece into town. Flem himself was presently manager of the city light and water plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handy-man to the city government; and three years ago, to old Bayard Sartoris’ profane surprise and unconcealed disapproval, he became vice-president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a bookkeeper.
There, in one paragraph, in the first Yoknapatawpha book he wrote, Faulkner tells the entire plot of the Snopes Trilogy. The first book in the trilogy is The Hamlet, which is not published for another ten years.
Although this snippet of information paragraph has little to do with the story in Flags, it is not at all out of place in this book. As I said earlier, there are a lot of words, and Faulkner likes to talk. I now wonder what other odd snippets I may have missed.
I find it remarkable that, seemingly by accident, Faulkner so quickly laid a foundation from which he could draw a career’s worth of stories.
When the librarian handed over the copy of Mosquitoes he crinkled his forehead. “I don’t think I’ve heard of this one.” I knew it wasn’t Faulkner’s most famous book, but sheesh. Looking at my copy, I immediately noticed that it was old. The title page said it was printed in 1956. The pages were yellowed. On the back cover someone had jotted: “Condition note: Yellowing edges, 1/3/91.” The book itself seemed to be trying to tell me that not many people read this book.
Faulkner wrote twenty novels. Seventeen of those are set in Yoknapatawpha County. And of the Yoknawpathwa stories, many contain overlapping characters. After you’ve read a few Faulkner stories, you get to know the town and you get the feeling you know what you’re getting into. I had no idea what to expect from Mosquitos.
I once heard a story about poets. If you ask two young poets why they write, and one answers “because I have something I want to say to the world.” and the second answers “because I just like playing around with words.” It will be the second who is still writing into old age.
I’m not sure how well that illustration will hold up under close scrutiny, but I am confident most successful writers enjoy playing around with words.
And that is what draws me to Faulkner’s writing. For all the fuss that scholars and English majors make over the world he created or the views of race in the south that Faulkner dwelled upon, he obviously liked to play around with words. And this is very clear in Mosquitos. Mosquitos is a playful book.
If you absolutely must know what the book is about, okay here’s the synopsis: take about a dozen artists, rich people, young people and muses and put them on a boat. That’s the gist of the plot. The rest of the novel is a series of scenes in which they all talk to one another. Many conversations linger on the meaning of art, or life, or sex. And nearly all the characters enjoy sharing their opinion on whatever the subject at hand is.
”Our forefathers reduced the process of gaining money to proverbs. But we have beaten them; we have reduced the whole of existence to fetiches”
”To words of one syllable that look well in large red type,” the Semitic man corrected.
Even though there is a lot of high-minded talk of business and art, most of the men on the yacht are more interested in drinking. Basically the host, Mrs. Maurier, has set up four nights of games and festivities. Whenever one of her activities is to commence, the men sneak out to drink and talk about art (and who they want to have sex with). Over the course of four days this scene is repeated, along with the occasional eloping and midnight skinny dips.
However it would be disingenuous to say that Mosquitos is without deeper substance. The novel has a lot to say about the role of art in society and sexuality. Faulkner talks about sex a lot in this novel and seems earnest in attempting to talk frankly about gender roles. There are feminine men and masculine women. Patricia (“Pat”) has a youthful and androgynous body that both men and women are attracted to. Eva, a poet aboard the yacht, is a lesbian who isn’t shy about entering the male-dominated discussions of art. She dominates intellectually and it is clear that the men are uncomfortable with it.
But what grabbed me in this book was not the deeper themes, but the dialogue. Many of the conversations in the book were funny:
“Or entertainment,” the Semitic man amended. “But why American scene?”
“Because our doings are so much more comical. Other nations seem to be able to entertain the possibility that God may not be a Rotarian or an Elk or a Boy Scout after all. We don’t. And convictions are always alarming, unless you are looking at them from behind.”
The waiter approached with a box of cigars. The Semitic man took one. Mr. Talliaferro finished his dinner with decorous expedition. The Semitic man said:
“My people produced Jesus, your people Christianized him. And ever since you have been trying to get him out of your church. And now that you have practically succeeded, look at what is filling the vacuum of his departure. Do you think that your new ideal of willy-nilly Service without request or recourse is better than your old ideal of humility? No, no”—as the other would have spoken—“I don’t mean as far as results go. The only ones who ever gain by the spiritual machinations of mankind are the small minority who gain emotional or mental or physical exercise from the activity itself, never the passive majority for whom the crusade is set afoot.”
“Catharsis by peristalsis,” murmured the blond young man, who was nurturing a reputation for cleverness. Fairchild said:
“Are you opposed to religion, then—in the general sense, I mean?”
“Certainly not,” the Semitic man answered. “The only sense in which religion is general is when it benefits the greatest number in the same way. And the universal benefit of religion is that it gets the children out of the house on Sunday morning.”
“But education gets them out of the house five days a week,” Fairchild pointed out.
“That’s true, too. But I am not at home myself on those days: education has already got me out of the house six days a week.”
Mosquitos is nothing like any Faulkner book I’ve read. You can certainly see a young writer fiddling around with words and having a fun time doing it. Had Faulkner been like the first poet in my illustration, I doubt that anyone would be thinking much about William Faulkner these days.
I imagine most every American who has made it through high-school has an notion of what Faulkner is all about. William Faulkner casts a long shadow on literature, especially southern literature.
I also imagine that most any American can think of a few things that a Faulkner novel would contain: commentary on the relationships of black and white southerners, the imatation of southern accents, run-on sentences that can go on for multiple pages, an idiot man-child and of course Yoknapatawpha County. You’ll find little of any of that in Soldiers’ Pay.
Soldiers’ Pay is Faulkner’s first novel. It was published in 1926, making him 29 when published. It’s easy to picture a struggling young poet living in New Orleans sitting down and attempting the great American Novel. Attempting something daring, something important, something large. So it’s easy to picture a young William Faulkner, having failed to become a war hero, banging this out on a typewriter.
The plot of the story concerns a solder with a terrible injury returning home from the first world war. But that’s not what the book is about. This book is about how a generation will deal with the aftermath of a terrible war.
The craft of writing has changed a great deal since 1926. We now celebrate precision and brevity. Cormac McCarthy is often compared to Faulkner. But McCarthy is very brief and careful with sentences. Stripping them down to the point where one word removed would make the entire sentence fall apart. McCarthy even removes quotation marks from his writing. We love brief and unadorned writing. Try to use the fewest amount of words to and concisely communicate your point. That is the key to precise writing. Faulkner didn’t get the memo. As my friend Jason Golliher once put it, Faulkner wants to talk to you a while. Faulkner is cutting his teeth in this novel. He’s not William Faulkner, the great literary figure, yet.
Soldiers’ Pay has the reputation of being a not-very-good novel, I would phrase it as a not-very-good-Faulkner-novel. I’ve heard it called a mess, but despite it being the worst of his writing that I’ve read so far, it’s still pretty good.
The book itself is uneven. The first chapter (essentially a interminable train-ride scene involving the characters getting progressively drunk) seems like it doesn’t belong to the rest of the book. The opening of chapter two is a jarring shift in style. Later in the novel, the format of the dialog changes briefly to a play. You get the sense that Faulkner was an eager experimenter and he had to get a few things out of his system.
Shortly after the drunken train ride of chapter one, we find out that the injured solier (Donald Mahon) is engaged. He’s returning home to his fiancé. On the train we meet Joe Gilligan, a fellow soldier, and Mrs Margaret Powers, a recent widow. Gilligan and Mrs Powers know Mahon is dying and decide to accompany Mahon home. We eventually meet Cecily, Mahon’s fiancé. She’s a bit of a fun girl, I imagined a flapper-type. She’s not been faithful, in fact she’s surprised and perhaps disappointed that he’s still alive.
A fat local latin scholar named Januarious Jones argues with Mahon’s father about, well, I pause here to admit: I’m sort of lost as to what Jones has to do with the story. He seems to be there to simply provide some comedic relief as he brags about his powers of seduction.
As the story continues, Mahon’s health rapidly declines. He speaks little. He loses his sight. Meanwhile, Cecily becomes more and more wishy-washy about whether she will follow through with her commitment to marry him.
Without spoiling anything (remember the book is about changing morals and recovering from the war, not the plot) Cecily backs out of the wedding. Eventually Mrs Powers, perhaps out of pity, perhaps out of guilt, agrees to marry Mahon. He receives his “soldiers’ pay”.
The book is heartbreaking, funny, disjointed and sort of a mess. But I enjoyed it. And it clearly gives a promise of greatness to come.
A few months ago I listened to all the records by some of my favorite musicians back-to-back in order of their release. Listening this way gave new insight on how the bands matured (or fell apart) and shed new light on some of the recordings in a way that I had not previously noticed. I then imagined reading all the books a writer had written, in the order that they were written. Would new things be noticed? Would the story unfold in a different way?
So I’ve decided to read every Faulkner novel, back-to-back, in chronological order of writing.
I’ve long been a fan of Faulkner. The first Faulkner story I read was a short story, A Rose for Emily. I read it from an anthology I owned from college. It wasn’t assigned. I don’t remember why I read it. But it grabbed me, and I decided to read more. I followed it with As I Lay Dying and then The Sound and the Fury. I was hooked. I began reading more and more of Faulkner’s work. I started trying to piece together chronologies and family trees in my head, attempting to better understand what was obviously unfolding.
In 2003 I naively built a WordPress theme and named it after my favorite Faulkner character. I suggested a few character names to my wife when we were choosing a name for our kid. She thankfully disallowed such nonsense.
Who knows why I became fascinated by the man’s writing. You could point to his social commentary or to his rich characterizations or his experimentation with stream-of-consconsciousness. Mostly, though, I just like the way he tells story and I enjoy the fictional world he created.
I’ve read most of what Faulkner wrote, but I have by no means completed the collection. Of the nineteen novels Faulkner wrote, there are five I have not read: Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitos, Pylon, The Wild Palms and The Reivers. I am by no means a Faulkner expert, I consider myself someone who’s simply familiar with his work. There is by no means a shortage of people writing about Faulkner (throw a rock in a university’s English department and you’ll hit one), but I’m also committing to writing a review and a probably poor-man’s analysis of each of the books as I complete them. So much about Faulkner’s work has already been written—even Conan O’Brien’s PhD Thesis concerns Faulkner—so I doubt I’ll be able to say anything original. So this is meant to be a take on Faulkner, by a fellow who may be sort of missing the point.
Changing domains was a big deal for me. My reasons were mostly conceptual. After mulling it over for quite a while, I took the leap and moved from pikemurdy.com to the more approriate michaelpurdy.org. “PikeMurdy” always felt like an inside-joke. “MichaelPurdy” is immediately apparent.
But before I did that, I had to also consider what content management system (CMS) to use. Whenever any redesign happens or certainly any shift in content it’s worth reconsidering what you’re using. Is there anything better? Is it worth the change? What do you need to do?
Since this site has been a blog, it has been run by some kind of CMS. For about a month in 2004, I maintained a blog based upon my own CMS (bad idea). At quickly switched to WordPress, I dabbled with Drupal (not for long though) and for the past two years I’ve run it with ExpressionEngine.
But ultimately you must look at what the site is. And this is a simple site, with simple needs. There is one person who updates for it (me). There is one person who writes and edits for it (me). There is one person maintains it (me). And that person (me) is more comfortable writing in HTML in Coda than typing text into a control panel. That person (me) is no expert in databases, and simply getting a local copy of the site running on my own machine that mirrors that of the server is a wee bit more than I am really happy fiddling with. In addition to that, the architecture and structure of the site is very simple. In short, most of the advantages of a content management system are outweighed by the costs of managing a content management system.
So I axed content management.
I still think ExpressionEngine is tremendously good software, and I will happily recommend it to anyone who will listen. However, for the needs of this particular site, it is too much.
The site is now a collection of good old-fashioned HTML files. Of course, that is nuts on its own. Nearly impossible to practically maintain. So I am now using Jekyll to create the HTML files (written in Markdown) locally, and checking that everything is to my liking, before publishing to my server.
I’m not a Ruby expert. And I’m not a command-line wizard. So at first using Jekyll sounded scary. After I did one or two tests of templates and creating a file that I pretended to publish, my fears subsided. It turned out to be easy.
To set up Jekyll on my local machine, I simply followed the instructions.
When it came to building my own site, I looked at how others were doing it. I also caught up on a few liquid template conventions. Having been a long time user of ExpressionEngine and WordPress, I was quick to adapt. The site took no time to build. To publish I use rsync, following instructions that are all over the internet. Using Jekyll turned out to be a way less technical than I feared. And it is certainly well documented.
The most obvious hurdle in switching from a CMS to a collection text files, is getting the hundreds of posts out of a MySQL database and into a collection of files. The files themselves would need only to be tex files (to be saved as .md files) with a bit of YAML at the top.
In my ExpressionEngine setup, I had three main channels for each content type: Collections (my channel for images), Blog (my channel for links elsewhere) and Articles (my channel for things I’ve written).
For a Jekyll post, you must have a text (Markdown) file, with YAML at the top. So I wrote an ExpressionEngine template that would show all of my posts in this format.
{exp:channel:entries channel=\"articles\" limit=\"9999\" rdf=\"off\"}---layout: posttitle: \"{title}\"categories: \t{categories}- {category_name}{/categories}date: {entry_date format='%Y-%m-%d'}summary: {article_excerpt}--- {article_body}<!-- end of post -->{/exp:channel:entries}
Notice that I added the channel-name to the categories. This is how I separate the types of content on the Jekyll site.
After the template was created, all I needed to do is visit the URL of the template in a browser and save the source as a text file. I did this for each of the Channels. I could have used one template, sure, but each of my channels had different fields and field types. This was just quicker.
All that was left to do was to clean up a bit of formatting with some simple find and replace. ExpressionEngine and WordPress wysiwyg editors had both wreaked a bit of HTML havoc on my writing.
To separate each post into a separate text file I followed Funkatron’s example. I created a PHP file and it did the work:
<?php\t$file_str = file_get_contents('./ee_articles.txt');\t \t$split = explode(\"<!-- end of post -->\", $file_str);\t \tforeach($split as $post_str) {\t \t $post_str = trim($post_str);\t \t if ($post_str) {\t $post_pieces = explode('---', $post_str);\t $yaml = trim($post_pieces[1]);\t $yaml_lines = explode(\"\\n\", $yaml);\t foreach ($yaml_lines as $line) {\t if (preg_match(\"/^date:\\s?(\\d\\d\\d\\d-\\d\\d-\\d\\d)$/i\", $line, $matches)) {\t print_r($matches);\t $date = $matches[1];\t }\t if (preg_match(\"/^url_title:\\s?([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)$/i\", $line, $matches)) {\t print_r($matches);\t $slug = $matches[1];\t }\t }\t // write file\t file_put_contents(\"./{$date}-{$slug}.md\", $post_str);\t }\t}?>
I did this for all three files (each ExpressionEngine channel was now a file) and found myself with a lot of markdown files with the proper YAML formatting. Exactly what I wanted.
The next hurdle was the URL structure. ExpressionEngine’s URLs were written domain/channel/post-title
. Jekyll has several URL structure options, but I opted for “pretty” because it was, well, pretty. Also the domain/year/month/day/post-title
structure of post URLs is common and familiar.
The new URLs would have the dates, whereas the previous URLs did not at all. I’m not an HTACCESS expert and I knew of no way to do it, other than redirect each and every old URL to the appropriate new one. But manually write each redirect? No thanks.
So I wrote another template in ExpressionEngine that would write it for me:
RewriteEngine on{exp:channel:entries channel=\"blog|collections|articles|quentin\" limit=\"9999\" rdf=\"off\"}{if channel_short_name == \"blog\"}Redirect 301 {title_permalink='blog/entry'} http://michaelpurdy.org/{entry_date format='%Y/%m/%d'}/{url_title}{/if}{if channel_short_name == \"articles\"}Redirect 301 {title_permalink='articles/entry'} http://michaelpurdy.org/{entry_date format='%Y/%m/%d'}/{url_title}{/if}{if channel_short_name == \"collections\"}Redirect 301 {title_permalink='collections/detail'} http://michaelpurdy.org/{entry_date format='%Y/%m/%d'}/{url_title}{/if}{/exp:channel:entries}
Visiting this template wrote a file that listed each URL and a redirect to the new URL. I am sure there are all kinds of variables that will do this more efficiently in HTACCESS. But this works.
And with that. I was done. Now every article and post on this site is completely static. There is no CMS to maintain. No server requirements at all. No plugins to get working right. No caching. As simple as it gets. And pretty manageable.
Best of all, all of my content is in easy, familiar files. Everything is listed in a file system. No fiddling with with databases. No wondering about the purpose of a random file on the server.
", "url": "/2013/03/25/switching-from-expressionengine-to-jekyll/", "date_published": "2013-03-25T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2013-03-25T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2013/03/14/things-i-have-learned/", "title": "Things I Have Learned", "summary": null, "content_text": "Here are two lists. These lists I’m calling “Things to Know” and “Things to Do”. These are things I’ve discovered in my life so far. I find them helpful, even comforting. I hope you do too.Things to know Expect your skills and education to be irrelevant in 10 years. Everything is changing, constantly. Keeping changing with it. Don’t be afraid. Hippies were wrong. You and your competition can both be successful. “They” do not have to fail in order for you to succeed. Jealousy will not help. The movie doesn’t have to be exactly like the book. You cannot execute every idea you have. Choose wisely. Stay focused. Say no. Working makes you happy. Work is important. Someone out there has the same idea you have. Ideas are useless unless you execute them. People will say: Stay positive, think positive, dance like no one is watching, et cetera. They are trying to think positive, which is noble, but their advice is terrible. Don’t listen to them. Your instinct is better than you think. There will always be people looking forward to their version of a wonderful future that clearly will never come. You were a kid once. It was fun, but you don’t need to relive it. You’re an adult now. You don’t need to act like a kid again to enjoy life. Having fun is overrated. Being happy is overrated. Conservatives are wrong about some things. Liberals are wrong about some things. Cars are stupid. Communism doesn’t work. Conservatism doesn’t work. People who wish a return to the good old days are fools. The kids are better than all right. The kids are great. There is only one decent way to drink coffee: black. It is not important to know what mocha means. Money makes you happy, in that you are less stressed if you know you can afford to pay your bills. The things you buy with money do not make you happy. Trying to get more money will not make you happy. You know three people you can show unfinished work to. Ask their opinions. (Don’t crowdsource).Things to do Do not try to like poetry. Find one poet to like, that will do. Memorize a poem. Love your family. Kiss your wife. Never kiss anyone else.1 Own books. Use bookmarks. Never fold the pages. Do not show everything you do to the internet. Don’t be cool. Being cool is being conservative and will get you nowhere. Criticize privately. Praise publicly. Work. Take your work seriously, but never yourself. Care about what others think of you. Be curious. Read one long article per month about something you know nothing about. Don’t drink. Don’t argue on the internet. Work with people you respect. Seek out people who are smarter than you and talk to them as much as possible. Do not take pictures of your cat. Don’t complain about Mondays. Refer to women as “women”, never “girls”. (Don’t be a douche.) Do not try to be creative. Try to be good.2 Understand your opponent. Find out your underlying differences. Start with what motivates them. You could be wrong. Never say “when I was your age” to a kid. People who say they don’t give a damn are not worth talking to. Give a damn. Stolen from Johnny Cash. ↩ Reworked from a Paul Rand Quote. ↩ ", "content_html": "Here are two lists. These lists I’m calling “Things to Know” and “Things to Do”. These are things I’ve discovered in my life so far. I find them helpful, even comforting. I hope you do too.
Stolen from Johnny Cash. ↩
Reworked from a Paul Rand Quote. ↩
I hemmed and hawed for long enough. It was only a matter of time before I tried to roast my own coffee.
Despite appearances, and how wacky it sounds, you can actually get a decent roast of coffee by using a $20 popcorn air popper. It should be noted, however, that the moment you drop a coffee bean into the popping chamber, you’ve probably voided your warranty. It also should be noted that the coffee beans get much hotter than popcorn kernels, so the risk of fire is greater. Tread at your own risk.
Every coffee drinker I know eventually gives up on ground coffee, preferring to buy whole beans and grinding the coffee themselves. The difference between freshly-ground and ground-god-knows-when coffee is remarkable. Coffee goes stale, not as fast as bread, but it does go stale. That is why ground coffee is sold in those creepy vacuum-sealed bricks. It’s important to suck every possible molecule of air out in order to somehow stave off the staling.
Once you grind your own beans, you never go back. After crossing the freshly-ground hurdle, comes fresh-roasted. But roasting your own beans is harder than grinding, so most coffee-drinkers never bother.
Lots of equipment is available. Since I was just dipping my toe into the coffee-flavored waters, I decided to take the cheap inexpensive route.
What I wanted to do was find out if fresh-roasted coffee really was as good as I had heard, and what kinds of coffee I actually liked. I’m not really good at taking mental notes on such things. I’ve had coffees that I liked, and those I didn’t. I’ve never tasted “nutty overtones” or “hints of cream soda”. I’ve always simply thought, hmmm this is good, and moved on. I never established a clear understanding of what it is that I liked and didn’t like.
So, I ordered a sampler from Sweet Maria’s and received four pounds of coffee. A pound each from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Java and Columbia. I roasted a portion of each coffee at a few different levels.
This gave me a chance to drink coffee and better evaluate the varieties and tastes.
Roasting is pretty straight-forward. You put coffee beans in the chamber where your popcorn would normally go. You use the same amount of coffee as you would popcorn. You turn on the machine.
After a minute or so you will detect a coffee-ish roasting smell and notice that the beans are markedly browner. It will be around four minutes (depending on the air temperature and the variety of beans and your popper’s power) before you will hear a distinct cracking sound. As the beans continue to hop around the popper they’ll continue to pop (about 20 more seconds). This is “first crack”.
If you’re using an air popper, obviously you’ll have to listen carefully. The motor is loud and can obscure the sound.
You need to reach first crack before the beans will be drinkable. This is as light as you’d want to go.
At this point, you’ll want to start paying close attention to the process. The beans are lightly roasted. You can stop the roast now and have a city roast. If you want a darker roast, continue roasting.
As the coffee gets darker, you’ll notice more smoke, as well as a new, nuttier smell.
Around a minute after first crack (again, depending on outside air temperature, the power of your popper, et cetera) you will be reaching “second crack”. During second crack, oils begin to be released and the beans take on a shiny appearance.
Somewhere shortly after second crack you reach the level commonly referred to as French Roast.
I personally think second crack is too far to take roasting. But those who take cream or milk with their coffee seem to like darker roasts better. I would recommend experimenting.
It should also be noted that using an air popper is not the only way to roast coffee at home. Sweet Maria’s has a lot of tips and recommendations on how to get started.
One note if you do try to do this: It’s messy. It’s smoky. Unroasted coffee beans have a thin, paper-like skin. As they roast, the beans get larger and shed the skin. This chaff will blow all over your kitchen. Pick a sunny day and do this outside. Or at least wait until your significant other is out of the house and quickly clean up afterward.
I’ve long hated dark roasts and I have considered myself a medium roast sorta-guy. I was wrong. More and more I found myself liking the lighter roasts.
But the best thing, by far, about roasting coffee yourself is watching it happen. You get a better understanding of what you are drinking. It gives you a chance to experiment with different varieties and different roasts in a controlled way. And this, in turn, gives you a better appreciation for what you are drinking.
All it takes is a little bit of time and a cheap-o air popper. If you drink coffee, you should try this.
", "url": "/2013/02/28/roasting-coffee-at-home/", "date_published": "2013-02-28T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2013-02-28T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2012/09/25/playmotion-car-chase/", "title": "Playmotion: Car Chase", "summary": null, "content_text": "And now for a departure of sorts.A few months ago, my son (then three years old) asked a simple question of how Wallace and Gromit was made. All of my attempts to explain it fell short. Nothing made sense to him, so I set my DSLR on my tripod and did a very simple test so I could show him.More questions followed, and quite by accident a new project emerged. A game of sorts was invented, we would play with some of his toys and “write” a story which would be animated.It turns out that my son, being four years old, is a better writer than I am an animator. I was learning as I went along, and boy did I learn. But the project was fun, nonetheless and I thought it worthy of a post here.Below are the results.[Watch](http://player.vimeo.com/video/50133144)", "content_html": "A few months ago, my son (then three years old) asked a simple question of how Wallace and Gromit was made. All of my attempts to explain it fell short. Nothing made sense to him, so I set my DSLR on my tripod and did a very simple test so I could show him.
More questions followed, and quite by accident a new project emerged. A game of sorts was invented, we would play with some of his toys and “write” a story which would be animated.
It turns out that my son, being four years old, is a better writer than I am an animator. I was learning as I went along, and boy did I learn. But the project was fun, nonetheless and I thought it worthy of a post here.
I was once working on a photo project and was fumbling around an old shed when I heard a man yelling at his horse. He was tending a 1.5 acre garden of corn which he still plowed with a horse-drawn plow. The horse he’d tied to a tree and he was now walking through his corn field. I quickly ran up through his garden?inadvertently trampling some seedlings along the way?and asked him if I may take his photo.
He only said yes. I apologized for stepping on his corn and he said it was no big deal. He stood there in his work clothes, gave half a smile and I took his photo. It didn’t turn out to be the greatest photo I ever took, but I liked it. I sent an 8”x10” print of it to him as a courtesy.
A few years later, I had forgotten all about it. That is, until the farmer died and he had a closed-casket funeral. I’ve been to many funerals and generally at such ceremonies is a photo of the deceased in their sunday finest. But at this farmer’s funeral, upon his casket was placed the framed photo I had taken of him a few years prior.
For the past twelve years I have been lucky enough to earn a living making things. And in those twelve years I’ve made all kinds of things, from posters to websites, from restaurant menus to packages for cloth diapers.
Some of the things I’ve made have been not-so-hot. Others have been pretty big successes. I’ve been proud of a lot of the work that I have done and I continue to do. Work I’ve done has been featured in magazines, it’s been praised and it’s won awards. I won’t list my awards and never will because that’s a waste of time and it doesn’t help me in my creative process. I mention it here merely to say what was and remains the biggest honor I’ve ever received.
It seems that the photo I had sent him as a courtesy was his favorite photo of himself. And that is the still the biggest honor I’ve ever had for anything I’ve ever made.
", "url": "/2012/06/10/on-honors/", "date_published": "2012-06-10T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2012-06-10T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2010/09/18/imagination-library/", "title": "Imagination Library", "summary": null, "content_text": "It’s not often that I talk about professional projects on this site (it’s a personal site, get it?). But it’s not often a designer gets a project like this. I don’t think I’ve ever had a project that allowed me to have this much fun. Not only did I get to have a major part in the conceptualization, but I got to illustrate, design and assemble a book, shoot and edit the commercial, and even do a little hand modeling.It was tremendous fun. And it had the added benefit of making me feel really good about my work: Not only did it turn out really well, but I have a son who receives a book every month from this program.The project is a fundraiser for the Knox County Public Library’s Imagination Library program. The project comprised of a one-page website, and a 30 second television spot. You can see the television spot below.Fun fact: I’m wearing Amber’s concealer on my right hand, because I had cut myself really badly during the assembly of the actual book.For more information or to make a donation, please visit KnoxReads.com. Thanks![Watch](http://www.youtube.com/v/sA5lJ41T_sc?fs=1&hl=en_US)Special Shoutouts go to:One of the Best Clients in the World: Knox County Public LibraryAmber for helping with the illustrationsAustin for writing the narrationHP Video for donating some after-hours time in the studio.WATE and Comcast for donating the media time.Chuck Morris for arranging the whole thing and letting me to do it.", "content_html": "It’s not often that I talk about professional projects on this site (it’s a personal site, get it?). But it’s not often a designer gets a project like this. I don’t think I’ve ever had a project that allowed me to have this much fun. Not only did I get to have a major part in the conceptualization, but I got to illustrate, design and assemble a book, shoot and edit the commercial, and even do a little hand modeling.
It was tremendous fun. And it had the added benefit of making me feel really good about my work: Not only did it turn out really well, but I have a son who receives a book every month from this program.
The project is a fundraiser for the Knox County Public Library’s Imagination Library program. The project comprised of a one-page website, and a 30 second television spot. You can see the television spot below.
Fun fact: I’m wearing Amber’s concealer on my right hand, because I had cut myself really badly during the assembly of the actual book.
For more information or to make a donation, please visit KnoxReads.com. Thanks!
One of the Best Clients in the World: Knox County Public Library
Amber for helping with the illustrations
Austin for writing the narration
HP Video for donating some after-hours time in the studio.
WATE and Comcast for donating the media time.
Chuck Morris for arranging the whole thing and letting me to do it.
", "url": "/2010/09/18/imagination-library/", "date_published": "2010-09-18T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2010-09-18T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2009/12/31/my-dumb-decade/", "title": "My Dumb Decade", "summary": null, "content_text": "On the eve of 2010, a look back on the decade. A lot of people like to look at how far technology has advanced or what they’ve accomplished at the end of a ten year cycle. I’ve decided to look back and think about some of the dumbest things I’ve said. Yes, I say at least 40 dumb things every day, but here are a few of the dumbest: 2000. “I’m not getting married at 24.” 2001. “An iPod? What is Apple thinking? They need to fix their OS, not mess around with MP3 players. That’s stupid; no one will buy that.” 2002. “*Being There *was good, but I don’t see myself getting all excited and running out to buy a Wilco album the day it’s released.” 2003. “Yeah, this house is small, but we’re not having kids so it’s okay.” 2004. “Bush is gonna lose.” 2005. “A free concert downtown every day? That’s too cool for Knoxville to sustain.” 2006. “Look, I just got a cheap bike for commuting and a bit of excercise. I don’t want to mountain bike.” 2007. “A kid? I don’t want a kid. I’ve never even held a baby.” 2008. “I’ll never own an iMac.” 2009. “A Snuggie? It really makes me sad to see someone spending so much money to advertise a product no one will buy.”May this decade be less dumb.", "content_html": "On the eve of 2010, a look back on the decade. A lot of people like to look at how far technology has advanced or what they’ve accomplished at the end of a ten year cycle. I’ve decided to look back and think about some of the dumbest things I’ve said. Yes, I say at least 40 dumb things every day, but here are a few of the dumbest:
May this decade be less dumb.
", "url": "/2009/12/31/my-dumb-decade/", "date_published": "2009-12-31T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2009-12-31T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2008/11/12/a-break/", "title": "A Break", "summary": null, "content_text": "Without going into great detail about personal life getting in the way, I will say that between work and the requirements that come with being a dad, posting trivial musings to a blog seems rather unimportant to me. So at this point, I’m closing shop for a while. It’s actually been closed for some time, but I’m doing officially now.This is most likely not a good bye, but rather a see-you-later. There may one day be a resurrection of sorts. Until then, thanks for reading and see you soon.", "content_html": "Without going into great detail about personal life getting in the way, I will say that between work and the requirements that come with being a dad, posting trivial musings to a blog seems rather unimportant to me. So at this point, I’m closing shop for a while. It’s actually been closed for some time, but I’m doing officially now.
This is most likely not a good bye, but rather a see-you-later. There may one day be a resurrection of sorts. Until then, thanks for reading and see you soon.
", "url": "/2008/11/12/a-break/", "date_published": "2008-11-12T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2008-11-12T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2005/04/01/book-recommendations-non-fiction/", "title": "Book Recommendations: Non-fiction", "summary": null, "content_text": "Instead of tearing down all the time, I’ve decided to build up. On this website I recently commented at how dumb The DaVinci Code sounded to me, and I feel bad for being such a curmudgeon. So instead of a condescending review of a book I’ve not actually read, I shall start making recommendations of books I actually have. To start things off, Non-Fiction.My closest friends have listened to me complain about the incessant recommendations for the The DaVinci Code I’ve recently received. It’s been tirelessly recommended to me by many as being “intriguing” and “a real page-turner”. So after about four weeks of starting sentences with “if one more person recommends The friggin DaVinci Code …” I decided to try it out, just to see.The great thing about a book like The DaVinci Code is that it’s available at grocery stores. During my last visit to the supermarket, near the milk aisle and greeting cards, The DaVinci Code was on display. So I picked up a copy, opened it and read a couple of pages. Then I realized I didn’t want to do it. I simply had no interest, and I still think the premise is dumb.But I also had the realization that I needn’t be so negative. I should not constantly complain about The DaVinci Code. I should just ignore it and instead talk about books that I feel are worth talking about.The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. WoodI imagine that there are two reactions that one may have at having a Ben Frank Bio recommended to them. One: “that sounds boring”, or two: “Jeez, not another biography of Franklin, there’s been like two hundred already”.Franklin’s own auto-biography is required reading at many schools; and even if it’s not, there are not many Americans who don’t know a great deal about him. He played with electricity. He wrote feverishly (and was a printmaker). He was a prolific inventor. He is generally regarded as a wise philosopher, and he had something to do with founding the United States.The Americanization is a biography that covers a great deal of his accomplishments that, no doubt, you’re already familiar with. But it does something many biographies and history books forget to do: it puts his actions and beliefs in context with sixteenth century society. A great deal of Americanization is not about Franklin, but about life in the 1700s. Which, in turn, makes for fascinating reading.It is often hard to think of Franklin as anything but American, which is of course not true. He had to become an American. The book guides the reader through a series of “becomings”. Becoming a Gentleman. Becoming a Diplomat. Becoming a Patriot. And finally, Becoming an American. This flow allows for a great journey into understanding colonial politics, life and society and sheds a great deal of light on one of our country’s most important founders and more interestingly (and dare I say, more importantly) into the society that led to its birth.Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker EvansIn 1941 two of my favorite artists—James Agee and Walker Evans—created this masterpiece of literature and photography (they insisted that each of their respective contributions stood on their own as separate pieces, and that Evans’ photographs were not merely illustrations of Agee’s words). I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t get around to reading it until early last year.Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a journalistic description of the life of white sharecroppers in Mississippi during the great depression. There is something unsettling about it. Perhaps it’s that the setting seems so alien (with its striking poverty and obvious suffering of the subjects), but is a mere sixty years ago. Many of our parents or grandparents can probably remember the time, maybe even the setting. But it is more probably the fact that Agee so beautifully captures the settings and forces you empathize with those he is writing about.The book jumps back and forth from poetic musings to straight-forward descriptions. In between stories of how he and Evans came to be working on this project, Agee details the food that is eaten, the shelter that is lived in, the work that is done and even the clothes that are worn by a group of share-cropping families. Evans’ photos do the same. The hand-squared planks of the houses and dresses made from flour sacks are just as poignant in the photographs as they are in the words.But the book transcends the mere descriptions into a gripping and fulfilling read. It is not simply an account of the time Agee and Evans spent with the share-croppers, but is also an account of Agee’s own guilt and self-examination and a study of what it means to suffer and live through the suffering.", "content_html": "Instead of tearing down all the time, I’ve decided to build up. On this website I recently commented at how dumb The DaVinci Code sounded to me, and I feel bad for being such a curmudgeon. So instead of a condescending review of a book I’ve not actually read, I shall start making recommendations of books I actually have. To start things off, Non-Fiction.
My closest friends have listened to me complain about the incessant recommendations for the The DaVinci Code I’ve recently received. It’s been tirelessly recommended to me by many as being “intriguing” and “a real page-turner”. So after about four weeks of starting sentences with “if one more person recommends The friggin DaVinci Code …” I decided to try it out, just to see.
The great thing about a book like The DaVinci Code is that it’s available at grocery stores. During my last visit to the supermarket, near the milk aisle and greeting cards, The DaVinci Code was on display. So I picked up a copy, opened it and read a couple of pages. Then I realized I didn’t want to do it. I simply had no interest, and I still think the premise is dumb.
But I also had the realization that I needn’t be so negative. I should not constantly complain about The DaVinci Code. I should just ignore it and instead talk about books that I feel are worth talking about.
I imagine that there are two reactions that one may have at having a Ben Frank Bio recommended to them. One: “that sounds boring”, or two: “Jeez, not another biography of Franklin, there’s been like two hundred already”.
Franklin’s own auto-biography is required reading at many schools; and even if it’s not, there are not many Americans who don’t know a great deal about him. He played with electricity. He wrote feverishly (and was a printmaker). He was a prolific inventor. He is generally regarded as a wise philosopher, and he had something to do with founding the United States.
The Americanization is a biography that covers a great deal of his accomplishments that, no doubt, you’re already familiar with. But it does something many biographies and history books forget to do: it puts his actions and beliefs in context with sixteenth century society. A great deal of Americanization is not about Franklin, but about life in the 1700s. Which, in turn, makes for fascinating reading.
It is often hard to think of Franklin as anything but American, which is of course not true. He had to become an American. The book guides the reader through a series of “becomings”. Becoming a Gentleman. Becoming a Diplomat. Becoming a Patriot. And finally, Becoming an American. This flow allows for a great journey into understanding colonial politics, life and society and sheds a great deal of light on one of our country’s most important founders and more interestingly (and dare I say, more importantly) into the society that led to its birth.
In 1941 two of my favorite artists—James Agee and Walker Evans—created this masterpiece of literature and photography (they insisted that each of their respective contributions stood on their own as separate pieces, and that Evans’ photographs were not merely illustrations of Agee’s words). I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t get around to reading it until early last year.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a journalistic description of the life of white sharecroppers in Mississippi during the great depression. There is something unsettling about it. Perhaps it’s that the setting seems so alien (with its striking poverty and obvious suffering of the subjects), but is a mere sixty years ago. Many of our parents or grandparents can probably remember the time, maybe even the setting. But it is more probably the fact that Agee so beautifully captures the settings and forces you empathize with those he is writing about.
The book jumps back and forth from poetic musings to straight-forward descriptions. In between stories of how he and Evans came to be working on this project, Agee details the food that is eaten, the shelter that is lived in, the work that is done and even the clothes that are worn by a group of share-cropping families. Evans’ photos do the same. The hand-squared planks of the houses and dresses made from flour sacks are just as poignant in the photographs as they are in the words.
But the book transcends the mere descriptions into a gripping and fulfilling read. It is not simply an account of the time Agee and Evans spent with the share-croppers, but is also an account of Agee’s own guilt and self-examination and a study of what it means to suffer and live through the suffering.
", "url": "/2005/04/01/book-recommendations-non-fiction/", "date_published": "2005-04-01T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2005-04-01T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } }, { "id": "http://michaelpurdy.org/2004/10/31/chuck-close-process-and-collaboration-at-the-kma/", "title": "Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration at the KMA", "summary": null, "content_text": "The KMA has been woefully uninspiring for a great many months. The last great exhibit was a collection of Polaroids (of course, that was an awesome show. One of the best I’ve seen there). There have been many great shows in the past, but not lately. This one, happily, ends that trend.Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration focuses on Close’s experiments and investigations into the art of printmaking. His first print was in 1972, and since then he’s become an important proponent of printmaking as a fine art.The exhibit contains pieces spanning the last 35 years of Close’s career. It contains many of his self portraits that were made over this time, which interestingly document his aging. Close’s experiments over a wide variety of media are also shown. Mezzotints, lithographs, torn-paper collages, woodblocks, and silk screens are all present, as are a variety of images using a range of techniques, from small eight inch prints done with etching to the gargantuan eight foot tall heads done with silkscreen.There is a certain understated discomfort in standing in front of an eight foot tall head staring directly at you, just as there is always a delight in standing close and looking at the abstracted brushstrokes or pencil lines that one can back away from and realize they add up to a photo-realistic portrait. The museum was filled with people standing ten inches away from a print, peering at the blobs of color, then backing up ten yards and squinting their eyes to see the blobs of color blur into a surprisingly realistic image. You can’t not do that at a Chuck Close exhibit. If you’ve ever seen one of Close’s paintings or prints reproduced in a magazine or book, you owe it to yourself to come see one in real life.The fascinating part of the exhibit though, is not the prints themselves, but the process displayed. Several woodblocks are shown adjacent to the print they produced. There are linoleum cuts on display. As are copper etching plates. There are “unfinished” prints, missing a few color plates, next to the “finished” print. All on display to show the process, and the way the final piece was produced.That the exhibit reads more as an educational experience rather than an “art show” experience is not at all a bad thing. This show can be one of great enjoyment to fans of Close, or fans of printmaking, or even of any non-art lover who’s interested in the process.That is the best part of Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration. Seeing the step by step by step progressions of each piece, and the step by step progression of the artist over the past 35 years. You don’t have to be a Chuck Close fan to enjoy that. And I dare say, you don’t even have to like art to enjoy seeing the process.", "content_html": "The KMA has been woefully uninspiring for a great many months. The last great exhibit was a collection of Polaroids (of course, that was an awesome show. One of the best I’ve seen there). There have been many great shows in the past, but not lately. This one, happily, ends that trend.
Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration focuses on Close’s experiments and investigations into the art of printmaking. His first print was in 1972, and since then he’s become an important proponent of printmaking as a fine art.
The exhibit contains pieces spanning the last 35 years of Close’s career. It contains many of his self portraits that were made over this time, which interestingly document his aging. Close’s experiments over a wide variety of media are also shown. Mezzotints, lithographs, torn-paper collages, woodblocks, and silk screens are all present, as are a variety of images using a range of techniques, from small eight inch prints done with etching to the gargantuan eight foot tall heads done with silkscreen.
There is a certain understated discomfort in standing in front of an eight foot tall head staring directly at you, just as there is always a delight in standing close and looking at the abstracted brushstrokes or pencil lines that one can back away from and realize they add up to a photo-realistic portrait. The museum was filled with people standing ten inches away from a print, peering at the blobs of color, then backing up ten yards and squinting their eyes to see the blobs of color blur into a surprisingly realistic image. You can’t not do that at a Chuck Close exhibit. If you’ve ever seen one of Close’s paintings or prints reproduced in a magazine or book, you owe it to yourself to come see one in real life.
The fascinating part of the exhibit though, is not the prints themselves, but the process displayed. Several woodblocks are shown adjacent to the print they produced. There are linoleum cuts on display. As are copper etching plates. There are “unfinished” prints, missing a few color plates, next to the “finished” print. All on display to show the process, and the way the final piece was produced.
That the exhibit reads more as an educational experience rather than an “art show” experience is not at all a bad thing. This show can be one of great enjoyment to fans of Close, or fans of printmaking, or even of any non-art lover who’s interested in the process.
That is the best part of Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration. Seeing the step by step by step progressions of each piece, and the step by step progression of the artist over the past 35 years. You don’t have to be a Chuck Close fan to enjoy that. And I dare say, you don’t even have to like art to enjoy seeing the process.
", "url": "/2004/10/31/chuck-close-process-and-collaboration-at-the-kma/", "tags": ["Art","Chuck Close","Knoxville"], "date_published": "2004-10-31T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2004-10-31T00:00:00+00:00", "author": { "name": "" } } ] }