Tuesday, September 17, 2002
 

Have read today:
Go Down, Moses
some (sadly, not much) of The Voyage Out
within 40 pages of finishing America

For the record, 300+ pages of Faulkner in one day is not the world's best way to stay sane. Don't get me wrong; I love the F-Man, and this contains one of my very favorites, "The Bear." Still, you can only back up and mutter to yourself, "Who's the narrator here? What year is this? What's going on? What the heck is that dialect supposed to mean?" before reality becomes a bit distorted. I had spilled something in the kitchen at supper, and I actually found myself thinking about it in Faulknerian sentences (eg, "and the water which had spilled is like all that water which gushed in torrents across the scarred terrain opening red clay gashes that neither man nor mule could cross until the old man who had been there since time began and perhaps before and perhaps even remembered the old deity who with dirt-stained hands had rolled this terrestrial ball and placed fish and tree and finally man on it said "dont look like we all is gwine plant that cotton today" like the pronouncement of a great elder and still the water dripped on"). Last example is an exaggeration, but I was definitely thinking of the spill in some seriously run-on sentences, the main point of which is that the whole past of the Southern states was somehow metaphorically represented by the mess in my kitchen.

Baudrillard, as you may have guessed by the previously-published excerpts from America, is helping me tone down this sentimentality. I anticipate that "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" will have a similar effect.


To reading!

Elvisette philosophized at 10:32 PM