The Stuff

OK. Enough dithering it’s time to get down to the important topics: Books, movies, books, comics, books, TV, books, cartoons, books, weird stuff from the flea market and dollar store, books, childhood traumas, books, weird people I have known, books, annoying stuff I feel compelled to rant about, books, libraries, bookstores, vintage paperback books, booksellers, science fiction books, noir mystery books, pulp fiction, and books about books.

That is the syllabus. My vital statistics go something like this:

Age: 45

Race/Nationality: Lithuanian/Slovak mix, but I have been mistaken for Italian, Jewish, Greek, British (in a pub in Cambridge much to my Anglophile then girlfriend’s annoyance), Russian, Polish, Middle Eastern, and my last name appears to have been taken from an eyechart on Ellis Island.

Sex: Straight Guy, although I have been thought to be gay and also told I should be a priest.

Occupation: Librarian. Although I have an MLS I have only worked the reference desk in dire emergencies, have never cataloged a book, and never conducted a story time. I seem to have carved out some weird niche as an outreach/bookmobile/only guy on staff who knows anything about comics or rare books /only guy who knows the answer to that annoying perennial reference question about the book that ends with the word mayonnaise (Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan) sort of librarian.

I guess that pretty much gets you up to speed on the who. Now for some what.

What am I reading now

I just finished a trio of William Faulkner books with a focus on crime, sex, and depravity. Sanctuary, Pylon, and The Wild Palms (Now commonly published under Faulkner’s original title If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem). These (with the possible exception of Sanctuary) are considered minor works. If only I had been required to read these in college instead of As I Lay Dying (“My mother is a Fish” nuff said), The Sound and the Fury (As if stream of consciousness wasn’t bad enough. Now I have to follow the thoughts of a retard watching a golf game through a fence? As if Golf wasn’t bad enough), and most painfully Sartoris. (Miss Vincent explained that the dull and languorous style was meant to convey the boredom and languor of the decaying southern aristocracy. Well I suppose if you were enough of a literary genius you could devise a style that would convey the languor, stench, and boredom of watching meat decay, but I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. I am sure Sartoris wasn’t worth the effort. Sorry Miss Vincent.)

But these three I just read, well, there was some good stuff in there. Rape, murder, adultery, botched abortion, sex, voyeurism, impotence, menage a trois, corruption, cover-ups, prostitution, airplane crashes, (well, OK, I think Sartoris did have an airplane crash. It just came way too late to save the book), floods, rescues, escape from a chain gang, alcoholism, bootlegging. That’s quite a catalog of deadly sins. That’s the way to portray dissolution and decay, baby. To paraphrase Thomas DeQuincy, it is only a short step from murder, rape, bootlegging, adultery, and voyeurism to Sabbath-breaking and procrastination. It's a slippery slope. The inevitable downward spiral. These folks sure didn’t have time for languor or boredom.

Sanctuary certainly would have made a better choice for college students if for no other reason than that it is probably the best argument against collegiate binge drinking ever written. Gowan Stevens gets roaring drunk and takes his date, Temple Drake, to the backwoods farm of his bootlegger, then leaves her there where she witnesses a murder, is raped (with a corn cob), abducted, and taken to live in a whore house, by a psychopathic gangster, who is impotent, forces her to have sex with another man so he can watch, and then kills the other man.

Umm. HEY! Can I have a rebate on the time I spent reading Faulkner in college. Cause I was robbed. (Well, OK, I never actually finished The Sound and the Fury because the night I was going to finish it my roommate dropped acid, and I had to spend the night in the men’s bathroom making sure he stayed on planet Earth and didn’t choke on his own vomit, while listening to him alternately puke and describe the kaleidoscopic fracturing of a row of urinals. Come to think of it if he had read Sanctuary he might have been scared straight, and none of that would have happened. Of course, if he had read Sartoris he would have been bored to death, and none of that would have happened either.)

And funny. I especially liked the two goofballs in Sanctuary who go to Memphis to attend barber college, and spend their nights visiting brothels and, afraid of scandalizing the landlady, sneaking back into their boarding house unaware that their landlady is a madam and they are living in a whore house. But the funeral scene in the barroom where a drunken riot beaks out and the casket is knocked over and the corpse falls out and the wax plug in the bullet hole in his head pops out was also very funny in a very black humored way.

The “Old Man” sections of The Wild Palms also provided much-needed comic relief from the grim story of the two adulterous lovers. I especially like the “tall convict” dragging the boat around with him and trying to surrender, but with no success. And finally after being swept away by the raging Mississippi flood, and saving the pregnant woman, and helping to deliver her baby, and then returning to the Parchman prison farm, and turning himself in he is given ten more years on his sentence for trying to escape.

And oh yeah one other thing I have learned since college. It is OK to skim. Or at least don’t worry if every single word doesn’t seem to make sense right away. Faulkner does tend to go on a bit. If you don’t catch something the first time don’t worry. He’ll probably repeat it again. And again.