Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

that's a great idea, lara - je do you have a paypal account?

If I can make it I'll stay 3... because it's silly to travel that far for three days.

And I'll bring... extra syrup!

Weekday/weekend doesn't matter as much to me, but weekend I bet would work better for at least some of us working stiffs.

Roll call: I'm a solid maybe.

JE both places you've chosen have worked out nicely.

Why don't we have people who are planning on going send you $ down on the deposit so you don't have to do it all alone... or even if you have to make the reservation soon, have people who commit to going plunk down their half now?

The rhythm of the story was poetic, just like the Wiki entry talked about how he would use poetic rhythms (iambic pentameter?) to affect readers and move things along... I felt that while I was reading it and it felt like a tide. Waves of awareness.

I saw the two characters coming together in synthesis and thought about the time that might be passing as all of these things are seen/felt.

I thought the idea of going up into space, and the danger associated with it, contrasted with swimming on our planet and the danger associated with that were lines clearly and beautifully drawn. If you've ever come close to drowning... you know that feeling.

Ben, I think you're right. That story will stay with me for a long time.

Now I will go back and re-read it, and maybe have something to add to the conversation. It did seem like an organic whole of its own. When I got to the end I thought, well, yeah, of course but I didn't know where to begin a conversation, not wanting to pick it all apart...

Oh, thank goodness someone understood it more than I did!

Well then. I'll just say that I don't have many thoughts. My experience in reading sci fi is a little thin. I did read that the author wrote in poetic rhythms and used them to alter the response to the story.

I need help here, people. A little help...

Ben, would you mind kicking off the discussion with your thoughts?

I have to admit, I'm a bit at sea with this story, but wading in anyway...

http://fasterthanfashion.blogspot.com...

Do you see Byron then as Hightower's Brown? The younger inquisitor who brings him in touch with (or in conflict with) the rest of the town? (Not sure I agree Hightower is "left alone" -- he's been beaten down pretty good by the town.)

//possible spoiler//

There has to be a person who draws the outside world in for both Christmas and Hightower. If Brown weren't around to shoot his mouth off, Christmas would have quietly run his moonshine business in perpetuity (maybe). If Bunch had not been there to draw the outside in, Hightower would have been left alone for at least a bit longer (maybe).

In comparison to Christmas? Hightower is not hunted down the same way. Although - there is a lot to contrast between being physically run out of town on a rail, and the psychological warfare waged on Hightower. Perhaps better for later conversation.

As to that quote ... there is some of that, but there is also quite a bit of men trying to figure out how to live in relation to women, I think. We're a perplexing bunch.

My opinion is that we are meant to contrast Hightower and Christmas.

There are elements of their behavior/personalities that are the same - proud, oblivious to the response of others, Hightower's ignorance of his wife's pain and Christmas' inability to receive any affection...

BUT one is a preacher and one is a moonshiner.

//SPOILER//

One is eventually left alone while the other is (SPOILER) hunted down.

There's a lot to it when you start stacking them against one another.

You mean this one by Robinson (which is actually quite Salinger-esque, IMO):

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

I dunno. I want to see his study in MOMA. I want to see the drawer opened. And viewers crooning, trying to see what's in the drawer.

After reading Franny & Zooey, I wonder if he didn't learn the secret.

You know, the real secret. Not the one with the red cover and seal.

Someone (here, I think) told me that he has been writing ever since, and put his manuscripts in a drawer.

Part of me hopes at least one of them sees the light of day, but if that goes against his wishes, then they should stay in that drawer.

Franny & Zooey and Nine Stories had more impact on me than Catcher. I read everything of his this summer.

Hm. For me it depends on the book.

There are books that affect me deeply on a personal level and I think that my response to them is just that, personal. Plus I'm probably afraid people will think I'm weird. I have the same response to music and art, though. Anything that I would develop tears talking about I generally keep to myself.

Infinite Jest is mentioned in this post... Infinite Summer totally helped me, and even though I've not finished it the site is still there, waiting for me.

This group is a perfect example of social reading. We have a rare combination of respect, lightheartedness, and GIANT-brained, well-read people who enjoy each other's company.

I love talking about what I'm reading with others - what other people pick up on and have to say is always so interesting.

I think you're right about Joe's ethnicity Shel, but I also think that the most important thing to focus on regarding the issue of Joe's race is the inability to know. Not only for the reader, but especially for Joe. His lack of ability to know himself is what I think causes this intense conflict in his being. This work, I think, is extremely existential. Faulkner himself said that the most tragic thing about Joe was that he had no way to know, to find out who he really was, which meant that he was never able to understand anything about himself because he had no context, no identity to call his own. He existed in a state of perpetual angst regarding who he was.

An interesting thing about the notion of race in the books is how quickly the townspeople turn on Christmas when Joe Brown mentions that Christmas is black--suddenly all suspicion is lifted from Brown once he says the N-word. This seems to confirm their suspicions that Christmas is different and therefore, more likely to have done the deed than Brown.

Agreed, Ry, it's not the most important question, but it is what I boil it down to because of the region and the time in which the book was written - just the differences in the ways people are perceived is so stratified that it makes a difference to me as a reader... and to the plot, which you mention here.

His inability to know = our inability to ... give him a locus, a starting point, as a character. The relentless rhythm at which he does things - whether he's shoveling sawdust, beating Brown or the horse later on, says more to me about who he is than most details I get about him.

I think it's brilliant in execution... since this is so much a novel of perception.

For me, that posed interesting questions about my own identity... the role of the perception of others... etc. etc. What would we be, what could we be, if we could never know who we were?

You're missing the fact that you have a lazy moderator. ;)

I have to get my act together. I just moved myself and my kids, and got a new job, so things have been more fast paced for me in the last month or so.

What I'm beginning to think is that Joe is not black. I was on the fence, could go either way, on my initial reading, but I'm thinking on the second time around... nope. He's not.

The men at the mill talk about the work he does as being only for black people but no one actually accuses him of having the blood he believes he has.

I think that's all about adding to the mystery, the spiraling of perception of Joe, how identity ties to action, how his attitude generates a response from people around him.

My grandfather, from a very small agrarian town in southern Illinois, would have called it "being too big for his britches" which was generally considered worse than being a layabout or a drunk, but not quite as bad as being a man who didn't "take care" of his children.

Watching Hightower’s story unfold, I wondered what its purpose was in the novel… to portray woman’s inhumanity to woman? Or what happens when a community’s pillar falls from grace? What happens to a man broken by personal tragedy turned outward? What being too ambitious can mean in a small town where people work hard and know their place?

Or is it about a town that possesses this inertia, or maybe even force, for keeping things the same, maintaining a small town uneventful, righteous status quo:

“Because the town believed that the ladies knew the truth, since they knew that bad women can be fooled by badness, since they have to spend some of their time not being suspicious. But that no good woman can be fooled by it because, by being good herself, she does not need to worry anymore about hers or anybody else’s goodness; hence she has plenty of time to smell out sin. … that good can fool her almost any time into believing that it is evil, but that evil itself can never fool her.” (p 68 of Vintage Int’l edition, Chapter 3).

This is one of those passages Faulkner’s treatment of men vs. women can be drawn out. In contrast with the men talking at the mill -- Bunch and his cohorts seem always to be predicting what kind of a man someone else is from afar– what that man will do, what he’s like, what he’s good for.

So the men live in this world of see what a man does, and that’s who he is; the women in this chapter see some of what another woman does, guess the rest, decide who’s good and who’s bad.

So is this about the visible and the invisible? The known/unknown, things we can know and things we can’t? Or is this about men and women?

Not exactly like Cheetos, but close. Pathos - "suffering" or "experience"; thanatos - the human drive toward our own death or destruction; eros - erotic love, all Ancient Greek. I bet you're messing with me and totally know what those things are.

I don't know if there's a film version. There isn't any dialogue, really, unless you count the old man talking at the younger version of himself. It really should be read aloud or seen performed.

The stage version I saw had Brian Dennehy. Right before that he did Hughie by Eugene O'Neill. Both one-act plays were about old men looking back on their lives and realizing what mattered most was love, or the missed opportunity of it. They fit really well together.