Tuesday, March 22, 2005

What happens next?

Surf was up on little old Green Lake this afternoon. Two foot waves, white caps, spray flying up when they crashed upon the walls along the shore. Not a great deal of fun running into the gusts, but not so bad going home. A chilly clear day, with the wind out of the north, hard.
Schiavo - "ski-AH-vo -" Italian for "slave."
Read a kind of interest-provoking review by J.M. Coetzee of Jay Parini's Life of Faulkner. I'm not sure it made me want to run out and get it, but it did provide some new information, at least to me, regarding a writer whom I've always appreciated. Didn't know, for example, that Faulkner fabricated parts of his life to enhance his appeal, or that he wound up as a written-out, alcoholic afficianado of foxhunting. There were a couple of memorable quotes from WF, one concerning the large amount of attention he received while abroad, from France and Italy: " If they believed in my world in America the way they do abroad, I could probably run one of my characters for President...maybe Flem Snopes." Damn you, Mr. Faulkner, we've got him now!!George W. certainly fills the bill of Flem, "the beady-eyed, coldhearted social climber of the trilogy", as Coetzee described the Snopes character in "The Hamlet", "The Town" and "The Mansion." The other notable quote comes from one of the characters in Faulkner's "Mosquitoes": "A book is the writer's secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can't reconcile them."
That's the kind of unparsable mystery I like to find in writing.

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