Officially speaking, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying tells the story of Bundren family traveling to bury their mother, Addie. Quickly in the narrative she dies. Children and husband must fulfill last request to take Mom’s body on a 40-mile trek in a wagon to be buried in Jefferson, Mississippi. Written in 1930, it dances […]
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, pt 1 (“Was”)
One advantage of the Internet is providing a certain type of community for people in places where there’s little of it, and in that spirit we’re starting a Mockingbird reading group (no law!), which will really just be planned serial blog posts with commentary encouraged. The book will be Go Down, Moses, a favorite among Faulkner’s […]
Love Endures Fecklessness: Marilynne Robinson on The Sound and the Fury
Among Marilynne Robinson’s many brilliant essays, a 2012 Foreword to the Modern Library’s latest edition of The Sound and the Fury particularly struck a chord, the edition a must-buy despite its paint-chipped wood (new south!) cover. Maybe it’s her easy command of language, her gently probing (rather than assertively polemical) style of argument, maybe that it’s one of the few […]
Ruts, Expectation, and the Word from Beyond: Thoughts on Christian Time
We all know the feeling of being in a rut: repetition temporarily dominates variation, and we’re going in circles, with routine and mundanity showing no signs of breaking. Most recently, Rust Cohle on True Detective comes to mind. His quote that “time is a flat circle” emphasizes repetitiveness, lack of progress, everything repeating and repeating – “tomorrow […]
The Chimera of Identity in an Anxious World – Paul Walker
NYC Conference video number three here we go, from the inestimable Paul Walker:
The Chimera of Identity in an Anxious World ~ Paul Walker from Mockingbird on Vimeo.
In Search of Lost Time: Reflections on Memory and the First Christmas
Memory and imagination work to give us experiences outside of the present moment, whether through recorded sensations (the low lights and taste of dinner yesterday), images of things past (the 2013 State of the Union on Youtube), or stringings-together of bare words: “at that time a decree went out…” We’re indisputably determined by our own […]
Thanksgiving and the Human Family
This short Thanksgiving Day devotion comes to us from Paul Walker: Virginians, being Virginians, like to claim that the first Thanksgiving took place not at Plymouth Rock, but at Berkley Plantation in Virginia in 1619. The ships that arrived from England had a charter that required that the day of arrival be observed yearly as […]
Faulkner as a Father: Do Great Novelists Make Bad Parents?
This reflection on literary fatherhood and the “blame game” comes to us from Mockingbird friend Sam Bush. Legend has it that William Faulkner, in response to his 12-year old daughter’s pleading for him to give up drinking, sharply told the girl, “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.” It’s a hard story to stomach, especially if your life has […]
The Life and Work of William Faulkner: A Conference Breakout
Join Paul Walker and James Wilson (yes, of Sons of Bill fame) for The Life and Work of William Faulkner. We discuss Faulkner’s brave, honest, (and perhaps peerless?) exploration of “the human heart in conflict with itself,”–his self-proclaimed raison d’etre for his varied and voluminous literary corpus. And, we attempt to make a compelling case for the deeply flawed (go figure) author’s Christian hope which stealthily seeps up out of the fecund ground of his imaginative, storytelling, Christ-haunted genius. We give special attention The Sound And The Fury, the work we believe to be the masterpiece of American literature.
No lit-crit savvy necessary! As one professor said, “If you want to learn about other people, read Dostoyevsky. If you want to learn about yourself, read Faulkner.” So, come one, come all!
Here’s the audio recording from the session.
[audio https://mbird.com/resources/?show&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mbird.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F09%2F04-The-Life-and-Work-of-William-Faulkner.mp3]
Or, if you prefer, you can download it by right clicking here and selecting “Save link as…”
Listening to Embryonic Murderers with William Faulkner (and the Catholic Church)
An incredible little passage from Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, ht PW: Somebody to talk to, as we all seem to need, want, have to have, not to converse with you nor even agree with you, but just to keep quiet and listen. Which is all that people really want, really need; I meant, to […]
The Twilight Looks a Whole Lot Like the Dawn: Sons of Bill’s Sirens
When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, even then there will still be one more sound: that of man’s puny, inexhaustible voice still talking. Those are the words of William Faulkner, taken from his defiant, melancholy Nobel Prize […]
Marilynne Robinson on the Great Problem of Christianity and the Failure of Russia and Mississippi
If in good conscience I could reproduce the entirety of Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful recent piece on the Bible for the NY Times Book Review, “The Book of Books,” I would. Instead, a few paragraphs will have to suffice. If you happened to read it when it appeared a few days before Christmas, you’ll know what […]
