Well the Elevator Repair Service theater group pulled it off, and their production of The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) seems to have gone off well (NY Times). Looks like they only performed the Benjy section–for my money one of the most difficult and rewarding passages I’ve ever read–which took two and a half hours. The article doesn’t mention if there’s plans for any of the other sections, though I guess that could get redundant on stage.
The Times reports that Dmitri Nabokov is going against his father’s wishes and publishing his father’s last unfinished novel instead of burning it. This whole thing feels like a stunt to me. I can certainly understand not wanting your unfinished work to go to the vultures–just look at what the Times had to say about Richard Wright’s unfinished novel–but at the same time all this hype is certainly getting people interested in Nabokov’s manuscript.
The NY Times has an article about a drama company performing an adaptation of The Sound and the Fury. The article reports, “Mr. Collins said he wanted to amplify the disorienting effect of reading the novel by mixing up the casting configurations, projecting lines from the book on the walls of the set and throwing in dance numbers. But he is aware of the dangers of alienating an audience with too much experimentation. The key to making the piece work, he said, is remaining as true as possible to Faulkner’s words, which is why he changed very little of the text.”
That’s insane. The novel is great, but the time jumps in the Benjy section are so fast that staging it might send someone into a seizure. I kind of want to see the performance.
Earlier this week I finished Paul Hemphill’s biography of Hank Williams. While I usually get bogged down halfway through a biography, about the time the subject gets famous (most seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on a person’s life before they did what they were biography worthy of–maybe that’s interesting: I’m interested in reading about someone because of who they became, but to me they’re more interesting before they did whatever it was they did that made them interesting), but I blew right through Hemphill’s book. Hemphill is also a novelist, so the book has a colloquial, storyteller’s voice. The author sounds one of the boys, just sitting by a campfire telling stories about Ol’ Hank.
Maybe that’s not particularly scholarly, but the book is well written, and Williams’s life is fascinating. My favorite anecdote is when Williams wanted to do a rendition of an older song, “Lovesick Blues.” He’d hooked up with Fred Rose, a Nashville producer who was big on making songs fit a pop template. Rose balked because he said Williams was starting with the chorus, and using the first verse as the refrain, which Rose couldn’t wrap his head around. He told the musicians, “I can’t listen to this. I’m going out for a cup of coffee, and if you can get this thing recorded in the ten minutes before I get back, I’ll pay you overtime.” The song then became one of Williams’s biggest hits.
It’s that time, when I no longer have school commitments, and thus find myself with an inordinate amount of time on my hands. This week I’ve been writing five hours a day, taking the dog on a two-mile run, reading at a pace of two books a week, and still have time to goof off online before going out to drink a Bud Light and play Golden Tee or watch the White Sox. That means blogging starts again, but might end if I ever find myself reasonably employed, or run out of money for internet access.
I’m done with the MFA, and moving from Lafayette to Richmond to be with my ladylove. May 16 is the day, just in time for Emo’s commencement on the 17th. Until then I’ll be going to watch the White Sox play the Orioles, helping to copy edit Sycamore, camping at Turkey Run, and driving out to Fort Wayne to visit a dueling piano bar.