Faulkner and Heminway -- The Great Modernest Coin

This is the first blog of my new blog.

You, you few who read my blogs on myspace, can now read these blogs at, appropriately, Brooke's Blog. I know this name sucks, and I will try to come up with the clever one, but right now the old fashioned margarita (made with lime juice, not "mix") and the light beer are making it extremely difficult to come up with anything original, or even tolerably clever. Just give it time.

There were blogs on my old blog that were really brilliant, and I should have saved them, but I'm rather impulsive when I stop something cold turkey, and I didn't save any of them. I'd like to use this blog to continue some of those rants, mostly about literature and language. Yay.

Talked to Blythe today about going to a dreamworld called, "Graduate School." I don't know where this is, or how you get there, or how much it costs, but she made it sound nice, and even nicer, she made it sound like they needed me there. I adore being needed! We then adjourned to class, where I wrote a paper in which I say that Hemingway and Faulker are like two sides of the same coin, though I don't state that illustration, and how one shut you off from thoughts and one bombarded you with them. I have the hardest time with WHY. Why does Hems do this? Why does he shut us out from Brett's thoughts? Is it because he doesn't think that anyone, even the writer, can write what the mind contains? Trying to get to that core, to that ultimate essence -- I think Hems thought it was impossible. I think he thought that thoughts were corruptive, yet, alas, in Snows we are in the mind of the character and what ho! what ho! there's no real feeling or conviction. Maybe Faulkner was dead wrong about Addie. Anyone should be so lucky to live such a life as Addie's and then just work it all out like a mathmatical equation -- I'll just give him these other children and I will have cleaned my house and then I can die. What? Is that all? Is that all that your life demands? Is that all that your heart requires to be whole and ready to die? I am suddenly, after writing a paper about how this works well, not convinced. Ugh! This is why, Blythe, this is why I don't think abut Graduate School -- I don't trust my own opinion most of the time. I like being able to be in the mind of the Bundren family. It's perversely voyeristic and I love it. I love to see how they think, how they feel. I get something new out of each re-read of Addie's passage. The loveliest thing is that it's stream of conciousness and it's condensed. It's not like Joyce who just goes on and on and on, and you just get mad. It's lovely with Faulkner, it's an intoxicating dream in which we are inside the Bundren family's mind, observing and trying to make sense of their perceptions. I get torn: I love Hemingway, because he tells it just like it is -- no sap, no romance, no obligations. But I'm intoxicated by Faulkner. He pulls me into these back woods, these country homesteads and makes me ride bareback, barefoot, and wild-eyed. His intoxication is all psyche, too, not just sensory overload, but hypnotic. As a writer, he had to put you in the mind of this family and the people that this family affected, and to do this he must have been very, very, out of his mind crazy. Heminway's writing and all pared down writing takes mass discipline, but to interperet the language of a dying mother's mind is insane.