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The Sound of My Fury Toward Overrated Authors Who Confuse Me by Stephan Pastis
March 5, 2010 | 2:44 pm
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By a TeleRead Contributor
Editor’s Note: I’m a big comics fan. I have a complete collection of Pogo, Peanuts and many others. Pearls Before Swine is right up in that category. Imagine my glee when its author, Stephan Pastis, personally, replied to my request to reprint this. I’ll never wash my monitor again. His blog is always worth reading. PB
I bought three William Faulkner books and forced myself to read them all.
One of them had a family trying to move their dead mom all over town. One of them had somebody looking for the father of her kid. And one of them was called The Sound and the Fury.
If you ever want to be so confused that your brain starts to ooze out your ears, read The Sound and the Fury. I defy you to make one bit of sense out of that monstrosity. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a different character, one of whom is mentally retarded (or, in the parlance of today, an “individual with an intellectual disability.”)
You could pour words out of a bucket and end up with a more comprehensible book than that.
So thanks to William Faulkner, I am now done reading fiction. Now I have moved on to watching movies by famous directors.
One of those directors whose films I am now watching is Howard Hawks. One of his movies is The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Yesterday I watched The Big Sleep. I followed the plot for about ten minutes. Then the thing exploded into the most ridiculously complicated storyline I have ever seen, involving twenty-five different characters, all of whom are lying and killing and lying about the killing.
By the end, I didn’t care who killed whom. I just wanted them all to die so that the film would end. Mercifully, after what seemed like the better part of three days, it did.
So at the end of the movie, I checked the credits. And I saw this:
“Screenplay by William Faulkner”
AUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHH
I am now going to find every literary critic who ever called Faulkner a great writer and punch them in the head. Then I’m going to find every movie critic who ever praised The Big Sleep and punch them in the head.
And if all that fails to dissipate my anger, I’m going to Oxford, Mississippi where I will unbury William Faulkner and punch him in the head.
Then I’ll confess to my criminal spree in a book I’ll call Stephan’s Sound and the Fury. But no one will be able to arrest me, despite what I put in the book.
Because no one will understand it.
Because I’ll write the entire thing from the perspective of “an individual with an intellectual disability.”
Take that, William Faulkner.
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Comments:
And why was space given on this blog abt ebooks to someone with a short attention span who has trouble following three sentences in a row? If they only want to read tweets or read only Facebook status updates, let them do so. But why are they getting space on a blog abt ebooks? Who cares abt this persons literary prejudices? And again, what the heck does any of their prattle have to do with ebooks? And god help them should they ever find themselves faced with Beckett or Celine.
It may not have anything to do with ebooks, but I thought it was funny as hell.
Whatever. Why is this here?
It sounds like a book review written by Rat.
Oh, come on, Deran. Lighten up. Faulkner’s as game for fun-poking as anyone. More so, probably.
Well, this probably explains why I am so unimpressed by Pearls Before Swine.
The Big Sleep is one of my favourite movies. I’ll admit that the plot is far from transparent. (Famously, when the director telegraphed Raymond Chandler during filming asking, “who killed the chauffeur?”, Chandler replied, “How the hell should I know?”) But is there nothing more to a movie than plot? Do the fantastic atmosphere and witty dialogue provide no enjoyment at all?
I’m really glad there is a wide variety of fiction to read. I myself can;t stand Hemingway. The good part is that if I have half of a brain cell, I then realize that he’s not the only published author in the world.
Was this supposed to be funny? Fail.
Come on this is actually quite funny. As someone who read through the Faulkner “oeuvre” back around the time the Pope was shot in Vatican square by the just-released Turk, I have to say he’s right on. Actually, try reading Absolom, Absolom! But, I digress. In fact, I can hardly wait to buy the Faulkner canon for my Kindle. Anyone know when they will be released? Anytime soon? Is Faulkner one of the backlist authors that the woman who left Harper Collins intends to release? Sure hope so.
This is the second Paul Biba post I’ve read in the last few minutes. Taken together, I have to conclude that Teleread has become a waste of time. Unbookmarked, effective immediately.
While it’s certainly possible to find humour in the common “this author takes work to read” scenario, you’re going to have to work on finding that humour; the simple statement of it is just boring because “we all knew that.” And it’s a dangerous line to tread, because if you get it wrong, you run the risk of looking not like a ha-ha-ha-funny-like-David-Sedaris fellow, but like an idiot. Unfortunately, this post tends toward the latter category.
My first thought upon reading the post was, “God help this man if he ever tries to read Thomas Pynchon.” My second was to be sad that I can’t get an electronic edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. My third was that it would probably not only be extremely enjoyable, but do me a whole heck of a lot of good, to type Gravity’s Rainbox into my computer by hand, which would incidently make my own e-book edition. Hmmm!