Further complaining: word choice

[walkitout]

Really, it is solidly downhill at this point. Foster is quoting Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom!

"... Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew ..."

Here's Foster: "Who is a "nothusband"?" Okay, Foster. That's what my not-brother-in-law is to my sister. He's been known to call her his not-wife. I have referred to him, when telling stories about what-happened-on-vacation, as my sister's not-husband. In _Miss_ Coldfield, dressed in black, she mourned a bunch of dead people and never really stopped, including at least one man she loved but didn't marry before he died.

Think that's a fluke? Alas.

"Think about the "biding", "dreamy," "victorious" dust. How is dust ever victorious or biding, to say nothing of dreamy? The answer is, it never was."

Okay, I have NEVER read Faulkner (well, maybe a page or two), certainly not Absalom, Absalom! I don't intend to, ever. But "biding" dust is obviously dust waiting for the perfect moment to humiliate you by being visible to a critical eye, or induce a sneeze in the allergic person you want to feel at home, or make a mark on an outfit just as you are about to leave for an important event. _Biding_ dust makes perfect sense. Dust, by its very nature, _bides_, and we let it, because if we fight it by constantly seeking it and eliminating it, it will ultimately prove _victorious_: we can never, ever, ever be vigilant or diligent enough housekeepers to win out over dust, however temporarily.

As for dreamy, if you've never watched the motes in sunshine, well, the fuck with you. You have no imagination whatsoever..

He gets another chapter and then he's out the door. It's actually a highly readable summary of the topic, but his specific opinions are so asinine that I now realize I was, perhaps, overly critical of English teachers in high school. I think they might all be like this. (<-- Okay, THAT was a joke. I'm complaining about his overgeneralizations about where meaning is and isn't and how it is constructed and I just did it, too. See? Not just me being like him. I Mock.)

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Peter has to read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying this year for class (it is a very weird mix, this class -- other set texts include Madame Bovary and Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem). I can't imagine what he'll make of it. I plan on letting him know large parts of it are meant to be funny (and are, if you read them right), but that may not be enough to get him through. Fortunately at least it's short (and the stylistic tricks mean there isn't much text on some of the pages). It might actually be a fantastic audio book, now that I think about it. Must look into that. (Apparently there's a recording of Faulkner himself reading an excerpt.)

Re the victorious dust: nothing wrong with the connotations you see, but in context the image is of something being recreated after having previously gone to dust. Obviously if you're dead and have turned to dust, the dust has been victorious over you. And Foster has no excuse for not seeing that, given that he's got the context in front of his eyeballs.

Biding, victorious, dreamy dust

[walkitout]

Of course you are correct. I had the context in front of me as well, and I agree that is surely what Faulkner meant. I was responding to Foster's context-free question of how could dust be ... and thinking, well, there are a _lot_ of possibilities here.

And me being me, I went straight to the most domestic and mundane one.

Really, in a book like this, there isn't a reason for asking a context-free question.