Work in Progress
From the website “Conrad Hall Looks Back and Forward to a Work in Progress” on a cinematographer who died on Jan. 4, 2003 (see today’s earlier entry):
“Hall concentrated on writing an original script and another based on Wild Palms, a William Faulkner novel. He was determined to direct his own films based on those scripts. Hall explained that just once in his life he wanted to control the process of making a film from beginning to end. It’s still a work in progress….
If he discovered Aladdin’s magic lantern, and had only one wish which could be granted, Hall says he would use it to bring Wild Palms to the screen.”
Crazy Protestant Drunk
An Amazon.com review of Faulkner’s novella Wild Palms:
***** “A Great Introduction to Faulkner”
Reviewer: Stephen M. Bauer from Hazlet, N.J., July 7, 2002 —
I love this guy Faulkner. I read another half chapter of The Wild Palms on the train. Never read anything by him before.
Faulkner’s characters don’t sit around and examine their navel. They just Do. Yes act on their passions they Do. His characters are not beautiful people. They have scars, injuries, poverty, depraved morals, injustices, suffering upon suffering. What makes The Wild Palms beautiful is the passion of people living life right on the bone.
A married woman is planning on abandoning her husband and two kids and running away with another man. The other man asks her what about her two kids. On page 41, she answers, “I know the answer to that and I know that I cant change that answer and I dont think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.” No Catholic saint-mystic ever said it better. Pretty good for a crazy Protestant drunk.
“The oral history of Los Angeles
is written in piano bars.”
— Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
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Tonight’s site music, “Long Ago and Far Away,” by Jerome Kern (with lyrics, including “Aladdin’s lamp,” by Ira Gershwin) is from the 1944 Rita Hayworth film “Cover Girl.” It was featured in the 1987 film “Someone to Love,” the final performance (on film) of Orson Welles. |
See also “For the Green Lady of Perelandra,
from the City of Angels,” my entry of December 21, 2002.
Thanks for commenting at my site again. i honestly can’t imagine why you’d find it interesting, but i think it’s cool that you read it. 🙂 About my post, evidentiality (expressed in language) and epistemology (understood abstractly) sort of intersect my fields of research, and so the particular book i mentioned in my last post is actually really important to me. it could turn into the thoughts behind a thesis paper or something! 🙂 i wasn’t trying to bandy big words around for self-aggrandizement; i just sort of assumed that the folks reading the post would know why i’m interested… too much assuming, though. sorry about that.
About your last post… have you read The Wild Palms? The Sound and the Fury was really good for me, but it’s been a while since I read it, and I never could get as interested in anything else I picked up by Faulkner (As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom were the 2 that I failed to finish reading). Would you recommend The Wild Palms? I’m not so sure about that Amazon reviewer… just in that I don’t think catholics are particularly more attuned to love or suffering than protestants (as he implied).
Comment by habergrrl — Thursday, January 9, 2003 @ 1:20 pm
Thanks for the comment. I replied via email.
Comment by m759 — Thursday, January 9, 2003 @ 8:31 pm