Pylon by William Faulkner
The man (the writer) sat in the early morning sunlight beside the window he had meant to clean but didn't yet, drinking his coffee from the coffee pot that he never cleaned, because he believed that there was no point in cleaning a thing just to put the thing you cleaned back into it or maybe only because he was lazy, or maybe (who knows?) because he just never thought about it, it was just a thing that sat there because it always sat there, demanding no more of you than the distant though visible mountains or even the horizon itself.
The book, you were talking about the book.
Right, right, the book, of course. So he sat there drinking his coffee which was not the cheap kind of coffee but not the most expensive kind of coffee either, in his neighborhood there were, right now, even with the pandemic raging and LA County breaking new highs for death every day even then you cold still walk right out down the block and go into a coffee shop/general distributor of precious things and buy a eight ounces of beans for twenty or twenty five or even thirty hard-earned (not by him, we have told you he is a writer, but by someone) heard-earned American dollars, not to mention a set of rose-gold measuring spoons and a knitted afghan for your niece.
The book, though, you were going to tell us about the
Book, the book, I remember. So he getting set just then, at the very moment, with his record player spinning some psyche-country tune and his medium-expensive coffee cooling getting ready to write something about this book, which is about a New Orleans air show and various shenanigans descending from said spectacle, but it occurred to him that there isn't really a point to explaining the plot of a Faulkner book--
But you said you would--
no point because you aren't reading the books for the plots, not even for the best ones some of which have very good plots but (of course (of course)) for his long, rolling sentences, which at first are tedious but as you sort of sink into it become more and more pleasurable to work through
I disagree!
like falling in love or a stone rolling downhill. They're fun to read but they're also lots of fun to write, you look down and boom you've got a thousand words straight, with nary a punctuation mark to mar the space. It's so much fun to write like that that he (the writer, the one in the chair in the sun) sort of figures the other writer (the dead one, the southern one, the one with the alcohol problem) might have gotten so caught up in the sheer joy of pumping out language that he did not always have energy to dedicate towards quality control, particularly when putting back a few pints of whiskey each afternoon.
For God's sake! For God's sake!
It's OK. I'd probably start with Absalom, Absalom.
