Better Than Starbucks discussion

If I were William Faulkner:

what would you have wished I had done differently?

You might have decided not to wear that stupid Canadian uniform around Oxford.

How about adding a letter to my name?

Actually I was thinking this might be game we play about the literary works of various authors, but I guess we could expand it to their personal and public lives....

I wish you would have created more sympathetic female characters

Agreed! I wish I had written more books! At least i wrote interesting female characters....

To be honest , Mr Faulkner, I think you wrote quite enough! I'm currently wading through your collected short stories and while I'm enjoying them very much I'm finding that they need a lot of concentration. I just wish you treated your ladies as sympathetically as your men. You were a lot better than Mr Hemingway in that respect though - I only got 3 stories in to a short story collection of his before vowing never to read anything by him ever again - if the book hadn't been on my kindle I would have thrown it across the room in disgust!!!

Mr. Faulkner, I don't mind your female characters, but I wish you had been a little less fascinated by wisteria.

Loved almost all of his writing except his poetry never impressed me. his shorts were not as satisfying either, except where he ran them into a novel, thinking Go Down Moses, one of my top ten favorite books of all time!

Stan, to be honest, i dont recall a wisteria passage, though i might have been too busy with other things to notice. Eudora Welty was fascinated by the various flowering bushes.... but i loved her for it or in spite of it, depending on which book you are talking about.

The funny thing is that i find her and faulkner to share the common fate of receiving the Pulitzer for their weakest works....

(yeah, i had to give up pretending i was faulkner, old bill was the only one who could pretend to be william faulkner and not look completely ridiculous!!!!

Now lookee here, Count No'Count, why you dis mah Miss Emily like that?

Tracy wrote: "Now lookee here, Count No'Count, why you dis mah Miss Emily like that?"

so i take it, you prefer his short stories?

I am an omnivorous Faulkner Acolyte..even made the pilgrimage to Oxford with my daughter who is equally smitten. But it has been a while since I've read anything bigger than a short story. Been meaning to read my fave, Sound and Fury, again soon.

I like S & F alright, but love Intruder in the Dust Wild Palms, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom, The Hamlet and most of all Go Down Moses. The village and the Mansion arent bad either:)

Pylon and Soldiers Pay were lacking, for different reasons.

you really like his poetry, too?

I have not read his poetry--or at least not that I remember. ;) I'm pretty hard on poets, I think. My favorites are the Romantics, Yeats, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and a Russian named Mayakovsky--brilliant.

Can relate to being hard on poets. TS doesn't make my cut:)

Oh, I love poets that tear tradition to shards and put them back together in new form! It's why I like Thomas Pynchon as well. and Margaret Atwood's "Siren Song". And Tom Stoppard. not all poets, I realize.