{"id":884,"date":"2015-09-22T00:51:49","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T04:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/?p=884"},"modified":"2015-09-22T00:51:49","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T04:51:49","slug":"my-mother-is-a-fucking-fish-for-chrissakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/2015\/09\/22\/my-mother-is-a-fucking-fish-for-chrissakes\/","title":{"rendered":"My Mother Is A Fucking Fish, For Chrissakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I tried coming up with a 140-character-max hot take for William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying<\/em> and didn't get too far — it was something along the lines of "Multiple viewpoint modernism doubling down on dumb fucking Southerners" — it's one of those pieces of culture that at some point became unassailable, or at least hexproof to a point where only James Franco believes he can interpret the vastness to future audiences.<\/p>\n

I was led to believe that Faulkner's whole deal is portraying the postbellum deep South as a bunch of tragic inbreds. As I Lay<\/em> certainly succeeds in this: every goddamn person in the book can't do a goddamn thing right, from the patriarch who allows his wife's body to decompose to the point of nasty on an eight-day trip to the burying ground to the ignorant teenager who can't get get a proper back-alley abortion to the fool eldest son who allows a broken leg to be set with cement to the fool youngest son who thinks his mother is a fucking fish; this is a dumb fucking lot of fucking morons. You thought Martin McDonagh was over the top?<\/p>\n

And really, in the end it's too much. We get it; the South has a lot to answer for. This just twists the knife. You're just like, "Let these fool motherfuckers twist in the wind, topple the coffin, I don't give a fuck, just make it end." And in the end, you're left with the cubistic, multi-angle storytelling, which is I guess what makes Lay Dying<\/em> modern. It's obviously hard to sit here almost 100 years later and contextualize this approach, but if you're contemplating the craft, it seems a little lacking: it seems like notes a writer would take while constructing a third-person narrative. And Darl — the literate one — is a bit of a narrative deus ex machina<\/em>, no? You just can't write a "book" without some smart piece of shit narrator serving as the divine intermediary to the creator's brilliance.<\/p>\n

James Franco, I read — or thought I read — was cowed by the challenge of portraying I Lay<\/em> cinematically; I don't know why because it actually seems really well suited for that. A film version takes a clunky first-person narrative — with like 15 different first-person perspectives — and seamlessly integrates them all in a (presumably) cohesive visual. I mean, right? Faulkner would have been a pretty rockin' auteur, right? Franco, man up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I tried coming up with a 140-character-max hot take for William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and didn't get too far — it was something along the lines of "Multiple viewpoint modernism doubling down on dumb fucking Southerners" — it's one of those pieces of culture that at some point became unassailable, or at least […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[266,1030],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-are-the-suvs-of-writing","tag-book-club","tag-i-just-typed-553-fs-without-realizing-it-while-gawking-at-brandon-marshalls-outfit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":885,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions\/885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}