THE holidays have slowed me down — happy new year, by the way — so I’m a bit late on getting this up. Recently I had a story in the LA Times on David “Deadwood” Milch and his new deal to oversee adaptations of Faulkner’s novels and stories to HBO.
When I began this piece, I thought the idea preposterous: I remember struggling with The Sound and the Fury as a high school student. But as I spoke to my sources — two literary scholars and a television historian with experience in audience testing — it started to seem feasible, if still difficult. If anyone can pull this off, it’s David Milch.
Will be curious to see how this unspools.
So you struggled with Sound and the Fury, huh? Snicker-snort! Who would have had the audacity to assign such a reading to a poor struggling little centipede like you??? This message comes to you from the depths of Maryland where retired teachers lurk and publish snarky comments on certain blogs. BTW The Sound and the Fury has already been adapted, and it focused almost entirely on the Dilsey section for obvious reasons. I hope HBO makes a better job of adaptation.
Ha — this correspondent knows of what she speaks…. My AP English teacher of 25 or so years ago.
In an academic career that included studying literature at the college and graduate level, I’m not sure I was ever more stumped by a text than I was by >Sound<. Joyce, Pynchon, Proust and even the poetry of Ashbery (okay, everything but the really arcane early stuff) reads like common sense compared to Faulkner at his most difficult. Perhaps I was programmed during that struggle to marry a woman who wrote her college thesis on >Absalom<. (I did, if memory serves, at least pass that AP test — courtesy of excellent teaching I reckon.)