Here's the entire essay, which I think was on one side of the bag. The quote I already posted is in large font on the other side of the bag. The essay is called "George Saunders Speaks: A Two Minute Note to the Future." In full:
Amazing to think that I am here in my time and you, future reader, are there in your (future) time, reading this! By the time you read this, I may be in grave (!). Maybe you, in your future clothing, can drive your jet car to my grave, hover over grave, think fondly of time you read these words, leave weird cloned flowers, go scooting back to own life. But beware: you too, future reader, will someday be in grave. All, in time, will be in graves. Unless you, in future time, have defeated death. If so, please revive me (!). Also revive Kate (wife) and kids (Sally, Kip).
Speaking of Sally, Kip: what parenting like in future? Still difficult? Even though your kids not brought to term in womb, but in small hygienic chamber attached to mother, even though your kids born speaking several languages + playing violin, due to tiny chips in brains, future parents still find parenting hard?
My boss just came, asked what I was writing. EnderCO report? Ha. No.
Note to future generations: Still have “bosses”? Bosses still intrusive? Still have “offices”? Future offices = high tech? All you have to do to raise temperature is think, “Raise temperature in office,” computer does? People move from place to place on invisible air-cars? People think: “AirCar, take me to Copy Room,” soon are soundlessly proceeding to Copy Room? Except there is no Copy Room, because paper obsolete, all documents projected on to screen inside brain? Sometimes, for prank, future person sends ton of random copies into brain of friend, friend cannot walk/see, has to feel way to AirCar, say: “AirCar, take me to Frank’s cubicle, am going to kill Frank for flooding my brain with random copies.” In your (future) time, boss can just stay in own (plush) office, nosing into what (excellent, responsible) worker might be writing in own spare time? Worker can send boss mental message: If you are so smart, Mr. Kenner, why branch shrinking, why did you have to lay off Jerry Ringer?
Jerry = good guy. Really miss Jerry. Jerry = dear friend. People still get fired in future? Even person with new baby? Hope not. Hope that, in future, all is well, everyone eats free, no one must work, all just sit around feeling love for one another.
Perhaps it’s just that it’s coming along towards supper time for me, but I cannot help but notice the gulf between the sentiments of our Mr. Saunders who wishes us all no-strings free food (which I have decided to take literally) and Mr. Faulkner (heretofore affectionately known as Cold War Bill), who in the film told kids that giving away free food was dangerous and would bribe people into an unthinking mass.
Thanks Mary. This (like a Time Machine) zapped me back to when I read this: In a Chipotle on Columbus just north of Lincoln Center, my usual go-to lunch spot when we lived in New York. That Saundersian syntax. The piece almost perfectly encapsulates George's fiction.
Yeah, this part was hard to listen to: "Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery — giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for.."
That Faulkner guy is a dang party pooper. Who is he to stop us from crashing parties we weren't invited to, where we'll shove food into tupperware containers we just happened to have in our pockets?
I heard Faulkner’s speech differently, that it could relate to today- of the masses of fear driven people in our country being “bribed” ( he used that word) by politicians or should I say a politician who gathers loyal followers, because of fear and a promises to give them what they think they need.
A different Faulkner recording & Faulkner's mistress: My father, William Schallert, had a small role in the film "In the Heat of the Night". During filming, the script supervisor approached him and asked about his accent since she knew he was from Los Angeles.
He told her that he'd studied Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech (I still have the record album). She looked nonplussed, said, "Oh," then turned and walked away.
My father approached the director, Norman Jewison, and asked if he'd said something wrong.
"That was Meta Carpenter-Wilde," he said. "She was Faulkner's mistress for 18 years."
I told my father he should take it as a compliment that she asked!
Here's a great quote from the speech: "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."
He was a lifelong reader of The New Yorker and I remember how excited he was when you started publishing there. He would read from them out loud (often in some accent he was working on) and would end up laughing until he cried.
There's a quality to your work that he really honed in on. When I was a kid, he'd try out different voices when he read to me at night. The voice he used for Winnie the Pooh morphed into Milton the Toaster (the talking toaster who sold Pop-Tarts). Those commercials helped pay for college, honestly, and only came to an end when, in a later iteration, Milton had a "fever" and the little girl in the commercial took his temperature. Well, turns out some child in TV land tried that at home -- whether she actually used a thermometer, he never found out -- but Milton was pulled from the airwaves after that. At times, he'd tap into his "Eeyore" voice for your work, though as he said, there was always such hope in your stories, as in "My Flamboyant Grandson".
In the movie, Sidney Poitier's character slaps a wealthy cotton baron (after being slapped himself), and Rod Steiger's character fails to react. William Schallert's character, the Mayor of the town, later says, "Bill...what's made you change your mind about Tibbs?"
"What makes you think I have?" says Steiger angrily.
"Last police chief we had...woulda shot Tibbs. Claimed self-defense."
It's a moment like those we talk about in Story Club--a fundamental change in character.
This was so lovely and strange. I am personally grateful for your time speaking to the public. We met in Cleveland and talked about Barry Hannah over Thai Food with other MFA candidates. With that conversation and this odd little bit of my home state, you gave another bit of my writing self back to me. How weird and wonderful is that? I am so grateful. And still writing.
I show this video every year to my seniors as we prep ourselves to read Unvanquished or Absalom, Absalom. I have tried to get them to film a re-enactment of their own, that sort of awkward, “stand here” kind of interview so that we can all take ourselves less seriously, but no one as of yet has taken me up on the offer. I’ll talk them into it one day. “By golly.”
I was on a Faukner advice hunt the other day, these two caught my interest
On when to stop work for the day:
“The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell, and you have trouble with it. It’s—what’s the saying—leave them while you’re looking good.
On writing outside one’s experience:
“There should be no limits to what the writer tries to write about. He has got to tell it in terms that he does know. That is, he can write about what is beyond his experience, but the only terms he does know are within his experience, his observation. But there should be no limits to what he attempts. The higher the aim, the better. If [he wants] to be a failure, let him be a fine bust, not just a petty little one.” (Faulkner talking to 1957 University of Virginia writing students)
For five years the Ford Foundation has stood like a rock of gold behind TV's Omnibus. "We were operating," says Omnibus' Executive Producer Robert Saudek, "with what Justice Holmes called 'the fighting significance of guarantees.' " What Saudek meant was that Omnibus, with Ford's "venture capital" behind it, could fight the mediocrity of TV and "raise the level of American taste." Saudek and Omnibus made such a good start at both objectives that last week the foundation decided to abandon its "experiment" and sent Omnibus into the cold world of commercial TV —with its blessings.
The show's full property rights fell to balding, bushy-browed Bob Saudek, 45, who promptly formed a new packaging firm—Robert Saudek Associates, Inc.—to keep Omnibus on the TV air. Best "guarantee" now, says Saudek, is "the funded know-how of my creative staff," which will include such Omnibus regulars as Cultural Headwaiter Alistair Cooke, Drama Critic Walter Kerr. But the question remains: Can Omnibus maintain the courage of past conceits, the venturesomeness of past successes, the educational luxury of such occasional failures as its go-minute The Iliad, without special subsidy? The signs are encouraging: both current sponsors (Union Carbide and Carbon Corp., Aluminium Ltd.) have committed themselves to sponsor part of Omnibus for a new season, and Saudek says there are other potential sponsors, and that all three networks want the show. CBS appareritly wants Saudek more than it wants Omnibus; NBC is considering alternating Omnibus with Wide Wide World on Sundays at 4 p.m., and ABC, its present network, wants Omnibus more than Omnibus wants it.
To make ends meet—and to make a profit as well—Saudek hopes to branch out. He talks of a jazz series, a high-toned dramatic series, and a children's program which will "excite youngsters [he has five of his own] into involvement with the world." All he needs, says Saudek, is "the well-conceived idea, the well-written word, the well-cast performer and the well-spent dollar." And he believes that all of them are within reach.
This was not only odd, but funny, really. it hops around with Faulkner here and there, smoking his pipe, almost the exact opposite of his long, sometimes convoluted lines. i heard Faulkner speak twice when he was at UVA. His voice, to my recollection, was slower and a bit deeper. The soundtrack on this video is really high, a bit chipmunky. I guess because I grew up with it, and was lied to in it for so many years (along with some good stories ), I have a hard time taking seriously anything in that Southern drawl - including my own.
The beginning of the video felt like a weird fever dream… the strange parade and the view of the town. And this: “ I don’t know if you’re good or not, but you got the Nobel prize.” That cracked me up.
Love b&w writer movies almost as much as I love google image searching writers’ houses.
Some highlights from the reel:
Voiceover: “His friends are the friends of his boyhood.” And we get a shot of Faulkner stroking the soft jaw of a horse as another horse enters from right of frame.
The part when Faulkner visits his lawyer friend looks like it could be inspiration for a Pixar movie. From the narrow, balconied portico façade to the thousands of law books. Lawyer friend: “How was Sweden.” Faulkner: “Cool but pleasant."
The pair of cute chickens that must have been coaxed to enter the frame and can be seen through the wagon wheel spokes as Faulkner asks the boy about when he begins school again.
A bird’s eye view shot at a crosswalk where people pass one another and then cut to a wide shot of dapper men in fedoras sitting on public benches set perpendicular to one another. The audio: "…so a writer overlays one life with another until they become a meaning, many meanings.”
His graduation line: “So never be afraid, never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.”
"You're the reason I have to wear a necktie in the middle of the week." ! My favorite line.
But I wonder whose idea it was Bill the farmer/writer made the rounds of Oxford wearing a suit and tie A charming and unsophisticated documentary.
I read several of his books but don't remember much except sentences that went on forever. I wonder if that came from the rural run on way of speaking. We read writers like Faulkner in high school, and then they're enshrined in our minds, fondly forgotten almost forever.
That WAS a peculiar video, with the mannered and stilted conversations (I kept expecting a pipe tobacco—or maybe whiskey, this being Faulkner—ad to break in), but it was endearing in some ways too, and fun to hear his voice. My grandmother was born in Meridian MS, and she had a honeyed drawl. Congrats on the Chipotle story George—I had a partial story published years ago on the outside of a coffee can by a Portland, OR coffee company called StoryHouse, with the longer conclusion of the story in the can—with the beans. Savory words.
Seriously I will stop after this. Couldn't get the whole PDF:
Faulkner on Omnibus :
A Portrait of the Artist as a Cultural Ambassador in the Making
Ted Atkinson (bio)
When the popular television series Omnibus aired late in the afternoon of December 28, 1952, the episode featured a short film with an unlikely leading man: William Faulkner. Appearing on national television marked a dramatic turn for Faulkner in more ways than one. For most of his career, he had shown a chronic aversion to the public-facing duties associated with being a literary celebrity. By the midcentury mark, however, Faulkner was becoming somewhat more willing to step into the public spotlight. A key factor precipitating his change of heart was winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 and garnering the acclaim that comes with the most prestigious literary prize in the world. The post-Nobel Faulkner was much in demand. Among the earliest and most prominent of his suitors were officials from the U.S. State Department, who recruited him to serve as a cultural ambassador. In the mid-1950s, he traveled on junkets to Latin America, Europe, and Japan to promote U.S. concerns through public readings, lectures, and press availabilities. Although Faulkner’s role was ostensibly diplomatic, he performed at times as a cold warrior on the cultural front. In that capacity, he fiercely defended individual liberty and self-reliance as deterrents to the oppressive forces of subjugation and fear under totalitarian regimes. This rhetorical stance became part of the stock remarks that Faulkner delivered while carrying out his official duties during a time of great urgency for the cause of democracy.
The narrative of Faulkner’s dramatic change in fortunes—rising from relative obscurity in the late 1930s to esteemed Nobel Laureate by the early 1950s—is now a familiar account in Faulkner studies.1 Only in recent decades [End Page 7] has the story of Faulkner’s concomitant development into a Cold War-era writer-diplomat gained traction. Largely neglected by scholars, the Omnibus profile of Faulkner—a short film in which he plays himself—is an unusual but instructive document of this post-Nobel transformation in progress.2 As such, it preserves in an encapsulated form a juncture at which Faulkner was becoming an actor in a geopolitical theater of cultural Cold War routinely staged in mass media.3 The production of Faulkner’s big TV moment employed the ascendant medium as an instrument for rendering the local and global domains the author now inhabited as a writer of international renown.4 The magnitude of the appearance for Faulkner is apparent when taking into account that Omnibus regularly drew a viewership in the range of seventeen million.5 By this measure, it was by far the largest audience that Faulkner was ever able to reach at once. In presenting Faulkner to the viewer, the production renders what he famously dubbed his “postage stamp of native soil” in Mississippi fertile ground for the cultivation of personal convictions and literary achievements presented as testaments to the generative possibilities afforded by American democracy.6 Faulkner on Omnibus took shape from a combination of televisual image-making and trademark self-fashioning that helped to refine the persona that the writer-diplomat would carry with him to the far-flung places and people he sought to address in the interest of advancing U.S. interests amid a heated ideological conflict on a global scale.
Omnibus Origin Story
The Faulkner profile aired on Omnibus in the eighth episode of the show’s inaugural season. A blend of cultural affairs and informational programming comprised the standard Omnibus format. The programming content was instrumental in establishing the television news magazine as a fixture on the broadcast landscape for years to come. In fact, it was so influential that it became a model for the development of PBS at the end of the 1960s. The shared DNA between the two enterprises was evident when in 1971 PBS launched Masterpiece Theater featuring as the host Alistair Cooke, the erudite and affable former host of Omnibus, which had aired its final season a decade earlier. Over the course of the show’s run, Omnibus resided at each of the three major networks and occupied afternoon and...
I love The Sound and the Fury so much. Read it at seventeen. Not the easiest thing to read, though. You might be thinking, what is the point of all this, much of the way. Until it begins to come together, and everything starts to make sense, and you’re blown away by the power of it. (I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cheat a little by reading the last pages along the way, where he comments on the main characters.)
It’s really difficult in the first half of it to understand what the hell is going on, partly because Faulkner is so good at his stream-of-consciousness. The insights in those endnotes saved my 17-year-old head from exploding.
I also love The Sound and the Fury. If you can sink into the consciousness of each character, they pull you through the story. My first Faulkner was As I Lay Dying, and in my first year of college, I didn't get it. My brother, who never went to college, and was in high school at the time said, "Read The Sound and the Fury. It's an amazing book." Also a very disturbing movie with Yul Brynner and Joanne Woodward. The 1959 movie, that is. I have not seen the James Franco one.
As good a reason as any! (And it’s a great name. My dads’s Louisiana family was full of great names; the hands-down best was my great-grandmother Ursula Dragon.)
I agree about “The Sound and The Fury.” I’ve read it three times. The first Wild Bill Novel I tackled. Getting ready to reread “Light In August.” And “Absalom, Absalom!” All masterpieces. And “The Hamlet” is Faulkner at his lyrical best.
Light in August. The story of Joe Christmas and what is done to him resonates today. LIA is one of my favorite books. TY for reminding me of the power of its story 💙🌷
Wow, what a find. Thanks George. Two things that stand out: How Faulkner talks around his friends and the locals vs. how he speaks at a podium. Not unusual, but noticeable, especially in the depth of his Mississippi accent. And the second is how we really never see white and black residents ever mingling, or that Faulkner's black friends are all working people, mostly in the fields. A stark segregation. Faulkner the only one crossing the invisible border diving one group from the other.....
When he speaks at the podium, I believe they are filming him as it is happening--so it's "real." When he speaks to the locals/his friends, it's all scripted.
I just read an article that says the speech at the podium is ALSO a re-enactment, and that he is reading from his Nobel speech there... So maybe it's the fact of reading as opposed to chatting is what the difference is.
Here's George on the Chipotle bag:
"Hope that, in future, all is well, everyone eats free, no one must work, all just sit around feeling love for one another."
Here's the entire essay, which I think was on one side of the bag. The quote I already posted is in large font on the other side of the bag. The essay is called "George Saunders Speaks: A Two Minute Note to the Future." In full:
Amazing to think that I am here in my time and you, future reader, are there in your (future) time, reading this! By the time you read this, I may be in grave (!). Maybe you, in your future clothing, can drive your jet car to my grave, hover over grave, think fondly of time you read these words, leave weird cloned flowers, go scooting back to own life. But beware: you too, future reader, will someday be in grave. All, in time, will be in graves. Unless you, in future time, have defeated death. If so, please revive me (!). Also revive Kate (wife) and kids (Sally, Kip).
Speaking of Sally, Kip: what parenting like in future? Still difficult? Even though your kids not brought to term in womb, but in small hygienic chamber attached to mother, even though your kids born speaking several languages + playing violin, due to tiny chips in brains, future parents still find parenting hard?
My boss just came, asked what I was writing. EnderCO report? Ha. No.
Note to future generations: Still have “bosses”? Bosses still intrusive? Still have “offices”? Future offices = high tech? All you have to do to raise temperature is think, “Raise temperature in office,” computer does? People move from place to place on invisible air-cars? People think: “AirCar, take me to Copy Room,” soon are soundlessly proceeding to Copy Room? Except there is no Copy Room, because paper obsolete, all documents projected on to screen inside brain? Sometimes, for prank, future person sends ton of random copies into brain of friend, friend cannot walk/see, has to feel way to AirCar, say: “AirCar, take me to Frank’s cubicle, am going to kill Frank for flooding my brain with random copies.” In your (future) time, boss can just stay in own (plush) office, nosing into what (excellent, responsible) worker might be writing in own spare time? Worker can send boss mental message: If you are so smart, Mr. Kenner, why branch shrinking, why did you have to lay off Jerry Ringer?
Jerry = good guy. Really miss Jerry. Jerry = dear friend. People still get fired in future? Even person with new baby? Hope not. Hope that, in future, all is well, everyone eats free, no one must work, all just sit around feeling love for one another.
Thanks Mary.
Perhaps it’s just that it’s coming along towards supper time for me, but I cannot help but notice the gulf between the sentiments of our Mr. Saunders who wishes us all no-strings free food (which I have decided to take literally) and Mr. Faulkner (heretofore affectionately known as Cold War Bill), who in the film told kids that giving away free food was dangerous and would bribe people into an unthinking mass.
I noticed that too, and agree with me.
Thanks Mary. This (like a Time Machine) zapped me back to when I read this: In a Chipotle on Columbus just north of Lincoln Center, my usual go-to lunch spot when we lived in New York. That Saundersian syntax. The piece almost perfectly encapsulates George's fiction.
I'm hoping you saved the bag....
And if you want to see it on the bag itself, Yale offers a photo of the bag from its archive! https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/14891973
Oh, fantastic! Thanks for the link!
It feels like the bag should have the Story Club chicken or Thinking Man.
Which is the exact opposite of the graduation speech Faulkner gives near the end of this odd film-ette!
Yeah, this part was hard to listen to: "Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery — giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for.."
I LOVE free food. It somehow tastes better. Also, money I haven't worked for sounds nice.
also free food WHILE sitting around feeling the love? Sign me up
That Faulkner guy is a dang party pooper. Who is he to stop us from crashing parties we weren't invited to, where we'll shove food into tupperware containers we just happened to have in our pockets?
Not that I've ever done that...
Yep.
yes-ambiguous!
I heard Faulkner’s speech differently, that it could relate to today- of the masses of fear driven people in our country being “bribed” ( he used that word) by politicians or should I say a politician who gathers loyal followers, because of fear and a promises to give them what they think they need.
It would be great if a Faulkner expert weighed in. I really can't make sense of his words there.
The times.
They are a-changin' and not in a good way (now).
A different Faulkner recording & Faulkner's mistress: My father, William Schallert, had a small role in the film "In the Heat of the Night". During filming, the script supervisor approached him and asked about his accent since she knew he was from Los Angeles.
He told her that he'd studied Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech (I still have the record album). She looked nonplussed, said, "Oh," then turned and walked away.
My father approached the director, Norman Jewison, and asked if he'd said something wrong.
"That was Meta Carpenter-Wilde," he said. "She was Faulkner's mistress for 18 years."
I told my father he should take it as a compliment that she asked!
Here's a great quote from the speech: "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."
And the president of SAG! 👍❤️
He was a lifelong reader of The New Yorker and I remember how excited he was when you started publishing there. He would read from them out loud (often in some accent he was working on) and would end up laughing until he cried.
Oh gosh, that is so nice to hear, Brendan. He was such a talented actor. ❤️. Would love to have heard those readings.
There's a quality to your work that he really honed in on. When I was a kid, he'd try out different voices when he read to me at night. The voice he used for Winnie the Pooh morphed into Milton the Toaster (the talking toaster who sold Pop-Tarts). Those commercials helped pay for college, honestly, and only came to an end when, in a later iteration, Milton had a "fever" and the little girl in the commercial took his temperature. Well, turns out some child in TV land tried that at home -- whether she actually used a thermometer, he never found out -- but Milton was pulled from the airwaves after that. At times, he'd tap into his "Eeyore" voice for your work, though as he said, there was always such hope in your stories, as in "My Flamboyant Grandson".
Could not find the memorable scene I wanted, but here is Mr. William Schallert in "In the Heat of the Night": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLW-4kZKcUo
In the movie, Sidney Poitier's character slaps a wealthy cotton baron (after being slapped himself), and Rod Steiger's character fails to react. William Schallert's character, the Mayor of the town, later says, "Bill...what's made you change your mind about Tibbs?"
"What makes you think I have?" says Steiger angrily.
"Last police chief we had...woulda shot Tibbs. Claimed self-defense."
It's a moment like those we talk about in Story Club--a fundamental change in character.
The Trouble with Tribbles! Patty Duke! Oh, my god! Your dad was in EVERYTHING! I totally recognize him from so many shows!
Thanks loved this Brendon. Thanks for posting I never realized he was such a rascal.
Fantastic story! Thanks for posting it! And that quote, too. Wow--so intense.
That was your dad? Wow. I always admired his performances.
This was so lovely and strange. I am personally grateful for your time speaking to the public. We met in Cleveland and talked about Barry Hannah over Thai Food with other MFA candidates. With that conversation and this odd little bit of my home state, you gave another bit of my writing self back to me. How weird and wonderful is that? I am so grateful. And still writing.
I show this video every year to my seniors as we prep ourselves to read Unvanquished or Absalom, Absalom. I have tried to get them to film a re-enactment of their own, that sort of awkward, “stand here” kind of interview so that we can all take ourselves less seriously, but no one as of yet has taken me up on the offer. I’ll talk them into it one day. “By golly.”
Sounds fabulous!
"So, you're the one the trouble begins with."
"Who did you want it to begin with?"
Proposal for Story Club motto
(Suddenly missing the quirky humor of my dairy-farming grandfather and his contemporaries.)
Love this for a motto! And for a T-shirt!
I was on a Faukner advice hunt the other day, these two caught my interest
On when to stop work for the day:
“The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell, and you have trouble with it. It’s—what’s the saying—leave them while you’re looking good.
On writing outside one’s experience:
“There should be no limits to what the writer tries to write about. He has got to tell it in terms that he does know. That is, he can write about what is beyond his experience, but the only terms he does know are within his experience, his observation. But there should be no limits to what he attempts. The higher the aim, the better. If [he wants] to be a failure, let him be a fine bust, not just a petty little one.” (Faulkner talking to 1957 University of Virginia writing students)
Hi JD - love the advice where did it come from? Thanks. I kind of let him go after the Sound and The Fury because no one could match him.
https://lithub.com/20-pieces-of-writing-advice-from-william-faulkner/
It’s from here. Some good advice : )
This is great. I always got the sense that Faulkner had a distinctly goofy side, e.g:
- Affecting a limp after he returned from service in the RAF in WW I, although he hadn’t been wounded.
- He was known by some in Oxford as “Count No Count” for his pretensions about being a gentleman farmer
- His outrageous/hyperbolic statement in the Paris Review that “Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”
You might get a kick out of it if you were an old lady!
Then again, you might not...
A bit about the producer Robert Saudek:
Time Magazine Monday, Mar. 04, 1957
Television: On with the Show
For five years the Ford Foundation has stood like a rock of gold behind TV's Omnibus. "We were operating," says Omnibus' Executive Producer Robert Saudek, "with what Justice Holmes called 'the fighting significance of guarantees.' " What Saudek meant was that Omnibus, with Ford's "venture capital" behind it, could fight the mediocrity of TV and "raise the level of American taste." Saudek and Omnibus made such a good start at both objectives that last week the foundation decided to abandon its "experiment" and sent Omnibus into the cold world of commercial TV —with its blessings.
The show's full property rights fell to balding, bushy-browed Bob Saudek, 45, who promptly formed a new packaging firm—Robert Saudek Associates, Inc.—to keep Omnibus on the TV air. Best "guarantee" now, says Saudek, is "the funded know-how of my creative staff," which will include such Omnibus regulars as Cultural Headwaiter Alistair Cooke, Drama Critic Walter Kerr. But the question remains: Can Omnibus maintain the courage of past conceits, the venturesomeness of past successes, the educational luxury of such occasional failures as its go-minute The Iliad, without special subsidy? The signs are encouraging: both current sponsors (Union Carbide and Carbon Corp., Aluminium Ltd.) have committed themselves to sponsor part of Omnibus for a new season, and Saudek says there are other potential sponsors, and that all three networks want the show. CBS appareritly wants Saudek more than it wants Omnibus; NBC is considering alternating Omnibus with Wide Wide World on Sundays at 4 p.m., and ABC, its present network, wants Omnibus more than Omnibus wants it.
To make ends meet—and to make a profit as well—Saudek hopes to branch out. He talks of a jazz series, a high-toned dramatic series, and a children's program which will "excite youngsters [he has five of his own] into involvement with the world." All he needs, says Saudek, is "the well-conceived idea, the well-written word, the well-cast performer and the well-spent dollar." And he believes that all of them are within reach.
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,862478,00.html
This was not only odd, but funny, really. it hops around with Faulkner here and there, smoking his pipe, almost the exact opposite of his long, sometimes convoluted lines. i heard Faulkner speak twice when he was at UVA. His voice, to my recollection, was slower and a bit deeper. The soundtrack on this video is really high, a bit chipmunky. I guess because I grew up with it, and was lied to in it for so many years (along with some good stories ), I have a hard time taking seriously anything in that Southern drawl - including my own.
love this, sallie.
Thanks, Mary! Being Southern expat is kind of like being a cousin of the Devil.
I'm reading Bastard Out Of Carolina at the moment, and I hear you, sallie.
The beginning of the video felt like a weird fever dream… the strange parade and the view of the town. And this: “ I don’t know if you’re good or not, but you got the Nobel prize.” That cracked me up.
‘Now you know our families have been friends for generations…I don’t know if you’re all that good but congrats on the Nobel prize’ 😆
Hahahaha! Just keeping it real, I guess!
We all need those friends
And the music was all warped.
Yes, it added to a melting quality— I thought of a Dali painting.
Faulkner didnt have a high school diploma
I love that–– it makes him more interesting somehow.
Love the idea of the Dali painting. I am having a chuckle after all that nonsense that I could not hear. thanks
It was odd, but I was sort of enchanted, too. Who had the idea? Who wrote the script? Did they rehearse at all?
Ha! Totally!
Yes, the start of the film is McGoohanesque.
Love b&w writer movies almost as much as I love google image searching writers’ houses.
Some highlights from the reel:
Voiceover: “His friends are the friends of his boyhood.” And we get a shot of Faulkner stroking the soft jaw of a horse as another horse enters from right of frame.
The part when Faulkner visits his lawyer friend looks like it could be inspiration for a Pixar movie. From the narrow, balconied portico façade to the thousands of law books. Lawyer friend: “How was Sweden.” Faulkner: “Cool but pleasant."
The pair of cute chickens that must have been coaxed to enter the frame and can be seen through the wagon wheel spokes as Faulkner asks the boy about when he begins school again.
A bird’s eye view shot at a crosswalk where people pass one another and then cut to a wide shot of dapper men in fedoras sitting on public benches set perpendicular to one another. The audio: "…so a writer overlays one life with another until they become a meaning, many meanings.”
His graduation line: “So never be afraid, never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.”
"You're the reason I have to wear a necktie in the middle of the week." ! My favorite line.
But I wonder whose idea it was Bill the farmer/writer made the rounds of Oxford wearing a suit and tie A charming and unsophisticated documentary.
I read several of his books but don't remember much except sentences that went on forever. I wonder if that came from the rural run on way of speaking. We read writers like Faulkner in high school, and then they're enshrined in our minds, fondly forgotten almost forever.
That WAS a peculiar video, with the mannered and stilted conversations (I kept expecting a pipe tobacco—or maybe whiskey, this being Faulkner—ad to break in), but it was endearing in some ways too, and fun to hear his voice. My grandmother was born in Meridian MS, and she had a honeyed drawl. Congrats on the Chipotle story George—I had a partial story published years ago on the outside of a coffee can by a Portland, OR coffee company called StoryHouse, with the longer conclusion of the story in the can—with the beans. Savory words.
Seriously I will stop after this. Couldn't get the whole PDF:
Faulkner on Omnibus :
A Portrait of the Artist as a Cultural Ambassador in the Making
Ted Atkinson (bio)
When the popular television series Omnibus aired late in the afternoon of December 28, 1952, the episode featured a short film with an unlikely leading man: William Faulkner. Appearing on national television marked a dramatic turn for Faulkner in more ways than one. For most of his career, he had shown a chronic aversion to the public-facing duties associated with being a literary celebrity. By the midcentury mark, however, Faulkner was becoming somewhat more willing to step into the public spotlight. A key factor precipitating his change of heart was winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 and garnering the acclaim that comes with the most prestigious literary prize in the world. The post-Nobel Faulkner was much in demand. Among the earliest and most prominent of his suitors were officials from the U.S. State Department, who recruited him to serve as a cultural ambassador. In the mid-1950s, he traveled on junkets to Latin America, Europe, and Japan to promote U.S. concerns through public readings, lectures, and press availabilities. Although Faulkner’s role was ostensibly diplomatic, he performed at times as a cold warrior on the cultural front. In that capacity, he fiercely defended individual liberty and self-reliance as deterrents to the oppressive forces of subjugation and fear under totalitarian regimes. This rhetorical stance became part of the stock remarks that Faulkner delivered while carrying out his official duties during a time of great urgency for the cause of democracy.
The narrative of Faulkner’s dramatic change in fortunes—rising from relative obscurity in the late 1930s to esteemed Nobel Laureate by the early 1950s—is now a familiar account in Faulkner studies.1 Only in recent decades [End Page 7] has the story of Faulkner’s concomitant development into a Cold War-era writer-diplomat gained traction. Largely neglected by scholars, the Omnibus profile of Faulkner—a short film in which he plays himself—is an unusual but instructive document of this post-Nobel transformation in progress.2 As such, it preserves in an encapsulated form a juncture at which Faulkner was becoming an actor in a geopolitical theater of cultural Cold War routinely staged in mass media.3 The production of Faulkner’s big TV moment employed the ascendant medium as an instrument for rendering the local and global domains the author now inhabited as a writer of international renown.4 The magnitude of the appearance for Faulkner is apparent when taking into account that Omnibus regularly drew a viewership in the range of seventeen million.5 By this measure, it was by far the largest audience that Faulkner was ever able to reach at once. In presenting Faulkner to the viewer, the production renders what he famously dubbed his “postage stamp of native soil” in Mississippi fertile ground for the cultivation of personal convictions and literary achievements presented as testaments to the generative possibilities afforded by American democracy.6 Faulkner on Omnibus took shape from a combination of televisual image-making and trademark self-fashioning that helped to refine the persona that the writer-diplomat would carry with him to the far-flung places and people he sought to address in the interest of advancing U.S. interests amid a heated ideological conflict on a global scale.
Omnibus Origin Story
The Faulkner profile aired on Omnibus in the eighth episode of the show’s inaugural season. A blend of cultural affairs and informational programming comprised the standard Omnibus format. The programming content was instrumental in establishing the television news magazine as a fixture on the broadcast landscape for years to come. In fact, it was so influential that it became a model for the development of PBS at the end of the 1960s. The shared DNA between the two enterprises was evident when in 1971 PBS launched Masterpiece Theater featuring as the host Alistair Cooke, the erudite and affable former host of Omnibus, which had aired its final season a decade earlier. Over the course of the show’s run, Omnibus resided at each of the three major networks and occupied afternoon and...
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/120/article/791001/pdf
As someone who also can't stop, I appreciate everything you are posting!
I’m among friends so I’ll confess: I’ve never read Faulkner. Where should I start (and why)?
I love The Sound and the Fury so much. Read it at seventeen. Not the easiest thing to read, though. You might be thinking, what is the point of all this, much of the way. Until it begins to come together, and everything starts to make sense, and you’re blown away by the power of it. (I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cheat a little by reading the last pages along the way, where he comments on the main characters.)
The Sound and Fury is so intense, I had to go to the last page. I cant remember this now but I felt guilty doing it. Thanks
It’s really difficult in the first half of it to understand what the hell is going on, partly because Faulkner is so good at his stream-of-consciousness. The insights in those endnotes saved my 17-year-old head from exploding.
I also love The Sound and the Fury. If you can sink into the consciousness of each character, they pull you through the story. My first Faulkner was As I Lay Dying, and in my first year of college, I didn't get it. My brother, who never went to college, and was in high school at the time said, "Read The Sound and the Fury. It's an amazing book." Also a very disturbing movie with Yul Brynner and Joanne Woodward. The 1959 movie, that is. I have not seen the James Franco one.
There’s no other book like it. That I know of.
“Caddy!”
"Go Down Moses" ( If only because the central character has the same name as my grandmother, Molly Beauchamp!)
As good a reason as any! (And it’s a great name. My dads’s Louisiana family was full of great names; the hands-down best was my great-grandmother Ursula Dragon.)
I agree about “The Sound and The Fury.” I’ve read it three times. The first Wild Bill Novel I tackled. Getting ready to reread “Light In August.” And “Absalom, Absalom!” All masterpieces. And “The Hamlet” is Faulkner at his lyrical best.
I highly recommend starting with The Unvanquished (and Faulkner himself acknowledged that this was his most approachable novel.)
Here's one of Faulkner's most famous short stories, "A Rose for Emily": https://facultyweb.wcjc.edu/users/jonl/documents/RoseforEmily.pdf
Light in August. The story of Joe Christmas and what is done to him resonates today. LIA is one of my favorite books. TY for reminding me of the power of its story 💙🌷
Wow, what a find. Thanks George. Two things that stand out: How Faulkner talks around his friends and the locals vs. how he speaks at a podium. Not unusual, but noticeable, especially in the depth of his Mississippi accent. And the second is how we really never see white and black residents ever mingling, or that Faulkner's black friends are all working people, mostly in the fields. A stark segregation. Faulkner the only one crossing the invisible border diving one group from the other.....
When he speaks at the podium, I believe they are filming him as it is happening--so it's "real." When he speaks to the locals/his friends, it's all scripted.
I just read an article that says the speech at the podium is ALSO a re-enactment, and that he is reading from his Nobel speech there... So maybe it's the fact of reading as opposed to chatting is what the difference is.