u/redleavesrattling

I have added some useful things to the sidebar. There is more still to come, but we're off to a good start. I would like to make this place as helpful as possible to people exploring Faulkner. There are some good places online (which at some point we will make some links to), but they are generally done on poorly designed and hard to navigate extensions of university websites, and half the time they are just down or their certificate is expired.

On phones, the sidebar of subreddits is not obvious, and many users who interact with reddit only on their phones may not even know that it exists. On the app especially, it seems like Reddit is trying to hide it. This post is to draw attention to it and the materials gathered there. I will include links to the resources below, along with a short description of what they are and what is still to come in that section. At the bottom of this post will be directions to get to the sidebar on the phone app.

Skim over what's here and look at anything that interests you. To suggest changes or additions, or to offer criticism or point out ways it can be improved, or to offer help, reply in the comments or send me a message.

##Bibliographies

###Books by Faulkner

These are the works that Faulkner himself had published in book form in his lifetime. It will not include things that were never published, things that appeared in magazines but were never collected in books, scripts he worked on, or letters.

###Unauthorized

These are Faulkner's works that were published in book form by somebody else. Most of them were published posthumously and are early amateur work, but a few appeared in his lifetime. Four of them are very easy to find, and probably essential to anyone wanting to read most of Faulkner's work: The Portable Faulkner - a chronological selection of stories and novel excerpts put together by critic Malcolm Cowley in 1946 which led to a re-evaluation of Faulkner's career at a moment when his books were mostly out of print; Flags in the Dust - the novel intended to be Faulkner's 3rd novel before it was cut down by editors to become Sartoris. Now it is the standard edition and Sartoris is out of print; Uncollected Stories - short stories either never published or published in magazines that didn't make it into Collected Stories; Essays, Speeches, & Public Letters - Faulkner's nonfiction. There's not a lot of it, and it's definitely not as good as his fiction, but there are some interesting things there.

Coming soon: Letters, interviews, writing about Faulkner by people who knew him, and biographies.

Coming after that: Books of scripts Faulkner worked on for Hollywood, list of movies he worked on, and list of movies based on his work.

Probably need help for: the bibliography of essential (for academic study, anyway) critical writings on Faulkner. Despite having an MA in English and Faulkner being my favorite writer, I thought it better to avoid academic work on him. I'm aware of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and I think I even read part of one of Brooks' books, but besides that, I don't know much. So if you have some academic experience with Faulkner, send me a message, even if it's just to recommend one book you think should be there.

In the Future: Books by others that Faulkner mentions, discusses or alludes to in his writings or interviews that are influences on him, or at least that he speaks positively of.

##Timelines

###Yoknapatawpha County A timeline of when each of Faulkner's works occur in his mythical county.

Coming Soon: a timeline of Faulkner's writing career. I have all the information in a spreadsheet already (besides the specific movies he worked on), but I need to experiment with formatting to make it fairly usable.

##FAQs

Only one FAQ so far, "where do I start?" If I left anything out in the answer to that, comment here. We can update it.

Some FAQs to come: "Is Faulkner racist?" - rather than writing a response would probably just link to the two good recent discussions we have had here about that. "What order should I read the books in?" "I've read the most recommended books by Faulkner, where do I go next?" "What were Faulkner's influences?" - should at least be partially covered by the last projected bibliography above.

Suggestions for answers to any of these, or suggestions for more questions that might need answering are welcome.

One other feature I'd like on the sidebar that is probably a long way away is a wiki page on the characters or at least major characters or families and their appearances in other works besides their primary work, as well as references to one story from another story. For the characters, I can write a Python script to go through and look for mentions, which will at least get places to start looking. But then, sometimes stories are mentioned with naming a character. I recently re-read Requiem for a Nun, and there Temple Drake summarizes the story of "Pantaloon in Black" as something that happened before her time in Jefferson. The main character of "Pantaloon in Black" isn't named even in his own story, so it couldn't be referred to here. I'm sure there are other cases a character refers to something without knowing the names of the people involved. If you run across any of those, let me know.

To visit the Sidebar in the Reddit App on your phone:
To visit the sidebar on your phone, first click on the subreddit name at the top of the post to go to the subreddit, then, at the top of the subreddit, click the subreddit name again. There you will see the 'About' tab, with the subreddit's description and rules. At the top, click on 'Menu' to see the links to the wiki pages. (These will be the same links I posted above.) I wrote these directions based on the Android Reddit app. If it is different on iOS, let me know in the comments, and I will add that to this post.

To visit the Sidebar on the Reddit website in the web browser on your phone:
Click on the subreddit name on the post to go to the subreddit. On the subreddit page, below the subreddit name and above the posts, you will see 'Feed' and 'About'. Click on 'About'. Now you are on the sidebar. Scroll down to 'Community Bookmarks', and there you will find the links to the wiki.

On a web browser on the desktop, just look at the right side of the screen for the sidebar.

Edited to fix formatting. I swear, Reddit's markdown never works the first time the way you want it to because of rules that aren't in the markdown guides.

Most of us know the opinions that Faulkner expressed publicly concerning the civil rights movement in the late 50s. Nationally, he tried to persuade black people to slow down, while at home in Mississippi he tried to persuade white people to go ahead and integrate. Probably accidentally he put himself at odds with both audiences. I think that it's probably right to characterize his public position as the white moderate that Martin Luther King criticized.

But when I was looking for the letters I vaguely remembered about punctuation, I ran across this letter to his stepson over a decade before his public pronouncements that makes his personal feeling about it very clear.

>To Malcom A. Franklin
Sunday [4 July 1943] Warner Bros.

>Dear Buddy:
Mr Robert Haas is vice president of Random House. They publish my books. During the times when I would be broke, year after year sometimes, I had only to write him and he would send me money--no hope to get it back, unless I wrote another book. He's a Jew.

>He had an only son, and a daughter. In '40, the son withdrew from Yale and became a Navy pilot. In '41, the girl about 20, joined that Womens' Ferry Squadron, is now flying, ferrying aeroplanes from factories to bases. The boy was flying torpedo planes off carriers (what Jim is training for) in the Pacific. He was killed last week. The girl is still flying. All Jews. I just hope I don't run into some hundred percent American Legionnaire until I feel better.

>There is a squadron of negro pilots. They finally got congress to allow them to learn how to risk their lives in the air. They are in Africa now, under their own negro lt. colonel, did well at Pantellaria, on the same day a mob of white men and white policemen killed 20 negroes in Detroit. Suppose you and me and a few others of us lived in the Congo, freed seventy-seven years ago by ukase; of course we cant live in the same apartment hut with the black folks, nor always ride in the same car nor eat in the same restaurant, but we are free because the Great Black Father says so. Then the Congo is engaged in War with the Cameroon. At last we persuade the Great Black Father to let us fight too. You and Jim say are flyers. You have just spent the day trying to live long enough to learn how to do your part in saving the Congo. Then you come back down and are told that 20 of your people have just been killed by a mixed mob of civilians and cops at Little Poo Poo. What would you think?

>A change will come out of this war. If it doesn't, if the politicians and the people who run this country are not forced to make good the shibboleth they glibly talk about freedom, liberty, human rights, then you young men who live through it will have wasted your precious time, and those who dont live through it will have died in vain.

>Pappy

Selected Letters, pg 175-76

In general, his letters are short and about needing money or are trying to get money, so I forget that sometimes good stuff like this shows up out of nowhere.

I mean, saying that U.S. participation in WWII will have been in vain if the U.S. doesn't begin treating minorities better afterwards is a pretty radical statement. But then again, when he had a national platform fifteen years later, he seems to have been too afraid of violence (not against himself, but a second civil war) to use it to push for that. It's a little sad. But at least he did push for it in his home state, if not nationally. It's not as good as we could hope, but it's a lot better than we could probably expect from a man in his position. Much better than Lovecraft, at any rate.

Here's a decent overview of Faulkner's time in Hollywood, focused mostly on his work with Howard Hawks. (Who was the director he worked with best.)

The writer seems a little naive, taking at face value some things that Faulkner said that maybe he should have thought a little more about, but I guess it was published in Garden and Gun, so maybe you can't put much nuance there.

I think it neglects a little just how unhappy being in Hollywood made Faulkner, and doesn't discuss at all the worse and worse contract terms he got every time, and finally an agent got him a really terrible contract that required him to be there far more than he wanted to be.

On the other hand, the article does do some to correct the idea that Faulkner was a bad screen writer. Many people were impressed with him, especially his ability to throw away the script and come up with new parts on the spot, as sometimes happened during filming. (The contract terms kept getting worse for him because he hated it and drank too much and was sometimes undependable.)

I had this as part of the Mod announcement post, but it got to be a little too long.

Here's some things I've seen recently that kind of rub me the wrong way and have me thinking about potential rules.

1. a page of text with one word highlighted and an image of something tangentially related to that word like “omg, I can't believe Faulkner is talking about this thing”. There are two of these recently. They seem pretty irrelevant to me.

2. a meme image with a decontextualized quote from Faulkner that has the uncensored n-word in it. Anyone who was familiar with Wash Jones and Thomas Sutpen would understand that it was making fun of people like Wash. However, it was really jarring to see it like that. Someone who doesn't know Absalom, Absalom! and sees the picture in their feed might get the wrong idea. I don't necessarily think it should be censored in quotes that are contextualized by being part of a discussion, but when it is a short quote stuck on a cartoon, probably it should be.

 

Examples of these two kinds of posts can be found somewhere in the newest ten to fifteen posts, if you want to scroll down and look at them. I haven't deleted them yet, but I probably will (pending some discussion here).

3. I have mixed feelings about image posts generally. I wouldn't want to ban them, but I may consider requiring some text with them. I mean, pictures of books are cool and all, but if it's the same edition you can get at Barnes and Noble right now, then who cares? What is there really to say about that?

It would be good to see some more discussion about these points, for or against, and anything else that we might want to consider discouraging.

Some of you may have noticed that this sub has gone without a moderator for a good while now. Between the couple looking for a third, the bot doing casino reviews, and a commenter on the Vonnegut subreddit pointing out that sub as being overrun with reposters, I decided that someone should start taking care of this subreddit. 

To introduce myself: 
Until about a year ago, I lived my whole life in the Memphis area, about an hour and a half from Oxford, MS. I have a BA in philosophy and an MA in English. Now I work as a software developer building internal applications for a small business. 

Reading The Sound and the Fury was a huge turning point in my life. I had always read a lot, but the Sound and the Fury was different. I didn't know books could do that. After that, I obsessively read and reread everything by Faulkner I could get my hands on, and also branched out to read the things he had mentioned, either in his work or in interviews, from Homer and the Bible to Joyce and Proust. Of course, each new thing leads to other new things, and I ended up getting a pretty good education as a side effect.

What about some rules:
I don't want to just start deleting posts. I would like us to discuss what kind of content we would not like to see in this community, and hopefully come to a broad agreement, if not a consensus. 
I've spun that discussion off into a separate post.

What do we want to see:
I'd like some feedback about what kinds of things we want to see more of here. Obviously, a lot of the traffic is going to be some of the same beginner questions that come up all the time, but what would be good for the rest of us? Would people like planned readings with discussions? What else could facilitate more in depth discussion? I've read a number of great insightful comments in my ten years in this subreddit, and it would be great if we could encourage a little more of that.

I plan on filling out the sidebar with some bibliographies and chronologies and other helpful information. Ideas for additions to that would be welcome. If anyone is knowledgeable enough to make a bibliography of essential Faulkner criticism, that would be great. The critical literature is kind of a weak point of mine. 

At some point in the next couple of months, I will probably look at adding a couple of additional mods, so if that interests you, keep it in mind. 

I'm not in a hurry with any of this. This is a slow moving sub right now, so it will take a good bit of tending to cultivate the kind of community we would like to see. For now, I'll be listening to what yall have to say here, and planning for the next steps.

I want to hear what you have to say. What would you like to see here? What would you like to not see here? What have you seen in other author oriented subs that might benefit r/faulkner?