It’s true. There are times when one must unplug from the computer. I did so vountarily for the past month or so, and now am being forced to do so–left at the mercy of aged, borrowed computers while mine is sent off to beg for repair. All this means my access is spotty, and when I am on a computer, as I am now, the terribly slow connectivity and odd happenings (due solely to my unfamiliarity with pcs) mean unplugging soon is the key.
Thus I was inspired this morning to unplug from current literature–for as a book critic I am forever reading what’s new–and take a look back. What grabbed me was Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, a book I have not yet read and which was not assigned during my junior year thesis on the author at university.
As one might expect, from the first Faulkner sets you off balance with elongated sentences, double punctuation (like the colon followed by the dash) and none, lack of capitalization, and just hints of breath gifted by paragraph breaks. I’ll leave you with the first sentence and then part, as today my internet connection is wonky at best. Enjoy.
“Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike’, past seventy and nearer eighty that he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one
this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thoguht should have been Isaac’s, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father’s slaves still bore in the land.”
Literary Lotus 