Last summer, NPR covered a University of Virginia professor digitizing and transcribing the remarkable tapes of William Faulkner's writer-in-residence sessions at the college in 1957 and 1958. The initial audio clips grabbed my interest, and I've been looking for an hour or three since then to sit down with the transcripts. Waking up too early today and being unable to sit in bed, this morning served my purposes well.

Faulkner talks with everyone at the events: grad students, freshmen, professors, psychologists, public gatherings, radio hosts, and others.

He seems, too, to enjoy talking to all of them. He adjusts his speaking style as necessary — long answers in the graduate classrooms, short answers on the radio — and answers the same questions with great patience. Questions about needing to write get mentions of a demon. Questions on becoming a writer get Sherwood Anderson. Questions about how long to write get a quote from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, "Always leave when you're looking good." Among other exchanges:

Unidentified participant: Mr. Faulkner—

William Faulkner: Yes, ma'am.

Unidentified participant: How do pronounce that county of yours correctly? [audience laughter]

William Faulkner: If you break it down into syllables, it's — it's not too difficult. YAK-NA-PA-TAW-PHA, Yoknapatawpha. [audience laughter] It's a Chickasaw word meaning water runs slow through the flatland.

Unidentified participant: [Means what?]

William Faulkner: Water flows through slow through the flatland.

And of course the obligatory:

Unidentified participant: Can you put that microphone a little closer to you or something?

Frederick Gwynn: That is not a public address system.

Unidentified participant: Oh, it isn't?

Frederick Gwynn: It's a tape recorder.

William Faulkner: Well, I'll — I'll try to speak louder then.

I love this note from the project chief: "Unless you listen to an entire recording, you won’t hear most of the pauses between exchanges, and you should use the 'Play Entire Recording' button at least once [do it!], to get a sense of how frequently silence fell over the room, and how comfortable Faulkner was about waiting those silences out."

Which is to say even the pedestrian moments move beyond cordial. In one Q&A, asked once again about the different voices in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner drops how he'd wanted to print the different voices (chapters) in different inks. He's similarly open about plots, symbolism and race, which Faulkner and others raise in all sorts of circumstances.

So, click through! On a Sunday morning, Faulkner tapes > Nixon tapes.

Working through the transcripts, in by no means exhaustive fashion, the passages that leapt at me were those free of plot and politics. So, within those guide rails, here were my top 10 moments on the tapes:

(more…)

Via TMN, a London Times look at how Italo Calvino's writing flew.

Certainly, Faulkner was working towards simple structural brevity and lightness in his magnificent novel As I Lay Dying (1930) but Calvino's own inner urgent necessity, away from any weight of narrative, took him farther than Faulkner towards the potential of spinning tiny bytes of text all at once and leaving the reader, not the narrative or the writer, to hold everything together mentally, and in movement. This, he felt, was real realism, because science had knocked out the weighty Newtonian Universe to reveal a world made of nothing at all. The endlessly dividing atom is empty space and points of light. If it all sounds post-modern — that is, relative, fragmentary, shifting — it is, but because Calvino is a great writer it is also satisfying and solid, in the curious way that art allows.

Some days, some weeks, some months, it's very hard to write anything positive here. Usually silence can manage to shut me down, but I have to say something at some point. So I go looking for reasons to write, ones better and dubiously safer than the reasons closest to mind. I search tonight for essays about writing, or writing about writing, or famous writers on writing, and find almost nothing, all of the nothing stripped with text ads. When Faulkner's Nobel speech turns up, it's a relief. The feeling comes, then the word, then the feeling.

In March, I said the Morning News dropped its daily headlines feature along with its daily newsletter. Whether my newsletter reading gave me attribution bias, my 800×600 monitor made me miss the obvious or the headlines did indeed disappear from the site's homepage for a while, my statement was incorrect. The feature never missed a day. I found it again last week.

So, to make up for this inaccuracy, yesterday I read the archived headlines since the point where I'd pronounced them dead. Making it a true weekend morning, Norah Jones' first album was the soundtrack for the hour. It was better and more intense than I remembered it, building the already sterling "Norah Jones Releases First Album for Third Time" argument. Along the way, I made things up to the site with a list of monthly favorites.

March. "Have you found love on a coach?" tries to explain the British bus company-generated statistic of one in 30 riders falling in love on a bus. The reporter turns to the same bus company for a scientific explanation.

So what is it that is sparking the roadside romance? A sense of shared adventure? Travelling down the open road, watching the countryside rolling past and car tail lights glowing in the dusk?

"We're not sure why coach travel sparks love and friendship between passengers, perhaps it is the excitement of the unknown, the spare time people have to relax or the smell of sherbet lemons that causes people to fall for a fellow passenger," offers Karen Beasley of National Express.

This link barely beats one describing how to sign up for a free Times Select account with a .edu e-mail address. I still have one, but stop when asked to lie about my graduation date. Messing with competitors is against company rules. But you search and make the call for you.

April. "Things I've Bought That I Love" is Office writer/actress Mindy Kaling's random shopping blog. She writes to "you guys" — awesome.

I like looking at cut flowers at people's houses and in doctor's offices and stuff, but when someone gives them to me, I'm like jesus christ, now what? Unless the flowers are like, in a vase already, I'm at a loss. And even if they're in a vase, I secretly kind of hate the fact that in a few days, I have to like, throw them out, have to wash and clean out weird gooky water that smells bad, and petals to pick up.

The first season of the Office, an ex-boyfriend (a lot of boyfriends, I know. Get used to it.) sent me roses at work and they stayed on my desk for weeks until the smell of rotting organic matter got so bad Michael Schur threw them away and like screamed at me. This was, by the way, when Paul, Mike, Ben-Jo and I all shared one office and there were only three computers, and our shared office was the size of a handicapped bathroom stall. First season was tough, man. Remember "Hot Girl"? No? See!

Runners-up are links to the current edition of Oxford American, which reminds me the New Yorker of the South deserves my subscription money (I put this off until life returns to normal circulation Monday), and quotes from the old Batman series in which Adam West lectures Robin.

Batman: "Robin, you haven't fastened your safety bat-belt."
Robin: "We're only going a couple of blocks."
Batman: "It won't be long until you are old enough to get a driver's license, Robin, and you'll be able to drive the Batmobile and other vehicles. Remember, motorist safety."
Robin: "Gosh, Batman, when you put it that way…."

May. "Machine translation or Faulkner?" asks, well, that. As you might expect, the Faulkner is all Sound the Fury. The "machine translation" passages come from various German writers. I get five of 12 right. Can you believe both the Faux Faulkner and Imitation Hemingway contests appear to be dead now? They don't appear to be online since 2005. If they still exist without a Web presence, they need help. They need a revival.

June. "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace" is danah boyd's controversial essay you may've seen through Digg or other sources late last month.

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, and whether you can connect with the lowercase name or not, the essay should be required reading for the social-networking industry. Previous articles have tackled the growing foreign populations on various U.S. social-networking services, but boyd's may be among the first to analyze national demographic divisions and their effects. Read her blog for hundreds of responding comments and her subsequent response to the commenters. Her homepage articulates the starting point well: "My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts."

Runner-up is an interview with Paul Ford — aka F-Train aka TMN's Gary Benchley — about his one-man digitization of the Harper's archives. "Creating this archive is certainly the hardest thing I've ever done–much harder than writing a novel, for instance," Ford says. "The trade for that work is that I have learned a great deal: about programming, about editing, about American history, about changing styles in prose and art, about typography, about the pagination of magazines in the 1920s."

Bonus is going to Ford's site for the first time in too long and finding his April post on relaunching the full Harper's site. Read it here. The feelings are certainly familiar.

"The project is gone, taking with it the nearly monastic order it gave to life," he writes. "In its place there is: one, the need for praise (even if they march you down the hall on their shoulders it will never fill up the well), two, the sense of failure (all those problems left unsolved, all the rough edges and clutter that you couldn't distill to simplicity), and three, the sudden awareness of insignificance (all you have done is to turn on another blinking screen among the blinking billions in the media night sky)."

July. "A Librarian's Guide to Etiqutte" is a blog. The tagline is "A polite librarian is a good librarian." Apparently, it is two and a half years old.

Every librarian should identify a nemesis within their library. This person can bear the brunt of all your frustration, moaning, and general ill will. Think of this colleague, patron, or pesky employee as the mascot for your misery. No search committee required.

And now we're caught up.

If you love Faulkner, let him go. Do not bring him up in the last sentence of your article about the death of the floppy.

Read Peter Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley this weekend and couldn't have read much of anything better. This first book of two is as tightly written as a biography comes and thematically as generous as fiction. I was looking for something to concentrate on, and the first paragraph brought me in. From "Prologue: Memphis, 1940" –

"It is late May or early June, hot, steamy: a fetid breeze comes in off the river and wafts its way through the elegant lobby of the Hotel Peabody, where, it is said, the Mississippi Delta begins. There is a steady hum of conversation in the room — polite, understated, well bred, but never letting up: the room is redolent with the suggestion of business dealings transacted in grandiloquent style, amid curlicues of cigar smoke rising toward the high Florentine ceiling, with the anticipation of a social evening to come. When the novelist William Faulkner is in town, he always stays at the Peabody; perhaps he is observing this very scene."

A different way to start the Elvis story, for sure. The other good jumping point comes in the author's note before the book begins.

"Discovering the reality of that world was something like stepping off the edge of my own. The British historian Richard Holmes describes the biographer as 'a sort of tramp permanently knocking at the kitchen window and secretly hoping he might be invited in for supper.' Holmes is presumably alluding to the researcher's attempt to penetrate the recesses of history, but he might as well be describing the literal truth. If one cannot recongize one's status as an outsider, if I were not able to laugh at the comic contretemps in which I have often found myself over the years, then I would be lacking in the humility necessary for the task. But if one were not vain enough, on the other hand, to think it possible to make sense of the mass of random detail that makes up a life, if one did imagine oneself capable somehow of the most diverse explorations, divagations, and transcendental leaps, then one would never seek to tell the story. 'The moment one begins to investigate the truth of the simplest facts which one has accepted as true,' wrote Leonard Woolf in his autobiography, 'it is as though one had stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or a quicksand — every step takes one steps deeper into the bog of uncertainty.' And it is that uncertainty which must be taken as both an unavoidable given and the only real starting point."

Shyam Sriram has a big tattoo on his left pec.

"The uninitiated sometimes mistook the image for Walt Disney or Peter Sellers — even Hitler. Not quite. The face actually belongs to the hard-drinking, Nobel Prize-winning, punctuation-hating Southern literature mack daddy William Faulkner."

Best of all, Sriram's from Evanston. Read the story.

Bonus: See the tattoo up close and read Sriram's blog.

It isn't easy, not even in short doses, because the paragraphs are still long and you still won't understand the South enough to understand Faulkner. But when you get a glimpse or even string together a comprehension, the experience is rewarding. The words are enriching on their own as you topple them, and sifting yourself out of their weight sets you free, for a few good steps before the language — of life or the book — catches up to you again.

So … Slate's Meghan O'Rourke joined Oprah's summer of Faulkner and described her time.

To keep you people somewhat placated during my trip, we're opening up the vault and picking out The Short Unhappy Life, inspired in 1999 by the annual Hemingway parody contest. It's not that good (it's four years old), but it's all I've got time post now. And it involved food, which is never bad.

The 2002 and 2003 Hemingway and Faux Faulkner contest winners are also online and even more worth reading.