Absalom, Absalom

At long last, I have vanquished Faulkner's dark, torturous, hyper-neurotic take on Southern Gothic.  

It was a trying but brilliant book, the entire work building a massive, foreboding pyre of ill-fated generations, twisted codes of honor, and racial shame for a climactic final scene pregnant with meaning.  I shuddered through the final pages.

I grew to hate characters.  I despised some for their evil, others for their psychotic stream-of-consciousness anxiety, still others for their surrender to the conventions of their time and place.

I came to detest Faulkner himself for his grotesquely overwrought and narrative-within-a-narrative-within-a-narrative writing - a style that nonetheless held me mesmerized despite my near desire toward the end of the slog to burn the book in a parallel to its own conclusion.

What a book, what an incredible book.  Far more malevolent - and perhaps overdrawn - than The Sound and the Fury, but admittedly the work of a great talent whose stereotypes, whose lack of clarity and accessibility were overcome by his ability to completely ensconce the reader in the darkest chilling shades of the old Deep South.

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Where y'at?

Me? I'm on a bit of an adventure. Pictures when I return.

For now, damn the torpedoes and have a clue:

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Swamp Thing

Yesterday, I took a break from the Tulane Law Review write-on packet (silly me, thinking school was done after exams) and headed a ways north and west to a swamp.























I've become very familiar with the bald cypress, that famed denizen of the swamps and bayous here in Louisiana. But until yesterday, I hadn't been introduced to another character in the watery lowlands - cue tympani roll - the swamp tupelo.



















Unlike the cypress, iconic for its many buttresses like piles of candle wax spilled smoothly down in all directions from a central candlestick, the tupelo merely gets larger as it nears the water and muck, flaring out more like a cross between a clarinet and an oboe bell. Maybe an English horn. Here's a cypress encroaching on a tupelo:























Tupelos are also broadleaf trees, so a look upward toward the canopy reveals a deciduous profile, unlike the needle-bearing cypresses.






















Anyway, they're very interesting trees. They support fern colonies on them like live oaks, and they proved to be host to a wide variety of small, colorful amphibians and reptiles - like the sweet blue-tailed skink I encountered (shown above). So did the muscadine vines (the one below is a broad-head skink):

















The woods merging with the swamp was also interesting for the species of trees present. I found American beeches at the extreme southern and western edges of their range. Hackberry, too, was present, seemingly representing an extreme southern outlier colony beyond its normal range. Sweetgum, water oak, and cypress, and magnolia made up most of the rest of the woods, along with some giant grape vines ('muscadine').

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Magnolias in Bloom

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America

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Yesterday, I Went to Venice

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