Thinking about Faulkner

I have started listening to Faulkner on audiobook. I haven't had much time for leisure reading and when I have tried to read, I have found myself getting bored and wanting more of a challenge.
It isn't really a reflection of the literary works so much as my state of mind right now.

I am grappling with bioinformatics approaches to defining everything microbial. That project combines epidemiology, genomics and clinical micro. The science isn't exactly hard, it is just a new perspective that seems to make a lot of sense right now and that has hardly been touched upon before. Having established a bit of firm conceptual ground from which to work, endless possibilities seem available.Creative fireworks are going off all of the time with me and my collaborators. It is science as it ought to be. Satisfying, productive, and so much fun. Hopefully it will be useful in the end.

My other intellectual pursuit, which I don't blog about very much at all, is studying Biblical imagery, and I am grappling with Isaiah.I understand a bit, do not understand quite a bit, and have figured out a few things I did not understand before, so that is pretty satisfying too.

And a final mental exercise put into practice is organizing and caring for my house. It is a way of dealing with the things I can't control or fix. For example, I couldn't find my box of X-Acto knives last night and I realized that it was taken when my home was robbed. That is something out of my control. However, where I keep the things I do have is something I can control. Somehow having a well-organized home makes me feel empowered. I am not OCD.Children are still welcome.But I love the mental challenge of figuring out how to coordinate the motions of my domestic duties with the physical objects of my house.

With all of this going on in my head, how could any old average book hope to hold my attention? So I went for some Faulkner. Also, Marie has been reading As I Lay Dying, and we try to coordinate our reading so we can discuss the books together. I still have a long way to go.The dead woman has barely been put in her coffin and so far from only three different perspectives. I have several hours left of listening. I love it so far though. It reminds me of so many things I love. Like cathedrals in France which are magnificent structures of Christian faith and yet pagan symbols and astrological signs were included in the workmanship for good measure by the humans who built them.And sometimes there is the smell of urine from the humans who visit them more recently. They are simultaneously so grand and so base.

The other thing it reminds me of is driving through rural Mississippi. A turkey jumping out of a tree right in front of my moving car, rain storms where so much water fell through the air that I sometimes questioned whether I would drown if I continued to breathe normally as I went outside, and mostly of getting lost. I called my Uncle Allen when that happened, sure that I was lost beyond hope. I was in a place where road signs didn't exist, there were no structures, there was nothing that stood out as a landmark. He just asked me to start describing things to him. The shapes of the hay bales.Whether there was a rock on the right side of the road; not real big, but big enough you could see it and it wasn't going any where.The fence.The color of the dirt. From those details, he knew exactly where I was and guided me exactly to his house. I couldn't even fathom remembering those details.

And as I listen to a reading of Faulkner's work, which roams through the thoughts of so many so different people, I am in a state of awe. They are all so real and believable. The details are a perfect recall of real humans. The text, flawless in construction and the characters so tragically flawed.It occupies my consciousness and my thoughts about science, imagery, and order, all struggle to compete with Faulkner.

KIT: Environment education in India