Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then again, as those who get hooked on his books can attest, never is his work ever wholly detached from reality. Time and time again, he delivers lurid visions of the macabre, grotesque, and bizarre, but they always work most powerfully when he weaves them into the coarse fabric of ordinary, makeshift, down-at-the-heels America. Though long rich and famous, King hasn’t lost his understanding of a certain downtrodden stratum of society, or at least one that regards itself as downtrodden — the very demographic, in other words, often blamed for the rise of Donald Trump.
“I started thinking Donald Trump might win the presidency in September of 2016,” King writes in a Guardian piece from Trump’s first presidential term. “By the end of October, I was almost sure.” For most of that year, he’d sensed “a feeling that people were both frightened of the status quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They wanted to upset the motherfucker, and would worry about picking up those spilled apples later. Or just leave them to rot.” They “didn’t just want change; they wanted a man on horseback. Trump filled the bill. I had written about such men before.”
King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”
Further Stillson-Trump parallels are examined in the NowThis interview clip at the top of the post. “I was sort of convinced that it was possible that a politician would arise who was so outside the mainstream and so willing to say anything that he would capture the imaginations of the American people.” Read now, Stillson’s demagogical rhetoric — describing himself as “a real mover and shaker,” promising to “throw the bums out” of Washington — sounds rather mild compared to what Trump says at his own rallies. Perhaps King himself does have a touch of Johnny Smith-like prescience. Or perhaps he suspects, on some level, that Trump isn’t so much the disease as the symptom, a manifestation of a much deeper and longer-festering condition of the American soul. Now there’s a frightening notion.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue it is Carl Jung who is still most with us in our communal practices: from his focus on introversion and extroversion to his view of syncretic, intuitive forms of spirituality and his indirect influence on 12-Step programs. But Jung’s journey to self-understanding and what he called “individuation” was an intensely private, personal affair that took place over the course of sixteen years, during which he created an incredible, folio-sized work of religious art called The Red Book: Liber Novus. In the video above, you can get a tour through Jung’s private masterpiece, presented in an intensely hushed, breathy style meant to trigger the tingly sensations of a weird phenomenon called “ASMR.” Given the book’s disorienting and often disturbing content, this over-gentle guidance seems appropriate.
After his break with Freud in 1913, when he was 38 years old, Jung had what he feared might be a psychotic break with reality as well. He began recording his dreams, mystical visions, and psychedelic inner voyages, in a stylized, calligraphic style that resembles medieval European illuminated manuscripts and the occult psychic journeys of Aleister Crowley and William Blake.
Jung had the work bound but not published. It’s “a very personal record,” writes Psychology Today, “of Jung’s complicated, tortuous and lengthy quest to salvage his soul.” Jung called this process of creation the “numinous beginning” to his most important psychological work. After many years spent locked in a bank vault, The Red Book finally came to light a few years ago and was translated and published in an expensive edition.
Before his fateful entry into politics, Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist. Even to the most neutral imaginable observer, the known examples of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 paintings and other works of art he produced in his early adulthood would hardly evidence astonishing genius. They do show a certain technical competence, especially where buildings are concerned. (Twice rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the young Hitler was advised to apply instead to the School of Architecture, a subject for which he also professed a passion.) But their lack of imagination and interest in humanity were too plain to ignore.
Could Hitler’s failure to gain entry to the art world explain anything about the cultural policy of the Nazi Party he went on to lead? Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured that policy’s single defining event: Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst,” or the Degenerate Art exhibition, staged in 1937 at the Institute of Archaeology in Munich’s Hofgarten.
Presenting 650 confiscated works of art purported to “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill,” it soon became a great hit, attracting one million attendees in its first six weeks.
That may not come as much of a surprise when you consider the artists whose work was on display: Paul Klee, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, and even Grant Wood, to name just a few. It seems that the Nazis could come up with nothing quite so fascinating for the planned first Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, or “Great German Art Exhibition,” whose collapse inspired Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels to suggest putting on a show not of the work that the Nazis approved, but of the work they didn’t.
An admirer of certain Expressionists, Goebbels displayed more cultural open-mindedness than the Führer, who practically declared a war on modern art itself. You can learn more about it from David Grubin’s documentary Degenerate Art, which is available to watch online. The Nazis confiscated more than 5,000 works of art, and even maintained files on no fewer than 16,000 that they’d labeled “degenerate,” a historic inventory that has been made available to the public. Surprisingly, their blacklist did not include the oeuvre of Gustav Klimt, which they attempted to use for their own ends. It could be that, deep down, Hitler, the failed artist, knew good art when he saw it — and that it just made him all the more resentful.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic Stalker. It was a long time ago, before the advent of smartphones and tablets. I watched a beat-up VHS copy on a non-“smart” TV, and had no ability to pause every few minutes and swing by Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram for some instant distraction and digital small talk. The almost three-hour film—with its long, languid takes and endless stretches of silence—is a meditative exercise, a test in patience that at times seems like its own reward.
I recall at the time thinking about how didactic Tarkovsky’s work is, in the best possible sense of the word. It teaches its viewers to watch, listen, and wait. It’s a course best taken alone, like the journey into the film’s mysterious “Zone,” since the presence of another, likely perplexed, viewer might break the quiet spell the movie casts. But while watching a Tarkovsky film—whether Stalker, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, or any of his other pensive creations (watch them online here)—may be a solitary activity, it need not at all be a lonely one.
The distinction between healthy solitude and loneliness is one Tarkovsky is particularly interested in. It’s a cinematic theme he pursues, and a pedagogical one as well. In the video above from The Criterion Collection, Tarkovsky offers some thoughtful insights that can only seem all the more relevant to today’s always-on, multi-screen culture. Unfortunately, the subtitles translate his words selectively, but Maria Popova at The Marginalian has a full translation of the filmmaker’s answer to the question “What would you like to tell young people?” Like some ancient Pan dispensing timeless wisdom, Tarkovsky reclines in an old, gnarled tree—on what may very well be one of his wild, wooded film sets—and says,
I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.
Though I speak as one who grew up in an analogue world free from social media—the only world Tarkovsky ever knew—I don’t think it’s just the cranky old man in me who finds this advice compellingly sound. As a Tom Tomorrow cartoon satirically illustrated, our rapid-fire, pressure-cooker public discourse may grant us instant access to information—or misinformation—but it also encourages, nay urges, us to form hasty opinions, ignore nuance and subtleties, and participate in groupthink rather than digesting things slowly and coming to our own conclusions. It’s an environment particularly hostile to mediums like poetry, or the kinds of poetic films Tarkovsky made, which teach us the value of judgment withheld, and immerse us in the kinds of aesthetic experiences the internet and television, with their nonstop chatter, push to the margins.
When it first went on air in the late nineteen-eighties, Fox had to prove itself capable of playing in a televisual league with the likes of NBC, CBS, and ABC. To that end, it began building its prime-time lineup with two original programs more thematically and aesthetically daring than anything on those staid networks: the sitcom Married… with Children and the sketch comedy series The Tracey Ullman Show. Before and after commercial breaks, the latter treated its early viewers to a series of irreverent animated shorts created by an acclaimed cartoonist and featuring the vocal talents of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Nancy Cartwright. I speak, of course, of Dr. N!Godatu.
On an alternate timeline, perhaps the personal and professional adventures of that near-unflappable psychotherapist were spun off into their own hit series that broke every record for prime-time animation and is now in its 36th season.
Here in our reality, however, that’s been the destiny of TheSimpsons, which also began as The Tracey Ullman Show’s bumper entertainment. Dr. N!Godatu vanished after a few weeks, never to be seen again, but the Simpson family remained for two full years, making their final short-from appearance in May of 1989. Seven months later, The Simpsons made its Christmas-special debut — an event that, if you don’t remember watching, I can’t count you as a member of my generation.
Not that, given my young age, I’d ever actually seen The Tracey Ullman Show at the time. But the hard promotional push leading up to that first real Simpsons offered glimpses into an animated world that looked and felt completely novel. (Having grown accustomed over generations to the show’s aesthetic, we easily forget how bizarre its yellow-skinned, universally overbite-afflicted characters once looked.) Many who tuned in wouldn’t have been aware that that look and feel hadn’t been created out of whole cloth, but rather had emerged through the evolutionary process you can witness in the 48 original Simpsons shorts collected in the Youtube playlist at the top of the post (and the hour-long consolidated video here).
To even a casual Simpsons viewer, everything in these shorts will seem at once familiar and “off” in myriad ways. The design of the characters looks both harsher and looser than it would later become, and certain of their voices, especially Castellaneta’s Walter Matthau-esque Homer, have yet to reflect the personalities they would later develop. The conventionally “cartoony” animation also distorts bodies and faces in ways that have long since been prohibited by the show’s official style guidelines. Even so, there are occasional jokes and even haunting moments of the kind we know from the first couple of seasons, if nothing in particular to foreshadow The Simpsons’ nineteen-nineties golden age — or the three decades’ worth of episodes that have followed it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t drive fast. Disney covered these subjects in its educational shorts, and then eventually got to the touchy subject of biology and sexuality. If there was ever a company suited to talk about “vaginas” in the 1940s in a family-friendly way, it was Disney. Hence The Story of Menstruation.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
As of this writing, the Beatles’ “Revolution 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spotify. This has no doubt generated decent revenue, even given the platform’s oft-lamented payout rates. But compare that number to the more than half-a-billion streams of “Blackbird,” also on the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and you get an idea of “Revolution 9”’s place in the band’s oeuvre. Simply put, even ultra-hard-core Fab Four fans tend to skip it. Regardless, as Ian MacDonald writes in Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, “this eight-minute exercise in aural free association is the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artifact.”
Masterminded by John Lennon, “Revolution 9” is not exactly a song, but rather an elaborate “sound collage,” assembled in broad adherence to an aesthetic developed by such avant-garde creators as William S. Burroughs, The Beatles’ graphic designer Richard Hamilton, John Cage, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. “While the cut-up texts of Burroughs, the collages of Hamilton, and the musique concrète experiments of Cage and Stockhausen have remained the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia,” writes MacDonald, “Lennon’s sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work.”
In the new Polyphonic video above, Noah Lefevre takes a dive into those progenitors and their work, providing the context to understand how “the Beatles’ weirdest song” came together. Points of interest on this cultural-historical journey include composer Pierre Schaeffer’s resistance-headquarters-turned-experimental-music-lab Studio d’Essai; Nazi Germany, where the early Magnetophon tape recorder was developed; the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa’s Studio Z; and the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, a 1967 happening that hosted “Carnival of Light,” a Beatles composition never heard again since.
What did Lennon, in collaboration with George Harrison and Yoko Ono (with whom he’d only just got together), think he was doing with “Revolution 9”? “To the extent that Lennon conceptualized the piece at all, it is likely to have been as a sensory attack on the citadel of the intellect,” writes MacDonald, “a revolution in the head aimed, as he stressed at the time, at each individual listener — and not a Maoist incitement to social confrontation, still less a call for general anarchy.” Indeed, as Lefevre points out, it expressed his ambivalence about the very concept of 1968-style revolt as much as the comparatively conventional “Revolution 1,” which comes earlier on the album. The sixties may be long over, but Lennon’s attitude hasn’t lost its relevance: we still hear an endless stream of promised solutions to society’s problems, and we’d still all love to see the plan.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously known as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians besides, most of them British. The bad news is that it contains no actual music. But the album, titled Is This What We Want?, has been created in hopes of preventing even worse news: the government of the United Kingdom choosing to let artificial-intelligence companies train their models on copyrighted work without a license.
Such a move, in the words of the project’s leader Ed Newton-Rex, “would hand the life’s work of the country’s musicians to AI companies, for free, letting those companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them.” As a composer, he naturally has an interest in these matters, and as a “former AI executive,” he presumably has insider knowledge about them as well.
“The government’s willingness to agree to these copyright changes shows how much our work is undervalued and that there is no protection for one of this country’s most important assets: music,” KateBush writes on her own website. “Each track on this album features a deserted recording studio. Doesn’t that silence say it all?”
As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports, “it is understood that Kate Bush has recorded one of the dozen tracks in her studio.” Those tracks, whose titles add up to the phrase “The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies,” aren’t strictly silent: in a manner that might well have pleased John Cage, they contain a variety of ambient noises, from footsteps to humming machinery to passing cars to crying babies to vaguely musical sounds emanating from somewhere in the distance. Whatever its influence on the U.K. government’s deliberations, Is This What We Want? (the title Sounds of Silence having presumably been unavailable) may have pioneered a new genre: protest song without the songs.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1969, Ella Fitzgerald released Sunshine of Your Love, a live album recorded at the Venetian Room in The Fairmont San Francisco. Recorded by music producer Norman Granz, the album featured contemporary pop songs that showcased Fitzgerald’s ability to transcend jazz standards. Take, for example, a version of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” Below you can hear what the original (recorded in 1967) sounded like in the hands of Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton, and then experience Ella’s own unexpected version above. It’s quite the juxtaposition.
Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninasalmost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since. If the public’s appetite to know more about it has diminished over time, that certainly isn’t reflected in the view count of the analysis from YouTube channel Rabbit Hole above, which as of this writing has crossed the 2.5 million mark. So has this video on Las Meninas from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter. What element of this particular painting has stoked such fascination, generation after generation after generation? Easier, perhaps, to ask what element hasn’t.
“Through the 36 years he worked for King Philip IV, Velázquez produced dozens of paintings of the Spanish royal family,” says the narrator of the Rabbit Hole video. But the large-scale Las Meninas is different: “the painting appears more like a snapshot of daily life than a typical visage of royals posing to be painted.”
The figures it depicts include Philip’s five-year-old daughter Infanta Margaret Theresa and her entourage, as well as Velázquez himself, at work on a painting — which may be a portrait of the king and queen, reflected as they are on the mirror in the back wall, or perhaps the very image we’re looking at. Or could we possibly be Philip and Mariana ourselves?
On the rearmost plane of Las Meninas stands the queen’s chamberlain Don José Nieto Velázquez (possibly a relation of the artist), on whom it can hardly be a coincidence that all of the painting’s lines converge, like a vanishing point on the horizon. Diego Velázquez’s representation of himself bears an even more conspicuous detail: the knighthood-symbolizing red cross called the Order of Santiago. Born a commoner, Velázquez worked for most of his life in close proximity to the royals, and seems to have made no big secret of his aspirations to join their ranks. Presumably, the Order of Santiago was added after the painting was complete, since Las Meninas is dated to 1656, but Velázquez wasn’t finally knighted until 1659, close to the end of his life.
Different theories exist to explain who exactly added that red cross to the painting, as covered by YouTuber-gallerist James Payne in the Great Art Explained video just above. Like most works of art that have endured through the centuries, Las Meninas has its unsolvable historical mysteries, despite its unusually well-documented creation. But for serious art enthusiasts, the most compelling question remains that of just how Velázquez pulled it all off. “Las Meninas, with all its splendid effects, is a vigorous argument for the virtue of painting,” says Puschak. “This gets at the heart of the mirror, the vanishing point, and the multiple centers of focus. ‘See what my art can do,’ Velázquez is saying to the viewer” — whether that viewer is King Philip, or someone across the world nearly four centuries later.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation.
While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore of Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be.
Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important.
It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of 1,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Clubends with a 33-page long whopper with 13,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect.
But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all 1,288 words of it, below.
Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying ‘Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
