Faulkner & the F-word

[alice wellintown]

dave linked a fine article, an excerpt from the intro to faulkner that
was published in the nyt a few days ago.   when i read the piece i
thought about how stupid it is to focus on the n-word and even the
race madness in these anerican materpieces, as if this is what we need
to focus on, a weakness that is stained int the fabric of the weavings
and the woven nation. how 20th century. we may still be a nation of
cowards on race, afraid to talk about, as holder, our first black
attorney general, serving under our first black president, claims, but
maybe we are doing a better job on this than most. living here, in
brasil, where the people foolishly think, because they are all poor,
that they do not have race problems like the yanks, i was struck by
the canadian view noted in the article, a view of all anericans as
southerners; it reminded me that fiction can use its lattitudes to
plumb a longitudinal issue like race with a single line. but that line
is tangled, as cherrycoke instructs, in a broken remembrancer. perhaps
a national amnesia, like the kind marquez magically mixes into his
fictions is as dangerous, but he who claims history, or reduces it to
a word, is a poor reader of fiction and history. the f-word is
complex. it can connote a false statement, a lie, a fable, a tall
tale, a stranger than fiction event. the n-word is also quite complex.
that sullivan claims that the word has only a negative connotation in
the white man;s mouth gives his knowledge of its usage, then and now,
the lie.