Faulkner, Faulkner, Faulkner – the bane of droves and droves of undergraduates lives, desperately attempting to decipher his exquisite works, his novels being far from easily accessible, they are deeply layered and initially appear completely chaotic. All novelists rely on their imagination, they take from it, think about what goes on in there, form letters around the ideas which are derived and place the words on paper…et voila a book is born. Faulkner skipped the interim steps, he places his imagination on the page and just like the erratic, confusing world of the imagination, so too are his novels, fuzzy and disorientating and annoying and amazing. Time, Faulkner time, is warped in relation to our normal perceptions, more akin to a dripping Dali motif, it plays havoc with normal form and sends us reeling in a desperate game of catch up.

Faulkner perceived time as not being so structured and easy to tame, he viewed it as a rampant beast that swung whichever way it desired and therefore the reading of his work was never going to be easy. At times Joyce can seem crystal as Faulkner flings the kitchen sink at us, stuffed with snapshots, flashbacks and stream of consciousness, the reader is soon lost in the swirling maze. It wasn’t always like this, in his first novels, time is, well rather normal and familiar, his tinkering with our sensibilities can be firstly sniffed in Sartoris (1929) and it’s plethora of reminiscences that completely overshadow the ’real time’ of the work.

Indeed the time in Sartoris is a cyclical thing with the past constantly being pored over and endlessly being interpreted. Within the same year, Faulkner had finished his The Sound and the Fury in which he abandoned all courtesy to the logical progression of time. The story, often maddeningly difficult to get a hold off is based around the decline of the once noble Southern Compson family. The Sound and the Fury (1929) was set in the same fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi as Sartoris had being, marking the beginning of what would become an obsessive chronicling of what was really his home of Lafayette County, Mississippi which would cover fifteen novels. They cover the decades from the American Civil War through the Depression narrating the tragic tale of the decay of the Old South. Faulkner followed The Sound and the Fury with As I Lay Dying (1930), which he perhaps unbelievably wrote in six weeks while working the nightshift in a power plant. It concentrated on the illness, death and burial of matriarch Addie Bundren, consisting of interior monologues spoken by people who knew Addie, mainly members of her family. The result is a grotesque, monstrous, ugly, catalogue of a quasi pilgrimage that Addie enforces upon her far from loving family of burying her in her home town of Jefferson. It has being acclaimed as one of Faulkner’s greatest novels, although it garnered little commercial success at the time of its publication. Once again, Faulkner employed far from conventional methods of writing, perhaps dissuading readers but time proved the book’s worth, it’s vivid characters, compelling tone and complex narrative were far too original to be ignored.

Relative fame and commercial success came with his fifth novel Sanctuary (1931), although unfortunately his publishing house became bankrupt, failing pay Faulkner’s due royalties. The novel was met with some disdain which was mainly due to Faulkner’s public admittance that the novel was written purely to make money and for that he was disgusted with himself. Perhaps he was, the novel disgusts us the reader but only for it’s content, the novel is in a word, excellent. Sanctuary challenges its reader, it’s menagerie of monstrous characters, page long sentences and subtle details that need to be remembered are all serious hurdles but bear with them and once again Faulkner delivers a wondrous piece of work. Faulkner continued the nightmare in his novel of the following year, Light in August (1932), charging at the age old problem of race in the Deep South, as we follow the travails of Joe Christmas in pursuit of his identity, completely confused as to whether he is white or black. His next novel, Pylon (1935) was different in two manners – it was published three years after his previous effort, not the usual one year turnaround and it was not set in apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County but rather in a thinly disguised New Orleans. It was savaged by most critics who viewed it as overly melodramatic, but Hollywood pounced on it, tuning it into a movie The Tarnished Angels starring Rock Hudson. Arguably it was the first time that Faulkner produced anything that could be considered shoddy, however he followed it, with what many critics regard as his masterpiece.

Absalom, Absalom! (1936),

The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Faulkner had taken his place among the greatest writers to ever have written. His acceptance speech was muffled and low, typical of Faulkner’s shyness but when it was published the following day, it was hailed for it’s eloquence and brilliantce, often being hailed as the greatest Nobel acceptance speech ever delivered. 1954 finally saw the publication of The Fable, which Faulkner had spent a decade sweating over and believed it to be his masterpiece. The critics thought otherwise although it did land him the 1955 Pulitzer Prize. It was based in the trenches of France in World War One, it seemed any time he wandered away from the environs of Yoknapatawpha County the critics and readers were not happy, desperately encouraging him to return. He did so, in The Reivers (1962), it would be for the last time, as sadly Faulkner was to pass away the following year. He was a rare type of writer, he possessed pure genius in his craft and this added to a unwavering commitment to his art helped him revolutionise Southern literature and universally transform the novel. From the beginning he was in it for the art’s sake, his earlier efforts were rejected but he refused to compromise an ounce, dedicating himself to his vision, he decided to write for the fulfilment it gave him. He would, he thought write for the drawer on his own terms, rather than write for the masses and not be true to himself. But something as original and simply brilliant as what he produced cannot be contained, it spread and spread, everybody recognising a master writer, although he more often than not drove his readership crazy with his intricate narratives, the rewards for perseverance of the reader were more than worth it, indeed the same could be said for Faulkner.

returned to familiar territory, as the narrative is mainly driven by Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury, describing the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. Once again, Faulkner does not shirk from criticising elements of the Deep South, this time tackling the morals and ethics of slavery. Aesthetically, it was also testy, it was written in such a manner that readers would interpret it differently, depending on how much of the evidence they picked up on and then whether they would be capable of separating what was true from what was false. April 1940, saw the publication of, The Hamlet, which was to be the first segment of a trilogy of novels depicting the Snopes, a poor Southern family, who would surface again in The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). However, the decline in the sales of his novels continued and following the publication of Go Down, Moses (1942), he moved back to Hollywood to write once again for the screen. During this stint, he earned screenwriting credits on To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and The Southerner. Great movies they were, no doubt, but how it must have burned Faulkner having to write the screenplay for Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Poignantly, the American public had abandoned his work, although according to Jean Paul Sartre, Faulkner was a god in France. However, the publication of The Portable Faulkner, an anthology of his work, in 1946, led to a re-awakening of interest in his work. It appears to have rejuvenated Faulkner, as he finished his first novel in six years, it was entitled Intruder in the Dust (1948) and it would bring huge acclaim to Faulkner when MGM purchased the rights and shot the movie in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh stirred up a hornets nest last month during a presentation in Minnesota he said the Bush administration ran an “executive assassination ring” that reported directly to Vice President **** Cheney. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving,” Hersh again reiterated during a TV news cast while being questioned by Amy Goodman. Amy Goodman interviews Seymour Hersh as follows:

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President **** Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed **** Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.

JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Hannah, **** Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven’t written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him—he had come a long way in—since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just—I am looking into stuff. I’ve done—there’s really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven’t written in the New York Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.

And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost—if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for **** Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected—that was the word he used—of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.

The evidence—the problem with having military go kill people when they’re not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we’re going into, and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.

And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by—well, let’s see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. “Gitmo,” they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me.

And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything’s sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said—I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close—he said that we’ve captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, “And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position.” He’s clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.

So, there we are. I don’t back off what I said. I wish I hadn’t said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we’re going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they’re very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you’re not as precise.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Del
ta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.

And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an assassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Name some.

SEYMOUR HERSH: No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets.

We’re a country that believes very much in due process. That’s what it’s all about. We don’t give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war—and it’s a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It’s not as if we’re at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It’s a very complicated war we’re in. And with each of those actions, of course, there’s always collateral deaths, and there’s always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That’s the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they’ve been there three or four months, they’re dangerous to us, because of the way they’ve been treated. But I’d love to move on to what I wrote about in The New Yorker.

AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?

SEYMOUR HERSH: How do I know? I hope not.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Sy Hersh. We’re going to go to break, and then we’ll be back with him, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His piece in The New Yorker is called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.” Stay with us.

Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand critic and author of “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America,” spoke on Thursday, May 12, about Andy Warhol’s 1962 exhibit of paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and the role it played the intellectual history of the Cold War era.

From KETC, LIVING ST. LOUIS Producer Jennifer Roller gets a look at an exhibit featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning photography that was on display at Maryville University. The photographs chronicle monumental, life-changing events throughout history, including those from the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, the Olympics, past presidents and the Iraq War.

Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Angela’s Ashes, discusses his latest work, Angela and the Baby Jesus. Marking a departure from his familiar memoir form, this Christmas tale – published in editions for both adults and children – revolves around the early years of the eponymous Angela, and her attempts to keep an effigy of the baby Jesus warm. Hosted by Sandip Roy of KALW’s UpFront Radio, this conversation is sure to offer insight into one of the master storytellers of our time.

Emergency Town Hall Meeting: Jan. 13, 2009, NYC, organized by Revolution Books. Chris Hedges is a former New York Times Mideast Bureau Chief, author of many books including “Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.

New York Time columnist and author Tom Friedman exposes the irrationality of US policies that promote consumption of vast quantities of oil. Friedman stresses that the United States must lead efforts to develop energy alternatives that would 1) free us from our dependence on petro-dictatorships and 2) help preserve the earth, oceans, and biodiversity. The program concludes with a Q&A between Friedman and Editor of The New Republic, Frank Foer.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Morin is an award winning political cartoonist for the Miami Herald.

New York Times Reporter David Barstow Wins Pulitzer Prize for Exposing Military’s Pro-War Propaganda Media Campaign In his first national broadcast interview, New York Times reporter David Barstow speaks about his 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of the Pentagon propaganda campaign to recruit more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as military analysts ahead of and during the Iraq war.

The United States Marine Corps War Memorial, (also known as the Iwo Jima Memorial) is a statue that overlooks the Potomac River at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. It has been placed there in dedication to all Marines who have given their lives in defense of their country. Its design was inspired by the most famous and iconic war-time photo ever taken, that of the flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi during World War II in the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 by the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Joe Rosenthal.

The Marines in the photo are Sargeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, PFC Franklin Sousley, PFC Rene Gagnon, PFC Ira Hayes, and PHM2 John Bradley (U.S. Navy Corpsman). Strank, Block, and Sousley did not survive the battle.Work on the project was authorized by Congress in 1947 and work began on the cast bronze memorial in 1951 and was dedicated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on November 10, 1954 which was the 179th anniversary of the Marine Corps. President John F. Kennedy issued a proclamation in 1961 stating that an American flag would be displayed onsite 24 hours a day. The memorial was sculpted by Felix de Weldon and designed by Horace W. Peaslee. The cost of construction was $850,000 and the debt was covered entirely by donations, of which 96 percent came from the Marines themselves.

Felix de Weldon was born in Austria on April 12, 1907 and died on June 3, 2003 in Woodstock, Virginia and was buried in Arlington National Cemetary. He worked on the memorial from 1945 to 1954 paying particular attention to every detail. The uniforms, helmets, boots were all recreated accurately. The 3 survivors of the battle modeled their faces in clay and photos were collected from the 3 who did not survive the battle and were later used in the modeling and sculpting of their faces. The casting of the bronze took almost 3 years to complete. Once sculpted in plaster, it was then disassembled and shipped to Brooklyn, NY to be cast in bronze. There, the 108 parts would be cast, cleaned, finished, chased, then ultimately shipped back to be bolted and welded together.

The inscription on the statue reads, “Uncommon valor was a virtue” a tribute by Admiral Chester Nimitz, and another reads, “In honor and memory of the men of the United States Marine Corps who have given their lives to their country since 10 November 1775″. Also inscribed are the names of the campaigns that the Marines have been involved in since 1775. The figures are 32 feet tall and the flagpole measures 60 feet. The base is made from 700 tons of concrete and 389 tons of black Swedish granite. At 78 feet above the ground, the memorial ranks among the largest bronze statues in the world.

The memorial is located at 14th Street North – Arlington, Virginia between Route 50 and the Arlington National Cemetery, open daily, 24 hours. There is a parade hosted by the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon and a Music In Motion performance by the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps from May through August on Tuesdays from 7:00 to 8:30 pm.