Ty Webb wrote:The dean also happened to be the father of White Zombie's bassist, and I wound up talking to him about Beavis and Butthead.

This is probably the most startling end to a post I've ever read.

Imagine how I felt when he brought up Beavis and Butthead for the first time. This is a balding guy in his fifties given to wearing vests and bolo ties with turquoise clasps. He's also nearly completely deaf and wears hearing aids in both ears. Not the picture of a hard rock fan.

Then he explained that B&B often played the first video from "my daughter's band." This was for "Highway 65". He told me he'd go to her early shows to support her, but turn his hearing aids off. He also said Rob Zombie was a very friendly, sweet guy who he really liked.

faulkner. that was so easy!

if it had been fitzgerald versus hemingway, i might've had more trouble. which i'm sure is seen as asinine (most would go with hemingway then, yeah?).

We talking as novelists? Yeah. Faulkner. Easy.

But Christ, Papa wrote some mindblowing short fiction.

Sure, you can trace them back to Sherwood Anderson or even Chekhov, but his contribution to the form is inestimable. I don't think many people would deny that. They're all stories that will stay with me until the day I die; utter perfection and I can't go more than a few weeks without taking a few tokes from my Complete Hemingway paperback.

"Indian Camp," "The Killers," "In Another Country," "The Light of the World," "A Day's Wait."

But then again, I go completely apeshit for good short fiction.

His novels ain't bad either (particularly the concluding tense-as-all-hell chapters of For Whom the Bell Tolls).

William Faulkner's NY Times obituary, in the archives, is one of my favorites. JFK invited Faulkner--who had just won a Nobel prize--to dine at the White House, and Faulkner turned him down, because, in his opinion, "eighty miles is an awfully long way to go for dinner."

Hemingway didn't do anything *that* funny.

Right on, Billy. Fuck JFK and every other American president post-Lincoln.

connor wrote:His novels ain't bad either (particularly the concluding tense-as-all-hell chapters of For Whom the Bell Tolls).

El Sordo's final stand (chapter 23?) may be the most sphincter-puckering, page-gripping, and moving long passage in modern American literature.

Ty Webb wrote:El Sordo's final stand (chapter 23?) may be the most sphincter-puckering, page-gripping, and moving long passage in modern American literature.

As sphincter-puckering as this?

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:Faulkner without even breaking a sweat.

Hemingway is a great stylist, well worth reading. Faulkner is the second-best english-language novelist of the last century.

Skuldt wrote:William Faulkner's NY Times obituary, in the archives, is one of my favorites. JFK invited Faulkner--who had just won a Nobel prize--to dine at the White House, and Faulkner turned him down, because, in his opinion, "eighty miles is an awfully long way to go for dinner."

Hemingway didn't do anything *that* funny.

Excellent.

Faulkner for me. Hemmingway is great, but Faulkner is a step up.

I don't like Melville at all, his place in the canon be damned. Boring.