Is God a Republican?

While I remember feeling that it was always blustery and rainy every time I voted in that bygone era before I started voting absentee and actually had to walk to a polling place to cast a ballot (and before I knew to say that Election Day was always Pineapple Express Day), it seems to me that this year may be worse than usual. There's major flooding around the state, at least three people have been killed, and some polling places are closed because of the weather. This means that voter turnout will be suppressed, and that always benefits the Republicans. So if God isn't a Republican, it could well be that the Pineapple Express is. Happy voting, y'all!

Faulkner and Film Noir

Meant to blog this last week, but Bright Lights Film Journal has reprinted a fascinating article by Daniel Barth called "Faulkner and Film Noir" about Faulkner's experience as a screenwriter. It's actually about much more than that. Not only does it talk about similarities between Faulkner's fiction and the fatalistic hardboiled writers whose works were adapted as film noir, but it also traces the influence of the French symbolists (and Poe) on Faulkner and in turn his influence on French writers such as Camus and Gide. Faulkner apparently admired the great French director Jean Renoir, and I hadn't realized that one of the scripts he worked on was The Southerner (1945), which Renoir directed in his brief wartime sojourn in Hollywood.

An interesting slice of literary history that draws together names I hadn't seen connected before. I wish he had found a way to work in Leigh Brackett's comments about working with Faulkner on the screenplay of The Big Sleep (1946), but now I can't find them again myself. And it also makes me want to read Sanctuary, which is treated as a minor novel by most literary critics but which Barth describes as very noir. It was filmed at Paramount as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), which is a notorious pre-Code movie that I've been dying to see since I first read about it in Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood -- Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934.