YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTY TODAY. BY VERNON LOTT- - - -Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, near Compson's Mile, and beyond the spot where Lee Goodwin was tried and lynched, I can see Yoknapatawpha County's Red Lobster burning, all orange and white and flashing in the dark like a bottle of lightning bugs, and I say to myself, "Benjy, you'd better keep your hands in your pockets before you get hurt again, like Caddy told you to, like she was always telling you to," but that was a long time ago, so long ago, and now everything's changed, like when they tore down the Sartorises' plantation house and put up the Gap store, and everyone started wearing brown pants and gray T-shirts, or when they built the Pottery Barn, which doesn't look like a barn at all, and where I can't listen to Queenie or Prince stomping around on the hard ground but instead can only hear some woman singing (Norah Jones, the salesclerk tells me) and see fancy things like $20 napkin rings for sale, or when Moseley's Drugstore was replaced by a Starbucks, where I went to buy a bottle of sarsaparilla but was only able to get a gourmet root beer, and where I ended up also buying a travel mug, a piece of low-fat blueberry coffeecake, and a copy of the New York Times, or when they knocked down the trees in the pine hills to put in David's Bridal, and how I stared at the pretty dresses in the window, white dresses like the one Caddy wore when she married Quentin; yes, everything's different now, and I can only stand in the dark, in what used to be my pasture, my place, a grassy place that is now a cement parking lot outside the Red Lobster, as I watch the fire jump, the windows burst, and a wooden anchor tumble from the top of the building, and I can no longer smell the trees.- - - -
Panda Bear, Bob Dylan, Panic at the Disco, Hercules and Love Affair, Hot Chip, Amy Winehouse, Modest Mouse, David Bowie, The Blow, Fiona Apple, the Who, Rollingstones, Bruce Springstein, T-Rex, Ben Folds, Vivaldi, Prince, Slade, Flaming Lips, Al Green, Bjork, Damien Rice, ELO, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, NIN, Madonna, Pink Floyd, Yes, John Prine, Of Montreal, Arcade Fire, and Toscanini.
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Harold and Maude, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Cabaret, Kill Bill, The Haunting (the old one), Spirited Away, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Big Sleep, The Empire Strikes Back, and what I can remember of Pineapple Express.
Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, South Park, The Wire, Arrested Development, Buffy.
Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, The Plague of Doves, One Hundred Years of Solitude (again), Swann's Way, The Years, American Pastoral, City of Night, A Single Man, Gay New York, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Myra Breckinridge, Giovanni's Room, The Mayor of Castro Street, Jeremy Thrane, The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club, The Great Man, And the Band Played On, All the Pretty Horses, Faggots, Suttree, Blood Meridian, The Witches of Eastwick, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, Three Tales, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The Monsters of Templeton, The Book of Other People, The Helmet of Horror, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice, The Waves, The History of Sexuality, The Sea, The Portrait of a Lady, The Counterlife, The Prague Orgy, The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman Unbound, The Ghost Writer, Middlemarch, The Swimming Pool Library, To the Lighthouse, On Chesil Beach, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Blue Angel, Effi Briest, and The Road...but the best is Madame Bovary.
Gustave Flaubert