*Disclaimer – please note that it is not my intention to cause offence in this post; this is merely a discussion of words which people find offensive. If you were offended by the first word of the title, I wouldn’t recommend reading any further.

The radio was playing in the car the other day, and Kanye West’s All of the Lights came on. It’s so rare that I listen to the radio as opposed to my own music that I was mildly surprised that one of the songs I’d been listening to frequently since getting the album a couple of weeks ago suddenly had a few words missing, most prominently the word nigger.

Nigger’s a strange word, because it’s not really a swear word, it’s not like you’d hit your thumb with a hammer and shout “argh, niggers!”, but it’s likely to cause as much, if not more, offence than, say, cunt. So why is that? Well, it’s a derogatory racially-specific term. I think that second part is the most important aspect of it; dickhead is derogatory, but not racially-specific, and would be considered much less offensive.

Presumably then, it’s the combination of being derogatory and being racially-specific. After all, there’s plenty of racially-specific words which aren’t derogatory: ‘occidental,’ ‘Aryan’, ‘kiwi’, ‘Asian’. Okay, I suppose these are more or less geographical, but the ideas of race and culture are inextricably linked with geography.

So, assuming that the racial-specificity of word is not in itself a bad thing, but rather acts as a modifier depending on what other labels can be applied to the word, is the word ‘nigger’ still derogatory, and therefore offensive?

Historically, of course it is. The connotations of the word run deep and remain as an ancestral relic from a time the people of the western world would like to, but never should, forget. But the connotations of words change over time. Does anyone use the word ‘gay’ to exclusively mean ‘happy’ or ‘cheerful’ any more? So is the derogatory connotation of ‘nigger’ still the prevailing sentiment?

In Hip-Hop culture, a powerful, primarily African-American cultural force, probably more so in the US than here, the word ‘nigger’ is used without care or restraint, admittedly still referring almost exclusively to a black person, but almost never in a negative manner. My interpretation of it in Hip-Hop, and African-American culture in general, is that the word is almost a synonym for something like ‘brother’; a mark of solidarity.

One thing that does occur to me is that the adoption of the word nigger by the very people it referred to, could in fact be ironic. A kind of verbal rebellion against the subjugation to which black people were subjected by the white men who called them ‘niggers’. But used ironically or not, it could still retain the ideas of brotherhood and solidarity.

Take for example the line I heard censored on Radio One the other day, from All of the Lights: “Something wrong, I hold my head, M J gone, that nigger dead.” Whatever the deal with Michael Jackson was, he started out as an ordinary black kid, had some cosmetic surgery, and ended up looking pretty Caucasian. Maybe he had some skin problem, maybe he was a bit unstable, maybe he wanted to look more ‘white’. That’s not important. My point is that by calling him a nigger, Kanye West is reasserting Michael Jackson as a member of the African-American community as a mark of respect and a lamentation over his death. In that context, is the word ‘nigger’ offensive?

Of course, context is everything. If there’s a guy in a white hood stood by a burning crucifix saying ‘nigger’, you can be pretty sure its neither a mark of solidarity or respect. If that guy starts talking on Radio One on a Sunday afternoon, I’d expect them to censor everything he says and replace it with several minutes of complete radio silence or, even better, some Miles Davis. Okay, that’s not entirely serious, I don’t really believe in censorship, as we’ll come to in a minute, but I do believe that saying anything discriminatory or with an agenda of discrimination against a group pretty much immediately invalidates your argument.

So I’ve given two examples where the word ‘nigger’ has such disparate meanings as to be almost two different words. But those are two extreme examples of a word being used within particularly groups. A word doesn’t change its connotations by being used by small groups of people, it changes by entering the mainstream world of every day language. But can that every happen for a word as charged as nigger?

One thing to bear in mind is that words do not inherently have meanings, and therefore are not inherently offensive or anything else. Words are just a series of vocalised sounds that can be represented as symbols and to which meanings are attached. If you say ‘cunt’ to a three-year-old, they’re not going to be neither offended or phased. They would treat it with the same unbiased curiosity as any other word. And if everyone said ‘cunt’ on a day-to-day basis, not in a derogatory manner, but in the same way that you might say the word ‘balloon’ for example, it would cease to offend anyone. Words are not inherently offensive.

What can be offensive is the meaning behind them. Now I’m going to take a guess here, because I can’t back this up, but I would say that the majority of people in Britain today, maybe not the vast majority, but, I would hope, a growing majority, are not racist. I’m sure everyone colours the world based on their own beliefs, and racist people probably believe the majority of people think like them too. There’s no use pretending racism doesn’t still exist, but I believe, on balance, Britain to be a fairly tolerant country.

So if the average British person head or used the word nigger, there would be no racist sentiment behind it, and it would be at worst neutral and, perhaps, mingled with a sort of inherited shame, because, yes, it is an uncomfortable word to use.

Now what’s the one weapon a racist has? I mean, sometimes, sure, they have sticks and petrol bombs, but generally the only weapon a racist has is language, which, in the long run, is much more powerful than anything physical, because words, for all their ‘vocalised sounds’ are, essentially ideas. There are no ideas without words to express them, no thought without language.

If the ‘brother/solidarity’ meaning of ‘nigger’ starts becoming predominant, if we overcome our initial discomfort at using the word, it ceases to be any more offensive than ‘Asian’ or ‘occidental’. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but if it did, you deprive racists of that word. Sure they could come up with new offensive words to express their views, but fear of a word only increases its power. That power can be diluted to nothingness just by using the word.

So, should Radio One have censored the word nigger? I don’t know to be honest. I don’t believe in censorship, but I do believe in restriction. I believe people should be allowed to make Saw and the Human Centipede and gay groupsex porn, but I do I think children and teenagers should be able to watch them? No. And I do I want to watch or discuss or even think about any of those things? No.

It’s up to the BBC whether they want to censor certain words or not. Actually, it’s probably up to Ofcom. There obviously is a need to avoid certain words on the radio and television, at least before the watershed, because certain words shouldn’t be glamorised to children to the detriment of other, more intelligent words that would help them articulate themselves better.

I’m definitely conflicted on the issue though. It was recently announced that an edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is to be released with the word ‘nigger’ removed. I’ve never read the book, but as far as I’m aware, the word is not used as a derogatory term but rather as part of the everyday lexicon for the time and place where the book is set. Whether for good or bad I believe that both words and work of literature are important relics of the time when they were created and should not be tampered with just to become more ‘palatable’ to modern tastes. Adapted into new works based on the original, maybe, but not edited.

The counter-argument for this is that because of that one little n-word, the book is banned in American schools. Remove that word and, hey presto, American schoolchildren are suddenly given access to the work of one of the important writers of the twentieth century. That’s good, definitely. But what if they did that to To Kill a Mockingbird? “Don’t say black person, Scout, it’s common. Say ‘Negro’.” I was taught that book for GCSE English, and I still hold it as one of the finest books ever written. But what poignancy and impact it would lose if you started censoring it. “Why I saw that yonder gentleman of colour ruttin’ on my Mayella!”

Then again, Enid Blyton’s Noddy books were edited for racist content when the evil gollywogs were photoshopped out and two politically neutral goblins were photoshopped in. Now again I’ll admit ignorance and say I’ve never read a Noddy book, and I certainly can’t speak for Enid Blyton’s intentions, but I’ve heard she was not a very nice or sociable person and that she didn’t particularly like children, despite writing for and about them all day, but, it’s my understanding that the gollywogs were the villains of the stories, so I would suggest there might be some conviction beyond sheer chance that all the other toys got on together nicely, but the black toys were evil, motivating that decision. So yeah, fair enough, if kids like what are otherwise considered to be ‘delightful’ books, then quietly remove the blatantly racist content and let them go nuts.

So those are some of my thoughts on the word ‘nigger’ and offensive words and censorship in general. One final thing I want to mention is that one of my absolute pet peeves that really annoys me in is when people swear but censor themselves, like f*%&er or sh@t or really stupid stuff like b*gger. Either have the balls to swear properly or find a different word that more accurately reflects your sentiment. If you don’t want to swear, fine, but don’t make a half-hearted, limp-wristed gesture at swearing. And don’t be afraid of it. They’re just words, and words are just tools, and all tools have their job and their purpose.

Until next time I update, remember, all of you who read my site, you’re all my niggers, feel free to send me love, hate and opinions in the comments below.

I don’t think I’ve read or watched anything of great inspiration lately either, not something that’s made me want to go off and write or even write about it. The last really great movie I watched was Let the Right One In, which I highly recommend, but otherwise I seem to have just been watching b-movies and comedies and such, oh, and I watched Forbidden Planet finally, but I was tired and half-asleep by its end, and somehow it wasn’t quite all I’d hoped for: I rather prefer the implausability and exaggeration of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars.

As for reading, I just a few minutes ago finished Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s a very short novella, and it has the typical Capote flair in the writing, but there’s something about his writing style that’s kind of boring. It’s hard to explain, but stuff that is consistently good can be boring, and with Capote there’s none of the wordplay or sudden flights of fancy in Joyce or Woolf. It’s like with those latter writers they really feel what they’re writing, but Capote seems more like he just developed this rather masterful manner of expression and from that base is able to just churn out stories. The plot also seemed a little ridiculous, with a sixty year-old woman running away from her sister’s house to stay in a tree-house for several days with her sixteen-year-old nephew, from whose viewpoint the story is told. The characters seem a little too colourful to be plausible, only a little, mind, but it was a little too much for me. Capote, I’m also going to point out, was good friends with Harper Lee, and there was speculation for many years that he actually wrote, or largely wrote, To Kill a Mockingbird and put it out under her name. To Kill a Mockingbird I think is quite different from what Capote work I’ve read, and far superior, so I don’t see how people could have believed that.

The other book I finished recently was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of the classics of Russian literature. I’ve never read a Russian novel before, and the only Realist novel I’ve read was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which did not compel me to read to its conclusion. I was rather disappointed with Crime and Punishment also. For a start, there was a lot of authorial intrusion, which irks me, though I doubt the average reader is even aware of the term. It basically means the author interjects opinions into the text, even though the author is this ethereal voice that exists beyond the text, on a different ontological plain if you want to get poncy about it. Modernist literature doesn’t do that, primarily because the Modernist movement was a reaction against the Realist fiction of the previous century. (This is what my dissertation is about, so I’ve been learning more about this lately). So authorial intrusion, I find, kind of takes one out of the story, because it’s like the director of a film jumping in with comment suddenly out of nowhere. The characters also seemed to lack psychological depth, or at least the psychological depth I like in Modernism. It’s debatable whether that’s true or not, but it would be accurate to say that in Realist fiction characters are defined through action and in Modernist fiction characters are defined through thought. I prefer the latter. So, yes, I saw the book through to the end, and I did feel a certain amount of intrigue waiting for the next twist of the plot, but every twist never quite satisfied me, and even I felt the title seemed unjustified: there was neither that much crime, nor that much punishment.

I’m starting a new Virginia Woolf book tonight though, so that might at least make me happier, though it will be Night and Day, her second novel, so not quite as ‘modernist’ as her later novels. Anyway, since there’s been so few updates recently, and really,  I have nothing new to show, I thought I’d drag out something old, from the archives you might say. So, in a minute, I shall paste in some poetry I wrote when I was a teenager, and a young one at that. Bad poetry, of course, the sort one does write as a teenager. I’d like to think I got marginally better over the years, but poetry has never been my forte. And, if you’d like, you can use the following three examples as instructional aids in how not to write a poem. Really, if you ever write anything resembling this, I recommend not showing it to anyone with any semblance of earnestness, only perhaps as a novelty five or more years afterwards.

No more than human

No need to speak,

there’s an eternity of words,

and sensations,

in every touch,

and with every touch,

millions of sensory neurones tingle,

as the heart flutters.

Slowly, nervously,

(anticipation makes the blood flow faster)

the covering is pulled away,

and, like candy,

no matter how beautiful the wrapping,

the inside is always sweeter,

expected and proven.

Every curve flaunts its perfection

in the soft ambience of the clouded sunlight,

the eyes know it,

the fingers know it,

the tongue knows it,

no more than human,

no less than love.

Love has no glory

Once upon a time,

Distance was our only division,

But love could not prevail,

You made too deep an incision

We had something once,

That distance could not take,

My dreams are still of you,

But the truth hurts when I awake

You took it away,

With his love that you returned,

Now we can’t go back,

Our crossed bridges we have burned

I hold on still,

To that distant memory,

It was only ever a dream really,

Love has no glory

Ropes and strings

Time like a spool

A reel ahead

A straight path laid out in

Red string

Two hearts tied together with

The strongest rope

Unbreakable

The strings just strengthened

The bond

Until

They got so tangled

There were too many of them

We lost sight of the rope

We weren’t sure whether it was still there

Any more

Or whether it was just the tangled

Spaghetti strings

Tying us together

Strangling us

Now came the scissors

The blood

The hurt

Cutting everything

Down to that central rope

It was still there

As strong as

ever

And if, for some reason, you liked reading these, perhaps in the way that I enjoy watching really shoddy, low-budget horror films, there’s plenty more where it came from. Just let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to post up some more. I might even dig out a few old teenage stories about vampires and angels and such for your delection.

P.S. My girlfriend illustrated Glitter and you can see the pictures over at Victoria Stitch.

Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

For the first few days at his aunt and uncle’s Tom is bored and restless, and resents that, on the way, his aunt did not take him up Ely tower. He writes a postcard from the tower to his brother Peter, expressing his dissatisfaction at his situation, though, as an afterthought, counter-balances his complaints, “in fairness to Aunt Gwen,” by underlining on the last line of his postcard “the food is good.” From the first night, he is unable to sleep, and from boredom gets up and wanders into the kitchen. For this he is reprimanded by his uncle, and instructed that he is not to get up before morning. Though occassionally the character of his Uncle Alan comes across as something of a caricature, he is never the overbearing tyrant of, say, a Roald Dahl story. James, from James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda, were both thoroughly opressed by the adults that governed their lives; a reflection of Roald Dahl’s own unhappy childhood. Tom, on the other hand, is merely bored, much like Milo is in The Phantom Tollbooth (another of my favourite children’s books), and I think this make’s Tom’s story more believable and Tom more relatable. After all, everyone knows what it is like to have been bored at some point in their childhood, kept somewhere against their will, but fewer children, thought they may have felt unfairly treated at times, have been in the truly desperate situations of James or Matilda. I have nothing against Roald Dahl’s children’s books, they are a wonderful form of escapism for children, but I feel myself less inclined to reread them now than I do Tom’s Midnight Garden, The Phantom Tollbooth or the Moomintroll books.

What I like about Tom’s Midnight Garden, or rather, one of the things I like about it, is the subtlety and strength of its central idea: In the hall of the large house in which the aunt and uncle’s flat is situated, is a grandfather clock that never strikes the correct hour. One night the clock strikes thirteen times, and Tom is so annoyed by it as he lies in the dark, listening to its defiance of time, that he resolves to get up and see what time the hands say. When he gets downstairs, it is too dark to see they clock, so he opens the back door to let in the moonlight. This is when he discovers that, rather than the small concrete yard with bins, a car and a creosote-covered fence, there is a great moonlit garden out there: his midnight garden. He plans to visit it the next day, but discovers it is gone, and only reappears at night. From then on, he visits it every night, secretly, and within it meets a young girl called Hatty.

She is not the only other person who frequents the garden, but she is the only one who can see him, and so they become friends. This is the real crux of the story: their friendship. Time moves differently in the garden, and so sometimes Tom visits it at earlier, and sometimes later, points in its history. He goes every night, but the seasons and Hatty’s age changes. Tom realises that this must be the garden of the house from the previous century and so Hatty must be a ghost, creating this constant tension and mystery about what became of Hatty: how and where and when she died. Having previously read the book, I remembered how it ended, but it does not end with a Fight Club-style twist that lets you read it once, read it again to see the clues that lead to that ending and then never bother with it again; Tom’s Midnight Garden has exactly the sort of resolution you want, though I shan’t say more than that.

In a way, Tom’s Midnight Garden is similar to David Almond’s Skellig. Both are built around a single, fantastical discovery that in turn leads to self-discovery, becomes a catalyst for growing-up, and both feature a strong friendship that is formed between a boy and a girl, a mutually beneficial union. But Skellig, although it has a good story, is not particularly well-written: it lacked the spark, for me, of Philippa Pearce’s work. It’s hard to say exactly what that spark constitutes, but it feels like Pearce never compromised her vision just because she was writing a ‘children’s book’. She uses semi-colons every now and then, for example, which I don’t recall being common in many other children’s books, and words such as ‘obstinate’. There is also in her work the occassional hint of authorial intrusion, which I think has generally been discouraged since the start of the twentieth century, though I believe it is quite prevalent in the nineteenth-century literature of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Here, rather than invoking the god-like narrator that exists beyond the ontological plain of the fiction, her asides such as “but what can children do against their elders’ decisions for them, and especially their parents?” gives the impression of a kindly aunt relating to you this story.

There is also an economy, an efficieny, to the structuring of the plot in this story. Every single event, however minor, is relevant, and has an importance to the story as a whole, even if it’s importance is not immediately obvious. These minor details help to create a more vivid and cohesive world, and also reminds me of another book I love: To Kill a Mockingbird. That novel similarly invokes the essence of childhood, but juxtaposes it with various other more adult themes, such as racism and morality, denying it the single-minded clarity of Tom’s Midnight Garden. Though the two books obviously have very different goals, I feel that comparison is justified because I don’t think children’s book, in terms of quality, should be judged on different terms to books written for adults. A good ‘children’s’ book is one that is suitable, enjoyable and understandable for children, but equally so for adults. Winnie-the-Pooh is a good example because, although those books are written for children, are about children’s playthings, the inherant emotional charm of a living, breathing teddy bear that exists in his patch of the world called The Hundred Acre Wood never loses its magic. Another good example of what I mean by a good children’s book being for adults as well is George Orwell’s Animal Farm. An adult can read it as a satire of corrupt communism; a child can read it as a story about some animals who took over a farm and started out with good intentions for running it, but some of the animals eventually were consumed by power and greed.

Of course, emotional response to a work of fiction is highly subjective. Tom’s Midnight Garden gripped me in a surprising way that I have not experienced for a long time, and with a ferocity I might never have before experienced. Perhaps it’s because of the way I’m feeling at the moment, the best analogy for which I can come up with at the moment, having been playing Forza Motorsport a lot recently, is like when, in a motor-race, you’re on the final lap, in first place, with your nearest rival less than a second behind you. You know that, at this point, none of the other laps mean anything: that you were in pole position for the first seven laps, and then for three-quarters of the final lap, means nothing if you don’t cross that finish line first. So you’re on edge for this final lap, shaking with its intensity, and you know that, although spinning out on a corner would be disastrous, would dash your chances completely of first place, missing the apex of a bend, losing traction for even a second, would be equally detrimental to your chances of winning because your rival will use the opportunity to overtake, and then all the work of the first seven laps would be gone in an instant. In the final year of my degree, with my plans for next year uncertain, and no chance to redo this year if I don’t acheive well enough, that’s how I feel. And so perhaps that’s why Tom’s Midnight Garden, with its evocation of time and memory and childhood, in many ways similar to Proust’s great work, but obviously far, far shorter and without the pomp and pretense and cleverness of high literature, affected me so deeply. I once read an aphorism that said a good book should leave room for the reader, and that’s exactly what Tom’s Midnight Garden does; with immediately identifiable characters and an uncomplicated plot it invites you to step out into the garden of your youth with the wonder of a child and the experience of an adult.

Here’s a bar chart I made illustrating the point, although the y-scale is comprised of competely meaningless arbitrary numbers:

‘Book 1′ represents a very well-written book with a not very interesting story. I’d say this description applies to a great deal of Modernist literature, and is the type of book I most commonly read. Prime examples would be Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in which a woman is planning a party for the evening, James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which a man wanders aimlessly around Dublin for a day, and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past / In Search of Lost Time / A la recherche du temps perdu, which spends the first thirty pages discussing how he often has difficulty sleeping, and the next hundred on what eating a type of French cake reminds him of. All of these, in isolation, are really quite boring stories of the mundane, and it is only the way they are written that brings them alive.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the type of work represented by ‘Book 2′: the interesting story that is not particularly well written. I’d say this is the most popular form of novel and includes the work of J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown. No one would argue that either Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code are well written or have any deep subtexts; they sell themselves entirely on their stories. Who cares that Harry Potter doesn’t deal with existential themes? We just want to see what happens to the boy wizard. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this type of writing; it fills the same needs as mindless trashy television which, despite its lack of cultural value is often cathartic to just zone out in front of. To speak metaphorically, I would liken this type of writing to a sugar-rush, a sweet, high-calorie low carbohydrate snack. You read The Da Vinci Code and it’s exciting (well, annoyingly over-excited): “first there was this man and then he got killed! and then some people found him covered in blood! and then he’d spelled out this riddle! and they were about to crack it! but they got chased by the police!” There’s no fat to chew, and sometimes you just want that. Mostly though, as I’ve said, I prefer something meatier, and I’d say Modernist literature is a like a well-cooked rump steak with a fine wine, full of rich and subtle flavours that are satisfying, but not to everybody’s taste.

‘Book 3′ which strikes a mid-range balance between well-written and interesting story, is the kind of average good book. Something like E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or, my favourite of all books, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Stuff happens, it’s well-described.

‘Book 4′ is the ideal book, with an amazing story and superlative writing. Almost no book has ever or will acheive this, and the only one I can think of that comes close is Homer’s The Odyssey, which was written well over two-thousand years ago. The story is as classic a monomyth as they come, full of exciting and memorable episodes that have weathered those two millenia to remain in the modern conciousness. The descriptions in it are also very well done, with Homer drawing simple paralells that demonstrate perfectly what he is talking about. I’d copy out some examples here if I hadn’t left my copy in another city or could be bothered to trawl through an internet copy.

Actually, I’d say that one other book which potentially comes close is Migeul de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of which I’ve only so far read the first two hundred pages. This story is classic enough that the adjective ‘Quixotic’ and the idiom ’tilting at windmills’ have entered our language, meaning, respectively, someone like Don Quixote in that they are excessively chivalric and/or with a unique, perhaps misguided, wordlview, and, someone attacking invisible or misperceived enemies or otherwise engaging in a futile fight. The writing is well-accomplished in that it parodies chivalric romance tales while remaining original, witty and funny, and is often interspresed with original poems by Cervantes.

And that’s essentially my theory on what any piece of writing needs to have for someone to read it: a good story or a good writer. Whether you agree or disagree, please feel welcome to leave a comment below.

Tomorrow was a film I wanted to see for a long time, having first heard about it in the booklet for the Grandaddy album The Broken Down Comforter Collection. One of their instrumental songs, my favourite on the album, Fentry, begins with a sample from the movie and in the CD notes they credit as being taken from “a nearly perfect movie made in the seventies.” Eventually I found the movie on Amazon as a Region One DVD for considerably more than I would usually pay for a DVD (about £19 I think), so I bought it, and watched it, I think, on New Year’s eve.

“Nearly perfect” is as good a description as any, but it’s a sad movie as well, one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen, but in a good way more than just a depressing way. In a way it’s a love story, but not a romance, just about human devotion and, more than anything, human suffering. The title comes from a line at the end of the original story which sums up the main theme of the story:

“The lowly and invincible of the earth – [who] endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

It’s the kind of story that I like, that Hemingway and Carver also write, of the struggles of ordinary men living their lives.

Both the film and the story have well-written lines, though they are narrated in quite different ways, but perhaps my favourite passage from Faulkner’s original story is this one:

“Quick told it, sprawled on the bench beyond Uncle Gavin, loose-jointed, like he would come all to pieces the first time he moved, talking in a lazy sardonic voice, like he had all night to tell it in and it would take all night to tell it. But it wasn’t that long. It wasn’t long enough for what was in it. But Uncle Gavin says it don’t take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered and he died.

“”It was pap that hired him. But when I found out where he had come from, I knowed he would work, because folks in that country hadn’t never had time to learn nothing but hard work. And I knowed he would be honest for the same reason: that there wasn’t nothing in his country a man could want bad enough to learn how to steal it. What I seemed to have underestimated is his capacity for love. I reckon I figured that, coming from where he come from, he never had none a-tall, and for that same previous reason – that even the comprehension of love had done been lost on him back down the generations where the first one of them had had to take his final choice between the pursuit of love and the pursuit of keeping on breathing.”"

I suppose the real brilliance of Faulkner in this story is the way he tackles these big themes of love and human experience in such simple terms, with such a simple narrative, although that seems fairly common to fiction set in the American South when you consider superlative works such as To Kill a Mockingbird (which remains my favourite novel), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Green Mile.

Now I suppose I ought either to eat or analyse this story. I recommend you, reader, if you feel so inclined, to check out either version of Tomorrow, particularly if you’re in America, since the Region DVD comes with the original story.