Monday night 2!

* 61 Essential Postmodern Reads: An Annotated List. (Absalom, Absalom!? Hamlet? Really?)

* Nature's right to exist comes to Shapleigh, Maine. Via MeFi.

* The Harvard Crimson reports that Henry Louis Gates was apparently arrested yesterday for trying to break into his own home. Post-racial America is awesome. (via SEK)

* Also from SEK: scientific proof Powerpoint sucks.

* Inside Blackwater, the corporation so evil they forgot to give it a non-evil name.

I have a review in this week's Independent of Lewis Shiner's recent novel Black & White, set in Durham and centered around the destruction of the historic Hayti neighborhood in order to construct the Durham Freeway in 1970.

"The past," William Faulkner wrote, "is never dead. It's not even past." Lewis Shiner's new Southern noir Black & White—set in the author's hometown of Durham—is only the latest novel to rearticulate this central, inescapable American truth, the endless return of the secret histories and collective sins we wish could just stay buried.

There are secrets upon secrets in Black & White, sins upon sins, but they all revolve around a single, penetrating absence: Hayti, the African-American community gutted by the construction of the Durham Freeway 40 years ago. When comic artist Michael Cooper returns to Durham in 2004 with his elderly mother and father after a childhood spent in Dallas, Texas (his father has "come home to die"), he finds himself drawn deeper into this still-bleeding communal wound. A simple effort to retrieve a copy of his birth certificate—of which there is mysteriously no record—leads Michael unexpectedly to his father's involvement in the murder of a civil rights activist found in a concrete overpass on N.C. 147.

The corpse, of course, is more than just a single person's: This is Hayti's corpse, the murder still unsolved.

Shiner's story takes us deep into the unhealed psychic wounds surrounding the urban renewal movement of the 1960s and '70s, in which federal funds were taken by Southern cities such as Durham to "revitalize" troubled—read "black"—areas in what one of Shiner's characters describes as a "calculated revenge for integration. Urban renewal focused almost exclusively on black neighborhoods. Nothing was ever rebuilt, only destroyed." So it was with Hayti when it was cut in two to build the road leading out of town to Research Triangle Park.

I recently saw on Boing Boing that Shiner has put the whole novel online free of charge, a development I wholeheartedly approve of. For more on Hayti and its desecration, there's no better place to start than Endangered Durham.

Wednesday afternoon apocalypse: William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech from 1950.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Gabriel García Márquez riffs briefly on Faulkner's address in his own Nobel lecture, in 1982:

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

(via my course on the South and the Global South)