"Faulkner," as in Faulkner.
[LAUGHTER]
Faulkner.
Faulkner wrote a great movie.
What was it?
[INAUDIBLE] But he wrote a movie.
I just saw it on video.
What was it?
That's it.
It just came out again in New York.
There were these scenes that they had taken out.
Brilliant.
"Faulkner."
"During the last two weeks of John's life,
Joe was reading As I Lay Dying for his English class.
He had to give an oral report, and John
kept asking me to read it.
You're an English teacher, he said.
You know what they want.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, I said, but the book drifted from the kitchen
to the bedside table to the pillows of the living room
couch.
What's it about, I asked Joe late one night
when we were making peanut butter sandwiches.
But I didn't understand the story
as he told it-- the good brothers from the bad brothers.
Who was the mother's favorite, really?
And who was building the coffin, banging and banging the nails?
The afternoon John died, I picked it up,
waiting for the food from the aunts and the cousins.
I tried to read it that night before I fell asleep
and stopped.
I don't know what finally happened.
'Caddy smells of trees,' I kept thinking during those days
and nights of the wake and the funeral.
But that was another book, wasn't it?
That was the idiot brother talking."