TWIL: / Review: two things at the symphony 10/31/2026

One: Friend Anne teaches me about literature.

The Barber piece included a poem by James Agee. On the way to the symphony, I said to Friend Anne, “I am fond of Agee because he wrote A Death in the Family, which included a chapter with nothing but ‘My mother is a fish,’ and that was in 10th grade and it was the first time I read something where the author didn’t spell it out for me, and I figured out the puzzle.”

Anne: “That’s Faulkner in As I Lay Dying.”

Me: “You are wrong. They wouldn’t have us read Faulkner in high school.” Checks. “Oh damnit, you are right.”

How is it possible that Faulkner, the man famous for a page-long sentence in The Bear also wrote a sentence-long chapter? And seriously, what curriculum threw that book at me in 10th grade?

(It might have been my Free Reading hour. I might have read As I Lay Dying by Faulkner and A Death in the Family by Agee at the same time. I don’t remember being a death-obsessed Goth, but it’s possible. I also didn’t remember Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is the prologue to A Death in the Family.)

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Two: Anne teaches me a new word.

So, James Agee wrote the words that were set to music in Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Supposedly he was playing with improvisational writing: write once, no second draft. (I gesture expansively at this blog.)

At one point the piece serves up this line:

People in pairs, not in a hurry/

scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body.

Ooo I thought, new word. “Aestival.”

At intermission I mentioned to Anne that I doubted Agee improvised the word “aestival,” because no one pulls that word out of their butt. (Butt, not ass, because I was at the symphony.)

Anne: “Aestival, pertaining to summer.”

She placidly pulled “aestival” out of her butt AND used it it a sentence AND probably would have spelled it correctly without having to look it up every time as I have four times now.

I gaped at her, and then gaped more dramatically, and she smiled the happiest smile I have ever seen her smile.

Anne: “Most animals hibernate, but some animals aestivate: they sleep in the summer.”

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So, I suppose that pumps the TWIL count up to three, because I just looked up what animals sleep in summer.

Aestival animals are: Fish, reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs (sleeping in tree hollows using tail fat reserves), select hedgehogs, and Unita ground squirrels.