Speaking of media credibility, The Scrapbook itself has screwed up, for which we are very sorry. But we are grateful to Theresa M. Towner, professor of literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, for her gracious letter of reproval. She noted that “Knock, Knock, Knocking,” an item in our November 7 issue on Bob Dylan’s giving the cold shoulder to the Nobel prize committee (as he was then doing), contained a few errors. “First of all,” she wrote, “William Faulkner was not Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia in 1962; he was there in 1957-58.” She continued:
He was in Charlottesville in spring 1962, where his friend and biographer Joseph Blotner brokered his comment about why he turned down President Kennedy’s dinner invitation. At first, Faulkner didn’t want to respond to the White House’s inquiry, which went from the English department secretary to Blotner when Faulkner happened to be in Blotner’s office; he changed his mind, though, and told Blotner, “Say I’m too old at my age to travel that far to eat with strangers” (Faulkner [1974], pp. 1820-21). The Nobel ceremony this year is scheduled for December 10 (not November). There is wry irony in this date, too, since it marks the 66th anniversary of the very day that Faulkner accepted his award from the Swedish Academy. I have tried to resist the urge to invoke the ghost’s lament to Hamlet: “O what a falling off was there.”
