Blues if you got 'em

I've had this line from Faulkner's The Wild Palms reverberating in my head for the past week:

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

This line was uttered by Harry Wilbourne, the escaped convict who saves the pregnant Charlotte during the great flood of the Mississippi in 1927. It was burned into my memory years ago because I loved this novella so much that I tried writing a screenplay of it when I was housesitting for Edgar Meyer the summer after my senior year of high school. I think I got to 80 pages and even found out who owned the rights to it (turned out to be Katherine Ross from the Graduate). Maybe I'll make it someday.

Lucky French Bastard

Anyhow, the other beautiful thing about this line was that it was uttered by Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle! If she isn't the most beautiful woman ever to grace the screen, I don't know who is. And on top of that, what I didn't know before, was that she was an active supporter of the Black Panthers and was subsequently hounded by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI while in Europe, which perhaps led to her suicide (overdose of barbituates) in the backseat of a car in Paris.

She was framed by the FBI, Hoover in particular, who leaked stories that she was pregnant by one of the Black Panthers, whose cause she fought for. When her child (the father was Romain Gary) died at birth, she insisted on a glass coffin, to show the world they had been duped. A series of nervous breakdowns followed that eventually killed Seberg in 1979 at the age of 40.
-- From the Journals of Jean Seberg by Gary Morris