 |
|
| home | bio | contact |
|
You are not a car. You know you are not a car. You are not a car. You know you’re not a car.
Finally broke 10,000 on my thesis word count. The end is (finally) near. But then again, at this point it needs to be.
Down with gouty academics and drunken, ignorant professors!
I’m a bit freaked out by how ever-present and all-knowing google is, but sometimes they’re just so smart. I discovered a new feature today while writing an email in the gmail setup: when I go to send it, a box pops up that say something like, ‘You used the words “I’m attaching” in your email, but didn’t attach anything. Do you want to continue?’
That, right there, would be why google is google.
the sprains and ruptures of sense
Nobody but Frenchmen and Hollywood homos still believe that old saw about how Southern men are as cold and bold as their women are flighty and sentimental, when the fact is just the reverse. In truth, no Southern woman has believed a word out of the mouth of a Southern man since 1861, when the men went riding off on their chargers shouting, “Not to worry, sugar plum. We’ll be home early from the war.” As a result, your average Southern belle of today is about as sentimental as a chain saw. And though she might twitter on about good manners and religion and such, when it really comes down to it, she don’t believe in nothing but hard currency, land in clear title, and rigged elections…. On the other hand, your average Southern gent, of which I was a touching example, believes in his heart of hearts and despite his rough and tumble ways, in fair play—and remains a fool for any kind of romantic adventure that requires charging the cannon to demonstrate his pure and constant allegiance to some lost cause, which, often as not, turns out to be one of them beautiful Southern girls without an ounce of mercy nor a jot of fair.
I grew up in Virginia, in the flat land not near but not far from the ocean. I never remember thinking about the landscape. What I remember was looking out the backseat window at countless, grey columns as we drove alongside another piney woods. We didn’t have vistas where I come from.
We have been half persuaded by Thoreau and by the evidence of our own brutal use of the land that the earth is beautiful except where man lives, or has passed through; and we have therefore set aside preserves where nature, other than man, might survive, and which men may visit in reasonable numbers and with adequate supervision, for their education and edification. This is an imaginative and admirable idea, and would perhaps be nobler still if we locked the gates to these preserves and denied ourselves entrance, so that we could imagine better what transpires there. We could then turn our attention to the rest of the earth, the part in which we live, which is not yet devoid of life and beauty, and which we might still rescue as a place worth celebrating.
Stumbled across this gem by Brecht back in the day, and just rediscovered it cleaning up the apartment.
...
So I’m still catching up from the Oxford American issues I received during the school year, and ran across some gems in Warwick Sabin’s notes on some of the songs on the CDs included with the music issue.
Particularly, on the South’s relationship to time:
“Faulkner famously said, ‘The past is not dead. In fact it’s not even past.’ When time moves slowly, you can see more of it at once. The past sits down to visit with the present. Time lingers more than it moves.”
And on moving to and from:
“If you’re not from the South, you don’t understand it and you don’t expect to like it…And even if you spend the rest of your life there, and defend it against all comers, you may always feel like an outsider.
“If you are from the South, you don’t expect any one else to like it, and your own complicated feelings may force you to escape it. But it is forever a part of you, and you can return at any time, confident about where you belong.”
(because great photographers have already done them and because the “symbolism” or “meaning” is now trite. Only the most sensitive photographers can still succeed with these subjects):
1. Snake handlers
2. Cock fights
3. African-Americans being baptized in muddy rivers
4. African-Americans, who do manual labor (on cars or farms, etc.), in dirty work clothes
5. Quaint sings (of a religious or barbeque or truckstop variety, usually)
6. Elvis impersonators (esp. if they are children or foreign or midgets)
7. Abandoned jalopies from the 1940s, overgrown with weeds; abandoned cabins or houses in the state of crumbling
8. Old Southern fellers squattin’, spittin’, pickin’, or carvin’ on the town square
9. The Confederate flag juxtaposed with something modern
10. Contemporary members of the KKK, usually obese, in robes, hooded or not hooded
11. Graveyards, esp. weeded-over graveyards
12. Contemporary black prisoners wearing prison stripes and working in a cotton field
13. Old Southerners on porches
14. Poor people washing their clothes or looking unhappy or poor or like they just stepped out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
—excerpted from “Soft and Tender Creatures” by J.B. Slogan, in the Fall 2005 Oxford American
