Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. - Flannery O'Connor
Today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers, Flannery O'Conner. She was an only child, and when she was just five years old she taught a pet chicken to walk backwards. Gotta love a dame like that. She earned a degree in Social Sciences then got accepted into the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she became friends with the poet Robert Fitzgerald and his wife Sally. In 1951 she was diagnosed with Lupus and given just five years to live. She returned to her home in Andalusia Georgia, raised peafowl and wrote, often including peacock's in her essays and stories. She never married and died at the age of 39. Her career as a writer produced 2 novels and 32 short stories, the most famous of which was "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" - a blow your socks off kind of story. The first time I read it I was delightfully stunned by its subtle brutality and for the first time truly understood the term "southern Gothic." If you've ever lived in the South, as I have, and a place where my paternal ancestors date back to the early 1800's, then you know a thing or two about the type of southern men in O'Conner's work, their volatility just there under the surface. Such was the subject of James Dickey's Deliverance as well. Southern men have always been noted for their "action over words" approach to many of life's most difficult problems. Moonshine and poverty didn't help any either. The lyrics of Country Music - at least the way it was before it became Country Rock Music - often reflected the life of Southern men, and women, with its poetry of hard times, drinking, cheating spouses, broken hearts and broken dreams. This is not to paint Southern men with the broad brush of brutality and violence to the exclusion of men everywhere given similar circumstances, but to simply say that Southern men are different from other men in my estimation. I think Flannery knew this and was able to write about it with the same stealth and explosive surprise as some ol' boy sitting on his barstool trying to get his mind right while some fool is yammering in his ear about his brand new Cadillac. You just know it's going to lead to a fistfight that will be quick and brutal. And that's why I read Flannery O'Conner and Cormac McCarthy as well. They understand this thing about the southern male. McCarthy writes of such men his "Appalachian" novels, Child of God and Outer Dark. I think to fully understand and appreciate the true southern character you have to live in the South and get to know the people here, the place's past and its present. And, you have to be of these same bloodstock to write accurately about what drives these men to do what they do as is always imperative in fiction, if not always in life.
So I say: "Bartender, I'll have another and put a quarter in the jukebox because I got some things I need to think about before the sun comes up tomorrow."
Some Stuff that happened in this day in History.
A patent was given for the thimble (1684)
The French outlaw Nicolas Jacques Pelletier became the first criminal to die by guillotine in 1792 (later Ron Popeil another Frenchman would take this idea and invent the "Veg-O-Matic" which would make him very rich.)
Journalist Edward R. Murrow was born in Polecat, N.C. which, as a child, every night when he'd ask his daddy if they were going to survive the hard times he was given the same answer: "Goodnight and good luck" - which became his signature at sign-off time on his television show.
There was other stuff too, but all boring. What can I say, as history goes, this wasn't one of its better days.
Time for a poem from my jewel box I keep under the bed:
It’s One of Those Days
One of those days
When everything’s working out
One of those sweet days
When there are no aches or
Pains, no sadness. One of
Those days when you find
You got a little extra money
In the bank you didn’t know
You had, when the weather
Is warm enough to drive
With the top down and you
Found a really good book to
Read and an old friend you
Haven’t heard from in a long
Time calls you to see how you
Are and lets you know they’ve
Been thinking of you – like
That, out of the blue. One of
Those days when you catch
All the green lights and everybody
Smiles and nobody gets killed in the
War you hate so much. One of
Those days when the words come
Out in a rush and they’re all good,
Better than you could have hoped for.
It’s one of those perfect perfect
Days and you wonder how many
More you’re going to have and the,
Reality is, not that many.
...do well, be well and be glad someone loves you.
http://www.authorbillbrooks.com/
