No really good writer could be merely Southern. A fiction writer isn’t provincial, ever. He should be sending back news from the front, news somebody else might not know about and it should be interesting and entertaining.

In an interview with SLR, another talented writer, Cynthia Shearer, described Hannah’s role in her evolution as a writer:

For a lot of years I feared my writing and the reactions it produced in people.  So I’m one of those people who tried to outrun it for a while and then realized in my thirties I’d be a saner person if I just submitted to it. I took Barry Hannah’s fiction course at the end of grad school to try to recover the old wonder at the power of words, and he pretty much started treating me like a writer, talking to me like I was writer, and prodded me to keep going.

Check out our previous profile of Barry Hannah.  Starting today is Oxford’s Conference on the Book, which this year is dedicated to Barry Hannah.

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Well butter my buns and call me a biscuit because the folks at the Oxford American have done it again! Each year this literary quarterly, proudly published by the University of Central Arkansas, releases a Southern music issue. This year the editors have introduced a new theme—The Southern State Series—because, according to founding editor Marc Smirnoff (no relation to the vodka distillery so far as I know), “We now expect, if not demand, surprises.” Fittingly for a publication out of Conway, Arkansas, the first of these pleasant surprises pays homage to Arkansas natives.
The issue offers not only the printed prose of several talented writers but also a double-disc demo of foot-tappin’-fanny-shakin’-honky-tonkin’ soul and sound. Bursting with improbable yet impeccable rhythms, refreshingly low-brow lyrics, twang, strings, and ol’-timey things, the CDs feature artists like Sonny Burgess, Billy Lee Riley, Larry Donn, Little Beaver, Maxine Brown, Sleepy LaBeef, and other notables among not-so-notables. One CD spotlights local artists (Arkansas Masters); the other, an eclectic, hand-picked mix of musicians from various Southern regions (Southern Masters).
Some of the selections will make you unbutton your shirt, loosen your belt, and flail your body from side to side. Some, though, will tug at your heartstrings. (I cried twice while listening to Southern Masters, but I’m a bit of a sap.) No one genre dominates this mélange of gospel, rock, bluegrass, and blues. Whether wailing about home-sweet-home, prison melancholy, lonesome highways, lost love or love made, these artists are sure to connect.
Most Americans were shocked when the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack rocketed atop bestseller lists and won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2001. Those of us raised on rockabilly, country and western, and family folk and gospel were shocked at the shock. “It’s about time,” we said, “please give us more.”
And, bless their hearts, that’s just what the Oxford American’s editors did. This year’s Southern music issue is the 11th of its kind. Many more, I hope, will follow.
Please do me a favor, y’all, and listen, as I did, to Smirnoff’s suggestion: “If all you passionate listeners out there in audience-land delight in anything you hear on the CDs, please tell your friends about your discovery. Or please track down more music by the artist who catches your ear. Or root around in the artist’s genre, if it’s new to you. This is the way we keep art alive and moving.” Do this, friends, and I assure you, art won’t be the only thing alive and moving.

Take a look:  http://www.loyno.edu/~bewell/SSSL2010/ssslinfo.html

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A Southern Town Echoes Cradle to Grave

And, mirrors civilization from cradle to grave as well. These stories from the South seep storied tales from the past. Vultures and buzzards abound, their leavings foreshadow early that nasty stuff is to come, as nasty as some of the hidden behaviors of the founding fathers. Snakes weave about and follow, mocking religious hypocrisy. The constellations and the muses reflect and scare by telling truth instead of some whitewashed legend.

History reflects off Deadman Mountain, shaped by flowing, constantly moving waters, yet unmoved by man until the government gets involved. All is tied to the historical founders, the Falklands. (How transparent is that?

KKK, slavery, religion, the Jeffersons and Hemmings, it’s all here. There is the journal, and the daughter who speaks of it and notes the entries are sparse when evil was afoot. Yet, Carson Falkland sings, beautifully sings on. The Gypsy finds love with the Jew. The blackest of blacks (named Tom in case the sophomores miss it again) appears when salvation is required. The danged ghosts persist. The most evil ones are silent in the silent grave of a bat and moss covered cave, leaving no visible memories.

Upstanding “leaders” hatch a plan to improve the area by destroying Concord. Poisoning the early planners doesn’t work. Like the hallowed founding fathers, the pesky critters keep coming back.

Should you ever wonder if a short story writer can create a successful novel using individual stories, here it is – a woven novel. The commonality of location runs from and through the stories. You know you are in the same place. The plot is the ground where the story lies. That plot, soon, like the black walnut that spans the decades, is sentenced to be sunken under a dam, or is it damnation?

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Yazoo Blues continues the adventures of Junior Ray Loveblood, the racist, trash-talking yarn spinning character from John Pritchard’s first book Junior Ray. Junior Ray is now a semi-retired self-described lawman, now part-time casino guard that boasts “I come from the roughest they is.” As story tellers go, he is part historian, part author of literature as well as a born philosopher as only a small town in the back woods can produce. In many respects he is Jerry Clower meets George Carlin. Junior Ray has all the flavor of the yarn spinner of Jerry Clower with the potty mouth, irreverence and politically incorrectness of George Carlin.

Yazoo Blues continues Junior Ray’s fasciation with history, as he sees himself as becoming part of history in the making. Leaving WWII behind, Junior Ray delves into the Civil War and especially the failed attempt on the part of the Union Soldiers to invade Vicksburg by ship coming through the Yazoo Pass. As the tale was described, “of course the expedition failed as the Delta is too tangled for canoes much less 200 foot ironclads and troop ships”.

When not discussing the Yazoo Pass and history, Junior Ray gives the philosophers attempt as he tells of his friend, Mad Owens, a poet in the making, love sick to the point of insanity over a stripper from Memphis that goes by the name Money Scatters. Of course Junior Ray has his own twist on what love is all about, complete with descriptive lap-dances given to him by his best friend’s grand-daughter, Petunia.

With recipes of Delta cooking and poems for all occasion mixed within each chapter’s philosophical review of the friends and town folk that make up Yazoo, Mississippi. Junior Ray has his own way of discussing the world around him. He describes what so many small, out of the way towns of the South that have their own little Peyton Place. Yazoo Blues keeps the formula of the first book, full of small town, back woods stories full of profanity and humor. Along with uneducated ramblings that find the truth woven in the yarns of the story teller that brings the reader along the way, with laugh out loud success. Junior Ray with his own unique and descriptive prowess keeps the reader turning the page.

See SLR’s review of Junior Ray.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel about people. A fact that can get lost when categorized as African-American fiction, or women’s fiction, and hailed as a great book by a black woman before the Civil Rights Movement took hold. Unlike Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Hurston didn’t write about black people as they compared to whites—she simply wrote about folks from Eaton Florida and they were black. The kind of people Hurston knew in a land she must have known as well as she she knew her own skin. How else might a writer write about a hurricane and all that led up to it and all that came to bear after it without knowing the land so well. The dialect is written as though it’s poetry.  The language has a rare musical quality and the pacing is perfect. Hurston was not known as a poet, but in this novel, passages could be pulled from it, given a new title and called poetry…beautiful memorable poetry. For instance, “It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”

The novel centers around the life of a beautiful woman named Janie Crawford with long flowing hair and a mind of her own. While young and at the insistence of her grandmother, she marries an older man she hardly knows and barely likes. He expects her to work harder than she wants to work. He expects her to work beyond the kitchen and do things that seem beneath her. She does not do what he tells. Even more, when she meets a sweet-smelling young man named Jody Starks she sees the promise of a life far more satisfying and so she runs off with him without ever looking back.

The two marry (there is nothing said about a second marriage without a divorce) and they move to Eatonville, a town that was created and planned as an African-American community. Starks is smart enough to buy land, build a store and a house worthy of his beautiful bride Janie. He quickly becomes the town’s mayor and Janie spends most of her time in their big house or at the store where Starks insist she keep her long hair Her hair represents life. As it is covered, so is the happiness in life that Janie is always yearning to have. By the end of their twenty years of marriage, Starks was so bitter toward Janey that he barely spoke to her from his deathbed.

After his death she finds true and lasting love with a much younger man named Tea Cakes. Tea Cakes can only be described as Janie’s soul mate and after two bad marriages her appreciation for this love is immense. He is a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort of man who plays guitar, dances, gambles, and sings. Janie is always expecting him to leave her, but it seems as though such a notion never crosses hims mind. He does disappoint her, he even hits her once, and he isn’t reliable for the little things, but for better or worse he seems to genuinely love her.

As I mentioned in the opening of this review, the Hurricane scene, which is near the end, is a spectacular and emotional event. The descriptions, the turmoil, the raw human nature against the earth’s elements—these chapters alone make for a powerful short story. As a whole, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of strength and personal growth for a woman and a community of people that had little to no voice before Hurston. Now, with this novel, people, a time, and a culture has a solid place in American history and American literature.

See SLR’s profile of Zora Neale Hurston.

]]> http://southernlitreview.com/reviews/theireyes.htm/feed 0 http://southernlitreview.com/reviews/faulkner-studies-in-japan-edited-by-thomas-l-mchaney-compiled-by-kenzaburo-ohashi-and-kiyoyuki-ono.htm http://southernlitreview.com/reviews/faulkner-studies-in-japan-edited-by-thomas-l-mchaney-compiled-by-kenzaburo-ohashi-and-kiyoyuki-ono.htm#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:26:10 +0000 Allen Mendenhall http://southernlitreview.com/?p=824 It was with great interest—and, perhaps, skepticism, for I myself taught English in Japan—that I read Faulkner Studies in Japan, an assemblage of critical essays written and translated by Japanese academics and edited by American Thomas L. McHaney, professor of literature at Georgia State University.  Whisking eagerly through the pages of this significant, insightful book, I learned, to my surprise, that Faulkner’s reputation in Japan has been, for six decades, mostly favorable, despite that his “works are difficult to read, even in his own country” (xiii).

Though my brief stint as sensei didn’t lend itself to instruction in unconventional, stream-of-consciousness fiction—just getting my pre-teen students to pronounce “Yoknapatawpha” would’ve been inconceivable—other sensei have taught Faulkner with relative, if not outright, success. 

According to McHaney, the Japanese have enjoyed a longstanding admiration for the short, mustachioed Mississippian, who once affectionately remarked, “The Japanese people really and actually wanted to see and to know me—the man, the human being” (xiv).  Under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, Faulkner visited Japan in 1955, roughly ten years after the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and fourteen years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Faulkner’s sojourn, particularly his appearance at a summer seminar in Nagano, resulted in probably the most fruitful give-and-take he ever allowed as public speaker.  “By virtue of their interest and their sincere questions,” McHaney explains, “Faulkner’s Japanese audiences also seemed to have received a higher percentage of clear and meaningful answers from him than almost anyone who ever asked him to explain himself” (xii).

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McHaney divides the book into three sections:  General Studies, Studies of Individual Works, and Faulkner and the Japanese Writer.  Topics addressed in General Studies include, among others, Faulkner’s style, his echoes of T.S. Eliot, his repetition or self-parody (he enriched and diversified fictional worlds he created in previous works), and his resemblance to—and difference from—Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and John Barth.  Only three novels—As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses—receive individualized treatment in the second section, though one could register little complaint about their exegeses.  The final section, peppered with “several reflections by distinguished Japanese novelists,” reveals, in McHaney’s words, “not only a profound response to Faulkner’s mysteries but also the deliberate intellectual appropriation of his techniques as both a Modernist and post-Modernist writer” (xvii).

Readers interested in either Faulkner or Japan, to say nothing of American literature enthusiasts generally, will find much here that’s appealing and constructive, but might, I suspect, find the editor’s selectivity wanting.  The nearly random assortment of topics gives the impression that inclusion in the work depended on Japanese nationality and not, say, thematic coherence.  Nevertheless, Faulkner Studies in Japan will sustain many re-readings and is essential for any Faulkner aficionado.

See SLR’s profile on William Faulkner.

For additional books by and about William Faulkner, please visit Amazon.com.