Today is the observance of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States (although his actual birth date was last Friday, January 15th), tomorrow is the birthday of General Robert E. Lee, and so it goes from day to day, observance to observance, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Before you know it, it will be National Pickle Day. It's not until November, but, hey, time flies when you're having fun.
Although the sun is shining brightly, today (Monday, January 18, 2016) is the coldest day of the 2015-2016 winter so far hereabouts. Tomorrow morning's low temperature is expected to be even colder; the weatherman is predicting 18 degrees Fahrenheit ( -7.77777778 degrees Celsius) . We've seen no snow yet this winter, but a "light dusting" of the stuff was reported yesterday in the mountains around Blairsville, near the border with North Carolina.
Mrs. RWP completed a page of ladybugs from her coloring book over the weekend and now is working on a page featuring a peacock.
Speaking of peacocks, Georgia's own Flannery O'Connor once wrote an essay many people know as "The King Of The Birds" but which was published originally in the September 1961 issue of Holiday magazine as "Living With A Peacock" -- you can read it in its entirety right here.
Or you could skip over it altogether, but I recommend that you do not.
Afterward, if you become as much of a fan of Flannery O'Connor's writings as I did, and if you are very brave, you may want to settle down for a long winter's nap with some of her short stories such as "The Enduring Chill" or "The Displaced Person" or "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" or "Good Country People" or "Everything That Rises Must Converge" or "Revelation" but you may not have pleasant dreams.
Showing posts with label Flannery O'Connor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flannery O'Connor. Show all posts
Monday, January 18, 2016
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Bits and snippets from the one and only...
...Flannery O’Connor:
“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles 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.”
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
“You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive...Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”
“When the Protestant hears what he supposes to be the voice of the Lord, he follows it regardless of whether it runs counter to his church’s teachings. The Catholic believes any voice he may hear comes from the Devil unless it is in accordance with the teachings of the Church.”
“To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join a convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down on your head.”
“St. Cyril of Jerusalem said to the catechumens, ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”
“One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him. The Aylmers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of the good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
“You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.”
All of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, none of which is quoted above, can be found in her two volumes of short stories (A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, plus The Complete Stories, a combination of the first two plus several stories she wrote and submitted in lieu of a master’s thesis while attending the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and her two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away).
All of the bits and snippets quoted in this post are taken from two other sources, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor and The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor (Sally Fitzgerald, editor), which, if your local library does not carry, shame on them.
Flannery O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39. Had she lived, she would have turned 84 last month.
(1962 Photo By Associated Press)Friday, May 9, 2008
Flannery O'Connor writes of peacocks
That Flannery O'Connor was clearly interested in, preoccupied with, and loved peafowl has not escaped the literary critics. Indeed, these mysterious and magnificent creatures (the peafowl, not the critics) have become to some a metaphor for the author herself and for her work. This is seen in such titles as The Voice of the Peacock (Kathleen Feeley, 1972) and The Invisible Parade (Miles Orvell, 1973).
Here are four short excerpts from her story, The Displaced Person, that mention her favorite creatures:
The peacock stopped just behind her, his tail--glittering green-gold and blue in the sunlight--lifted just enough so that it would not touch the ground. It flowed out on either side like a floating train and his head on the long blue reed-like neck was drawn back as if his attention were fixed in the distance on something no one else could see....
"What a beauti-ful birrrrd!" the priest murmured.
"Another mouth to feed," Mrs. McIntyre said, glancing in the peafowl's direction.
"And when does he raise his splendid tail?" asked the priest.
"Just when it suits him," she said. "There used to be twenty or thirty of those things on the place but I've let them die off. I don't like to hear them scream in the middle of the night."
"So beauti-ful," the priest said. "A tail full of suns," and he crept forward on tiptoe and looked down on the bird's back where the polished gold and green design began. The peacock stood still as if he had just come down from some sun-drenched height to be a vision for them all....
“Where is that beautiful birrrrd of yours?” [the priest] asked and then said, “Arrrr, I see him?” and stood up and looked out over the lawn where the peacock and the two hens were stepping at a strained attention, their long necks ruffled, the cock's violent blue and the hens' silver-green, glinting in the late afternoon sun....
The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping....
and here are three more from her essay, The King of the Birds:
“...seven or eight screams in succession as if this message were the one on earth which needed most urgently to be heard.”
“To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.”
“When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns.”
Perhaps you will see my French blogger friend's photo in a new light:
Friday, April 25, 2008
I never tire of Flannery O'Connor
For the past week, over at Scot McKnight's blog, a small discussion has been going on in several threads (“On Reading Fiction 1,” “On Reading Fiction 2,” etc., through “On Reading Fiction 5”) using Flannery O'Connor's short story, “Revelation,” as a jumping-off point. I have joined in, and here are some more of my comments. (If it is confusing to read just my comments, go over there to read the entire conversation.)
#1: [name], what will be left when the wood, hay, stubble, and “all the rest” (to use your words) have been burned away will be the gold, the silver, and the precious stones. And just as it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, it will also surely be a fearful thing to be saved, yet so as by fire.
I know this doesn’t sound at all postmodern, but it’s what “the Scripture saith.”
[name], I didn’t read O’Connor in the 60’s, I read her in the 70’s, but it was pretty shocking stuff even then. Reading Wise Blood prompted no less a personage than Evelyn Waugh to say of it, “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” In “Revelation,” what don’t you find shocking about, “Mrs. Turpin knew just exactly how much Negro flattery was worth and it added to her rage”? What don’t you find shocking about, “You could never say anything intelligent to a nigger. You could talk at them but not with them”? Read all of her stories; eventually you will be shocked.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If reading Flannery O’Connor doesn’t shock you, you aren’t paying close enough attention.
#3: [name], I can’t wait for you to read “The Lame Shall Enter First”! And are you saying you haven’t read “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”? Tsk, Tsk (jk)!!! Flannery’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, has a very high “shock quotient,” in my opinion. Try all of her work, a little at a time. Eventually, mark my words, you’ll be shocked. (I must have a very low shock threshold: I was shocked from the get-go, after reading “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in 1975.) It’s also very instructive to read Mystery and Manners, her non-fiction volume, to find where she’s coming from.
Flannery O’Connor said, “While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it most certainly is Christ-haunted.” Then there’s William Faulkner’s famous statement, “The past is never dead; in many places it’s not even past.” I don’t think the times are all that different, in the South or anywhere else. The landscape may have changed, but people’s hearts haven’t.
#4: [name], I have never thought about “the level of thoughtfulness and complexity within Mrs. Turpin” before or that O’Connor uses it to “jab at” the reader’s assurance of superiority to Mrs. Turpin.
Flannery was definitely attempting to wake up readers of her fiction from their complacent sleep, to get a specific message across through her characters. Even the trees and the sun are characters in her stories in the sense that Flannery used them to shock the reader into looking at things another way.
I think perhaps you are also right in thinking that we readers are being “tweaked” and challenged about our assumptions that transformations are total, all-at-once experiences. Given that Flannery O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic and not a Four Spiritual Laws evangelical, that is certainly a very real possibility. I generally read “out of” her work, though, and not “into” it.
I never tire of uncovering layers and layers of meaning and motive in the works of Flannery O’Connor.
[End of comments]
But assuming that even readers of my blog will eventually grow weary of my fascination with all things Flannery O'Connor, this ends my series of posts about her.
#1: [name], what will be left when the wood, hay, stubble, and “all the rest” (to use your words) have been burned away will be the gold, the silver, and the precious stones. And just as it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, it will also surely be a fearful thing to be saved, yet so as by fire.
I know this doesn’t sound at all postmodern, but it’s what “the Scripture saith.”
[name], I didn’t read O’Connor in the 60’s, I read her in the 70’s, but it was pretty shocking stuff even then. Reading Wise Blood prompted no less a personage than Evelyn Waugh to say of it, “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” In “Revelation,” what don’t you find shocking about, “Mrs. Turpin knew just exactly how much Negro flattery was worth and it added to her rage”? What don’t you find shocking about, “You could never say anything intelligent to a nigger. You could talk at them but not with them”? Read all of her stories; eventually you will be shocked.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If reading Flannery O’Connor doesn’t shock you, you aren’t paying close enough attention.
#3: [name], I can’t wait for you to read “The Lame Shall Enter First”! And are you saying you haven’t read “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”? Tsk, Tsk (jk)!!! Flannery’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, has a very high “shock quotient,” in my opinion. Try all of her work, a little at a time. Eventually, mark my words, you’ll be shocked. (I must have a very low shock threshold: I was shocked from the get-go, after reading “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in 1975.) It’s also very instructive to read Mystery and Manners, her non-fiction volume, to find where she’s coming from.
Flannery O’Connor said, “While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it most certainly is Christ-haunted.” Then there’s William Faulkner’s famous statement, “The past is never dead; in many places it’s not even past.” I don’t think the times are all that different, in the South or anywhere else. The landscape may have changed, but people’s hearts haven’t.
#4: [name], I have never thought about “the level of thoughtfulness and complexity within Mrs. Turpin” before or that O’Connor uses it to “jab at” the reader’s assurance of superiority to Mrs. Turpin.
Flannery was definitely attempting to wake up readers of her fiction from their complacent sleep, to get a specific message across through her characters. Even the trees and the sun are characters in her stories in the sense that Flannery used them to shock the reader into looking at things another way.
I think perhaps you are also right in thinking that we readers are being “tweaked” and challenged about our assumptions that transformations are total, all-at-once experiences. Given that Flannery O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic and not a Four Spiritual Laws evangelical, that is certainly a very real possibility. I generally read “out of” her work, though, and not “into” it.
I never tire of uncovering layers and layers of meaning and motive in the works of Flannery O’Connor.
[End of comments]
But assuming that even readers of my blog will eventually grow weary of my fascination with all things Flannery O'Connor, this ends my series of posts about her.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
More on Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation"
More of my comments from Scot McKnight's blog about reading Flannery O'Connor's short story, “Revelation”:#1: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as unnatural to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” (Flannery O'Connor's reply when people said her fiction was grotesque)
Flannery made it clear what these unnatural, repugnant distortions actually are. When she submitted the final versions of some of her stories for publication, she wrote to her editor, “Enclosed are nine stories about original sin, with my compliments.” And of the so-called “deadly sins,” the story “Revelation” deals mostly with pride, or, rather, the stripping away of pride, and the manner in which it is stripped away. God has to shout to get Ruby Turpin's attention, just as Flannery O’Connor has to shout to her hard-of-hearing readers. First there is the accusation of Mary Grace in the doctor's office (“Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart-hog”) and then there is the echo of Ruby’s own voice while she is hosing down the hogs in her pig-sty (shades of the parable of The Prodigal Son!) and telling God off with, “Who do you think you are?” In the silence that follows the echo, it becomes increasingly clear to her just who she is, just as it becomes increasingly clear to readers of Flannery’s stories who they are as well.
Over at the Comforts of Home website, Steven Sparrow has posted a very good essay on “Revelation” called “And The Smug Shall Come Last.” Being Roman Catholic like Flannery, Steven’s take is a bit different from that of Protestants, who dismiss Purgatory altogether, but it is worth reading. Like the stars in the sky over Taulkinham in Flannery's novel, Wise Blood, it adds depth on depth to the story.
#3: After Ruby Turpin’s angry question to God (Who do you think you are?) came only an echo, then silence, which effectively turned the question back to her. And only then came the vision. Ruby saw a great heavenly procession "extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire,” with people like herself and Claud not leading the procession but bringing up the rear, behind all the people to whom she thought herself superior. Suddenly she “knew her place.” And even though her kind marched with dignity and they alone sang on key, “Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” This probably suggests different things to different readers. Scot thought, until he read the story a second time, that the procession led both upward and downward and that these fires were the fires of Hell. Roman Catholic readers (and Flannery O’Connor was Roman Catholic) might assume the procession was entering Purgatory for the purification of their souls. I thought instead of Heaven, and the verse, “Our God is a consuming fire.”
After the vision faded, Mrs. Turpin remained immobile for a long time. Her pride, I think, was replaced by genuine humility, and her anger was replaced by genuine gratitude. When she moved again she was truly a changed woman, hearing in the cricket choruses of early evening “the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujahs.”
Reading Flannery O’Connor is like coming out of great darkness into marvelous light. One never looks at things quite the same ever again. At least, that has been my experience. Some people have entirely different reactions. My wife, for example, says only, “That woman is weird.”
If any of my posts about Flannery O'Connor's writing cause you to read any of her work, my work here is finished.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
More on Flannery O'Connor
When it comes to the use of “shock and awe,” Flannery O'Connor was decades ahead of the Bush-Cheney crowd. This is my all-time favorite quote from Flannery O’Connor (not from her work, but about it):
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs that you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”
And here's my second favorite quote from Flannery O'Connor:
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
(Note to commenter Anonymous (Bob): if you're reading this, I've responded to your comments at my earlier Flannery O'Connor post. We can continue either here or there, or both.)
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs that you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”
And here's my second favorite quote from Flannery O'Connor:
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
(Note to commenter Anonymous (Bob): if you're reading this, I've responded to your comments at my earlier Flannery O'Connor post. We can continue either here or there, or both.)
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The incomparable Flannery O'Connor
My all-time favorite writer is Flannery O'Connor. If you've never read anything by her, time's a wastin'. Get thee to a library and check her out. At a Christian blog that I visit regularly, jesuscreed.org, I have been participating recently in a discussion about her. For purposes of my own blog, and since my words belong to me, I quote below my own comments only.
#6, #7 (combined): As one who has made Flannery's home state of Georgia his adopted home, I do not find her “too grotesque and bizarre” at all, as does [name withheld]. A Latin phrase comes to mind: de gustibus non est disputandum (there’s no disputing about taste), but let me just say that Northerners often find Flannery’s characters unbelievable and incomprehensible; Southerners (with the possible exception of Atlantans) recognize them as neighbors and friends that they see every day. Flannery’s ear is pitch-perfect and her eye is single to His glory.
I had never heard of her until a corporate transfer (I’ve Been Moved) brought me to Georgia in 1975. One day on my lunch hour I wandered into the West Paces Ferry branch of the Atlanta Public Library and, being a new resident, picked up a magazine called Brown’s Guide to Georgia to peruse. I was intrigued by an article in it by Betsy Fancher about Flannery O’Connor. Since I was now officially a Georgian, I decided to read something of hers. The only thing on the shelves that day was her posthumously published collection of short stories entitled Everything That Rises Must Converge. Later I read her first volume of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and only after that did I read her two novels, Wise Blood, which is about The Holy Church Of Christ Without Christ, among other things, and The Violent Bear It Away, which should give both paedobaptists and credobaptists pause. Her non-fiction essays (Mystery and Manners) and her collected letters (The Habit of Being), both edited by Sally Fitzgerald, are treasure troves. Let’s just say I love reading stuff by and about Flannery O’Connor.
There are some wonderful essays online (especially those by Stephen Sparrow of New Zealand) at a site called Comforts of Home: The Flannery O’Connor Repository (the internet address is http://mediaspecialist.org/index.html).
Once you “get her,” few other writers are as satisfying.
#10: [name], she may or may not be poking fun at her characters but she finds them redeemable. There’s a customer review of her Collected Works over at Amazon, by a guy named Pliplup, that says it very well:
“Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound that saved this wretched human race. O’Connor writes of God’s love and redemption of humanity. She uses exaggeration to make her point. Her characters are so very silly, obtuse, bigoted, loathsome they become cartoons, yet there is a deep integrity to their shallowness. She’s not making fun of them, but giving them the justice of a pitiless description. Indeed they do not seem judged, but naked — the fruits of their stupid, misguided ideas and actions on display. And these children of God do shocking things to others and themselves. And yet….
And yet God allows them to live and learn, or not learn if that is their inclination. He gives them this freedom. He loves them. How can this be? How?
I love O’Connor for her art, her convictions, her courage, and her love. She is so very true and honest.”
I sincerely hope and pray that I haven’t violated a copyright.
#16: [name], what??!!?? Can anything good be found in a story? I don’t know, can anything good be found in your story? In my story? It’s rather like saying, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’-–isn’t it?
God is Creator, and we, His Eikons, are sub-creators since we are made in His image (see C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien).
Forgive the prose-only readers, Father, they know not what they do.
#17: [name], the humor in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is not as broad as Barry, Keillor, or Grizzard, but it’s far more cutting. For example, the girl who tells Ruby Turpin she’s a wart-hog from Hell is named Mary Grace (she is not the grace itself but perhaps a doorway leading to grace?); the cynical PhD. whose wooden leg is stolen in a hayloft by a Bible salesman she hopes to seduce is named Joy Hopewell (although she calls herself Hulga); and the Bible salesman who does the actual seducing, who has been believing in nothing ever since he was born, is named Manley Pointer. You don’t get any funnier than that.
#33: The first story of Flannery’s that I read was “Everything That Rises Must Converge” from the collection of the same name. Each story in that book jolted me in some way. “Greenleaf,” “A View of the Woods,” “The Enduring Chill,” and on and on. “Parker’s Back,” oh, my word. “Revelation.” “Judgement Day.” “The Comforts of Home.” “The Lame Shall Enter First.” And “Revelation.” This woman’s stories have changed me forever. Everybody needs a kick in the pants occasionally, or a whop upside the head, but over and over and over? (I guess the answer is “yes.”)
I have never advocated “the reading of fiction” in general because you really have to pick and choose. For example, much of the stuff on supermarket shelves is trash. Popular trash, maybe, but trash nonetheless. On the other hand, I have never hesitated to recommend anything Flannery O’Connor ever wrote.
If you don’t “get it,” just keep on reading. Eventually you will.
Her work transcends time and geographical place. Her characters may speak like backwoods Southerners, but that’s only to set the scene. People like them live everywhere. They’re all around you, and Jesus loves them. [End of comments]
I hope you're not too confused. A good read is hard to find.
---------------------------------
[Update: An anonymous commenter and I continued the conversation in several comments to this post. If you're not yet bored with Flannery O'Connor, have a look.]
#6, #7 (combined): As one who has made Flannery's home state of Georgia his adopted home, I do not find her “too grotesque and bizarre” at all, as does [name withheld]. A Latin phrase comes to mind: de gustibus non est disputandum (there’s no disputing about taste), but let me just say that Northerners often find Flannery’s characters unbelievable and incomprehensible; Southerners (with the possible exception of Atlantans) recognize them as neighbors and friends that they see every day. Flannery’s ear is pitch-perfect and her eye is single to His glory.
I had never heard of her until a corporate transfer (I’ve Been Moved) brought me to Georgia in 1975. One day on my lunch hour I wandered into the West Paces Ferry branch of the Atlanta Public Library and, being a new resident, picked up a magazine called Brown’s Guide to Georgia to peruse. I was intrigued by an article in it by Betsy Fancher about Flannery O’Connor. Since I was now officially a Georgian, I decided to read something of hers. The only thing on the shelves that day was her posthumously published collection of short stories entitled Everything That Rises Must Converge. Later I read her first volume of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and only after that did I read her two novels, Wise Blood, which is about The Holy Church Of Christ Without Christ, among other things, and The Violent Bear It Away, which should give both paedobaptists and credobaptists pause. Her non-fiction essays (Mystery and Manners) and her collected letters (The Habit of Being), both edited by Sally Fitzgerald, are treasure troves. Let’s just say I love reading stuff by and about Flannery O’Connor.
There are some wonderful essays online (especially those by Stephen Sparrow of New Zealand) at a site called Comforts of Home: The Flannery O’Connor Repository (the internet address is http://mediaspecialist.org/index.html).
Once you “get her,” few other writers are as satisfying.
#10: [name], she may or may not be poking fun at her characters but she finds them redeemable. There’s a customer review of her Collected Works over at Amazon, by a guy named Pliplup, that says it very well:
“Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound that saved this wretched human race. O’Connor writes of God’s love and redemption of humanity. She uses exaggeration to make her point. Her characters are so very silly, obtuse, bigoted, loathsome they become cartoons, yet there is a deep integrity to their shallowness. She’s not making fun of them, but giving them the justice of a pitiless description. Indeed they do not seem judged, but naked — the fruits of their stupid, misguided ideas and actions on display. And these children of God do shocking things to others and themselves. And yet….
And yet God allows them to live and learn, or not learn if that is their inclination. He gives them this freedom. He loves them. How can this be? How?
I love O’Connor for her art, her convictions, her courage, and her love. She is so very true and honest.”
I sincerely hope and pray that I haven’t violated a copyright.
#16: [name], what??!!?? Can anything good be found in a story? I don’t know, can anything good be found in your story? In my story? It’s rather like saying, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’-–isn’t it?
God is Creator, and we, His Eikons, are sub-creators since we are made in His image (see C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien).
Forgive the prose-only readers, Father, they know not what they do.
#17: [name], the humor in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is not as broad as Barry, Keillor, or Grizzard, but it’s far more cutting. For example, the girl who tells Ruby Turpin she’s a wart-hog from Hell is named Mary Grace (she is not the grace itself but perhaps a doorway leading to grace?); the cynical PhD. whose wooden leg is stolen in a hayloft by a Bible salesman she hopes to seduce is named Joy Hopewell (although she calls herself Hulga); and the Bible salesman who does the actual seducing, who has been believing in nothing ever since he was born, is named Manley Pointer. You don’t get any funnier than that.
#33: The first story of Flannery’s that I read was “Everything That Rises Must Converge” from the collection of the same name. Each story in that book jolted me in some way. “Greenleaf,” “A View of the Woods,” “The Enduring Chill,” and on and on. “Parker’s Back,” oh, my word. “Revelation.” “Judgement Day.” “The Comforts of Home.” “The Lame Shall Enter First.” And “Revelation.” This woman’s stories have changed me forever. Everybody needs a kick in the pants occasionally, or a whop upside the head, but over and over and over? (I guess the answer is “yes.”)
I have never advocated “the reading of fiction” in general because you really have to pick and choose. For example, much of the stuff on supermarket shelves is trash. Popular trash, maybe, but trash nonetheless. On the other hand, I have never hesitated to recommend anything Flannery O’Connor ever wrote.
If you don’t “get it,” just keep on reading. Eventually you will.
Her work transcends time and geographical place. Her characters may speak like backwoods Southerners, but that’s only to set the scene. People like them live everywhere. They’re all around you, and Jesus loves them. [End of comments]
I hope you're not too confused. A good read is hard to find.
---------------------------------
[Update: An anonymous commenter and I continued the conversation in several comments to this post. If you're not yet bored with Flannery O'Connor, have a look.]
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Jeannelle of Iowa
This blog has a new reader, Jeannelle, and since she lives in Iowa, I have dubbed her Jeannelle of Iowa. That has a nice ring to it, don't you think? Sort of like Eleanor of Aquitaine, a woman who lived in the twelfth century and was the mother of Richard the Lion-hearted. She mentioned in a comment a few days ago (Jeannelle of Iowa, not Eleanor of Aquitaine) that she saw Field of Dreams listed in my profile as one of my favorite movies. She said she lives not far from where the movie was filmed, and she allowed as how she is not really a Kevin Kostner [sic] fan, but the movie was so moving near the end when Kevin Costner's departed father played ball with him, a classic tear-jerking scene for her.
In my previous post, "Why I Blog," I mentioned that I have written a book entitled Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind), and it can now be revealed that Chapter 27 of the book brings up that very scene. The narrator is Billy Ray Barnwell, who, I must warn you, not only writes in an unconventional manner (unlike myself) but also wanders all over the map (hence the subtitle).
So for Jeannelle of Iowa and any others of you lurking out there who might be reading my blog, get out your hankies. Here it is:
CHAPTER 27
Billy Ray Barnwell here, I would be the last person in the world to tell you how to run your finances, there are plenty of financial planners in the world willing to do just that for a fee if you are dumb enough to let them, but I do want to pass along the best piece of financial advice I ever heard or rather ever saw, we had stopped to eat at a Stuckey’s just off the interstate years ago on the way to somewhere, I forget where, we were prolly in south Georgia or deep in L.A. which in my part of the world means Lower Alabama and I was checking out the souvenirs on the way back from the restroom, you know the ones, the baseball caps with the Confederate flags that say “Forget, hell” and the sets of shot glasses with somebody else’s favorite college football team logo on them and the beach towels that say Harley-Davidson and the salt and pepper sets that look like little outhouses, stuff you cannot possibly live without, and suddenly I saw this plaque that you could buy to hang on your wall that said “If your outgo exceeds your income your upkeep will be your downfall,” the plaque said it I mean, not your wall, and I was dumbfounded, I had this epiphany just like O. E. Parker did when he was in the tattoo parlor in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back” and saw this Byzantine Christ tattoo whose eyes said to him GO BACK, boy I wish I could write like Flannery O’Connor, either her or Pat Conroy, his prose flows and hers shocks, I guess if I had to pick just one it would be Flannery, but unfortunately the only way I know how to write is like me, anyways I knew I had to have that plaque, I wanted to buy it so bad I could taste it but I also knew we couldn’t afford it even though it was only $9.95 because we had saved for months just to make that trip to wherever it was we were going and we needed every penny we had for food and for gasoline to get back home on, so I did the next best thing, I committed that saying to memory instead, who needs a plaque on the wall when it is emblazoned in your heart is what I say, so for years that saying has been my watchword, well more of a goal I would have to say, as there have been many times when my outgo did in fact exceed my income and I was very much afraid that my upkeep was indeed going to be my downfall but somehow we always managed to make it through to the next paycheck, thank you Jesus, it’s always darkest just before the dawn is what my stepmother used to say, not the thank you Jesus part, that was me, and she would still be saying it too only she passed away last November in Texas at the age of eighty-nine years, seven months, and twenty-eight days, not that anybody was counting, and she was right, about the darkness and the dawn I mean, because dawn always came and that black cloud would somehow have a silver lining and life would go on, except of course for her it didn’t as of last November, but you get what I’m saying. Speaking of going back, it’s funny how at the most unexpected times I get a flashback to a story I’ve read or a movie I’ve seen like that scene from Funny Girl I told you about, the movie Field of Dreams has that effect on me too because my Dad moved from LaCrosse Wisconsin to Cedar Rapids Iowa when he was in junior high school, he joined the Navy from Iowa, he and I were such different people, we never threw a baseball to each other on more than a couple of occasions, he was always working at the factory and I was always reading a book or practicing the piano, I was never very good at sports but I did love baseball and except for the minor detail that I couldn’t hit, couldn’t catch, couldn’t pitch, couldn’t throw, and couldn’t run, I could have played baseball, I always rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers whenever they ended up playing the New York Yankees in the World Series, so I was drawn to a movie like Field of Dreams, I become a blubbering idiot every time I see it, Udella Mabry’s cousin Darlene Abernathy says well why do you watch it then and I really have no answer except that something grabs me in the pit of my stomach every time Kevin Costner which is pronounced Kevin Costner finally has that encounter with his father, the person he could never communicate with, and his father, who has been dead for many years but looks as young as or maybe even younger than Kevin, thanks Kevin for building the baseball field and says “It’s like a dream come true” and then asks “Is this Heaven?” and Kevin looks around at the baseball diamond and the cornfield and says “It’s Iowa” and his father says “I could have sworn it was Heaven” and Kevin says “Is there a Heaven?” and his father says “Oh yeah,” and after a short pause in which you can tell Kevin is thinking “What’s it like?” his father says “It’s the place where dreams come true” and Kevin looks around at his house and his wife and his daughter and says “Maybe this is Heaven” and he and his father finally have that game of catch and up on the front porch of the house Kevin’s wife throws the switch and the baseball diamond is lit up in the growing darkness and the camera pans back and up and you see all these hundreds of cars with their headlights on making their way in the twilight to the baseball field all because Kevin heard the voice saying “If you build it he will come” and “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance” and went to see James Earl Jones as Terence Mann and then the both of them went to see Burt Lancaster as Archie “Moonlight” Graham who gave up his heavenly baseball career to save Kevin’s daughter from choking to death on a hot dog and by this point I have been reduced to a puddle on the floor thinking about what never was and what might have been and what part of the fault was mine, Virgil Abernathy says he can tell from all the time he spent in rehab that I am way too involved with that movie, I’ve never been in rehab but he is prolly right, some other movies I especially like include Dances With Wolves which also has Kevin Costner in it, some parts are almost like looking at a painting in a museum, parts of the movie I mean, not parts of Kevin Costner, oh and there’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Some Like It Hot and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Prince Of Tides and Out Of Africa and of course the incomparable Casablanca, and if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, the motion picture industry is in a great decline nowadays with the notable exception of the three Lord Of The Rings movies, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.
Maybe you didn't need your hankies after all.
In my previous post, "Why I Blog," I mentioned that I have written a book entitled Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind), and it can now be revealed that Chapter 27 of the book brings up that very scene. The narrator is Billy Ray Barnwell, who, I must warn you, not only writes in an unconventional manner (unlike myself) but also wanders all over the map (hence the subtitle).
So for Jeannelle of Iowa and any others of you lurking out there who might be reading my blog, get out your hankies. Here it is:
CHAPTER 27
Billy Ray Barnwell here, I would be the last person in the world to tell you how to run your finances, there are plenty of financial planners in the world willing to do just that for a fee if you are dumb enough to let them, but I do want to pass along the best piece of financial advice I ever heard or rather ever saw, we had stopped to eat at a Stuckey’s just off the interstate years ago on the way to somewhere, I forget where, we were prolly in south Georgia or deep in L.A. which in my part of the world means Lower Alabama and I was checking out the souvenirs on the way back from the restroom, you know the ones, the baseball caps with the Confederate flags that say “Forget, hell” and the sets of shot glasses with somebody else’s favorite college football team logo on them and the beach towels that say Harley-Davidson and the salt and pepper sets that look like little outhouses, stuff you cannot possibly live without, and suddenly I saw this plaque that you could buy to hang on your wall that said “If your outgo exceeds your income your upkeep will be your downfall,” the plaque said it I mean, not your wall, and I was dumbfounded, I had this epiphany just like O. E. Parker did when he was in the tattoo parlor in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back” and saw this Byzantine Christ tattoo whose eyes said to him GO BACK, boy I wish I could write like Flannery O’Connor, either her or Pat Conroy, his prose flows and hers shocks, I guess if I had to pick just one it would be Flannery, but unfortunately the only way I know how to write is like me, anyways I knew I had to have that plaque, I wanted to buy it so bad I could taste it but I also knew we couldn’t afford it even though it was only $9.95 because we had saved for months just to make that trip to wherever it was we were going and we needed every penny we had for food and for gasoline to get back home on, so I did the next best thing, I committed that saying to memory instead, who needs a plaque on the wall when it is emblazoned in your heart is what I say, so for years that saying has been my watchword, well more of a goal I would have to say, as there have been many times when my outgo did in fact exceed my income and I was very much afraid that my upkeep was indeed going to be my downfall but somehow we always managed to make it through to the next paycheck, thank you Jesus, it’s always darkest just before the dawn is what my stepmother used to say, not the thank you Jesus part, that was me, and she would still be saying it too only she passed away last November in Texas at the age of eighty-nine years, seven months, and twenty-eight days, not that anybody was counting, and she was right, about the darkness and the dawn I mean, because dawn always came and that black cloud would somehow have a silver lining and life would go on, except of course for her it didn’t as of last November, but you get what I’m saying. Speaking of going back, it’s funny how at the most unexpected times I get a flashback to a story I’ve read or a movie I’ve seen like that scene from Funny Girl I told you about, the movie Field of Dreams has that effect on me too because my Dad moved from LaCrosse Wisconsin to Cedar Rapids Iowa when he was in junior high school, he joined the Navy from Iowa, he and I were such different people, we never threw a baseball to each other on more than a couple of occasions, he was always working at the factory and I was always reading a book or practicing the piano, I was never very good at sports but I did love baseball and except for the minor detail that I couldn’t hit, couldn’t catch, couldn’t pitch, couldn’t throw, and couldn’t run, I could have played baseball, I always rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers whenever they ended up playing the New York Yankees in the World Series, so I was drawn to a movie like Field of Dreams, I become a blubbering idiot every time I see it, Udella Mabry’s cousin Darlene Abernathy says well why do you watch it then and I really have no answer except that something grabs me in the pit of my stomach every time Kevin Costner which is pronounced Kevin Costner finally has that encounter with his father, the person he could never communicate with, and his father, who has been dead for many years but looks as young as or maybe even younger than Kevin, thanks Kevin for building the baseball field and says “It’s like a dream come true” and then asks “Is this Heaven?” and Kevin looks around at the baseball diamond and the cornfield and says “It’s Iowa” and his father says “I could have sworn it was Heaven” and Kevin says “Is there a Heaven?” and his father says “Oh yeah,” and after a short pause in which you can tell Kevin is thinking “What’s it like?” his father says “It’s the place where dreams come true” and Kevin looks around at his house and his wife and his daughter and says “Maybe this is Heaven” and he and his father finally have that game of catch and up on the front porch of the house Kevin’s wife throws the switch and the baseball diamond is lit up in the growing darkness and the camera pans back and up and you see all these hundreds of cars with their headlights on making their way in the twilight to the baseball field all because Kevin heard the voice saying “If you build it he will come” and “Ease his pain” and “Go the distance” and went to see James Earl Jones as Terence Mann and then the both of them went to see Burt Lancaster as Archie “Moonlight” Graham who gave up his heavenly baseball career to save Kevin’s daughter from choking to death on a hot dog and by this point I have been reduced to a puddle on the floor thinking about what never was and what might have been and what part of the fault was mine, Virgil Abernathy says he can tell from all the time he spent in rehab that I am way too involved with that movie, I’ve never been in rehab but he is prolly right, some other movies I especially like include Dances With Wolves which also has Kevin Costner in it, some parts are almost like looking at a painting in a museum, parts of the movie I mean, not parts of Kevin Costner, oh and there’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Some Like It Hot and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Prince Of Tides and Out Of Africa and of course the incomparable Casablanca, and if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, the motion picture industry is in a great decline nowadays with the notable exception of the three Lord Of The Rings movies, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.
Maybe you didn't need your hankies after all.
Why I Blog
The Writers Guild of America strike, now in its eleventh week, has produced an interesting byproduct (I mean besides the cancellation of the Golden Globes Awards telecast). A new blog called "Why We Write" started 23 days ago, and each day another member of the Guild writes a short essay explaining his or her raison d'être. It has contained informative and entertaining stuff, although I personally could do without the increasingly obligatory four-letter words. On one of my bookshelves is a book entitled, "Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction" that I bought in 1998; it includes essays by Norman Mailer and Pat Conroy and Terry McMillan and Richard Ford, twenty-six people in all. Now that my blog is almost four months old (glory be! who woulda thunk?), the time has come for me to think out loud about why I decided to start blogging.
In December of 1972, when I was thirty-one years old, I wrote my first poem. I know the date because the poem's title is "December, 1972." Clever, huh? I put it in a folder and put the folder in a desk drawer. Over the years since then, I have added another poem occasionally to the folder. I say occasionally because the folder now contains around 40 poems, not enough to make a book, but too many to ignore. They call to me from their desk drawer.
In 2006, when I was sixty-five years old, I started writing a book (who hasn't?) and it was finished in time to give each of my children a copy at Christmas 2007. Thanks to the Fed Ex-Kinko people, there are exactly four spiral-bound copies of my book in existence: the three I gave away and the one I kept. My book's title is Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind). You can say you read about it here first. Midway down the title page are the words "Not a memoir...Not an autobiography...Not Grapevine, Texas" and at the very bottom are the words "A Truly-Godawful Book" (which doesn't necessarily mean what you might be thinking). I'm not sure what I intended my book to be, but it turned out to be what it is. If it's a novel, it's a most unconventional one. I broke, on purpose, every rule of writing known to man. For example, the first sentence is 274 words long and there are more commas than you could shake a stick at. Maybe one day my book will find a publisher who will distribute even more copies. One can only hope. Why did I write it? Because I could, I suppose. In the meantime, while waiting for lightning to strike, I blog.
Writing/blogging is a form of self-expression, of course, but self-expression can also be achieved by throwing rocks at passing cars. Not that I would ever do that. When someone once asked Georgia's own Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she answered bluntly, "Because I'm good at it." I hope that's one of my reasons too, but I would never be so bold as to say it out loud. Oops, I think I just did. (That's the thing about blogging, people can read your mind. If you're not ready for them to, maybe you'd better not start.) Mama always said, "Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back." Listening to your Mama can be quite instructive, depending on the kind of Mama you have. If you weren't happy with yours, you can always put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and tell the whole wide world about it. The world may or may not choose to listen. That's strictly up to them.
I think a third reason I write is to make a difference. When Paul Revere (or Dr. Samuel Dawes or whoever the historians have decided it was) went riding through the Massachusetts countryside yelling "The British are coming! The British are coming!" one April night in 1775, his chief reward was that someone out there was listening. I can only hope to be as fortunate.
A fourth reason I write is to discover who I am. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the result of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Perhaps I have just begun to answer the question, "Why do I write?" Perhaps I'll be writing more on the subject later.
In December of 1972, when I was thirty-one years old, I wrote my first poem. I know the date because the poem's title is "December, 1972." Clever, huh? I put it in a folder and put the folder in a desk drawer. Over the years since then, I have added another poem occasionally to the folder. I say occasionally because the folder now contains around 40 poems, not enough to make a book, but too many to ignore. They call to me from their desk drawer.
In 2006, when I was sixty-five years old, I started writing a book (who hasn't?) and it was finished in time to give each of my children a copy at Christmas 2007. Thanks to the Fed Ex-Kinko people, there are exactly four spiral-bound copies of my book in existence: the three I gave away and the one I kept. My book's title is Billy Ray Barnwell Here (The Meanderings of a Twisted Mind). You can say you read about it here first. Midway down the title page are the words "Not a memoir...Not an autobiography...Not Grapevine, Texas" and at the very bottom are the words "A Truly-Godawful Book" (which doesn't necessarily mean what you might be thinking). I'm not sure what I intended my book to be, but it turned out to be what it is. If it's a novel, it's a most unconventional one. I broke, on purpose, every rule of writing known to man. For example, the first sentence is 274 words long and there are more commas than you could shake a stick at. Maybe one day my book will find a publisher who will distribute even more copies. One can only hope. Why did I write it? Because I could, I suppose. In the meantime, while waiting for lightning to strike, I blog.
Writing/blogging is a form of self-expression, of course, but self-expression can also be achieved by throwing rocks at passing cars. Not that I would ever do that. When someone once asked Georgia's own Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she answered bluntly, "Because I'm good at it." I hope that's one of my reasons too, but I would never be so bold as to say it out loud. Oops, I think I just did. (That's the thing about blogging, people can read your mind. If you're not ready for them to, maybe you'd better not start.) Mama always said, "Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back." Listening to your Mama can be quite instructive, depending on the kind of Mama you have. If you weren't happy with yours, you can always put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and tell the whole wide world about it. The world may or may not choose to listen. That's strictly up to them.
I think a third reason I write is to make a difference. When Paul Revere (or Dr. Samuel Dawes or whoever the historians have decided it was) went riding through the Massachusetts countryside yelling "The British are coming! The British are coming!" one April night in 1775, his chief reward was that someone out there was listening. I can only hope to be as fortunate.
A fourth reason I write is to discover who I am. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the result of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Perhaps I have just begun to answer the question, "Why do I write?" Perhaps I'll be writing more on the subject later.
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