A Good Ole Southern Road Trip

I just got back home after nearly two weeks at the beach and I have to say that I have missed blogging. It's growing on me. A long stint at the beach is a hard life, I admit, but it was for the purpose of eliminating all distractions (read: internet connectivity) and to get some quality writing done on my dissertation. I returned home happily, having accomplished a lot, including my first real tan in about 10 years! I also did a good bit of pleasure reading, finishing The Shadow of the Wind, the new Harry Potter book and making a nice dent in Maya Angelou's Heart of a Woman. Reviews are in the works.

In the meantime, the clock has been ticking away--the Southern Reading Challenge Sense of Place Contest ends today! My husband and I are trying so hard to create our own sense of place, having made a offer on this lovely house this past weekend. Doesn't seem like this one will work out, but who knows. It does look really homey, though, doesn't it? I can picture some comfy rockers on the front porch, maybe some ferns hanging from above... If not this one, maybe something else (and even better!) will come along.

Flannery O'Connor had a beautiful homeplace on her farm, Andalusia. Her room, where she wrote the majority of her works, was in the front left corner of the country plantation below. The tree-lined dirt road leads up to the front door. Her peacocks roamed the grounds at will, harassing visitors and feasting on her flowers. There are no longer any peacocks on the grounds, but it's not difficult to imagine them.

So, here's my sense of place entry. Not really fair of me to use so many pictures, but I had fun with this! Great idea, Maggie!

These excerpts from "A Good Man is Hard to Find" remind me of driving up the old dirt road to O'Connor's home. I like to think that one can at least partially experience the sense of place that she creates here when visiting Andalusia.

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. [...]

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath, she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat. [...]

She said that it was going to be a good day for driving [...]. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. [...]

The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it [...].

They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly
along in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's journey.

Short Stories

Flannery O’Connor’s collection of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find, has occupied much of my reading time over the past few days. I must admit that I am quite pleasantly surprised by her writing. This book had two strikes against it before I even picked it up: 1) it was written by Flannery O’Connor--reason for my (unjustified) distaste explained in prior posts; 2) it is a collection of short stories. I am one who likes long, slow novels—The Forsyte Saga, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, you get the picture. When I fall in love with a writer, I want as much as I can get. I want to go on reading for days, even weeks on end. I don’t want the experience to end, at least not any time soon.

This is, in fact, rather ironic because the majority of my graduate work (including the thesis that I am currently writing) has focused on the short genre in medieval and Renaissance France, collections much like Boccaccio’s Decameron. Obviously, I don’t like to mix work and pleasure reading. I have surprised myself, however, by my recent reading choices. In fact, a delightful new pattern began to emerge a couple of months ago when I picked up Alice Munro’s Runaway. She has an ability to pack an enormous amount of character development into only a few pages. Then I discovered that Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, marketed as a novel, is actually made up of three interlinking short stories. And this leads us to Flannery O’Connor. She reminds me of Alice Munro, though the latter delves much deeper into the psychology of her characters. The stories in Munro’s collection are held together by the common theme of the book’s title. The author is preoccupied by the conflicts, whether internal or external, that cause her characters to miss out on something, to run away from what it seems that they want or need. So far (and I’m not quite halfway through), the unity of O’Connor’s collection also seems to lie in its title (logical, right?) and she sets the mood for the entire book in the first, eponymous story. For the women in O’Connor’s stories, it does appear that a good man is hard to find, but I’ll hold off on discussing this book for now.

Simon over at Stuck in a Book had this to say yesterday about short stories:

in general, their brevity and structure mean a short story can hang on a single moment, issue or point - a novel would be quite weak if it tried the same thing - so it's much more sink or swim. When they succeed, like Mansfield's 'The Garden Party', for instance, they really succeed. When they fail... well, at least you haven't spent weeks to be disappointed.

Actually, the brevity and singular focus that used to leave me unsatisfied is precisely the quality that I now am beginning to appreciate. I may even join that Seconds Challenge that I have seen popping up on books blogs lately in order to get a second helping of these writers' stories. Otherwise, I'm likely to return to my old habit of putting them off and that would be a shame.

Southern Books!

My goal for the Southern Reading Challenge was to read one southern book in each summer month, June through August. My three picks are listed over on the right. With only one week remaining in June, I figured that I should get on the stick! After a trip to our cozy, local bookshop, I came home this afternoon with the first two: Maya Angelou's autobiographical book and Flannery O'Connor's short story collection. Sorry to be slow getting started, Maggie, but my TBR pile was just so seductive!

Think I'll start off with Flannery O'Connor as I have a rather morbid curiosity for this writer. From what I hear, her Southern Gothic style does not make for good bedtime reading as it can be a bit disturbing in its realism at times. After being diagnosed with the autoimmune disease, lupus, O'Connor lived the last fifteen years of her life on her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in my hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her mother, Regina O'Connor, lived in a beautiful, grand antebellum home in downtown Milledgeville, one of the few southern towns that Sherman did not burn in his March to the Sea. Her home was right next to the church where I attended preschool and kindergarten and she did not take kindly to having kids playing and hollering too close to her property. She wasn't shy in voicing her opinion, either! This experience, combined with Flannery's ethereal presence about town made an impression on me--locals revere her, for there is a scant number of famous people, much less published authors, from this small town. Since I have lived away from my hometown for a number of years, I have developed a fondness for it, but there was a time when I was repulsed by anything associated with the place. I felt stifled growing up there and left for college without looking back. Now, however, I look forward to discovering O'Connor's work. Rather than rejecting her for her ties to Milledgeville, perhaps (?) I will find in her a kindred spirit. She was, after all, a misfit (an Irish Catholic in the middle of the Bible belt!) simply trying to find her place.