Mobile
The hovering of an invisible fly
In a room where you’ve never been
Its buzzing, insistent and pointless
The insatiable hunger for blood
The overwhelming heat
Of the oven of Summer
The rot of the world
In perfect stasis
The futility
Of nothing
Circling
Round in time
Through the tattered screen of
An empty Alabama
Afternoon
7 comments:
What brought this on?
Kirb:
Maybe thinking about weather.
Wife and I have traveled to New Orleans (twice), and she's from Texas. We visited Galveston once, years ago.
Maybe it was an attack of Faulkner-Welty-O'Connor fever?
Or was I reading too much Sam Beckett lately?
Who knows?
My dad lived in Pascagoula from 1937 to 1939, a half hour drive from Mobile. His mother believed that movie theaters were the work of the devil, but it didn't stop them from going into Mobile to see Gone With The Wind. It had to have been an advance screening. The movie wasn't released until 1940.
Some discussion of Miss O'Connor's stuff would be interesting ( I don't quite see connection here--...whatev). Cal. needs a bit mo' O-Connor and Faulkner, IMHE--that is, apart from Ho-wood, who has ripped off southern writers for a few decades now (as outlined in Barton Fink--the Coen bros rip them off as well, even when paying a sort of ...homage to Faulkner).
Tho I imagine any O-Connor product
may seem a bit low-tech or considered "goth" (as anything remotely catholic is) in the age of Microsoft.
I paid university tuition for a quarter so I could intern as an unpaid community college instructor. I understudied with a professor from Oklahoma who'd been a high school English teacher until she earned enough credits in summer school to get her doctorate, a degree that allowed her to dump her high school football coach husband by becoming a community college professor. She upgraded to a retired Scottish dentist during the term I co-taught with her. I learned how to use a mimeograph machine and make transparencies for an overhead projector. She had her students read A Late Encounter With The Enemy so she could be Sally, while I was clearly the colonel's idiot great grand nephew. I repaid her with Twain's Whittier Birthday Speech and we concluded the course with Harte's Outcasts of Poker Flat.
Interesting. Her short stories are great if a bit monotonous. In a way her novel--Wise Blood--...had more of an effect IMHE--like David Lynch meets Dante. She was not so PC, either (as some ...femmes think)--but few writers ever captured the protestant yokel-mindet as did Miss O'C.
Twain-Harte country's alright with me, however quaint to Bay or LA sophisticates. Murphys! Clemens/Twain's little cabin is still up there. Twain's writing on mormons still moves me, as does Roughing It as a whole, and he's not as rustic as some think though...a bit raw. Nothin' like standing in those high hills north of Mono Lake (or...Mt Dana, say--tho doubt MT bagged it) where Mark looked down on that big expanse of Nada. He probably passed through Bodie, as well on his way to the ..Esmeralda district---old nasty, gunslinger days.
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