Why Michael Ellsberg Wouldn’t Pass My English 101

It’s not unusual to find vapid arguments about higher education on ” journalists’” web articles and blogs these days. But they’re becoming more frequent, which means they have to push the envelope to get attention. That means making even less-informed, more incendiary claims about what teachers in the Humanities do or don’t do. In the latest and greatest such piece, entitled “Why Trying to Learn Clear Writing in College is Like Trying to Learn Sobriety in a Bar,” Michael Ellsberg claims that college students can’t possibly learn clear writing in their classes because their professors themselves write hopelessly tangled prose. No responsible journalist would make such a bold claim without evidence, right? Of course, I use the term “journalist” loosely with Michael Ellsberg. Judging from his recent column in Forbes, I’m not sure he is one (not even in that wacky Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson sense). In fact, I’m not even sure he’d pass my English 101 class based on this kind of writing. Let me explain why.

Point #1: My English 101 class expects students (by the end of the semester) not only to write clearly but to support claims with relevant evidence. We spend a fair deal of time on this point. But take Ellsberg, who claims it’s impossible to learn writing in college based on an excerpt from a sociologist who died 30 years ago. Houston, do we have a problem in reasoning here? How does Ellsberg get away with advising us to “stay a thousand miles away from most university professors” if his only source is a single piece of bad prose?

Point #2: My English 101 class also teaches sound argument as part of writing. But take Ellsberg, who praises a book written by a university professor and then later tells us that university professors don’t know how to write. Imagine if I said that I never go to clinics or hospitals anymore because my doctor once said that sometimes radiologists are slow. We rhetoricians call this argument the “hasty generalization” fallacy.

Point #3: Another logical fallacy in argument I teach students is the ”straw man.” When politicians or celebrities have nothing of original value to say, they fabricate an issue or a problem that doesn’t actually exist and then complain about it. In Ellsberg’s case, he doesn’t seem to realize that the Talcott Parsons of the academic world would never stray within a thousand miles of a writing classroom to begin with. So Ellsberg’s problem doesn’t actually exist.

Conclusion: So don’t worry, Michael. Writing might be taught by under-appreciated faculty, but most of us know what we’re doing and we don’t write like dear Talcott. It would be nice if more “journalists” would actually live up to their old reputations and do some research before they run their mouths.

Death: Mother of Beauty

This week I drove from one end of the country to another and wound up listening to four audio books, all of them about beauty and death. The lineup included all three of Dan Wells’ John Cleaver books plus Preston and Child’s Still Life with Crows. Maybe I seek out this darker work, but I’ve noticed it’s less difficult to stumble on than it used to be. Some critics, as I’ve noted in previous posts, have bewailed this turn toward the Gothic. I disagree. It’s good that pop culture has taken this artistic swerve toward death rather than try to cover it up with saccharine. In fact, the Rebecca Black approach to music and art depresses me precisely it does everything it can to avoid grim realities. Meanwhile, a fictional character’s inner demons, or a painting’s focus on mortality, provides a productive channel for it. Take Well’s character, John Cleaver–far from sane. In some ways, he’s not even a good kid. (He threatens his mom with a knife in one of the books, and he even reminds her of the incident at later points to get what he needs.) But these faults render works of art more beautiful. Not the kind of faults that make characters look like petty, pathetic whiners, but problems that propel plots and characters toward terrible realizations, silver-lined with some form of redemption.

Listening to Still Life with Crows in particular has brought me back to a running topic on this blog: art and murder. Odd how often the two cross paths (See my posts from recent months.) If Funaro’s killer is a highly organized Michelangelo, then Preston & Child’s is a kindergartner. It turns out that art does indeed inspire the grotesque man-child, albeit in ways far more primitive. Definitely worth a read.

I’ve also found two more artists who blend art and crime explicitly: Pepón Osorio and Melanie Pullen.While each one takes a radically different approach, they both take that Wallace Stevens line about Death and Beauty one step further. Is it ethical to think of murder as beauty? Sure, as long as you’re not killing your models. That’s the whole point of art; it’s everywhere. The job of an artist (including writers) is to find the beauty or potency in unexpected places and bring it to people’s attention–even if some find that offensive.

Pepon Osorio, "The Scene of the Crime."

On that note, a recent post on The Starving Art Historian blog also reminded me of Sally Mann’s work, especially her exhibition centered on the infamous body farm in Tennessee–which I’m pretty sure also appears first in Patricia Cornwell’s crime fiction. My favorite art always pushes the envelope, and it informs my own writing–whether it’s Bosch or Marina Abramovic scrubbing a skeleton or Mann walking about poking dead bodies (as described in The Guardian and in the documentary “What Remains.”):

Mann has a gift for provoking strong reactions (“I like pushing buttons”) and her pictures of rotting corpses certainly do that. She took them at the University of Tennessee’s anthropological facility at Knoxville, aka the “body farm”, where human decomposition is studied scientifically. The bodies are mostly left in an outdoor setting and lie there for months or even years. In Steven Cantor’s 2006 television documentary about Mann, she is observed happily wandering from cadaver to cadaver, prodding this body part and stroking that one, unfazed by the maggots and reek of decay.

Melanie Pullen, "Last Light."

“Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to get there. The smell didn’t bother me. And you should see the colours – they’re really beautiful. As Wallace Stevens says, death is the mother of beauty.”

More and more, I realize this is why I write: to find the unexpected beauty in places and bring it to people’s attention, and to prod at the small gaps between opposites that we take for granted every day. I’m not very interested in looking at paintings of flowers, sunsets, lakes, or forests. But if you slip something in there that’s out of place or unusual, or give it a new frame, then you’ve made thought-provoking art (or poetry, or fiction.)

So, I’m pleased to watch Sally Mann roam the Body Farm–just like I’m pleased to roam abandon buildings and art museums and asylums. And I’m also happy to write things that are likely to piss people off, like I did with those posts about Southern Literature. It’s not that provocative people cling to provocative beliefs. They just realize that nobody else is going to say what’s necessary to generate new ideas–which are often painful to birth.

Salon, what have you done?/New issue of The Writer

These days, you don’t have to look terribly hard to find a young writer-teacher complaining about something. I was reminded of this a week ago when stumbling on that column “Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?” on Salon.com, where an Iowa grad muses about killing off the humanities in part because it didn’t help her choose a career or land her a great job. Wait, you might ask, isn’t she writing for Salon.com on a regular basis? Why, no, that’s not a gaping  hole in her argument at all…

The second column happens to come from the same author, bewailing some of the basic tenants of writing pedagogy like collaboration and peer review in favor of grammar instruction. (Has she read Stanley Fish’s latest?). Entitled “Death to high school English,” the column wanders aimlessly through her frustration teaching composition and “puzzl[ing] over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits.” This is the wail of the novice teacher, and it should go away as, hopefully, he or she learns that there’s nearly four decades of scholarship to address and mediate these woes. The problem is that our culture, including publications like Salon.com, continue to perpetuate these negative and reductive views of writing and teaching. I’m sad that this writer chose to spend her hours writing something like this, rather than asking her colleagues for books or articles in rhet-comp that would address her concerns.

Probably, I should stop here and talk about something less overtly political, like the new issue of The Writer, which has an article by yours truly. You’ll also find articles about Lan Samantha Chang, Alan Ball, Dorothy Allison, and others.

Readers: An Author’s Best PR Team

Unknown Female is hot off the press, and you can grab it from Amazon in paperback and kindle formats.

My new novel goes deeper and darker than the last one, but the two have plenty in common. Both Sarah and Marx deal with unstable, dead parents. Of course, Sarah’s mom suffers from bouts of schizophrenia while Marx’s is a sociopathic killer. Sarah’s a young aspiring artist, and Marx draws forensic sketches for law enforcement. Sarah’s mom paints and sculpts, and Donald Bath murders people and uses their blood to paint works inspired by the likes of Alfred Rethel.

The plot draws on my experience writing about unsolved murders and South Carolina’s dark past in general.

I’m planning readings, including one in Winston-Salem and Charlotte later this month. So far, Amazon sales numbers are off to a decent start. But I’d like to break the 10,000 rank and hold it for at least a week. Here’s what you can do to help: send links to the Amazon page or my website to your friends through Facebook and Twitter. If you’ve ordered a copy, thank you. When you’ve finished, please post a short review (1-2 sentences) on Amazon. The more reviews a book has, the better the chance people will discover it.

Readers are an author’s best PR team. Promoting books is tough work these days, especially for indie writers. We don’t have large financial resources to compete with bigger publishers. We usually can’t leverage book retailers like B&N to display our books on front tables or hang huge posters about our books on their windows, or even get them to keep copies on the shelves. You won’t even find some of my favorite authors in brick & mortar stores. On top of that, major newspapers and magazines are reluctant to give much attention to titles from small presses. Even when they do, we still depend on readers to actually buy our books and recommend them to their friends, colleagues, families, and students.

Indie authors hardly ever get rich. At best, we make enough cash to fuel our own book-buying habits. In my case, I’ve spent nearly every cent of my royalties on books–sometimes at indie stories, sometimes from Amazon.

To conclude, here’s a growing list of who else has used blood in their art: Lennie Lee, Ron Athey, Yang Zhichao, Kira O’Reilly, Marc Quinn, and Andrew Serrano.

Art Inspiring the Novel

Alfred Rethel

Here’s a few post-it notes I found with names of artists. I scribbled these down over the weeks and months working on Unknown Female: Harry Clark, Albrecht Durer, Vincent DiFate, Aubrey Beardsley, Sidney Sime, William T. Horton, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsony, Nicoles Gordan, Joel Peter Witkin, Constantin Brancusi, Zdzislaw Beksinski, Maeve Berry, Patrik Budenz, Wee Gee, Alfred Kubin.

I’ll save extended commentary on these blokes for later, but for now I’ll let you all have fun exploring. They all seemed to speak to the dark underside of the Southern landscape, culture, crime, and overall ambiance.

Waverly Hills: Spooktastic (Sort of)

It’s been a helluva week. I toured the Waverly Hills Sanitarium my last night in Louisville. The sanitarium reigns as one of the most haunted places in the world, largely because of their high death rate during the White Plague–Tuberculosis in the 1920s and 1930s. The tour guides said a death occurred in the place almost every hour for years. So many people died that the staff started using a service tunnel to transport the bodies out of the place in order to keep the residents calm. Otherwise there would’ve been a constant stream of hearses. Is it just me, or has nobody written a short story about this place yet? If you haven’t, too late. It’s mine.

The service tunnel, a dark cavern that stretches out about 500 yards, earned the name the “body chute.” I walked it at 10 pm. I’m glad I was with a group of 20 people. Tempting fate, I lagged behind once or twice just to turn and gaze down the dark mouth. Yeah, it’s creepy.

As for the ghosts, I had no paranormal experiences to report except for shadows. In fact, parts of the tour seemed a little silly in that regard. “You’ll see shadow people out of the corner of your eye.” Yes, near dusk in a dank abandoned building you do see lots of wavering shadows on your periphery. Not that I’m going to play the role of the skeptic. It was spooky enough that I don’t plan on spending an entire night there. One other small complaint: For a 2-hour tour, I didn’t appreciate being shown videos about the asylum in a gift store for 30 minutes, then being rushed through. One of the tour guides was even rude enough to threaten that they’d have to skip parts of the building if WE didn’t hurry. In all seriousness, you need a little more than 5 minutes to appreciate the poetry of rusted autopsy tables, morgue cabinets, and busted surgical lamps dangling from the ceiling of an operating room.

Conclusion: If you’re in Louisville, worth it. If you’re going to block out 2 hours, you might as well get your full money’s worth and pay for a 4-hour tour so you don’t have to go on a forced march. Now I leave you with a video by a disturbing little music group I listened to while writing parts of Unknown Female. (Don’t worry, this was before I discovered Dexter and decided to tone down the nihilism and rev up the dark humor.) The Sanitarium visit reminded me of them. Wonder how the ghosts at Waverly would dig these licks:

Darkness Too Visible: My Annotated, Corrected Version

My new goal is to make young adult literature happier, one book at a time.

By MEGHAN COX GURDON

Edited by Brian Ray

Amy Freeman stood recently in the young-adult section of her local Barnes & Noble, feeling thwarted irritated and disheartened slightly bored. She had popped into the bookstore to pick up a welcome-home gift for her 13-year-old, who had been away. Hundreds of lurid and melodramatic covers stood on the racks before her, and there was, she felt, “nothing, not a thing, that I could imagine giving my daughter with a straight face. It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark cliche, dark whiny stuff.” She left the store empty-handed.

How dark solipsistic is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker More narcissistic than when you were a child, my dear: So dark self-indulgent that kidnapping moaning and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings groaning and wallowing and Emo music are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children spoiled little rats from the upper-middle class from the ages of 12 to 18. Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching eye-rolling detail.

Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it. If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. If teens are going to swear then,  for God’s sake, give them a real reason for doing so.

There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity self tortured confessional mush —will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses wimpiness, misdirected soul searching, and inflated emotion of the most horrendous kinds. Now, whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in ugliness navel-gazing probably depends on your philosophical outlook. Reading about homicide doesn’t turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won’t make a kid break the honor code. But the calculus that many parents make is less crude than that: It has to do with a child’s happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. But we do seem to be raising a generation of girls and boys who can’t think beyond their own nose, and many who listen to Lady Gaga on every kind of Apple device imaginable but don’t know who Steve Jobs is.

Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it. [yalit] Raul Allen If you think it matters what is inside a young person’s mind, surely it is of consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new. Plato was right. People shouldn’t be reading fiction or poetry because it’s too emotional and sets a bad example. In fact, all teenagers should be reading The Republic. That’s it.

Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once (which is great news for people who find high school dull and confining); so whether the debate has raged for eons doesn’t, on a personal level, really signify. As it happens, 40 years ago, no one had to contend with young-adult literature because there was no such thing. But there was certainly Wuthering Heights, which we should also burn every single copy of since it promotes the same mood-injected, anxious ambivalence about romance and family.

This novel's feeling happier already.

There was simply literature, much of it about screwed up alcoholic and drug-addicted adults rather than their kids, some of it accessible to young readers and some not–but most of it very, very depressing. As elsewhere in American life, the 1960s changed everything. In 1967, S.E. Hinton published “The Outsiders,” a raw and striking novel that dealt directly with class tensions, family dysfunction and violent, disaffected youth. It launched an industry. Mirroring the tumultuous times, dark topics began surging on to children’s bookshelves. A purported diary published anonymously in 1971, “Go Ask Alice,” recounts a girl’s spiral into drug addiction, rape, prostitution and a fatal overdose. A generation watched Linda Blair playing the lead in the 1975 made-for-TV movie “Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic” and went straight for Robin S. Wagner’s original book. The writer Robert Cormier is generally credited with having introduced utter hopelessness to teen narratives. His 1977 novel, “I Am the Cheese,” relates the delirium of a traumatized youth who witnessed his parents’ murder, and it does not (to say the least) have a happy ending. Grim though these novels are, they seem positively tame in comparison with what’s on shelves now.

In Andrew Smith’s 2010 novel, “The Marbury Lens,” for example, young Jack is drugged, abducted and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he encounters a curious pair of glasses that transport him into an alternate world of almost unimaginable gore and cruelty. Moments after arriving he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, “covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f— was this?” Sounds like something Neil Gaiman wrote and then scratched out. No happy ending to this one, either, depending on your point of view. In Jackie Morse Kessler’s gruesome but inventive 2011 take on a girl’s struggle with self-injury, “Rage,” teenage Missy’s secret cutting turns nightmarish after she is the victim of a sadistic sexual prank. “She had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn’t breathe.” Missy survives, but only after a stint as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Maybe I’m missing something, Missy, but you don’t sound highly qualified for a job as one of the Horseman of the Apocalypse. This position largely involves slicing other people’s limbs to ribbons and turning the world, rather than oneself, into a mess of meat and blood. We’re really looking for a James Hetfield/Metallica type of person here. Thanks for your application. We’ll keep it on file.

My Commentary: The concept of the “child” has existed for barely a hundred and fifty years. The “fairy tales” we know were once folk tales intended for general audiences–and they were quite raunchy and graphic. So my problem lies less with the darkness of young adult literature and more with the incessant moodiness and self-defeat in it. My first book was treated sort of like young adult literature. The main character goes through some tough shit, but she never sits down and starts cutting herself. I also make darkness funny, not woe-is-me. The great literature of the olden times had enormous despair and violence. When you think about it, there’s not a huge difference between “The Great Gatsby,” “East of Eden,” and the Twilight Series–except I’d say the first two were actually written rather than manufactured. The main line of Gurdon’s critique stands, but she gets carried away with “darkness.” Also, I think it’s largely a good thing literature in general has taken up topics like depression and psychological illness. While it’s true that literature inflects mindset, not writing about adolescent disorders doesn’t make them go away. We don’t need less darkness, we just need books that deal with those issues rather than trying to cash in on them. I think that’s Gurdon’s main point, although she takes a helluva long time to make it. Looks like someone got paid by the word. Anyway, this is what my generation did when we got depressed:

BOOKS FOR YOUNG WOMEN: You should all go read Brian Ray’s “young adult” novel, Through the Pale Door.

For a very long discussion and summaries of other books, which may or may not have profanity, go here.

The Help, and My Help

Opposum Actors Guild announces come back, plans cameos in next five adaptations of novels about race relations set in pre-Civil Rights era.

Growing up in Atlanta, I never had a black maid. But I did have a black martial arts instructor, and two Korean ones. Does that count? I haven’t thought much about them in the past decade, until trying to force myself through The Help, and realizing how much it reminds me of those dark days in secondary school where I learned to yawn at “socially-important fiction.” Indeed, I expect this book will be torturing high school seniors for generations of AP Literature.

There seems something patently disingenuous about contemporary books exploring race as if it were a taboo subject. Race is important, and it should be written about, but why does it always get the same treatment in Southern Lit–with the rare exception of trail blazers like Toni, Alice, Harper, and the like? I’d like to see a novel that goes against the grain, just like my last few posts. Race in my own life was a matter of national news–O.J. Simpson, the race riots, Rodney King. In fact, California seemed to have more issues in the early 1990s than greater-metro Atlanta.

A childhood in Atlanta could be pretty multi-racial, to the point that the pre-Civil Rights era might as well have been the dark ages. At least in my perception, racism hovered somewhere near the bottom of the exploded concepts pool  along with the use of leaches and the burning of witches. Maybe I do owe part of this to my martial arts teacher. Twice a week for about five years,  sometimes three times a week during the summers, my ass was under his command. Imagine a Catholic school teacher with a black belt and an attitude. It was physical and mental punishment with forms, grappling, foam shields, and lots of shouting. A compliment from this man was worth missing the first half of X-Files on a Friday night, because of all the work it took to earn one. When I think about my own work ethic, self-discipline, low tolerance for nonsense, and Stoicism, I’ve got to admit that part of it came from my years-long interactions with him. If nothing else, he helped teach me the futility of whining or thinking, “I can’t do it.”

At fifteen, I became an assistant instructor. I had a special patch sewn on my uniform and everything. I got to boss around other adolescents. My martial arts master watched me lead groups of five, six kids, and sometimes an entire class of fifteen. Once, I got the special privilege of “closing down the dojo,” which meant locking the doors and carrying the keys to him at the pool hall next door. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I felt so stupidly pleased with myself. (Any retard can lock a door.) But the point is that I did.

My martial arts teacher might have been providing a “service,” I guess, that ultimately my parents were paying for. But the only “yes, sir” or “no, sir” involved in this relationship came from yours truly. (And it came often.) There wasn’t much ambiguity as to who was in charge. If anyone in our class screwed up, we all paid through extra leg-numbing drills. Disclaimer: I’m not saying I’m the only person who had an experience like this. I’m also not going to write a 400-page book on it and submit to 50 agents. I’m more the type to write a 400-page book about talking opossums. I would definitely send that out.

Different times, of course. But let’s face it. The vast majority of Southern novels about race jump straight back to the 1960s. Why? Even novels set in the contemporary South spend half their time looking fondly (?) upon that era. I know nostalgia, history, and regret are supposed to be major themes in Southern Lit. Believe it or not, the 1980s and 1990s was a generation ago now–uncharted territory to get wistful about.

All these years, I’ve convinced myself this isn’t a “Southern” experience because it doesn’t fit within the cookie-cutter bookends of the Great Southern bookshelf. But lately I reflect on these moments and ask, how can it not fit? Of course, I could continue narrating my multi-racial upbringing and multi-ethnic martial arts teachers as a counter-narrative to the trends we see so often in popular Southern Lit. The truth is, I feel as irritated and awkward writing about it as I do when reading those novels. I guess I could write my own tome about race relations in literature, but it would read more like Erasure–which is short, funny, and to the point.

Faulk You II: Southern Archetypes versus Stereotypes

My last post on Southern fiction apparently stirred the hive. Let’s stir it some more. As a friend from Charleston said, “It was entertaining but probably didn’t earn you many friends.” Maybe not, but I’ve always had a sore spot when it comes to exploitation of Southern stereotypes. Even as an MFA, I’d nearly vomit whenever some “Yankee” tried to write about cotton fields or the Klan. I read and wrote some real crap in grad school round one, and it takes a lot to make one vomit. In any case, my last entry earned a couple of comments that inspired more thought about the South, the New South, and novels. Exhibit A:

Hi, I havent read your books and you haven’t read mine.  I promise to refrain from critiquing your books before I’ve read them, if you’ll do the same for mine.  Some people employ stereotypes, and others seek to use them to explode them.  Good luck with your work.   The “Southern” bookshelf is large and there is plenty of room for all.   Thanks!  Mark

Yes, that’s Mark Childress. Beneath this sensible proposal lies the premise that I’m not “justified” to express a reaction about the first chapter of a novel–arguably the most important part. The second part of this comment neglects to note that, while the “Southern” bookshelf is large, mediocre books are taking up a lot of the space. Since that comment, I’ve miraculously finished the rest of Georgia Bottoms and also Crazy in Alabama. Although I’m not fond of authors who try to police public discussion about their books, I’m less fond of books that purport to explode stereotypes–Southern or otherwise–but wind up inflating them further.

Like a number of popular Southern novels, Georgia Bottoms hits almost all of the key “S” themes by the end of the first page: church, ice tea on a front porch, excessive heat, Baptists. It picks up the rest of the themes by the end of the second or third chapter: shelling peas, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, racists, George Wallace, and words like “Ya’ll” and “Paw.” Oh, and it turns out that one character has spawned an illegitimate child from an interracial relationship. Childress has carefully plotted into his book every stale, overdone concept. I don’t see any use of these commonplaces to forward satire or serious social commentary. Even worse, I didn’t laugh. Not once. Well, that’s not completely true. But I probably laughed for the wrong reasons.

If that weren’t enough, we get one of the shallowest treatments of racism I’ve seen in a Southern novel. As one character observes, “If uppity Rosa Parks hadn’t sat down on that bus in Montgomery, things might have stayed as they were when Little Mama was young: gasoline was nineteen cents a gallon, a white woman had privileges, you could have a colored girl do your housework for nothing. Little Mama didn’t invent that way of living, but she sure as hell preferred it to the way things were now.” Is this character supposed to be a Dixie-fried racist? It sounds more like a bad impersonation of one.

About halfway through the book, one of Georgia’s boy toys gets pulled over because a deputy suspects he’s a “Ku Klucker.” I was wondering when the Klan reference would show up.

My biggest problem with the novel lies with the main character–a heap of stereotypes, unlikable, mundane. She’s supposed to be unlikable, but she’s not even interesting. Nothing about her explodes anything, except my attention span. For some reason, 9/11 takes place in the middle of this novel and ruins a luncheon that Georgia’s planned. Instead of doing anything truly selfish or despicable, Georgia wishes “everyone would just go home so she could cry.” Then she thinks, “Anyway they were strangers, they were Yankees, they should be none of her concern.” This isn’t compelling, even in its lack of empathy. Georgia is not someone you love to hate, just a forgettable wannabe socialite. My second biggest problem lies in the trite use of events like 9/11 and the foreshadowing of Katrina to score points for political awareness. At least that’s how it comes off.

It’s one thing to encounter these staples in a book. (After all, I liked Bastard Out of Carolina.) The KKK are still usable as villains or even jokes, but it’s not as easy as it looks. With Childress, and a number of other authors in the Southern canon, it’s hard to see the tropes as genuinely inspired–more like they’re getting stuffed in at every fold, so that the book appeals to “Southern” readers and promotes an image of the auteur as bona fide Deep South. Even if a KKK false alarm is supposed to be humorous, I’m not laughing. Frankly, reading this book was like being strapped to a chair in a room with Jeff Foxworthy and Joe Dirt for two hours. Not fun.

That’s my opinion; I’m expressing it without malice. (Irritation is different from malice). I am, however, expressing it with the mindset that someone needs to say something about the exploitation of Southern-ness without the butter and sugar.

Moving on to meditation: I continue to reflect on what it means to be Southern. My street cred has been called into question throughout my adult years, in amusing ways, mainly because of my lack of an accent. I’m not exactly proud of my lack of accent, and I never worked to get rid of any accent like news anchors do. I just never developed one. Blame it on TV. Once, someone even asked “Are you a Southern writer?” I said, “I guess.” She asked, “You were born in the South, right?” When I said, “Yeah,” she said something like, “Whew, good. But work on your accent.”

Make no mistake. I’m Southern, and I know all the tropes. I grew up just outside Atlanta, GA. I learned Coca-Cola, Margaret Mitchell, Martin Luther King. I also learned Chick-Fil-A, Ted Turner, General Sherman. And I learned Morehouse, Michael Jordan, The Varsity. I can go on. In middle school I visited MLK’s boyhood home and his church. All of eighth grade history was dedicated to Georgia, and our teacher mapped out nearly every Civil War Battle in detail on the chalkboard over the course of a month. I even got teased about possible relations to James Earl Ray. (I promise, he’s not in the family lineage book.) I’ve taught MLK and Malcolm X in my American Lit classes. I met Truett Cathy in the fifth grade, and I also panned for gold in Dahlonega.

Sometimes I wonder why I haven’t jammed all of that into some short stories. If I cared only about becoming the next Kathryn Stockett, I might. Instead, I try to imagine that an audience of mine–however small–has seen a lot of this before and so they want something new, or at least a creative use of the old standbys. I’m less disturbed by recent news about the lawsuit against Stockett than I am bored with media hype of books proclaimed to be the next To Kill a Mocking Bird. I’m not merely speaking as an author here, but an avid reader who’s taken graduate coursework in the Southern novel and who’s been reading “Southern” books since I could spell. Having actually read and enjoyed Gone with the Wind, All the King’s Men, Confessions of Nat Turner, Huck Finn, Deliverance, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Bastard Out of Carolina, Half-Mammals of Dixie, Serena, and several Faulkner novels, I guess I’m just that hard to impress and hoping I’m not alone. And just in case anyone’s forgotten the terror that was Jeff Foxworthy: http://youtu.be/H7qZIRtbFJ8

My Brief Life as a Crime Reporter

A box filled with copies of my new novel will arrive in the next few hours. So I’m moved to reflect a little on the year I spent writing full-time for a now-defunct newsweekly called Snitch that started in Louisville and pretty much ended there–with the exception of a franchise in Columbia, SC. South Carolina was the perfect place for something like Snitch. It was an odd, gruff, fly by night operation that didn’t care much what other people thought. I started out writing their “Zip Code Crime Watch.” I drove around to all of the local agencies and read through incident reports for anything chilling, intriguing, or funny. We concentrated on funny. You’d be surprised at the stupid things criminals do. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, especially if you’ve ever lived in South Carolina.

We were pro law enforcement. If crime’s your bread & butter, you don’t have much of a choice. Most of the time that didn’t pose a problem. After a couple of months, the cops loved us. My editor, Jerry Adams, had the good sense to place Snitch newsstands in all the law enforcement offices. So cops and deputies read and laughed at the crime-watch pages and delighted when one of their busts got into the paper.

Here’s an example of how much they loved us: My editor sent me to the State Fair to tag along with the Richland Co. Sheriff’s department for a night. At first, the Sgt. I shadowed thought I worked for The State. For about 20 minutes he regarded me with a polite but reserved manner. When he found out I actually worked for Snitch, a happy glow came over his face and he said, “Oh, man. You write for them? I love that paper.” He opened up, talking about his family’s history in law enforcement. He’d inherited the line of work from his great-great grandfather, one of the first U.S. marshals. I wound up interviewing him for a story but the paper closed down before I could finish it. Anyway, the main point is that many of the local cops liked us a little better than the main show in town.

I still remember my first story, about crime scene cleanup crews. I interviewed a few of the local companies and wrote a grisly blood & guts piece that made the editors feel a little queasy. That was the first hint I might wind up writing a crime thriller.

Over the weeks and months, I got to know the local law enforcement relatively well. When Richland opened a new forensics lab, I got a free tour. I also went out to the Columbia PD horse farm, where the mounted patrol kept their four-legged friends. (They did not offer me the chance to ride one, however.) I got to cruise around in a patrol car for a couple of nights, and I also got to attend court once or twice. The only downside to all of this was that, since we were  weekly paper, there was no point in really learning to use a police radio like the big boys. I dug into cold cases and almost managed a trip out to Pee Wee Gaskins’ old place, where last I checked law enforcement was still cooperating with USC to search for remains with sonar.

In the end, my dream job wasn’t meant to be. Snitch helped support poverty-stricken Me through my first year of grad school and gave me the basic tools to write gripping fiction. Then they shut down, for a range of reasons that certainly had nothing to do with my performance as a journalist. I learned several valuable lessons from this job: First, don’t call on your ex-girlfriend to pick your sorry arse up from jail, especially if you were serving time for domestic assault. (That’s why she’s your x-gf now, chief.) Second: Alcohol and baseball bats do not mix well, especially at pool parties. Third: Do not fall asleep in your car in the middle of Two Notch Rd past midnight with a joint smoking on the dashboard and an open beer in your lap. Fourth: it’s best not to jump out of a moving vehicle, even if that vehicle is being tailed by a Crown Vic with flashing lights.