The 2008 North Locust Conference: A Proposal

Our week in Annapolis was so exquisite; let's not wait two more years to gather again. We have already started to think about next time, and this is what we propose:

St. George Island, on Florida's Gulf Coast. We can rent a beach house for a week or so (they will be quite affordable with all of us splitting the cost), lie about on the sand, take sunrise walks, drink sangria, and prowl around nearby Apalachicola, a wonderful coastal town that boasts the best oysters in Florida, a bookshop with wildflowers out front and a wealth of local history, literature, and photography inside, and an excellent coffee shop. There are boutiques for Melody and me to explore, too. Perhaps appropriate discussion topics would be The History of Leisure or Les Vacances: A State of Mind. Maybe Taylor could give us a critique of The Real Florida, and Jeremy could talk about Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Jeremy will wrangle crabs and cook them, I expect. And we will sit on roofs or porches and tell each other about school and work and bills and life, and be happy.

We think all of this should happen next summer sometime, perhaps early August. When you come down for Kristen and Nate's wedding, Taylor, you can see what you think. All of the rest of you can either trust us, or come visit and see for yourselves. We will take you to Papa Joe's and buy you oysters on the halfshell, baked with butter and parmesan cheese. Resist that.

Why We All Love Poetry

Gerrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" selection for today is a poem by X.J. Kennedy, from "Peeping Tom's Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008":

Ars Poetica

The goose that laid the golden egg
Died looking up its crotch
To find out how its sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don't watch.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

P.S. Speaking of poetesques, today is Robert Zimmermann's birthday. Happy birthday, Bob.

An American Epic

Today, in 1942, Go Down, Moses was published. Though he had already published a few of the stories in The Saturday Evening Post, and the first printing initially carried the subtitle and other stories, Faulkner always meant the work to read as a novel. The chapters, which are more or less self-contained narratives, work a lot like my own family. That is, there are certain episodes in the history of my family that have clear beginnings, middles, ends. Some of these I can remember myself, but the majority are stories which have been passed down into a collective family memory. These stories are never contained by the present, nor are they mere slaves to the past. These stories often misremember and mischaracterize, but they deeply ground the way my family understands itself. This is one of the reasons that I find the novel so compelling. It crystallizes how storytelling from generation to generation interprets a family's history for the family's own understanding. The dedication, for instance, is striking:

TO MAMMY

CAROLINE BARR
Mississippi
[1840-1940]

Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love

Faulkner, of course, is writing for us as much as he is writing for himself. One of my favorite tutors here at St. John's, Brother Robert, told me that he thought of "The Bear" as the definitive American epic. He was ninety-two when told me this, and had been teaching for nearly fifty years, still sharp as a tack. I must say I agree him. Here is a single sentence:

It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, a through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant; - the old bear solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowed childless and absolved of mortality - old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons.

As much as I love the novel because it is the human heart in conflict, I love the sheer mastery of language. It is both humbling and inspiring, and brings back memories of Searcy in the dog days of summer, sitting on the porch with sweet tea, and long conversation. I might just read it again.

J & K out west

Hi gang,

Brief blogging/pictures from the first four days of our trip out west are up. You can track our progress (and, hopefully, my speedy recovery) by clicking Jeremy's name as contributor to North Locust. We're posting on the site "if only I knew." All further updates about the trip will be there, so as not to clog up North Locust.