Jack Hitt hits the rueful Theroux.
That's all very interesting, but I'm just going to say a couple things about that Faulkner quote, which, Hitt slightly misses, putting "not" where the dramatic and time-related word "never" belongs: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
This line is often paraphrased, as it was by then-Senator Barack Obama in his speech "A More Perfect Union." In 2012, Faulkner Literary Rights LLC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sony Pictures Classics over a scene in the film Midnight in Paris, in which a time-traveling character says, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party." In 2013, the judge dismissed Faulkner Literary Rights LLC's claim, ruling that the use of the quote in the film was de minimis and constituted "fair use."Obama's paraphrase was: "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."
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38 comments:
Hitt sounds like he's never read one of Theroux's "travel" books (not that they're all quite like this).
Southernophobia is never over. It is the automatic knee jerk love of all strange and ignorant northern jerks.
Look. The South is a complicated place because of slavery and race, and riveting because the reality of our past was built on epic brutality and the history of that past is built on epic myth. The cause of the Civil War was slavery, and many blacks and whites in the South are still struggling with a barbarous poverty that has plagued the region since the plantation economy was rightfully smashed by force of arms. Racial fury, in one form or another, has postponed any decent economic recovery for a century and a half.
In which, the reviewer replaces Theroux's simplistic notions of the history of the South with his own simplistic history, in this case a history that still comforts the self-image of his WP readers.
The War of the Rebellion was all about slavery and the right side won thanks to a good Illinois trial lawyer and a General named Sherman.
But the poverty during the next. 100 years of defeated, colonized southern states was an intentional act of northern monetary interests. They won and then took the spoils of victory as they compromised with a few ruling whites in the South by allowing them to re-institute slavery under the Segregation laws in exchange for monopolies.
Faulkner is a flak jacket for Southerners. Y'all think we're stupid, but Faulkner!
I've lived in the South for 20+ years and if I have ever encountered a snake handler I was unaware of it. I know they exist, I even passed a windowless building on a country road that my friend told me was a snake handler church (they didn't want people to see what they were doing inside, apparently its against the law.) But they are as rare as a hens tooth.
On the other hand I hang out and am friends with people with Master and Doctorate degrees all the time.
Apparently this Theroux is unaware that some Southerners went and git them some lernin.
And that a lot of Yankees are moving the the South.
http://www.adweek.com/sa-article/black-population-moving-south-137629
Heck, we even have sawbones who don't saw bones, they conducts whatcha call research.
http://www.uab.edu/medicine/diabetes/
http://www.uab.edu/medicine/radiology/about/fac-centers/med-center
https://www.uab.edu/medicine/home/
I started a Paul Theroux novel years ago and found it utterly conventional in a boring, lefty sort of way. Didn't finish it and never read anything else by the man. This review of his latest does nothing to change my opinion.
Bob Ellison said...
Faulkner is a flak jacket for Southerners.
Confession time: I've never much enjoyed Faulkner. If we need shields I'd go more with Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, John Kennedy Toole, or even Tom Wolfe and Pat Conroy.
Sure, the war was about slavery. After all, the North endorsed slavery in its borders and kept the slaves till well after the war. And the Emancipation did not free any slaves in the US. So the North was fighting to end slavery in the South, only a Yankee could come up with that logic. Sure, some states used slavery to justify leaving the Union, but that was their right as they interpreted the Constitution and it makes sense in the government we used to have. Of course the rest of the world thought two big powers were fighting for autonomy, but don't let facts sway anyone in the US. The same problems exist now as then, without slavery. We don't like you, you don't like us, so let us go.
I believe someone working for National Review coined the term "Gorillas In The Mist Style Journalism" for this sort of reporting meant to convey the inexplicable customs of those people so unfortunate as to not live within the NYC-DC corridor or alternately on the West Coast to those that do.
traditionalguy said...
Southernophobia is never over. It is the automatic knee jerk love of all strange and ignorant northern jerks.
"Southerners in the Mist", a frequent companion type piece to "Conservatives in the Mist". I'll give him the near religious devotion to college football. That one is true. As for the city of Huntsville where I live, the top profession is engineer and we almost certainly have more Ph.Ds. per capita than almost anywhere else in the country. Those Ph.Ds. aren't in the humanities, either. It isn't uncommon to see bumper stickers reading, "Why yes, I am a rocket scientist" here.
The South has actual integration. The North is a bunch of white and black places. I say this as a Northerner.
I'm from Kansas, but have lived in many parts of this country. I was lucky enough to have found and married an Alabama woman. The stereotypes of the south are incorrect and disgusting.
I love the mid-west for the friendliness of the people. The South has that (in spades) as well as well mannered children and warmth.
Most of the rest of the country you can have. Absent economic reasons (i.e. my job) I found those areas are second or third rate.
I'll give him the near religious devotion to college football.
I'm originally from Ohio, I can assure you, the South does not have a monopoly on that.
In fact, I remember seeing a map on the Internet that showed the highest paid public employee for each state, other than Utah in each case it was either a college football or basketball coach.
chuck said...
I started a Paul Theroux novel years ago and found it utterly conventional in a boring, lefty sort of way. Didn't finish it and never read anything else by the man. This review of his latest does nothing to change my opinion.
A couple of short ones I enjoyed were: Kowloon Tong and The Elephanta Suite.
YMMV, he has a style that you'll either enjoy, or not.
Hm. I like both Jack Hitt (he did great work on This American Life back in the day) and I adore Paul Theroux's work. But agree with whoever said that Theroux is not for everyone. I will read both the review and the book and decide for myself, but I doubt that Theroux is particularly southernophobic. He's cynical and sour about every place that he's written about and I've read all of his travel books.
Blogger Ron Winkleheimer said...
I'll give him the near religious devotion to college football.
I'm originally from Ohio, I can assure you, the South does not have a monopoly on that.
I never claimed we have a monopoly on our devotion to college football. Any Saturday afternoon channel surfing the different games shows there are rabid fans everywhere. I'm just saying that it is present here in Alabama in abundance. So, of all his characterizations about Alabama in general and Tuscaloosa in particular, that one is definitely true. The rest are simply bigoted stereotypes based on ignorance.
At first the North insists we are all one people, and then conducts a fratricidal war to punctuate the point. Then spends the next 150 years belittling us, telling us how ignorant and backward we are. If we are really so different after all, why not let us erring sisters go in peace in the first place?
I live in Atlanta, within its City limits. We are a megalopolis much occupied by northern transplants who for the most part live outside the beltway and outside the City limits. They huddle together behind their gates and commute in and out of the town. They are afraid of black people and are as far from them as they can possibly get and still arrive at work on time.
I think some effort could be profitably spent surveying the towns along the Erie Canal and its tributaries in Penn and NY and discovering how prosperity could have vanished leaving in its wake a population as profoundly inbred and backward as the most backward of southern villages. These northern towns, btw, are loaded with underclass blacks.
"Salvation on Sand Mountain" is an excellent read for those interested in snake handling churches. It is better than most of PT's writing. Mark 16:17-18 underpins the belief in picking up serpents as a sign of salvation. There are some interesting videos on YouTube on the topic.
Cleanth Brooks once commented that, in Faulkner's fiction, "respectability is the first temptation to which every cowardly soul succumbs." See Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: First Encounters (Yale Univ. Pr. 1983) at 13. Theroux, in his way, cherishes respectability, and so will never understand the uncowardly souls that populate the South.
Also, he is an ignoramus when discussing economics. Kevin Williamson (of small-town and hardscrabble Texas origins) offers a take-down of Theroux' latest NYT screed at NRO.
" He's cynical and sour about every place that he's written about "
So much so, you have to wonder why he bothers traveling. Perhaps he should just stay home and enjoy the ocean view from his home on the North Shore of Oahu. I enjoyed reading his early works and I think his book on Oceania is quite good. By now he has a few near imitators in the same travel genre (e.g., Troost comes to mind).
Oh, shut up.
Shades of V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South!!! Is Theroux trying to reignite their feud or to pay homage with this version of what looks to be the same book?
I grew up in Tuscaloosa Co. in the 50s and 60s. I visited a lot of backwoods protestant singings and revivals. It was a way to meet girls. I never once saw or heard of a church in that area that handled snakes. We thought, rightly or wrongly, that stuff happened in Tennessee.
Ken in Tx
I don't think there is snake handling outside the foothills way to the east of Tuscaloosa. Lookout Mtn. would be the spot furthest south where people would pick up serpents. My bet.
I miss the South. I grew up there, particularly North Carolina. Yeah, it still has its yahoos, like the South Carolina lawmaker who compared the NAACP to retards and apologized ... to the retards. Then there's the GOBs walking into the Wal-Mart with Klan T-shirts reading "It's a white thing, you wouldn't understand," and the gang in the barbershop joking with the customer who was standing outside when the King parade came by.
I also never heard anyone talk about how the Jews ruled the U.S., like I heard in Baltimore.
But the people were a lot more friendly to strangers than up here in Pa., and much more willing to spend time with you shooting the shit. And if you want a hit of cognitive dissonance, you can go down to the feed store and hear the black farmers talking with disgust about the rappers, and if you closed you're eyes, you'd swear they were white.
ken in tx said...
We thought, rightly or wrongly, that stuff happened in Tennessee.
My people have spent the last 200 years on the border between North Carolina/Tennesse and are pretty hardcode mountain Baptists. They joke about snake handling, but I've never heard them talk about anyone doing it.
Foot washing, well, that's another matter....
Growing up in northern Alabama in the 60s & 70s, I, like the rest of the southerners here, never, ever, heard of a snake handling congregation nearby. There might have been one that kept very much to themselves out in the country, but none of my family's Protestant friends ever mentioned any even to deride them.
I think snake handling congregations are mostly an Appalachian, up West Virginia way, kind of thing.
However, speaking in tongues, "being moved by the Spirit", etc. became more prevalent (or so it seemed) as the 70's went on. Not at the main stream, "city folk", Protestant churches, but at the more rural or smaller city congregations. That's the white folks I'm talking about. For the blacks, it was always a part of their spirituality.
There's babbling in voodoo too.
Young Hegelian
Read "Salvation on the Mountain". They were there. Remember that the Appalachians begin in a small way in Birmingham and snake (yep) north to Lookout Mountain and then are gapped at Chattanooga and commence again in Georgia to the east.
Paul Theroux's is getting old and his already "Done" most of the Globe so now he's reduced to putting a travel book out on the "South".
Good lord, how the mighty have fallen. Theroux used to write edgy travel books about exotic destinations detailing who he suffered from bad food, bad trains, and insufferable natives and traveling companions.
Now he's reduced to puttering around the American South regurgitating the old Southern stereotypes. Good God, 10-1 he probably writes about the KKK.
I'd Recommend "Kingdom by Sea" where he describes his travels around the seacoast of England. From reading it, the entire population of England consisted of Yobs, layabouts, decrepit fish and chip shops, old people waiting by the seaside to die, and of course, insufferable traveling companions.
Its great.
"I think some effort could be profitably spent surveying the towns along the Erie Canal and its tributaries in Penn and NY and discovering how prosperity could have vanished leaving in its wake a population as profoundly inbred and backward as the most backward of southern villages."
Speaking as someone who was born and raised in the "birthplace of the Eire Canal" that's a very harsh description of upstate New York.
True,
But very harsh.
Phil 3:14
I love the region but when I am there I am reminded that good things do not necessarily last forever.
Y'all better stay up there in the North. You know this guy is right. It's dangerous for y'all down here. Don't even make a short trip, much less contemplate moving down this way.
We'll feed you to the snakes... yes, yes, we will!
I'll make an exception -- if you want to come to see some of our magnificent tourist tra..., er, I mean attractions -- by all means come on down and spend beaucoup dinero. Just don't overstay your welcome and don't even think of moving here.
Except Florida. You can move there. Far south Florida please. Forget the panhandle.
And whatever you do, Dear God, stay away from Texas. God, we have people on the overpasses watching for out of state Priuses and Subarus. If we see the blank spot where they scraped off the Coexist or Obama bumper sticker, there's hell to pay.
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