Tag Archives: Flannery O’Connor

Blogs, Socials, Music, Non-fiction, The Press

But How Are You Really? Well, Journalism Is Dead

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This week, I had one of those frequently repeated conversations about what we mean when we greet others with “Hello” and “How are you?” An earnest person might think it’s dishonest to ask someone how they are doing without expecting an answer and may feel a burden to share transparently when others ask them. You may have heard someone argue that Christians shouldn’t say they are fine when they aren’t fine; they shouldn’t paint on a smile when they’re going through a hard time.

But honesty doesn’t require complete transparency. That would expose us all to the fixers, who don’t know when to listen and when to advise. Greeting one another with a word or phrase is essentially verbal acknowledgement. We see and maybe recognize each other. We ask each other how’s the day or the doing or life at large as a way of well wishing. If we’re close to each other, we’ll want more than that, but even then, it may not be the time for it.

We can thank Thomas Edison for popularizing the word hello as a good way to answer the phone. Alexander Graham Bell (why do we give his full name so often? why not Alex Bell or Alexander G. Bell?) wanted us to us say ahoy, as if we were called out to someone in the distance. Prior to the phone, hello was a common word of surprise, which I suppose is the reason Bertie Wooster and co. say, “What ho!” regularly. The Online Etymology Dictionary says there are records from 1849 that show hello, the house as “the usual greeting upon approaching a habitation” in the American west.

Yes, yes, I suppose we should get on to other things, shouldn’t we?

Vocabulary: Here’s a good word for everyday use.

via Cian McCarthy/Twitter

Journalism: News outlets aren’t dead, but their owners may be trying to kill them. Ted Gioia has a compelling piece on news sites that wanted our clicks so bad they killed themselves, and now big news outlets appear to want to die the same way. “The company tried to maximize clicks with shallow gimmicks, when it should have been worrying about the articles themselves.”

Conservatism: A right-wing movement wants a big reset. John Ehrett says critics label it different things, but vitalism is a good name for it. “In place of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘three-legged stool’—free-market economics, military interventionism, and religious conservatism—the new vitalists would burn the place down altogether, and host a festival around the pyre.”

Bruce Springsteen: “He paints his masterpiece of America as a brand and what it does to people. To me, Nebraska is an album-length description of how America has struggled to find its soul, has never had much of an identity beyond the brand that’s been sold over and over again to people living here. But lives are lived behind the brand, and Springsteen is unearthing them, exposing them to the light.” That storytelling was formed by a love of Flannery O’Connor.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

Bookselling, Poetry, Reading

Illinois Tells Readers to Stop Complaining about Library Books

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Illinois will soon have a law designed to put silence readers who might be under a delusion that they have a voice in their community libraries. I wonder if it will matter as much as they think it will.

In his State of the State address, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said, “This afternoon I’ve laid out a budget agenda that does everything possible to invest in the education of our children. Yet it’s all meaningless if we become a nation that bans books from school libraries about racism suffered by Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron, and tells kids they can’t talk about being gay, and signals to Black and Brown people and Asian Americans and Jews and Muslims that our authentic stories can’t be told.”

The bill, that has passed both house and senate, requires libraries to adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights or to create their own policy against removing books in response to community pressure. At least, that’s the intent.

What the House bill actually says is “In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.” Banning is the term used. Removing from circulation would be another thing entirely, wouldn’t it?

The ALA’s policy says, in part, “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” and “libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”

But a library can’t hold everything, can it? Who chooses what goes on the shelf or what provides enlightenment? If the state library system has four copies of one book and 16 copies of another, is the latter book understood to be more enlightening?

This seems to be an attempt to silence reading communities, and I have to wonder if it will amount to much. Will some libraries adopt the proper policy and ignore it, going about their business as usual? Will some communities express their complaints quietly? Will some librarians be run out of town?

Book banning, as you and I both know, is not a thing. Wrestling over the moral propriety and age appropriateness of books is what the ALA calls banning, and that’s what we’re arguing over. Now, Illinois will declare that no one knows moral propriety like public librarians, so sit down and read what they give you.

What other waves are undulating the Internet?

O’Connor: “On Our Need to Be Displaced” – “The richest irony in efforts to dismiss O’Connor is that her fiction provides the insight we need right now to help heal our social and political divisions, and to temper our hostile public discourse. Because Flannery O’Connor, with her scorching wit, fingered the exact cause of all of it, including racism: fear.”

Tips for Creatives: Ted Gioia is offering advice to struggling artists who are trying to make music in the world of TikTok (which is a corrupt platform you shouldn’t use). Here’s a bit of it.

“The music itself is the pathway to joy. Getting applause after a performance is lovely, but not as lovely as the song you just played. Reading a favorable review is sweet, but hardly as sweet as the ecstatic moments of creative expression.”

Podcast: At the end of last year, Trevin Wax released a podcast on the current crises in the church and how to tackles them. It’s called Reconstructing Faith, and it’s marvelous.

Family: Roberto Carlos Garcia has a moving poem about the adults in a child’s life, called “The Tempest.” Poetry Foundation has a short passage from it.

My father was a great sailor, a seaman, navigated
Only the darkest waters—the sweetest squalls

Which is to say he was a drunk

Photo by Maxim Lugina on Unsplash

Authors, Reading

Fake Reads, or I Loved That Book I’ve Never Heard of Before Now

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I’ve run out of time to do a blogroll post this morning, so let me share a couple things before I install someone I love in a college.

Reading: In the U.K. Critic, Simon Evans writes about pretending to read books: “‘I am writing a book,’ says the man at the drinks party, in the old Peter Cook cartoon. ‘Neither am I,’ replies his companion. 

“Still makes me laugh. But would now work with ‘I am reading a book’, too.

“’The larger the island of knowledge,’ goes the old Reader’s Digest phrase, ‘the longer the shoreline of wonder.’ I used to find that thought reassuring, even awe-inspiring. It is now absolutely terrifying. That’s before you factor in the fractal nature of the coastline. When you get there, there is no ‘there’.”

I have never pretended to have read something I haven’t read, but plenty of times I have suggested, discussed, or recommended books on the scantest of knowledge about them, which is something entirely different.

Southern Literature: Warren Smith notes that Marion Montgomery and Flannery O’Connor were close friends for a few years and gave us “perhaps the greatest definition of Southern literature anyone has so far come up with, certainly one of the most quoted.”

Authors, Religion

O’Connor: Life Is Violence

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“Life is suffering and it is violent, so overwhelming is it that we cope by voluntarily consenting to spiritual deafness,” Michael Rennier observes. “The reality of sin must be forced home to us by an act of divine violence so that our pretensions can once and for all be torn away.”

This is what he draws from Flannery O’Connor’s life, which is being featured on PBS in a new documentary, Uncommon Grace. Director Bridget Kurt agrees. “She wasn’t using violence to glorify it; she was showing how extreme moments in our lives are spiritual wake-up calls.”

Like the time when an escaped convict points a gun at a grandmother’s head. In that moment, all of her religiosity melted out of her, leaving her nothing but Jesus. She could have been a good woman had someone been there to threaten her everyday. That would have been respectable. But she didn’t need to be a good woman. She needed Jesus.

Perhaps O’Connor is just too Christian for secular schools. Kurt , a transplant from Northern Wisconsin, found less help than she expected when looking for material on O’Connor’s life.

“Even at her alma mater, GSCU in Milledgeville, very few students that we ran into on campus knew who O’Connor was,” Kurt told Milwaukee Magazine. “In Wisconsin, most of us know that Frank Lloyd Wright was a Wisconsin native because we are taught about famous Wisconsinites and we name libraries and schools after them. I’m not sure how much Flannery O’Connor is taught in Georgia schools.” (Via Prufrock News)

Fiction

Seeking but Never Leaving Home in the South

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Alabama Sunset

“When I taught English classes at a university in the Midwest,” Sarah Domet writes, “I often turned to William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! as a representative sample of a ‘Southern’ book. . . . At the heart of the novel stands a character who both transcends and is forever bound by his roots.”

Interestingly, I have never taught Absalom! Absalom! in any Southern classroom. Perhaps this is due to my fear of being outed as an outsider myself, my fear of being seen as the dreaded Yankee stereotype who instructs Southerners on the ways of the world. Yet, as I was recently re-reading this great Southern novel, something struck me: My desires to belong to a new region—my anxieties of place, too—are all very Southern, at least in a literary sense. In my fear of not being Southern enough I was playing out the very themes of Southern fiction. Time and time again Southern writers confront the conflicting notions of what it means to live in the South, be of the South, find a home in a place with a complicated history. Time and time again Southern writers have reminded me that misfits and outsiders alike all have a shot at redemption. It is Flannery O’Connor herself who famously notes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

Authors

Seeing With Rather Than Through the Eye

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Flannery O’Connor’s desire to help us see.

Critic and editor Christopher Ricks suggests that this process is actually a good litmus test for determining the literary quality of a sentence, image, or phrase: if the words come to you, unbidden, as you are driving down the road or drinking a glass of water, then the writer has succeeded. Personally, after reading Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” I cannot look at a bare tree on a bright winter day and not admire the play of light through branches: “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.” So, too, Saul Bellow’s description of a water glass in his novel Seize the Day is now firmly etched in my mind, and I find it true of even bottled water when the sun hits just right: “And a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on the cloth; it is an angel’s mouth.”

“To believe nothing,” she says, “is to see nothing.” (via Prufrock News)

Authors

How, Exactly, Should We Tell the Truth?

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Jason Morgan asks, “Should you be telling the truth like Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, or Dewey Short?”

Let us say you are in a large lecture hall. The teacher begins to compare Scott Walker to Hitler. (Would that this were only a hypothetical case, but Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, recently took to Twitter to do just that.) Your hand goes up, perhaps against your better judgment. The professor looks up and acknowledges you. Now what?

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction

Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer

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Flannery O'Connor and peacock
What did Flannery O’Connor pray for? To be guided toward the right people.

The Georgia Center for the Book has O’Connor’s prayer journal on the list of books all Georgians should read. The list for adults started in 2002. The Center’s coordinators started with a list of 25 books. They now add ten new books to the list each year. See all of their selections here.

Regarding the prayer journal, Betsy Childs describes it, saying, “O’Connor wasn’t a writer sitting at her typewriter crafting prayers; she was a girl pouring out her heart in longhand.”

As a small example, the young Georgia woman, while in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1946, prayed, “I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery.”

If only all Georgians would follow her Lord and heed this warning.