In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in. (BG is aka Bradley Greenburg)
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools unsuffered. We hope it’s a welcome break from the world of shit falling on our heads daily in the political sphere.
Tonight’s Topic: Literature and Art That Define a Region
Take it away, BG!
The MA course I’m teaching this fall is Southern Lit. I’ve taught it several times, and for each iteration I swap out probably 1/3 to 1/2 of the reading. I’m always looking for something interesting (especially recent) to slot into the late part of the course. I’m currently sorting that section of the syllabus, and it has me thinking about regional literatures (not just of the South).
For this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about regional literature, or other art forms that define, or represent, a region. Could be an area of the country (Midwest, Appalachia, PNW), or a state (recovering Hoosier here), or even something more local. It shouldn’t be something that’s just from there, but a work that situates the place’s placedness. Tell us how it does that.
*****
After tonight, BG will be on vacation for two weeks – apparently that’s in his (nonexistent) BJ contract for Medium Cool! But we have done some advance planning, and we have a gaming post all set for you guys for next week on 8/5.
Last time we had a gaming thread on Medium Cool, a bunch of you came in late to the thread and said “I wish I had known we were going to be talking about this.” So please consider this your official advance notice!
We have another post teed up, scheduled for the week after that, on 8/12. BG won’t be participating in the vacation posts in real time, but I know he is going to want to read what you guys come up with in response to the 8/12 post, because it’s a good one.
Baud
Hey! I resemble that remark.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Gregory Peck should’ve played Clark Kent/Superman at some point
Yutsano
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You’ve heard of the Superman curse right? Henry Cavill is probably one of the few who have managed a post-Supes career. But he’s also not done playing the Man of Steel.
I’m waiting for the other aspect of the curse to strike Dean Cain. I guess he doesn’t do too much that might cost him his life.
SiubhanDuinne
There’s an old trope to the effect that “history is written by the winners.” Given the sheer quantity of Southern literature — and in many cases the undoubted quality — I would submit that there is a contrary argument to be made.
There’s a parallel dynamic at work in Canadian literature (CanLit), with a great many Québecois/Franco-Canadian writers making enormous contributions to the broader culture, whether in English, French, or translation.*
(Even the slogans are similar: “Fergit? Hell no!” and Je me souviens [“I remember”]).
*Mildly edited
WaterGirl
I immediately thought of Gregory Peck, and To Kill A Mockingbird as literature that caught the feel of a region.
(no surprise, probably, from the person who often gets to pick the images for Medium Cool.)
trollhattan
Tom Robbins is my choice for author who presents the PNW in a way I can relate to. Blackberries, for example, in “Still Life with Woodpecker.”
Carl Hiaassen may or may not be accurate about Florida, but how can I quibble with how he depicts it?
mad citizen
As a lifelong Hoosier who spent four years in Bloomington at IU, I’ll go with how the movie Breaking Away defined IU, Bloomington, brought us the term Cutters, etc. I did a day trip there yesterday just to get out for the first time since March. Campus is totally dead, the town mostly dormant. Made some nice pictures (hopefully) on film with a Pentax autofocus camera from the 1990s I bought recently.
Also the movie Hoosiers for 1950s high school basketball and that culture, which was destroyed when Indiana went to class basketball.
After working all day in the yard (as well as Monday), is there a book or movie about humidity? Body Heat, humid Florida, of course!
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: PNW?
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: Agree that often the ones who lose produce significant cultural material. Ireland and many other colonized countries/peoples really countered with cultural material. The Caribbean islands full of examples. Af-Am culture in the US, too.
WaterGirl
@mad citizen: Will you be sending your pics in to On the Road?
K488
@mad citizen: I’ve been a breaking away fan since I was in graduate school (although not in Bloomington). I moved to Bloomington about seven years ago, and we’ve watched the movie a couple of times since. I marvel at the fact that the next to last shot in the movie pans across our opera house, and winds up fixed on my office window! If someone had predicted that to me back when I first saw the movie, I would have laughed!
BGinCHI
@mad citizen: Oh yes, Breaking Away like a time capsule. I love that film and it holds up so amazingly well.
Yutsano
In answer to the question: The obvious one is Carl Hiaasen and Florida. I personally don’t like his writing. I got about two-thirds of a way through a book, don’t recall which one, and wondered what was the point other than everyone in Florida sucks. I also think no one else could do Silverman’s biography.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
Pacific Northwest. And with Robbins perhaps more narrowly, the Puget Sound region but I don’t want to deprive Eugene folks of the fun. :-)
trollhattan
@BGinCHI:
“I don’t want any more ‘ini’ food!”
That movie is quotable as hell.
BGinCHI
@K488: Has the downtown even changed that much?
I lived there in 84-85 (my freshman year of college), and when I was back in 99 or 2000, it looked pretty much the same.
I miss the record stores, though.
BGinCHI
@Yutsano: Only FL books I can stand are Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford and Harry Crews.
Yutsano
@trollhattan: I guess you really need to be from the Pacific Northwest to know just how unbelievably funny that snippet is.
RSA
John Nichols captures New Mexico for me in The Milagro Beanfield War. The American southwest has some great writing about it.
Rand Careaga
@trollhattan: It has been forty years now, but Still Life with Woodpecker put me off Tom Robbins for all time. I can’t tell you at this remove what elicited this allergic reaction, because I have mercifully forgotten the whole thing (except that an ad slogan for a canned pastry product figured in it somewhere), but having approached the novel with high hopes, I completed it with deepest contempt. Your mileage appears to have varied: nichto problemo—I do not regard my personal tastes as dispositive, or dissents as signifying moral failures.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI:
Yes, all good examples. I didn’t mean to imply that French Canada and the American South were the only such examples of “loser lit.”
Makes me wonder if the “history is written by the winners” is a bit of denial, or wishful thinking, on the part of the “winners”!!
BGinCHI
If you want to read a book that will take you to a place and hold you there (and I know some of you will have read this book many times), you have to read the Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. Deepest West Virginia, so lovely and true and moving. You won’t soon forget them. I don’t know how many times I’ve read that book.
Great article here.
Yutsano
@RSA: Add Barbara Kingslover into that mix.
satby
@Yutsano: I think John D MacDonald captured Florida better in his Traves McGee series, which have been mentioned before. I’m not a huge fan of Hiassen either, have started books by him twice and don’t think I ever got past the first chapter in either one. As dated as the McGee series is in many ways, a lot of his descriptions of Florida and the people there still ring true.
MattF
A few weekends ago I read Donna Tartt’s front-page NYT Book Review essay about Charles Portis. Hell of a good read. And it led me to read the book True Grit and watch the Coen bros movie of the same name. Both very much worth doing. I haven’t really come to any conclusions about either, since they are both more or less like getting hit over the head repeatedly with a two by four, and it takes a little while to recover and think about it. But the book and the movie are both ‘regional’ in a good way. I guess the Coens make regional movies, but each one is in a different region…
Portis is a different story– he was very much a regional guy, and according to Tartt, he knew his particular region down to the last detail. And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten so far.
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: Key difference between the “official history” and the “true story.”
England: The Irish were dirty animals so we had to civilize them.
Irish: Watch us use your language better than anyone who ever lived.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Thanks! I am not on top of the regional abbreviations.
trollhattan
@Yutsano:
The struggle is real!
zhena gogolia
@BGinCHI:
Elmore Leonard knows how to capture a region.
Of course he knows how to do everything.
piratedan
@RSA: I was going to suggest that Tony Hillerman manages to capture the AZ/New Mexico vibe pretty well in this Leaphorn and Chee stories.
JA Jance also does a nice job of getting the Southern AZ vibe with her Joanna Brady mysteries and also has a similar bent for Seattle for an additional detective series that she runs.
Stephen King definitely has a New England/Maine vibe that continues thru his stories as well.
BGinCHI
@MattF: Portis was a GREAT writer. Full stop. Read all his books and you won’t ever be sorry.
He was from Arkansas, nearby where my mother is from, and where I spent part of every summer growing up. I’m pretty sure one of our distant relatives is mentioned early in the book, but I’ve never traced it. How many “Biggers” could there be?
Sab
Not ancient or old literature, but I thought Laura Leigh Morris’s “Jaws of Life” short story collection was amazing. Set in West Virginia, which we Ohioans sneer at, but a bunch of those stories are still resonating with me years after I first read them.
I think she was featured here on some writer’s weekend showcase.
BGinCHI
@piratedan: Never read Jance. Tucson? Any good?
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: History is written by the winners; literature is not.
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: Accurate.
zhena gogolia
Not US, but Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea has a great sense of place and atmosphere.
K488
@BGinCHI: I watched the record stores disappear from Ann Arbor during the 30 years I was there, and there’s really nothing like that left here. The downtown is still recognizable from the film, though, despite certain changes. I was out driving south of town a few years ago and all of a sudden things looked strangely familiar. It was on a road where they shot the bike race with the Italian teem.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI:
As a great admirer of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (among many), I approve this sentiment.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Yutsano:
Kind of? I know both Reeves who played the Superman characters ended up in tragic circumstances.
As for Dean Cain? His was easily one of my favorite versions of the character. He didn’t have much of career after Lois and Clark, did he? I know he’s a right-wing nut job sadly
oatler.
Seinbeck’s Salinas books like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.
Craig
@BGinCHI: it’s the third leg of my sports movie stool, along with Slap Shot, and The Bad News Bears. Double dose of Jackie Earle Haley
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
It was amusing growing up there and learning in school that the Northwest Territories described a completely different region, and then we’d ask “What about Alaska?” I think we ended up using Northwest, Northwester and Northwestest” to describe which is which.
K488
May I drop in a vote for Wallace Stegner, whose quasi-autobiographical novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain has some of the most vivid writing about place I have ever read. While I have never been to Saskatchewan or Utah, his writing conjured as real a place as any I’ve encountered in literature, or the real world.
debbie
Reynolds Price for the South. Obviously, Wallace Stegner for the West. I would also add Ivan Doig for the West. He may not have been Stegner’s literary equal, but he was a damn good yarn spinner. I’m still shivering from his description of two sheep herders lost in a blizzard on the frontier which I read back in the 1980s!
Craig
@satby: I concur.
WaterGirl
@piratedan: Agree with your first two, wholeheartedly.
Stephen King is too scary for me, so I can’t speak to that one.
Sab
@SiubhanDuinne: I very much wish the Irish had saved Turloch O’ Carolan’ s lyrics. His tunes are great, but everyone said he sang like a frog. So maybe great lyrics? We will never know.
trollhattan
@Craig:
LOVE “Slap Shot.” Guess I’d nominate “North Dallas 40” or “Bull Durham” as my third stool leg but yours works too.
prostratedragon
Humidity: Summer of Sam drips with it, and really catches the tense feeling of NYC that summer.
Sab
@K488: Yes, yes, yes!! Stegner!
BGinCHI
@K488: I love that scene!
I used to stop in Ann Arbor driving from Toronto/Buffalo to IN, just to eat, stop at Zingerman’s, and buy music.
trollhattan
@K488:
“Beyond the 100th Meridian” is a favorite. Stegner was an amazing writer.
ETA Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey fit in there somehow, as regional writers.
Brachiator
@SiubhanDuinne:
Throw in John Millington Synge, Samuel Beckett and Eugene O’Neill as well.
It is amazing the degree to which modern English literature was dominated by Irish and Irish American writers.
MomSense
@Yutsano:
I’m still heartbroken about the Reeves. They were friends of my parents (I saw them sometimes, too) and were very kind to me when I was a teenager and had a really bad injury. Dana was an amazing singer. She and my stepdad (pianist) would do impromptu performances.
BGinCHI
@Craig: Those are the 3 greatest sports movies of all times. Spot on.
Slap Shot the most underrated, as it’s famous for its brassy comedy, but is really profound as a study of the rust belt small town.
Hyperbolic, but I think maybe Newman’s greatest performance.
Omnes Omnibus
@prostratedragon: I just can’t get over Lee using the Who as his example of punk rock.
debbie
@MomSense:
OT, but did you see the Lincoln Project’s ad about Susan Collins? Pursed lips to the extreme!
BGinCHI
@debbie: Great writers all. I’d add Barry Hannah to that list of contemporaries.
Anyone here read Padgett Powell?
zhena gogolia
@BGinCHI:
Bang the Drum Slowly?
piratedan
@BGinCHI: she has about three or four series ongoing… I tend to think she’s kind of formulaic, but ymmv. Her Joanna Brady series is centered around Cochise County (Benson, Winslow, Bisbee, Douglas, Sierra Vista), she has another series with three titles centered around Tucson, another one using the Sedona Area as her settings as well.
The local flavor is kind of touching because she actually mentions restaurants that exist and local landmarks in all of her series, so she’s lived here and knows the landscape, socially at least. Her writing isn’t bad, but neither is it “wow, that was great”.
trollhattan
@BGinCHI:
“What are you doing?”
“Makin’ it look mean!”
.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IahDEcy9Ssc
BGinCHI
@Brachiator: McGahern, Roddy Doyle, Edna O’Brien, Flann O’Brien.
“Born with a tune in their heads” as the old saying goes.
K488
@BGinCHI: I believe that Encore Records, a great used music store, is still operating, or was the last time I was in Ann Arbor a couple of years ago. Can’t tell you how many CD’s I found there!
James E Powell
@BGinCHI:
Shakespeare’s agent on line 2
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Never said this publicly before, but I don’t care for the way Spike uses music in his films. Not the music itself. Its use.
Even in DtRT, which is a masterpiece. It’s just too much….
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Has A Confederacy of Dunces been mentioned yet?
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: Everyone else playing for 4th…….
Craig
@BGinCHI: I lived in South Western Virginia in the 80s, and that book nailed Appalachia. It boggled my mind the first time I read it. The Scrapper is one of my favorite Short Stories. Time and Again is just horrifying. I’ve given this book away so many times.
BGinCHI
@piratedan: Thanks! Have someone to whom I’ll recommend.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I think he did it well in Inside Man, but it was also very, very limited.
Spanky
@SiubhanDuinne: Also once-removed Irishmen like George Denis Patrick Carlin.
For the PNW, Sometimes a Great Notion actually put me off the region. It was one of those novels I wasn’t exactly enjoying, but still couldn’t put down.
And I can’t think of any good examples for the Maryland region. Excluding DC, please.
raven
The Ninth Wave by Eugene Burdick (Fail Safe and The Ugly American) is a fascinating look at California surfing, politics and Stanford in the late 30’s.
Delk
Under other art forms: Sufjan Stevens Invites You To: Come On Feel the ILLINOISE
BGinCHI
@Craig: Yep, me too.
It’s like other things, but there’s nothing else like it.
JMG
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (book and movie both) is a perfect rendition of the Boston I moved to in the early ’70s.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Funny, I was thinking about that movie today. I can’t remember it at all and want to re-watch it.
Blanchard do the soundtrack?
Hungry Joe
Re Pacific Northwest: Can’t leave out Ken Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion.”
Edit: Dammit, Spanky!
raven
@mad citizen: And the TV series Breaking Away was filmed here in Athens, Ga.
Faithful Lurker
As a native Floridian, I think Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings captures the true heart of rural Florida. The casual racism, the struggle to survive a harsh and unforgiving environment are spot on. I love Cross Creek the most.
My husband, whose family is from the Ozarks, says that Daniel Woodrell’s books are true to the region. I loved the movie, Winter’s Bone. We lived 5 years in very rural Misery and I recognized the people.
BGinCHI
@raven: Cool. Will check that out.
dexwood
I’ll add to the Southwest lit suggestions. Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Heart of Aztlan and Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya died a few weeks ago. He was a good human. Both Anaya and John Nichols of the previously mentioned Milagro endorsed The Journal of Antonio Montoya by Rick Collignon whose day job is that of a roofer. These are truly New Mexican writers who know how to spin a tale about a place and its people.
BGinCHI
@Delk: Maybe the only one to capture downstate IL in all its shitty glory.
Craig
@BGinCHI: for Newman I’d got with Reg Dunlop, Butch, and his Detective Harry Ross in the underrated Twilight. Not the vampire movies.
BGinCHI
@JMG: Oh, LOVE LOVE both book and film.
To the point of obsession.
Brachiator
There are so many interesting California writers.
For now, I will simply mention Susan Straight, who has written very interesting work set in Southern California, especially Riverside.
Ken
Flipside, are there any regions that are a big blank spot in the literature/art map?
I just googled for “literature about idaho” and “literature about north dakota” and got hits, but I can’t say any of the novels struck me as famous or top-line – but that may reflect my reading habits.
raven
@Hungry Joe: And the film with Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Lee Remick and Richard Jaeckel (in one of the most agonizing death scenes ever) was pretty good.
BGinCHI
@Faithful Lurker: I have always wanted to like Woodrell’s books more than I do. The film was fabulous.
Cross Creek is great.
Wasn’t there a film of that with Mary Steenburgen? Gosh, I was in love with her a long time ago….
AliceBlue
Flannery O’Connor. She may not be everyone’s cuppa, but she captured the gothic/grotesque side of Georgia like no one else.
BGinCHI
@dexwood: I saw that Anaya died. Bless Me, Ultima is a great book.
I never read Nichols’ book, but Milagro Beanfield War film is excellent.
BGinCHI
@Craig: Hud, too.
BGinCHI
@Ken: Great question.
Craig
@Craig: Flannery O’Conner gets The South
dexwood
@BGinCHI: The book, as is often said, is better, the characters and setting more developed, but I love the movie, too.
MagdaInBlack
@K488:
Thanks for that prompt. I love Wallace Stegner. Try ” Wolf Willow” his memories and reflections on SW Saskatchewan, where his family homesteaded.
BGinCHI
I’ll mention two other writers I love, for their evocation of place:
–Kentucky’s Wendell Berry (who has been doing some stupid shit lately in Lexington)
–William Maxwell (I’ve said it here before many times, but if you’ve never read So Long, See You Tomorrow, get off your ass and do so)
MagdaInBlack
@BGinCHI:
I also love Wendell Berry, but whats he been up to now?
Eta: I want to take your classes =-)
Craig
@BGinCHI: oh yeah for sure, and The Hustler. I just like picking hat tricks, but with an actor like Paul Newman, he doesn’t make it easy. Henry Gondorff.
BGinCHI
I also want to mention Jesmyn Ward, whose Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury, 2012) is a devastating, amazing novel about what Katrina did to poor African Americans, outside New Orleans.
All her books are terrific.
Peale
Maybe Tony Hillerman for the Four Corners?
Fargo for the prairie and plains.
BGinCHI
@Craig: She embodied it, for better and worse.
Florida Frog
@Sab: fellow Harper? I understand that his lyrics were witty and sometimes quite barbed. I’d love to know the text of O’Carolan’s Quarrel with His Landlady” or “Ode to Whiskey”. The lore in my harp circles is that when his doctor forbad him to drink , O’Carolan wrote such a scathing lyric to a particularly hook-rich tune that his poor doctor promptly scribbled a prescription for whiskey. Must have had a sharp pen indeed.
raven
@AliceBlue:
BGinCHI
@MagdaInBlack: Ugh, google it. About a mural he wants to save….
Hungry Joe
@raven: Yeah, they did a decent job of wrestling that big, sprawling novel into a movie. Kesey was pretty much done after that — even a hard head like his can start to short out if you zap it with enough acid; seems there ARE limits, after all. I met him once, very briefly (like, introduced at a function, and that was it), and he struck me as a little … fried.
(Anyone else’s name (nym) and other info disappear from the field? I keep having to re-enter everything.)
Spanky
@BGinCHI: Your mention of Berry doing stupid shit caught me by surprise – I didn’t know he was still alive.
I assume you mean this (per Wikipedia):
BGinCHI
@MagdaInBlack: Well, thanks to the pandemic, you could. We’re totally remote. Email me if you want info.
CaseyL
@satby: I still have a bunch of the Travis McGees. First read them, oh, decades ago, and enjoyed them (his female characters were very well done, for a man writing in a sexist genre at a sexist time).
I’ve been re-reading them mostly as time capsules. MacDonald’s evocation of small Florida towns, and Ft. Lauderdale before it became a Spring Break haven, are fascinating – and poignant. At least to me.
BGinCHI
@Craig: Yes, I knew there was one I was missing.
raven
Michener wrote a number of interesting books about “place”.
Faithful Lurker
@BGinCHI: I think they did make a movie with Steenbergen (sp?). I was disappointed in it. They cleaned up the gritty environment quite a bit. I loved the story where Rawlings shoots the neighbor’s pig that keeps eating her petunias and then faces down the redneck farmer with her shotgun. I knew guys like that farmer in Florida, Missouri and Michigan and her courage was inspiring. I grew up in Jacksonville, close to the St Johns River. Rawlings’s boat journey from the beginning to the end of that magnificent river never gets old.
I have the same problem with Woodrell’s books but the movie was wonderful
JMG
@Ken: Well, I grew up in Delaware, and as far as I know we are undepicted in both literature and film. I guess it would have to be a short story. True fact: When we had state history in fourth grade in the late ’50s, it only took half the year. After the DuPont company was founded in the early 19th century, basically nothing has happened since.
BGinCHI
@Spanky: Yepper.
prostratedragon
@Omnes Omnibus: Heh, I imagine thereby hangs a tale — or maybe he really just liked them.
Edit: Thinking a little further, his main characters were not that cutting edge, though they were mostly unaware of that fact. Would have to see it again, but maybe that’s a hint.
MagdaInBlack
@BGinCHI:
Thank you, I’ll do that.
BGinCHI
@JMG: Tax haven, banking. One great brewery.
AliceBlue
@raven: That sounds really interesting–thanks!
raven
@Hungry Joe: Further!
raven
@Faithful Lurker: I liked it, I have the Cross Creek Cookbook too! Rip Torn is awesome in the film.
MomSense
@debbie:
Yesterday I got a news alert from the Lewiston Sun Journal saying Gideon was up by 5 in a PPP poll.
Sab
@Florida Frog: Used to be a harper but I have lapsed ( tuning took all my practice time). Never liked anyone’s music as much as his. I suspect his lyrics were as good as his music, but we will never know.
eddie blake
that sort of fiction isn’t really the stuff i read, but i AM really enjoying this conversation.
Sab
@Florida Frog: Also too, my dogs hate the harp with a passion. Hurts their ears.
Go into the next room guys. That is my retirement plan. Harp sitting in the corner waiting.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: No idea who did the soundtrack.
billcinsd
Being from the Great Plains, I still remember 2 books from the Literature of the Graet Plains class I took in HS 40 years ago. These are “Lord Grizzly” by Frederick Manfred, a Professor at the University of South Dakota. This is a story about Hugh Glass and his battle to get back from being ravaged by a grizzly bear. Same story as The Revenant. The second is “Giants in the earth” by Ole Rolvaag, which is a very good book about Norwegian farmers in South Dakota. This includes the discovery of winter wheat
Other South Dakota based art would be Oscar Micheaux’s book “The Conquest” and the movie version of The Conquest, called “The Homesteader” which are sort of autobiographical of his life as a homesteader near Gregory, SD. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books are in their too.
Not being 100+ years old, I have no idea if these are good representations of the old times, but there isn’t much new here
Craig
Dashiell Hammett gets The Bay Area. He portrays SF in all of it’s grand and seedy forms. He nails the difference between the city and the small towns around it. The Continental Op also gets the dustier parts of California, like Red Harvest.
MattF
@Craig: Red Harvest was (they say) set in Helena Montana. ‘Poisonville’.
ETA: Butte, according to Google.
raven
@AliceBlue: The film “Wise Blood” is pretty interesting. The dvd has an interview with screenwriters Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald. Flannery babysat for them when they were kids.
raven
@BGinCHI: yes
JMG
A brief diversion. Both local and national TV news (ABC) tonight tried to stir up a shark story because sharks were sighted off Nauset Beach in Cape Cod, Plymouth and off Long Island, and of course a woman was attacked and killed in Maine this week. Which is very sad, but the whole thing seemed so quaint. Thousands of Americans are dying of a plague and we’re supposed to be scared of sharks?
raven
The Loved One and Lord Love a Duck are pretty good looks at LA in the early 60’s.
narya
@BGinCHI: It’s one of my favorite Newman performances, but I have a weak spot for “Nobody’s Fool.” I love that novel, and he brought Sully to life.
Starfish
@SiubhanDuinne: Right?
I got to sit in on some readings at the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium some years ago.
I think The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas was the most recent thing that I read by a southern author.
A friend recommended The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity, but I have not had a chance to read it yet.
I definitely read some Faulkner in school, but having to read things in school ruins stuff for everyone.
BGinCHI
@billcinsd: This excellent list also reminds me that Willa Cather does wonders for Nebraska. Not sure it deserved her.
Craig
@MattF: that guy really got around.
BGinCHI
@narya: Totally agree. Great novel and film.
Hard for any aging actor to pull off what he does there.
Craig
For a quick diversion into movies. Smokey and the Bandit just isn’t possible outside of The South. Totally tied to the region.
laura
Sacramento is my adopted town and they lay claim to the brilliant Joan Didion. But I have to confess that out of all the great and good authors listed that I have never gotten over reading the Milagro Beanfield War. It’s a must read that was forced on me as an initiation. In turn, I’ve passed it along as a gift and remember my dad telling me him that he just had to wake mom up to read to her because it was so funny that he didnt want to laugh alone. Just deeply, deeply human and lasting.
I got Tom Robbins to sign all my books when he came to town about 20 years ago. He also confirmed to me the rumor that Elvis was reading Another Roadside Attraction when the good lord called him home and he slipped the earthly bonds while taking a read. So there’s that.
prostratedragon
@billcinsd: Thanks for mentioning Oscar Micheaux. I’ve seen a couple of his movies, but not The Homesteader, and had forgot about his time in SD, though I did recall that there were some unusual things about his background.
KSinMA
Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” for Idaho, and her “Gilead” series for Iowa.
KSinMA
@BGinCHI: ^2
Hungry Joe
@MattF: Re “Poisonville”: “He also called a shirt a shoit.”
WaterGirl
@BGinCHI: If anyone wants to contact BG and you don’t have his address, send me an email and I’ll pass your contact information along.
Drdavechemist
As an interloper with Hoosier connections (IU grad student from ‘81-‘86 plus a few stray summers) I fully agree that both Breaking Away and Hoosiers capture something essential about a time and place. If I can diverge into music, John Mellencamp also captured something elemental about southern Indiana in Jack and Diane, and if we branch off into nonfiction, I just finished reading The Man They Wanted Me to Be which is part memoir/part cultural analysis from a self-described “sensitive” guy who grew up in the 80s and 90s in that part of the country under the influence of the oppressive toxic masculinity that helps explain why Indiana is so much redder than the rest of the rust belt.
Hungry Joe
@KSinMA: The movie (“Housekeeping”) was great, too. Nailed the book, just NAILED it.
Emma from FL
@satby: perception is a very individual thing, isn’t it? I have lived on and off in Florida since 1985 and I find Hiaasen about one twisted step off reality.
CaseyL
A 1970s miniseries called “The Awakening Land” set in the midwest (Ohio?) in the 1830s intrigued the hell out of me. It was about an era unfamiliar to me, and starred some of my favorite actors (Elizabeth Montgomery and Hal Holbrook). I liked it so much I went out and read the books the miniseries was based on.
A wonderful series about the white folk who settled the Midwest. One thing I particularly remember (from the book, not the miniseries) was how dark and threatening the huge forests were to those pioneers/settlers. I’ve grown up in a time where there are so few forests left we can’t imagine even wanting to cut them down. The idea that a forest could be so huge, and dense, and dark, that it was terrifying, and people couldn’t wait to get rid of the trees to let some sunlight in, to be able to see farther than 10 feet, stuck with me.
prostratedragon
In movies there’s a subgenre of Sierra noirs that evoke the California back country quite vividly. Among my favorites are High Sierra which was filmed in various places near Mt. Whitney and in the San Bernardino forests, and Out of the Past, whose small town phases were filmed in the vicinity of Bridgeport, Mono County, on the East Walker River. That is the Mono County courthouse, which still stands, in one scene.
Drdavechemist
@Starfish: The Hate U Give was the summer reading for the school where I teach. Though the author is from the South, my sense of place for the book was more of a not quite NYC that might have been Philadelphia or Baltimore but without any specific landmarks. Did you get something different?
Riodawg
@RSA: Such a great one! We live in NM, and it’s a really unique and special place.
Florida Frog
@Sab: Poor pups! My cats used to climb into the sound box when they were kittens. They purred along with the harp. They did mess up the resonance though. I love O’Carolan’s airs too. Hope you can get back to it soon. There is nothing like making music especially with friends. The thing I miss most about staying home is playing with my quartet. It is so much fun.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: But the history of the US largely WAS written by former Confederates and neo-Confederates through the 20th century. Which suggests that they actually won.
BGinCHI
@Drdavechemist: Damn, I’ll have to check that out. That’s my experience completely.
ETA: Ahh, Sexton’s book! He’s fabulous.
Emma from FL
Faulkner. But he hurts.
Starfish
@Drdavechemist: Baltimore is so conflicted about where it wants to be as a place.
I guess I was thinking more about where the authors were from than where the books were set.
I did not think that highly of Where the Crawdads Sing. I know the place was the South. The ambiance was okay, but I did not love the characters.
Starfish
@Emma from FL: I had to read As I Lay Dying in high school. A classmate read A Rose for Emily for some writing assignment. She was always so protective of her work. I read it later. It was creepy.
billcinsd
@prostratedragon: Well, while living in SD his wife gave birth, emptied their bank account, and left while he was gone for a while on business. She complained about him not giving her enough attention. Her father sold their homestead out from under him, too. This started him on the path to The Conquest
K488
@MagdaInBlack: Have done so! Recapitulation is also excellent.
Anoniminous
@JMG:
H’mmmmmmmmmmm
Shark attacking people off the coast of New England in the summer.
That might make a good movie.
Tim
The Foxfire series.
Craig
George Pelecanos really had DC nailed. Since he’s become a screenwriter he’s slipped a bit. He’s still stuck in the 80s-early 90s, characters talking about the GoGo scene like it’s a fresh vibrant thing that’s exploding
HinTN
Late to the party here, but given the currency of the discussion if race, there’s a book written by a gentleman born in my home town, Sewanee, Tennessee, and edited by another member of the Sewanee community, Arthur Ben Chitty, that tells the tale(s) if being black in the early 20th century. The book is Ely – Too Black Too White.
zhena gogolia
@Starfish:
Don’t get OO started on As I Lay Dying. He and I were once (separated by some decades) subjected to a cruel experiment involving that book.
Craig
@Tim: absolutely. Instant Appalachia, Southern Style.
oatler.
@raven: You’re right about The Loved One. It was so crazy I thought it was mostly Terry Southern but I found out later there was a lot of Waugh’s original book in it.
K488
Another Southern writer, Robert Penn Warren. All the Kings Men is a fascinating study of politics in Louisiana in the ’20’s and ’30’s, following the rise of Hughie Long in the character Willie Stark. And wildly pertinent to today’s political scene. “Man is conceited in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the did to the stench of the shroud. There’s always something.” That stuck with me the first time I read the book, nearly a half-century ago.
dexwood
@Craig: His first four or five books as they advanced through the decades were really good. He knew DC, not the power players, but the citizens and their hang outs.
Sab
@Sab: Can I reiterate how much I love Laura Leigh Morris ‘ s short stories. ” Jaws of Life.” It is amazing.
CCL
@piratedan: Hillerman for Four Corners area; Larry McMurtry’s earlier stuff – Lonesome Dove etc. for Southern Texas. Though I did get frustrated with the final one I read – where the last few chapters had a page each and screamed “I am behind my deadline and I gotta finish this.”
Sab
@Hungry Joe: That was one of my favorite novels ever. Sprawling, but the characters were intense and complex.
Barbara
@Craig: I was going to avoid the South, but the story “Revelation” is my candidate for best American short story ever written. It cuts like a razor blade through the outer layers of Southern life, especially religion and class, but race as well. O’Connor, like Faulkner, shied away from writing directly about the African American experience, ironically because they understood that it wasn’t their experience. I can only imagine what they would have thought of a work like The Help. For current Southern writers, I would read Jesmyn Ward.
I have a few dark horse candidates for works that really capture a region. One is Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure, and the other is Joan Didion’s California trilogy, Run River, Play It as It Lays and the Book of Common Prayer. The first is far and away the best of the three, about the Central Valley, and the other two reflect the vision of someone who knows the cultural zeitgeist of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 60s really, really well.
ETA: I actually don’t know if Run River is about the Central Valley. I think it’s actually further north. I am not good on California geography like that. I think Didion grew up in the Sacramento area. Nina Warren was one of her good friends.
badgirl
167 comments and no one has mentioned Annie Proulx and her short stories of Wyoming?
HinTN
If you want to go Faulkner but without the deep south you can find some amazing work in his collected short stories. Those from WWII, especially Turnabout, are especially crisp writing.
Sab
@Florida Frog: One of the benefits of lockdown is I am at home with my neglected harp and not much to do. Cats don’t hate it like dogs do, and dogs are downstairs because they are afraid of my huge tuxedo cat.
Sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Winners publish it, however.
HinTN
Then there’s Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. That catches so much of family dynamics while set in the rugged logging culture of the PNW.
JeanneT
It’s not set in the US, but I’ve been indulging in the Commissario Brunetti mystery series by Donna Leon. The books are set in Venice, and I’ve been wallowing in all the sensations and practical challenges that she describes of living in that city, so different from my west Michigan experience. Plus bonus old nobility, international big business, political corruption and organized crime complications. It’s been a great mental get-away; I’m going to be sad when I catch up to the most recent mystery.
Craig
@dexwood: absolutely. I hung out in DC a lot as a kid and his old books are true to that place/time.
HinTN
You want a sense of place in the South you could do worse than the short stories of Peter Taylor.
Craig
@Barbara: I’ll go back and read Revelation tonight. Thanks.
HinTN
@HinTN: Now I see others have already been there. Still, a fine piece of work.
Sab
OT. My city is fonally repaving my street. Weirad and wasteful because the filled potholes last week.
So they stripped the pavement and opened up a hole right behind my driveway. Difficult to back out. Sigh.
There go two miscreants
Maybe this is my biases showing, but the movie Body Heat for Florida. Also ditto on the biases, but I like Hiaasen.
Also, for the Maryland area (Chesapeake Bay generally), A. Aubrey Bodine published several books of his photos around the region, especially Baltimore. He was a long-time photographer for the Baltimore Sun. Not sure how widely they sold though.
HinTN
@HinTN: For a completely different look at the absurdity of war there’s Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon.
Mo MacArbie
Hmm, upstate New York. I guess Buffalo ’66 captures it pretty well. Bleak despair, pointlessness, dated music, the quest to kill Scott Norwood.
HinTN
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Nor since, and that’s an amazing book. Thank you for reminding me!
Tim
@Emma from FL: Flannery O’Connor also can be hurtful, I find.
Brachiator
Nearing the end of the thread, I suppose, let me toss in James Clavell’s Noble House. A bit over long, but still a very interesting novel about Hong Kong.
HinTN
@Yutsano: The very early Doc Ford books by Randy Wayne White captured Florida pretty well.
Scamp Dog
@Craig: ooh, I love Hammet and the Continental Op stories!
prostratedragon
@billcinsd:
I saw those details in his Wiki bio. They sound like such lovely people –I mean, stealing the man’s farm!
I’d like to see The Conquest. Maybe also a contemporary maker could find another good movie in there.
Yutsano
Since we’re not limited to books, i will say Mystic Pizza does capture the tension between townies and visitors pretty well. But damn Julia’s accent…
J R in WV
@BGinCHI:
So true. Great writing, great story teller. Took his own life at the age of 26, after establishing his success.
So sad!
BGinCHI
@Mo MacArbie: If you check back, it’s worth reading Dan Simmons’ (yes, that asshole, but good writer) Buffalo-set Hard Case series of noirs. They’re really good.
BGinCHI
@J R in WV: That article I linked to is terrific about the details of his life and its end.
RSA
Yes! I loved Hillerman’s novels as well.
You’re also right about Stephen King and Maine.
trollhattan
Back from my bike ride (kinda hot) and I remembered Cheever. Upper East Side and Westchester? John Cheever’s your man.
RSA
I’ve only had the chance to visit once, Santa Fe and Taos, but I enjoyed the trip immensely.
PJ
@Tim: she’s been cancelled now, for her decidedly less than progressive views on race; not sure how that will affect her place in the canon.
Wolvesvalley
It’s not recent, and it’s not about a region of the US, but I have to mention Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford for its wonderful evocation of rural Oxfordshire in the 1880s and 1890s.
J R in WV
@Faithful Lurker:
Don’t know the writing this story came from, but it rings a bell with me. My grandma, mom’s mother, had a tiny farm, and kept a big garden for many years.
One summer, her neighbor’s prize fighting cock, which was probably worth a pretty penny, as gambling on fighting roosters was big money back in the day was loose and into her tomatoes. She shot it with her .22 rifle (with which I learned to shoot years later… my couIsin still has it, and we shoot with it for ole time’s sake) and took it to him hanging from her fist.
I’m pretty sure those fighting roosters were all bone and sinew, but it was his chicken, and she took it straight over there, right next door, and knocked on his door. I don’t know if she took her pistol over, but neither did he. He surely knew she had the pistol, and surely he knew she knew how to use it.
And there’s a West Virginia story, all facts and no BS. She was a church going Baptist raised in Louisa, Kentucky.
PJ
Edith Wharton nails the upper crust of New York society. 120 years later, things have changed superficially, but the always unspoken obsession with wealth and status remains.
“No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity, and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of power.”
And after Lily Bart has had some hard lessons:
”She had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to the emotion it elicits, and generosity of feeling is the only ostentation condemned.”
both from The House of Mirth.
raven
@BGinCHI: I have to mention that I recently read a book written by our former mayor. I think you were here when Gwen was in office? Her book was a historical fiction set in Atlanta and Shady Dale (south of Madison) during the Spanish Flu Pandemic. It’s about a woman who gets a job with Bell Telephone and is responsible for expanding phone service in the Madison area. It’s also a really interesting story about race and centers on a real event where African American were murdered by landowner’s.
Miss Bianca
@K488: Schoolkids, or get outta town.
Sigh. Schoolkids Records and the original Borders Books. Both gone, baby, gone.
Wonder if Zingerman’s is still there. Or the Bagel Factory.
Damn. Making myself nostalgic here.
J R in WV
A great book about Florida, Sarasota and the arts community there, is Duma Key, by Stephen King. Yes, it’s a little weird, Yes, there’s creepy history, all that.
But my mom was an artist in the Sarasota area, and the way King frames the arts folks… amazing. Plus the remote key, the people on those remote keys.
My folks lived right next to where the novel took place in real life, although Duma Key was a fictional island just beyond the actual keys I rode a bike on. Pretty amazing AND strange to be that familiar with a place Stephen King wrote about!!! So realistic, until the weirdness started, but even then, so realistic!
Miss Bianca
@Wolvesvalley: Oh, I love that one. Rural Oxfordshire being one of my favorite places on earth.
Miss Bianca
Also, too, I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Raymond Chandler and his love-hate thang going on with 30s-40’s-era Los Angeles. Chinatown, same time, same place, same sweet smell of corruption.
TomatoQueen
John D MacDonald taught me to love Florida and to mourn it. Travis would be seething at the teeth at the state of the water today, and then do something excruciatingly brutal to a rogue US Sugar employee, while examining his sterling character. I’d read The Yearling many years earlier, and it was only after living in Ft Lauderdale for three years, and leaving for Fort Myers for another seven, and then reading Cross Creek and Cross Creek Kitchens, that I could see how they threaded the state.
Others: Savannah, GA was a stop on the annual trip up and down I-95. Lovely lovely lovely and weird, and fabulous food. Then there’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to blur the distinction between fiction and non as finely as such was ever blurred.
James Lee Burke does New Orleans and having more recently coming into money, Montana. I love the New Orleans he has made and believe he is faithful to it in characterization, and oh can he do humidity. And thunderstorms.
Cheever did Westchester of a certain time, and John O’Hara the same for Philadelphia, but do they stand up? Similar for Ward Just and Louis D Auchincloss.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: You are so right about that!
Tim
@PJ: o, surely “cancelled” is already an ironic in-joke by now; and who was “progressive” then? Irrelevant. She was what she was etc., And “a Good Man Is Hard to Find” remains a wide-awake nightmare, marking one hell of a writer. Timeless.
suezboo
Hesitantly because I know he’s not popular : Tom Wolfe on California surfers and Dr Hunter S Thompson on Hawaii. Can you tell I’m Stuck in the Sixties?
debbie
For sense of place, Bukowski and Carver. I may not choose to visit, but I get a very clear sense of the space they inhabit.
PJ
@Tim: I don’t make the calls, I just report them.