The short stories of Flannery O'Connor book starts out with unpublished stories, her 6 stories for her masters degree. So what you get is a kind a "see the artist develop" start to the book. You can see that she has finely crafted her sentences, she is not just a writer, she is also a great editor of her own work. But this book is everything we could get our hands on. I wonder if there is a 5 best stories book. You can get the way they came out her 2 books with short stories.
She gave us 4 books of art. Digestible is part of the appeal of her oeuvre. There's not an overabundance of writing about her. I'd be curious to see what other famous writers she got to know there.
I began to trust her. She will not make careless mistakes, or disappoint. There is nothing worse than being partially abandoned by a writer. There is a movie out about her. In some ways a project you could get sucked into is the idea that she is part of the cannon. Her racism wants to push her out of the cannon.
She does not have charity of the spirit the way Thomas Merton did because she would be judged racist by our modern standards , but there is a kind of universal spirituality. She may claim it's Catholicism the way Merton would too, but they both don't make it gaudy. They avoid the stuff that pushes me away. In a way, that is the greatest spiritual gift. To not push people away from the spiritual life. So many of them do.
It frustrates me no end that she cannot see her connectedness to African-Americans, or maybe she couldn't hold that insight. In the south it is a convenient target for feelings of disgruntlement. Sometimes I can't figure out what I am that is not disgruntlement. It's too everywhere for me to place negative thoughts.
Great art does two things to me. I want to do art too--that feeling comes to me while reading it. Why did it take me so long to find this writer--is another thought that comes to me, a signal that this is classic stuff.
She went to Iowa's Writer Workshop in 1946 when she was 21. World War 2 was just over. The next year my mother would be born to the boomer generation. I can't get into generational conflict, but I live with my partner and daughter. I know when you kill your father you take over and all that crazy stuff. Now you become the one defending the castle instead of laying siege.
"The Geranium" is a perfect portrait of a racist, including 22 uses of the N word. I cringe, can't say the n word. Somehow I am so disgusted by the word. But it's the narrative of a racist. It's quite a meditation on racism. I can seen now why the one book on her that's not her biography is about trying to rehabilitate her, regarding racism.
She published from 1952 to 1965, and her books aren't coming off copywrite like Philip K. Dick who began publishing in 1952, but churned out the works.
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