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Flannery O'Connor  (1925 - 1964) is a southern gothic writer.  Alice Walker grew up on the farm next to her. She went to Iowa Writers Workshop and spent time at Yaddo, but retired to the family farm rural Milledgeville Georgia when she found out she had Lupus. She grew up in Savanna, spent some time in Atlanta, even lived in NYC for spell. She lost her father when she was 12. Wise Blood is a novel about weirdos and misfits, and the skulking presence of Christianity. I need to see the John Huston movie based on it. They picked him to make it because he was an atheist. He's quoted as saying after it was done, wistfully, it was about Christianity. American Masters has a wonderful 120 minute documentary on Flannery. We're on a first name basis. These things are available in ephemeral ways, and go behind firewalls unexpectedly, so watch it if you like the history of American writers or are interested in well crafted art that somehow transcends. They want you to buy the DVD for ...

The Violent Bear It Away is by Flannery O'Connor . It is her second novel. She published 3 short story books and 2 novels. Today it amounts to 3 books with the stories collected into one volume.  I'm also reading Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch . The Gooch. She was briefly famous as a child for teaching a chicken to walk backwards. "I ain't worried what my underhead is doing." p. 171. I guess the underhead is subconscious, or maybe the thinking mind, or the observing ego. Who knows. I google scholar-ed it and came up with nothing. Tarwater is the kind of American that says he's going to do things and not talk about it. The introvert who has some thoughts, but doesn't want society to interfere with his vision of what he thinks he knows. A Trump supporter.  I'm not a Catholic (I'm a Buddhist ), but I do sort of like her exploration of the wounded atheist struggling to fight off Christianity. Makes me think of my father, who ...

Read "The Barber" and "The Wildcat" and "The Crop" in The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor . Now I'm on "The Turkey". Listened to Flannery O'Connor episode 59 on the History of Literature Podcast (on Spotify). Rambling meditations on O'Connor as it intersects with the life of the podcaster. His mentor was a correspondent of FO'C. So I read "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" Pretty bleak. I'll have to reread it to appreciate it more. It uses the phrase "pickaninny". My grandfather used that phrase. I reread a Raymond Carver story for a paper I wrote and it became more and more meaningful every reading.

There is the book, which I'm currently reading. Suddenly (page 93) I realized she was portraying the vacuity of southern masculinity. The negative example, the anti-hero. What not to be. And yet you recognize it more than you would care to admit. He's also an atheist in the Bible Belt. He talks about having a church of the no Christ. Then he becomes Humbert Humbert. But then he has O'Connor's sexuality and wafts away, avoiding intimacy, pushes away the teen who tries to crawl into his bed. There's a kind of lack of intimacy in every character, nobody is really wanted or powerful in any real way. Haze is schizoid. Isolation.  Wikipedia writes: "O'Connor states that the book is about freedom, free will, life and death, and the inevitability of belief. Themes of redemption, racism, sexism, and isolation also run through the novel." There is a movie . It's for a fee on Amazon Prime. The cool thing now is that when you search a movie, they will tell you...

I spent a year reading Shakespeare, which turned into 18 months. I'm struggling through Two Noble Kinsmen, and I haven't read H8th. But the question became, who else could I read through . I thought of Dickens, Balzac and Falkner. Today I was thinking about Dostoevsky.  Flannery O'Connor probably wouldn't take a year. Here is some output: Novels Wise Blood (1952) The Violent Bear It Away (1960) Short Stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) The Complete Stories (1971) Other works Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1961) The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1979) The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews (1983) There's a review of documentary in the NY Times today about her. That led me to her latest biography . "Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day." ...