Before Flannery O’Connor died in 1964, she wrote “There won’t be any biographies of me, because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”
O’Connor has been proven wrong with the publication of Flannery: The Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch. The book, cited to have gone where no other Flannery O’Connor history has gone before, reveals letters, early criticisms of O’Connor’s work, and cartoons from her college days, while uncovering O’Connor’s own thoughts about herself. Included in the book is a description of O’Connor’s pilgrimage to the healing waters of Lourdes, which a wealthy cousin funded in the hopes of curing O’Connor’s debilitating lupus. She admits in a letter to a friend, “I prayed there for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I care about less.”
The new biography is a triumph in its own, but for those who may have believed, as did the subject, that there was not much to know about Flannery O’Connor, it is a rare gift.
Wait a minute? Is this a lost Pink Floyd album? A B-Side that Fear Factory hid from fans in the late 90’s? Or is this Ozzie Osborne suddenly singing melodies again? With much disappointment Crack the Skye, the new effort from metal band Mastodon, enforces my opinion that some bands with tremendous talent must eventually fail, with at least one album.
This may sound horribly inauspicious but this character trait is something I have long held as an ultimate truth. It’s aligned with my love for the idea of the Phoenix rising from the flames. So, in the end, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But, it’s not what I wanted from this album. Especially now – when I feel I needed a really good metal album to keep my faith alive in metal music. (My faith has been waning ever so slowly the past four years.)
When I first started listening to Mastodon it was late 2002, a five-song EP released by Relapse Records. At the time I was living on the East Coast and would take trips to Philadelphia every summer. The storefront for Relapse Records had just opened the previous year – 2001. That summer, they were playing the song, Hail to Fire in the store as I was browsing around for some Neurosis. Needless to say I was hooked – line and sinker.
Ever since then I have been a devoted Mastodon fan, going to any shows I could, any huge tours including Hellfest, just to see them and buying their albums and merchandise. I also have always spread the gospel of Mastodon to the unconverted in the realm of metal music and have never erased them from my Band listing on any of my MP3 players. Mastodon has always managed to create albums that define a mood and set the stage for big things to come. I feel, especially in examples like Remission, their first full length; they really had a concrete identity; each song layering on the other, each one telling its individual story but relying on the previous one as prologue. Their sound was strangely hypnotic and drudged up. The album Leviathan that followed proved that Mastodon could deliver a metal album with exactness in execution – their instruments weren’t just making noise – they were making music.
Listening to Sound Opinions this past Saturday, Greg Kott said he really appreciated the melodic nature of the album. I can’t agree more. There are some pretty beautiful melodies on this album, but their not melodies I would ever associate with Mastodon. Maybe another reason I’m bitter is because there is no continuity in the landscape of the new album, except for lyrically. Being a writer I am attune to the lyrics above all else. This album is filled with fantastical images of monsters and wizards and sorcery. So maybe that is why there are so many filler parts with the guitarist doing four minute solos and every time a decrescendo ends a crashing drum roll begins. It certainly builds wonder – but not the kind I think they were looking to create. Instead I found myself realizing the album was forgettable, and tragically self absorbed and self aggrandizing.
Ok – I’m not going to stand on a soapbox and talk about “when bands sign to majors they lose their soul,” because their last album – which also scored an MTV award among other accolades was put out by Warner Brothers – but something happened on the way to becoming a little metal band that was larger than life – and then suddenly thrust into the limelight of notoriety in circles that didn’t associate with them when they were on an indie label.
Either way, Crack the Skye won’t be on my spring playlist. But I probably will see them live at the Metro on April 30th. For old times sake and to hear those songs that I know from heart.
There is something strange about witnessing men all suited up and donning top hats on the cusp of daybreak. The official name of this group of gentleman is, The Inner Circle. They are the caretakers of the famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, who predicts if we will see six more weeks of winter or an early end by whether or not he sees his shadow. Phil is named after King Phillip and has been predicting the weather atop Gobbler’s Knob since February 2, 1887.
What’s amazing, is that after all these years, and all the incarnations of Phil (groundhogs average a lifespan of about 6-7 years, so you do the math), that he is one of the largest tourist attractions in the state of Pennsylvania during the winter months. Plus he still has the recognition of being on most every printed calendar year after year on the day of February 2nd.
I have been watching video of Phil since I was a little girl. It’s amazed me that after all these years Phil has never bitten or been rough with any of his handlers, as they hold two different scrolls to his face when he is atop his little home (which looks like a tree stump). They hold the two scrolls to his nose, and see which one he moves toward or sort of moves his nose at, and they choose which scroll to read to the crowd based on his movements.
What bothered me this year and has in past years as well, is that I would prefer they let Phil crawl out from his home on his own accord, and not drag him out. I would also like to see them not throw the poor little guy around so much, this year at one point his little legs were wailing in the air as they threw him around like a little rag doll.
Nevertheless, with everything else going on in this country, it feels good to watch an American tradition like Groundhog Day continue and flourish. It’s adorable to witness the simple and genuine allegiance the Inner Circle show Phil, and the crowd grows larger each year. It’s just too bad that we’re stuck with six more weeks of winter, but I don’t think we needed a groundhog seeing his shadow to convince us of that.
I have the fortune of working with the mother of one of the producers and cinematographers of the new film about Norman Porter. I’m pretty excited for her, as her son’s film has won the distinction of Best Documentary from the Boston International Film Festival and is currently drumming up some media attention, from places like GapersBlock and from the Tribune which just gave it three and a half stars. After being convicted of a double murder in Massachusetts, Porter came to Chicago in 1985, changed his name to J.J. Jameson and proceeded to live a life of a Poet.
The film is screening at 8:15 1/29/08 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
NOTE: This essay was written and presented by Delia Ford, member of the StoryStudio Novelists Roundtable. Each roundtable member presents a report on a novel that has had an impact on their own writing process. Delia shared her epiphany after reading Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies.
I feel quite strongly that books come to you when you need them. Not the day you purchase them, and stick them on the shelf. Or the day a friend hands it to you and insists that you simply must read this, ‘it is so you.’ Not the day you crack it open for a peek and find the language a little impenetrable, or a vast departure from what you expect of this author. The book knows what you need. Even if you do not. It knows when to reach out even if you are disinclined to listen. Several of my favorites sat, unread, in my home for years before pulling me in. Outlander, Firedrake’s Eye, Shadow of the Wind, Time Traveler’s Wife, and now The Friendly Young Ladies.
They know, you see, what your missing piece is. You may only sense a vague discontentment. But the book will know when its key will fill your lock. It knows how to answer questions that you can’t even articulate. How to weave a narrative? What do mysterious or sacred spaces do to a hero? A villain? How can you float from one closely held perspective to another? What constitutes bad taste or prejudice? Does the modern reader appreciate metaphor? Do I?
I have been a fan of Mary Renault since reading The King Must Die in seventh grade. It was, perhaps, most of all, the book which defined my taste for historical fiction. Already an enthusiast of Mythology, I was pulled into the historical world of Athens. Theseus became for me less operatic and more tangible. With Renault’s mythical characters, the divinity was secondary. And quite possibly delusional manifestations of the characters’ minds. So, I bought all her books and read them hungrily over the years. It was by her hand that I peered at Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great.
The Friendly Young Ladies is not this book. When I purchased it five years ago, I never did press past the first two pages. I found it not long enough ago nor far enough away for what I had come to expect from Mary Renault. So it sat, unmolested for a time until a recent conversation about Mary Renault recalled it to me. The right book at the right time.
Set in England in the 1940’s, the story picks up with a girl of seventeen, Elsie, withering under the deluge of her parent’s bickering. She makes herself quite ill over it all and a doctor is called in to tend to her. The doctor, Peter, is a substitute for the vacationing family doctor. Elsie becomes besotted of him and he does nothing to discourage her. He feels it his place to act as surrogate to draw out young ladies who are repressed or otherwise psychically damaged. At the end of his tenure in the countryside, he lays the seeds of a notion that Elsie should reacquaint herself with the older sister who fled years earlier under a cloud of scandal.
And so, emboldened by Peter, Elsie discovers her sister’s whereabouts and sets off unannounced to the houseboat on the Thames where her sister is in residence. Leonora, or Leo, is Elsie’s sister, older by ten years. She shares the houseboat with Helen, a nurse and technical illustrator. And there’s something ...unusual… about their relationship. Also, inhabiting a small midstream island, is Joe, a close friend to Leo. He is a writer of serious books. Leo, as it turns out writes western pulp under the pseudonym Tex O’Hara.
Elsie uses the temerity in leaving home to find her storied sister as an opening to reconnect with her ludicrous crush, Peter. She sends a letter. When Peter does show up, unannounced, Leo and Helen are immediately aware that his interest in Elsie is actually piqued curiosity in their own arrangement. There is a bit of jockeying about to shield Elsie from this cruel reality despite her drag on their comfortable home life.
In the end, Peter has hit on both Helen and Leo while believing himself to be somehow treating their individual psychoses. Elsie, after seeing her sister in the arms of her beloved leaves in the middle of the night and returns to her parents. And Leo has decided to join Joe in America as his lover, not just his pal. Which leaves poor Helen alone, and Peter indubitably wondering what happened.
Melodrama. In the past I have reveled in Renault for her epic telling of tales. But The Friendly Young Ladies is a small story about historically inconsequential people wrestling with their own places in the world. The story itself unremarkable. But I found myself pulled in. Sympathizing with most of the characters to some degree at some point. That is to say, recognizing something familiar in each character. As Renault freely shifts her closely held perspective from person to person, you can see people as they make ludicrous assumptions and justify their conclusions. You can feel the desperation in each side of a scene.
Another little asset in the book is Joe’s observations on craft. And Leo’s. And how they work comfortably side by side while forging entirely different tales. Yet he freely gives his knowledge of the American West to her while she presents a satisfying sounding board to him.
But insofar as The Friendly Young Ladies being the right book at the right time, its this. It just is. A story told by a story teller I admire. Set in the century within a decade of my own heroine. And raising the issue of bisexual characters with which I am, myself wrestling.
Renault has her heroine follow convention and, in the end, pursue Joe rather than stay with Helen. And yet, in an afterword from Renault given the distance of nearly 40 years , she says that it was a ludicrous choice to make. (It wasn’t clear to me whether it was her choice or Leonora’s that was so silly) The relationship had no chance of survival. My heroine, too, makes this choice. (or rather it is made for her by second tier deities of the Greek cannon) But in neither case do I feel that the ultimate coupling is a matter of choosing gender, so much as a matter of choosing an individual.
Early in workshopping my own novel, I had feedback from a woman in LA who felt that by sending Moira off with Damon, I was misrepresenting lesbians everywhere. It was somehow illegitimizing a whole subset of society by allowing Moira to slip in and out of her sexuality. And whereas I continued to write the story that was unfolding in my head, I have been leery of presuming to write across this border. In fact, when I moved to Minneapolis, I enrolled in a Queer Fiction class to make sure that I had the right to write my story.
Not only does Mary Renault write in this and other of her books about lesbian and bisexual characters, but she also wrote frequently about the experiences of gay men in romantic encounters without apology. And I’ve decided to follow same.
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