On Regional Writing, by Flannery O'Connor

The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light. In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well as of intensity, and it is enough to feed good literature if our people - whether they be newcomers or have roots here - are enough aware of it to foster its growth in themselves.
Every serious writer will put his finger on it at a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, "Because we lost the War." He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence - as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of the country.
Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history. Mencken called the South the Bible Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. In the South we have, in however attenuated form a form, a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols. This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer from Hollywood or New York. It is the knowledge that the novelist finds in his community. When he ceases to find it there, he will cease to write, or at least he will cease to write anything enduring. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

From "The Regional Writer" in Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 58-59.

Ivanhoe and Romance

I've been reading Ivanhoe during Christmas Break. It is a romance, which does not mean that it has a cover with a scantily clad woman being swept into the arms of a loosely-dressed but obviously very muscular man (which is what we see most in Barnes and Noble or the checkout of Bi-Lo).
Instead, a literary romance refers to an adventure story typically set in medieval times with knights, castles, ladies, jousting, and chivalry. There's not much of that left in our modern notion of romance. Romance is typically highly-idealized. It does not often deal with the realities of life but instead focuses on the high ideals of society, in the form of chivalry. Chivalry is a term used to describe, loosely, the code of behavior practiced by knights and lords under the system of feudalism.
Sir Walter Scott is said to have revived the art form in the nineteenth century with his Waverly novels, of which Ivanhoe may be the most famous (but there is also Rob Roy). Scott wrote a great tale of love, honor, and duty and set it in one of the most turbulent times of merry old England: the reign of Richard the Lion-Hearted. Richard is away, but may be on his way home and his brother Prince John is acting as regent. The major conflict is between the favored Normans and the oppressed Saxons. Racism is a major theme of this novel and it is interesting how Scott makes it play out. While Normans are guilty of racism toward the Saxons, both are guilty of the same thing toward the Jews represented in the novel.
As I read more, I'll post some entries on the way these themes work out.

Death of Bryan

In researching Donald Davidson for my thesis, I came across lots of stuff I would otherwise not have known. A good deal of it was about my hometown and state, some of which can be read in previous blog entries. One thing I haven't noted much here is how much the Dayton Trial of John T. Scopes, known commonly as the Monkey Trial, was a part of Davidson's thinking. Much of his shift to Southern Agrarianism came after the Scopes Trial was concluded. In his second volume on the history of the Tennessee River, he devotes many pages to a discussion of the trial and its effects on the culture of Tennessee and the South.
In this second volume I discovered that William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner who served to assist the prosecution in the case, gave his last public address in Winchester, TN (my hometown) before dying unexpectedly on July 25, 1925 on his way back to Chattanooga. According to The Truth and Herald (July 30, 1925) between 6,000 and 7,000 people attended the public address given by Bryan in Winchester.
I doubt anything Bryan said there was substantially different from what he said at any other time, but it was interesting to me that my little hometown had even been visited by someone like William Jennings Bryan, not to mention that he gave his last public address there.

New Domain

For those who follow this blog a little, I have a new domain you can take note of. One of my students (with his own techno blog, here) gave me a domain name for Christmas. You can now point your browser to www.campusmentis.net and it will forward you right here. Thanks John.

Christmas Break

It's that time of year again. It is that time when I am supposed to get to take a break from school and sit around a warm fireplace sipping spiced cider (or scotch, depending on my mood), smoking my pipe, and reading to refresh and relax. So how come that never happens? We've spent the last few days running around looking for Christmas presents we would normally already have bought. The van being broken down for three weeks did NOT help our present buying timeline. Consequently, I have spent very little time at home period. And not only that, we appear to be having some kind of heat wave in the Southeast. I am very appreciative of the rain, but it should not be 65 degrees in December unless you live on the equator.
Oh, the present buying is not working out so well either. By this point all the Lego sets under $50 have been bought (which isn't that many anyway), all the bikes under $80 are gone, and nothing is available online either. I don't think I'm going to like living in a depression, if it comes to that.
Hopefully things will look up though. We have most everything bought that we are going to buy. I plan to spend a good bit of tomorrow doing exactly what I want to. I really want to finish Ivanhoe.

Christmas lights

I love taking the kids out to look at Christmas lights. I remember doing thsi as a child and enjoying it very much. The internet and especially YouTube has made doing this a lot of fun as well. You can see Christmas displays from all over the country. A new trend is to use electronic control modules to time lights to a piece of music. The passerby can tune to a particular FM frequency and hear the song while seeing the lights timed to it. YouTube has some interesting displays of this, but a favorite for a couple of years now has been this one. The song is by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. TSO has become very popular in recent years for their Christmas albums mixing progressive metal and traditional Christmas tunes. I have followed them since they began as a progressive metal band called Savatage. Savatage began their transformation as early as 1991 with their self-proclaimed rock opera Streets. There is an interesting review of Streets here. Savatage was famous for recycling lyrics from one song into other albums songs and making it work because the theme was similar or the sentiment was the same.
For example, on their 1991 album Streets, the final song "Believe" declares:
I am the way
I am the light
I am the dark inside the night
I hear your hopes
I feel your dreams
And in the dark I hear your screams
Don't turn away
Just take my hand
And when you make your final stand
I'll be right there
I'll never leave
And all I ask of you
Believe

Savatage recycled this sequence in their 1994 release, Handful of Rain, on the final track "Alone You Breathe," written for Christopher Oliva, brother of band member Jon Oliva. Shortly after Handful of Rain, Dead Winter Dead (1995) became the second rock opera released by Savatage and contained the now popular "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24." The band released another album of two after this, but mostly began the transition into the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. The song, "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24" was re-released on their first album Christmas Eve and other Stories.
Besides an amazing sound, one of the things that interests me about TSO and the predecessor Savatage is their emphasis on storytelling. In a 2003 interview with Christianity Today (found here) producer, Paul O'Neill stated, "I'm a strong believer in the power of storytelling. I grew up in a large Irish Catholic home, and my parents wouldn't allow us to watch TV. That forced us to learn to read. Also, before we went to bed, my father would weave these incredibly intricate fairy tales and stories from the top of his head. Even as I got older, I'd hang around him telling stories to my little siblings. And Irish music tends to have strong storytelling."
The guys of TSO have some very interesting stories to tell, even if they aren't the most theologically accurate, they can still spin an interesting yarn. For some of us, it might be better to hear a story that is a little lacking in the theology department but makes us think in theological terms. TSO's music and stories do just this.
Give them a listen if you are into Classical and Progressive Metal fusion.

Herodotus' flying snakes?

Probably not, but a student of mine who actually pays attention sent me this link to an article he found while excavating the web one day.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/dec/03/flying-reptile-lacusovagus-magnificens
It is worth a read, even if it comes from a evolutionary worldview. God had made such an amazing variety of creatures. I am constantly impressed by the ones that don't even exist anymore.

Really Done!

I just received word that my manuscript has been accepted by Clemson. That officially ends the process of writing my masters thesis. My degree will be awarded on December 18 and I'll go down on the 19th to pick it up. This has been a very long and tiresome project, but looking back on it, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. There were some late nights and a few personal days from work, but nothing that really killed me.
Now I get to pay more attention to my classes at school and read what I want to read. Which is not to say I won't be reading Donald Davidson any more. I have some of his stuff still that I'd like to pay more attention to than I could during the thesis writing phase. Not to mention the other Agrarians that I hardly touched at all.
I'll post a picture of my diploma when I get it.

The Vulture by Hilaire Belloc

The vulture eats between his meals
And that's the reason why
He very, very rarely feels
As well as you and I.
His eye is dull, his head is bald,
His neck is growing thinner.
Oh! what a lesson for us all
To only eat at dinner!