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   Thursday, October 17, 2002
I am so strange lately: I keep drifting into reveries about words. This inward, meditative state is not new, but it is stronger lately. And the words or phrases I've been choosing are hard ones: choice, beginning, dreams of houses, aloneness, compassion--even some reading I did about friendship set me off. Some of these ideas are beautiful, but some are fraught for me, as they would be for anyone.

"Peace" is one I can write about, I think. We've had sermons for the past two weeks from Methodist reverends, both about peace efforts. I think this must be a strong heritage of the Methodist church, although I don't remember that being a part of the orientation classes I attended. Anyway, no Becca, I'm afraid, and the first sermon from Mark, the Methodist chaplain, really turned me off. That's not easy: to alienate a pacifist with a sermon about peace.

His major point : it is every citizen's duty to make choices that appear unpatriotic because government is inevitably falling short of the ideal and corrupting itself. In other words, it is our spiritual duty to oppose war no matter what names we are called.
Mark is very much into this, so the thesis didn't surprise me, although my choices might fall far short of his in this vein, I think. It was the way he introduced the sermon that upset me. As I heard it, he used the same parable in two ways: 1) quit bellyaching, and 2) yell to the skies, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not taking it any more." Difference: situation and, maybe, gender.

He said that every clergyperson has experienced too many times the weeping woman in his or her office lamenting what has happened to her marriage. Once, she says, we really talked about things; now we never talk, we're like strangers, and he won't even take out the garbage. I just want to shake her, Mark said, and tell her to grow up. This is how it is for everyone. All marriages, he said, are fraught with unreconcilable differences.

Besides deciding never to go to him for any kind of counseling, I thought the logic of the entire sermon rather flawed. Why was complaint self-pity for the woman but righteous outrage for the citizen? Why ought she just accept her situation, surely as corrupted and short of the ideal as the other, but it be a necessary duty for the citizen to oppose and insist on reconstruction? His statement about the inevitable differences was true, a truism, but missed the point entirely, I felt. Wasn't his whole point that some things are too bad, that, if they can't be more as they should be, they shouldn't be reconciled?

Well, an old guy preached Sunday and went even further than Mark with the pacifist message (retired and free to be really courageous, I guess). It is our duty, he said, to fight against even the church's hierarchy when it comes to war. Now, understand, this was parents' weekend, and the chapel was full of dressed-up parents of V'bilt students, mostly high-church Episcopal, it seemed, so I can just imagine how they responded. But, you know, I accepted his message better, though more extreme, because of the way he delivered it. He was soft-spoken, unabashedly southern, used a good bit of humor, and kept the sermon very short. He didn't seem to need to ridicule one kind of need in order to promote another. And he said a couple of things I really liked.

He began by quoting Garrison Keillor: how the Lake Wobegon Catholic church reacted when the bishop told them they had to include passing the peace in their service. Their rector made it more palatable by telling them they didn't have to make eye contact. This will tell you that his sermon was mostly about individual relationships (in fact, he said that all insidious patriarchies make otherwise decent people helpless), and he said something I've heard before but thought about in a new way: Peace is not just the absence of struggle but the presence and security of love.

I liked his blessing, too: He wished us the discomfort that would not allow easy answers or superficial relationships and that would allow us to live deeply within ourselves.

This is the kind of blessing I like to hear at the end of a church service, to feel good about endorsing, to say "Alleluia, alleluia." It is far harder to live out in the week to come. It is always harder when we make eye contact, with ourselves and others.

Shalom.



   Wednesday, October 16, 2002
On Sunday after church (more about that in my next entry), I sped down Demonbreun, zipped up 7th, found a parking lot, ran a couple of blocks, and made it to my friend's session at the Southern Festival of Books. After he went off to sign the six copies of his book the Festival ordered, I decided, with some trepidation, to go to Rick Bragg's reading. I hadn't read "Ava's Man" but had heard some good things about it. Bragg should be a stand-up comedian; he has the southern detail, the voice, even the pacing just right to have people hooting with laughter, as we do in the south when we recognize ourselves, or, better, someone else. Bragg reminded me of a newspaper reporter (surprise!) I once dated. Both wore the same uniform: old jeans and long-sleeved white dress shirt, open at the collar. Both had charm abundant for twenty men coupled with a string of messy relationships. Both exaggerated their working-class dialects until an opportunity arose to speak in another voice or to remind someone they graduated from Ivy-League schools. But I found Rick Bragg engaging and intelligent; he reminded me of my cousin Ronnie in some ways. The passages he read didn't make me buy his book but I considered it.

Later that day, I mentioned to someone that Bragg spoke of killing some Washington Times reviewer who dumped on one of his books. And I added that I had likely single-handedly maimed, if not killed, sales of his first book in Australia. I don't think the person believed me, and I could scarcely believe it myself. But it is true. ' The Age,' Melbourne's largest non-tabloid-type newspaper and the one newspaper most respected in the country, asked me to review 'All Over But the Shoutin'', called 'Redbirds' there. I don't know why the title was changed, but I have two guesses: 1) Aussies don't understand the phrase and 2) the literati would find the title too gauche; they wouldn't want to carry the book around. I wote the review, the editor loved it: gave it featured place and almost a full page with photograph in one of the weekend feature editions. Many people let me know they were impressed with the review.

To be fair to myself, the review was at least half praise, but half was not. I found that something about the persona rang false, the author trying too hard to be the dirt-poor Alabama boy he hadn't been for a long time. Also, I had never read such extravagant and even comical similes in a sentimental work meant to be placed in a literary section of a bookstore. But, mostly, I felt that the book too often seemed to condescend to its subject, Bragg's "little mama." I suspect if I read it again, I'd have the same response, and, as a reviewer, I needed to write an honest review. Here's the difference: I don't think I'd accept the commission now. I don't KNOW that the review even affected sales; maybe it didn't, though it likely did. But I know it affected opinion. And now I think: who am I to judge? Thousands of people loved that book. When they ask Bragg questions, they speak as if they're members of his family.

That's another issue, but the same: in writing about his family, including non-deceased members, Bragg has invited strangers to ask him if his brother has "shaped up" any. So he makes it clear he's too nice to comment on that but, really, no, he hasn't. This black sheep brother is still a grief to the family, this brother of the Pulitzer Prize winner who now speaks about him to hundreds of people at a go. These are the dilemmas that face writers.

Bringing it home: I accepted the review commission and thought little about it at the time. It was one of many requests for my voice that were beginning to arise as I became known as a writer in Australia. I was American, yes, and southern, but I'd never have been asked to write it without that reputation, one I had begun to accept in the ways others did and glory in far too much. In Australia, if you're a writer of fiction, poetry, script, screenplay, you're asked to write non-fiction too, constantly, in collections, in journalism. You're asked to read and to speak on any number of issues, in all kinds of places. As an academic as well as a writer, literary criticism was assumed to be a special expertise and a right for me. Rick Bragg was oceans away, besides; it felt safe to write about him.

It was hard to move back here and to be a nobody once again, but I'm glad it happened. More and more, I'm becoming aware of the magnitude of what is said in public, of how careful I need to be about it. It even makes me wary of this weblog, although I will write at least one more entry on this same subject. To write this here seems to deny my recognition; believe me, I haven't missed the contradition. But I'm convinced that this blog, unlike dear Annie's, is never read. No comments. Still, there is the possibility. Someone, searching for material about Rick Bragg for a school report, may open it, may read this. If so, I hope he or she uses it only as an example of hindsight.