swedish hobo candle

While in Sweden earlier this year on a business trip, my father was taught a simple yet useful trick for turning an ordinary log into a sort of stove/lantern/torch. Turn the log up on end, saw several criss-crossing cuts lengthwise taking care not to cut all the way to the bottom, add a little diesel fuel to the center, light and enjoy! He calls them "Swedish candles" and was told they were developed years back by a Swedish hobo. Perfect for cooking your tin of beans on top of and huddling around during cold nights, but none of us came up with a good answer as to how a hobo might get his hands on a chainsaw to make one.

Above is a picture of one we made over the holidays as practice for the Burning Labyrinth.

"crooked-letter state"

I just read Kevin Sessum's memoir, Mississippi Sissy, and I'm for the moment speechless. Wow, just wow.

I have a bad habit of starting out to write about a song/book/movie that I've just heard/read/seen and barely mentioning that work of art before I basically just start rambling about myself. It seems a bit narcissistic, which I suppose it is (which I also suppose is exactly the adjective you should expect when you start blogging), but I also like to think there is something complementary in finding a stepping stone to self-reflection in someone else's artwork and only lazy people with book reports to write want to read someone else's synopsis.

So I'll skip over all the critical commentary that I'm sure someone else has already done better anyway; suffice to say the book was well-written and an engaging read. I had seen it when it came out in hardback and was immediately drawn to it. It was obviously written for me to read, but I refrained and patiently waited for it to come out in paperback, not -for once- so much out of cheapness as books and music for my trips at sea are currently considered life-saving expenses rather than luxuries, but because the hardback book was large and heavy and wouldn't travel well. When you typically bring an extra bag just for books in addition to those you cram in your duffle bag and other pack, such considerations matter. But after this long wait, let's say that the book was better than I ever could have expected.

I don't know what I did expect. I was drawn to it because I'm also something of a Mississippi sissy. I grew up straddling the state line between Mississippi and Alabama, born in the former and growing up mostly in the latter, but within a few miles of the border the whole time. So I suppose I was looking for someone else's story about growing up gay down there. And I found that, in spades. I ended up taken in more by the landscape than the coming out bit, though.

This is a different way of rendering the same landscape that I keep talking about whenever I go on about Faulkner or O'connor or most recently McCullers. This wasn't a fictionalized snapshot from some omniscient point above or looking in from outside through the eyes of a created character. The fictional accounts are only believable if the landscape feels familiar, feels realistic, but the difference between feeling realistic and being real can be jarring. I've said many times how much trouble I have reading Faulkner, because to me it is too realistic and too traumatizing most of the time so I've only made it a very short way through his catalog of fiction despite being a fan, but at the end of the day it is fiction and I can back away from the characters and argue with myself that he cast the landscape in harsher light to make these masterworks of tragedy.

Memoirs are different.

Assuming the writer is being honest, you can only explain away so much as dramatic lighting and theatrical staging. They tell their story, choosing their scenes, shaping the trajectory of the plotline, framing everything just so, but unless it is a fanciful retelling the backdrop is already there in each scene. This emotional/political/literal landscape is where the story already has happened, not a believable facsimile rendered to plant a story in, but a place to harvest what crop it has already brought forth. If the writer has any talent as a storyteller, which Mr. Sessums certainly does, the seams don't show and the background is just that: background. If I read this as more of an outsider I don't know that it would have struck me as anything other than an element in the story, but being from this same landscape it loomed large in my reading. Not distractingly so, but as I read about his experiences I couldn't help thinking how familiar or foreign everything seemed.

I'm from a younger generation. I caught the tail end of the Seventies and grew up a child of the Eighties. Integration had already happened and it was a very different South in many ways. But in many others not so much, and I recognized the people and pictures he painted in his retelling. The foreground was different for me when I was growing up there, but oh how I recognized all that swirled in the background. Sometimes though, recognition isn't enough. Once you've got something in your sights, its remains a thing apart until you've completed Adam's task and named it. This first and most slippery charge of humankind is where a writer's magic lies. The ability to present and describe is his power over our surroundings and minds. I've thought quite a bit lately about the power of names and language and how we describe things. Names can maim or contain or cut free depending on how they are wielded.

I could get off track and begin speaking abstractly about names and words and such (especially since I've just finished reading two books on the English language and am gurgling with thoughts about word usage in the current election), but I mention all this simply because Mr. Sessums finally game me the name for that landscape when the black lady who had helped raise him at his grandparents house remarks, "Love? Hmmph. It ain't never 'nough in a crooked-letter state like this."

"Crooked-letter state". Maybe when I read I leave myself wide open to being struck, but that phrase caught me square between the eyes. I had to put the book down for a moment and just breathe. If you aren't from Mississippi, you might not have been taught how to spell the state with the sing-song description: "M, I , crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, humpback, humpback, I" but this is how we were taught and it still goes through my head each time I have to spell it. The childhood phrase turned into a scornful descriptor made it, for me at least, terrifyingly potent. It hits enough of a subconscious place that I wonder if it clangs in the mind of anyone else who reads it. The whole sentence is harsh enough, but the overt anger and frustration paled compared to what was said by her name for our landscape.

Kevin Sessums and I grew up differently and similarly but both of us grew up in a "crooked-letter state". Having found it so aptly named only made his rendering (and my remembering) of our common landscape so much more beautifully potent.

A hunting we will go...

"But I feel like I shouldn't be reading this book. Well, not like I shouldn't be reading it, but like you should be reading it." Ben says this to me a couple of days before I head out to sea for this most recent trip while telling me about how beautiful The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is, which he was then reading. I've bought the book several times when I've come across it at used book stores, always intending to read it but never getting around to it. Of course these various copies are scattered across states and various places, so when my friend Ian who had been sick wanted to go to Barnes & Noble to escape his apartment, I jumped and was determined to find a copy for this trip. In bookstores I turn into a weird beast who easily loses all sense and is tugged from one book to another and lost in a trance, so when I staggered to the counter laden with books, Carson McCullers wasn't with me.

And she wouldn't have been with me on this trip, but sometimes a thing's time has come and even my absent-minded stumbling and procrastination can't keep it from happening. On a whim I stopped in this bizarre Japanese import store they have in the mall, which I've only ever gone in before for the inexpensive electronics but as I was leaving I noticed they have a book section. Mostly Japanese titles but there was also a substantial section of books in English, most of which were only a dollar! I started casually perusing and noticed that there were some good books and suddenly remembered The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and bam! Only one copy, but they had it for a buck. Having a funny feeling while looking through the cd section next to the books, I picked up a Reba cd which naturally was the one containing the song of the same title. Personalized recommendation, song, and hard copy in hand there was no way around this book except right through the middle.

I'd bought so many copies of it because I liked the title. This is largely also why I kept not reading it: fear that the book would kill the title. Maybe that sounds silly or just ridiculous, but some titles hit me and make some vague impression about what the book the describe should be like. Not a clear feeling or some ghost outline of story, but just leave an impression and something in me worries that if the book's impression and the title's impression don't feel the same that it would be somehow disconcerting. I know this is crazy and it is mostly subconscious but certain books I feel like I have to have a reason to pick them up to get over this hump and this was certainly one of them. If someone telling you as they read a book that they feel vaguely like they are cheating because you are the person who should be reading it can't get you to pick up a book nothing will. So I did.

And I have no idea what to say. Wow. There is so much that could be written about this book. The cross section of the characters. The running theme of messianic projection or of the blurring of gender and racial distinctions contrasted against the community/individual enforcement of black and white interpretations of each. I hope to dig deeper into the different subtleties when I've got more time and be objective and not personalize the story or its impact so much, but I'll need a little time. Partially because there is the sorting out of what was meant when I was told that I should be reading this book. In a way that totally makes sense and I immediately understood and further understand having read the book, but like the impressions certain titles make on me, the understanding is subconscious and it would make less and less sense to me if I tried to articulate it right now.

But largely I've just got to deal with this book the way I have to deal with any decent Southern writer. Every time I read Faulkner I'm blown away by his writing and feel like my head has been both beaten up and revived. Emotions flood back and I'm populated by feelings that come at me like they are out of a different lifetime and from a different person, and in a way are. This is not to compare McCullers to Faulkner. They are very different writers, but they write in the same emotional landscape and it is the same landscape that I grew up in. So in a way I can't read these stories without asking which character I could have ended up like if I hadn't escaped (that is the right word and not meant in a strictly geographic sense). Few of these characters ever escape.