A Fascinating article from Oxford American
The Strange Case of Brad Vice and his book The Bear Bryant Funeral Train
Check the Website www.oxfordamericanmag.com cause I think many of you will want a copy of the upcoming Movie Issue
This one bout explains the remaining mysteries of the ambience of Alabama
http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/currentissue.cfm
I particularly liked this paragraph
This is where I confess that I left my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, for bigger cities a long time ago and rarely looked back. Like the narrator of “What Happens in the ’Burg, Stays in the ’Burg,” who, during a very successful fish fry on his lawn in Russellville, Arkansas, wishes he were at a martini party with his cold but graceful ex-wife, I occasionally have the feeling, while sipping a martini at some swank hotel bar, surrounded by slick beauties in fishnets and men in elegant pants, that I’d much rather be elsewhere: drinking cold beer at a fish fry. And like The Moviegoer—Walker Percy’s unforgettable tale of soul-searching, polite society, and secretarial lust in New Orleans, which I have carried with me to places as far-flung as Reykjavík and Beijing just to have a taste of home in my backpack—The Bear Bryant Funeral Train serves as a kind of uneasy reminder of the landscape and culture I left behind. Uneasy because it holds no tidy answers to racism or poverty or, in fact, the demagoguery of its title story, nor does it offer up quaint suggestions of mint-julep-infused yarn-spinning on wraparound porches. And yet, reading these stories, I cannot help wondering what it would be like to hear them on just such a porch, holding just such a drink in my hand, tasting the mint and the cool, slippery ice. In this happy fantasy I am barefoot and wearing one of those summer dresses Irwin Shaw was so fond of. One does not often go barefoot or wear summer dresses in my adopted hometown of San Francisco.
Which is to say that there are so many different lives we can choose, and no matter how well-suited we are to the one we end up with, there’s no banishing the longing for the one we turned away from. There are places a person can leave without feeling some regret, but I’m not sure you can ever leave your childhood home without, one day, feeling the sting of it....
Again the whole thing is linked here.
http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/content.cfm?ArticleID=148&Entry=CurrentIssue
Check the Website www.oxfordamericanmag.com cause I think many of you will want a copy of the upcoming Movie Issue
This one bout explains the remaining mysteries of the ambience of Alabama
http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/currentissue.cfm
I particularly liked this paragraph
This is where I confess that I left my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, for bigger cities a long time ago and rarely looked back. Like the narrator of “What Happens in the ’Burg, Stays in the ’Burg,” who, during a very successful fish fry on his lawn in Russellville, Arkansas, wishes he were at a martini party with his cold but graceful ex-wife, I occasionally have the feeling, while sipping a martini at some swank hotel bar, surrounded by slick beauties in fishnets and men in elegant pants, that I’d much rather be elsewhere: drinking cold beer at a fish fry. And like The Moviegoer—Walker Percy’s unforgettable tale of soul-searching, polite society, and secretarial lust in New Orleans, which I have carried with me to places as far-flung as Reykjavík and Beijing just to have a taste of home in my backpack—The Bear Bryant Funeral Train serves as a kind of uneasy reminder of the landscape and culture I left behind. Uneasy because it holds no tidy answers to racism or poverty or, in fact, the demagoguery of its title story, nor does it offer up quaint suggestions of mint-julep-infused yarn-spinning on wraparound porches. And yet, reading these stories, I cannot help wondering what it would be like to hear them on just such a porch, holding just such a drink in my hand, tasting the mint and the cool, slippery ice. In this happy fantasy I am barefoot and wearing one of those summer dresses Irwin Shaw was so fond of. One does not often go barefoot or wear summer dresses in my adopted hometown of San Francisco.
Which is to say that there are so many different lives we can choose, and no matter how well-suited we are to the one we end up with, there’s no banishing the longing for the one we turned away from. There are places a person can leave without feeling some regret, but I’m not sure you can ever leave your childhood home without, one day, feeling the sting of it....
Again the whole thing is linked here.
http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/content.cfm?ArticleID=148&Entry=CurrentIssue
posted by foxofbama | 8:10 AM
1 Comments:
I saw your bio. I used to live in Rome, GA and coached football at Pepperell. I'm also a big Bama fan. :)
Post a Comment
<< Home