Musings on a Saturday

Larry Brown, umcssc


Larry Brown has become a bit of an obsession for me. I've read Joe, On Fire, Billy Ray's Farm, and Facing the Music. I'm now on Fay, and enjoying it thoroughly. I want to watch the movie on him, The Rough South of Larry Brown. Something about his writing reminds me of my father and truthfully, he looks a bit like him too. The tone smacks of home for me.

Reading these books have sparked a few ideas for my own writing as well, and I can't help but hope I'm coming out of a long drought into a productive time. Where Brown speaks of riding around the truck with beers, dogs, sweating in Mississippi, I see coal mines, suburbs, the sprawl taking over the smaller Alabama towns, Church of Christ Sundays, and some sort of neo-South idea of who we are all in this new generation.

Someone recently told me he believed air conditioning revolutionized the South. I think it was the trauma of the 50s and 60s, the Civil Rights wounds, and the death of the small farm. And that none of us are doing better than our parents, which is every generation's hope. We're mired in structures and processes our government tells us that we have to operate in and under. We pay the cable, the power, the insurance, gas up the car, and at the end of the month, we have nothing left. We go to work five days a week and can't catch up. But at least we have a job in times like these, right? That's what you have to think.

My dream is to own a farm with livestock. To be able to do as people used to do. Grow their own vegetables, live their lives away from an urban sprawling commercial trying to feed us foreign-grown food and sell us cheap products. To retreat from what they keep telling me I need. All I need is my family and a place to live.

I just wanted to mention how much I adore this man and his writing. I'm stupid for him and unabashedly so. I hate he died so young and we weren't able to have more from him. Selfish, I know, but I think that if we had met one afternoon, in Oxford, we'd have a good time talking about Blue Mountain, fishing, and maybe we'd even play a song together. And he and Taylor would stand in Proud Larry's side by side and smoke cigarettes.

Psst!

There was a great book launch last night that that Garrison Keillor hosted for one of Turner Publishing's books (my company), the Historic Photos of Minnesota by Susan Marks. He's one of my favorite people.

Masters: Expressionism (1905-1945)

Blue Horse

Franz Marc

Psst!

Last night we did a little impromptu songwriting and Judge, Big Baby and myself wrote this together. Hope you like it.

Folks

Brad Watson, born to Robert Earl Watson and Bonnie Clay Watson in Meridian, Mississippi, on July 24, 1955, published his first work, a collection of short stories called Last Days of the Dog-Men, and won a Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

However, Watson did not start out to becomes a writer. He was a high-school student/actor who married the summer of his junior year in high school. At seventeen, after graduating from high school, Brad Watson left Mississippi with the hope of making a name for himself in Hollywood. His stay in Hollywood, however, was not long because there was a strike. After finding work only as a garbage man (which was a job he loved because of the solitude it provided him), Watson came home to Meridian where he got a job as a carpenter.

Finally, after some persuasion from his family, Watson enrolled at Meridian Junior College, a turning point in Watson's life. Because he scored high on the entrance English exam, he was placed in an Honors English class. Although Watson had no previous interest in writing, this class turned him on.

Watson decided to further his education at Mississippi State University in 1976 by majoring in English. During Watson's first summer at Mississippi State, he wrote his first short story. In 1978, after graduating from Mississippi State with a bachelor's degree in English, Watson enrolled at the University of Alabama where he pursued a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and American Literature. He then moved to the Alabama gulf coast to work as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. He also worked as an editor at the Montgomery Advertiser and spent a year in an ad agency before returning to Tuscaloosa to teach in 1988. He moved there with his wife and three-year-old son and taught creative writing at the University of Alabama.

Before he completed Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories by Brad Watson in 1996, Watson had also worked in the University of Alabama public relations office for four years. Watson says the inspiration for writing stories about dogs and people came from his childhood. He said everyone he knew had a dog and he related the dog’s personality with the owners.

Returning to full time teaching, Watson moved to Harvard in 1997 to teach. He taught there until his second book, a novel called Heaven of Mercury, was published in 2002. Originally, the book was to be called Obituary of Helen Browning Wells. Following the publication of his novel, he took visiting writer-in-residence positions at the University of West Florida, the University of Alabama, Ole Miss (as Grisham Writer-in-Residence), and the University of California, Irvine. In 2005 Brad Watson began teaching at the University of Wyoming in the MFA program where he continues to teach in 2009.

A new book, a novella and stories titled Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, will be published by W.W. Norton (also the publishers of his first two books) in March 2010. These stories have been published in The Oxford American, The Yalobusha Review, Greensboro Review, Idaho Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

via Mississippi Writers and Musicians

Artsy Fartsy

CSX Locomotive No. 9

Stephen Macsig

Picture Pages

Untitled

A. Scarpulla

Lunchtime List

• image via CW61

• Sheep Counting System

• That us, folks!

• Interview

• Topography

• Found Photo

• Country Day

• Crazy Thing

• This Weekend

• Stockholm

• Tractor

• Islam Misconceptions

• In the Houseboat

• Beautiful Lindos
  

• image via ir_photos:

Poesy

A Red Palm

You're in this dream of cotton plants.
You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds
Fall with a sigh. You take another step,
Chop, and the sigh comes again,
Until you yourself are breathing that way
With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town.

That's hours later. The sun is a red blister
Coming up in your palm. Your back is strong,
Young, not yet the broken chair
In an abandoned school of dry spiders.
Dust settles on your forehead, dirt
Smiles under each fingernail.
You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,
You can buy one splendid fish for wife
And three sons. Another row, another fish,
Until you have enough and move on to milk,
Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.
You can rest in the back yard under a tree.
Your hands twitch on your lap,
Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom
Of a boat. You drink iced tea. The minutes jerk
Like flies.

          It's dusk, now night,
And the lights in your home are on.
That costs money, yellow light
In the kitchen. That's thirty steps,
You say to your hands,
Now shaped into binoculars.
You could raise them to your eyes:
You were a fool in school, now look at you.
You're a giant among cotton plants.
Now you see your oldest boy, also running.
Papa, he says, it's time to come in.


You pull him into your lap
And ask, What's forty times nine?
He knows as well as you, and you smile.
The wind makes peace with the trees,
The stars strike themselves in the dark.
You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants.
You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm,
The sore light you see when you first stir in bed.

- Gary Soto

via poets.org

Word!

bravura

1.

A florid, brilliant style of music that emphasizes the technical force and skill of a performer; virtuoso music.

2.

A showy or brilliant display.






image via Eduardo Amorim