September 2012

Reading with Senses

proctorc13

The human body has five, equally important senses of perception- touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision. When reading a piece of fiction or poem in the traditional manner, one needed only two of these senses: seeing and touching. You held the book or paper in your hand and used your eyes to visualize the words. However, with technology and the Internet, there is an opportunity to employ additional senses to absorb and appreciate literature. As an online publication, Shenandoah is entrenched in this new, evolving digital world. Poets can now record their poems, giving readers the choice to listen to their work. Though this is not available for the fiction and non-fiction genres, the act of reading stories online gives the reader an entirely diverse experience. Scanning through a webpage requires slightly more effort and concentration, and it is tempting to scroll through less interesting passages in order to reach the climax or ending. As well, you cannot highlight or make notes in the margins, which limits the interaction with the author’s words and intended message.

This begins a debate, one that I have thought about a lot recently as I listened to books on tape during long, monotonous road trips. How is the art of listening to a creative piece different from tangibly, physically holding and reading it? Arguably, you are using the same amount of senses since eyesight is traded for ears and their ability to hear. Auditory “reading” allows you to multitask, as books become even more transportable. With this benefit comes the drawback of unconcentrated attention and the potential for daydreaming and images of to-do lists. Though I admire the convenience factor of downloadable books, I will not trade my beloved paperbacks for an e-reader in the near future, nor do I envision transitioning to a solely auditory consumption of literature. After going back to one of the books I listened to earlier this summer, I discovered the act of reading gave me the ability to examine the author’s syntax and to appreciate word choice to a greater extent as sentences can be read again and chapters pored over with an alert eye. Though Shenandoah is online and the act of possessing, touching and reading an actual journal is not feasible, the other possibilities associated with a literary journal have subsequently expanded. Images can be incorporated into the stories, either as supplemental information or simply as a thematic or decorative addition to the webpage. Videos are increasingly popular as supplementary elements to literature since poems can be presented in song form or simply recited in a more visually appealing way. Essentially, the simple experience has become multidimensional. Although I don’t foresee literary journals, particularly Shenandoah, being replaced by videos or audio recordings of poems or fictions, I do think it is important to be cognizant of how technology enhances, or detracts from, the way we interact with literature and creative works.

Trained to Read

wellforde13

In his review of Alyson Hagy’s Boleto, New York Times writer Bruce Machart writes, “Good stories teach us how to read them, and the opening pages of Boleto are entertaining, entrancing teachers.” I agree with Machart’s review because I find myself invested in the novel after only several pages. The immediate familiarity and patience with which Hagy writes is reassuring, in the same manner that Will talks to his filly.

As readers, we assume the role of a horse brought into the physical and figurative frontier of Will Testerman’s world. Hagy’s depiction of the west is inviting, and yet unembellished and unforgiving. Hagy writes, “When [Will] stepped out into the unsettled morning with the pressure gauge cold in his hand, the air pushing down through the valley of the Greybull ran icy along the edges of his jaw. It was late spring in Wyoming. The river was as crumpled and brown as a paper bag” (9). In this manner, Hagy is an effective storyteller. And thus we follow her voice and her lead, understanding within the first few pages that this is a novel of honesty and perseverance.

Trained to the author’s writing, we become invested in the narrative and its deliberate crafting. My favorite aspect of fiction is the language. It is the willful surrendering of both attention and imagination that is crucial to the dynamic between author and reader. A trust as integral and simple as the one Will assures his filly: “I will always be good to you, he said. That’s all I really need to promise” (32). Indeed, in the narrative we have found a beloved protagonist, and in Hagy a trustworthy teacher.

Volume 62, No. 1 of SHENANDOAH now online and free to all!

R.T. Smith

Readers can now open up our new issue and enjoy the art of Billy Renkl, as well as a whole book’s worth of good writing:

*Poems by Linda Pastan, Robert Wrigley, Lisa Russ Spaar, Margaret Gibson, David Huddle, Andrea Null

* the nine finalists for the 2012 Bevel Summers Prize in the Short Short Story, including the winning story “The Pointer” by Jim McDermott

* short stories on dealing with loss by Gilbert Allen, Marc Dickinson and others

*non-fiction, including a reminiscence of Bible camp by Jeanne Murray Walker and an essay on poet’s notebooks by David Wojahn

* reviews of Hilary Mantel, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claudia Emerson, Charles Frazier, Robert Olmstead and more

* a whimsical editor’s note about buckeyes, literal and metaphorical

In addition see our features, Poem of the Week and rotating quotations from the high and the low.

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

Fear and Loathing in Lex Vegas

mcleodc13

During the first week of Journalism 318: the Literature of Journalism, Professor Robert de Maria introduced the class to journalist Hunter S. Thompson and his book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Noting the title of the course as the “literature of journalism,” I was immediately intrigued. Where is the journalism in this acid trip of uppers, downers, laughers, and screamers? Where is the journalism amidst the saltshakers of cocaine, amyls, and ether?

The answer is this: Gonzo Journalism. It’s an interesting word, gonzo. (I’m not sure why, but the word “gonzo” conjures images of Fonzi from Happy Days in my mind. Perhaps it’s the two-syllables and emphasis on the letter “z.”) The word holds origins in both Irish and French vocabulary. Some believe that Gonzo originated from Irish slang meaning the last man standing after an all-night drinking marathon. Others believe that the word maintains French origins from the word, “gonzeaux,” which translates to the shining path. In my opinion, either of these interpretations fit Thompson and his Gonzo practices to a “T.”

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that includes the reporter as part of the experience through first-person narration. The term described one of Thompson’s first journalism pieces. He continued to popularize the style in his writing throughout the 1970s. Gonzo journalism emphasizes personal experiences and emotions to achieve a desired reputation of an event or idea. The “Gonzo fist,” two thumbs and four fingers holding a peyote button, became the symbolism for Thompson and Gonzo journalism.

Most of the students in Journalism 318 felt conflicted by what we, as students, know as journalism. The journalism taught within the Journalism and Mass Communications Departments includes detached writing that spells facts and observations to a reader. How could Gonzo journalism and the writings of Hunter S. Thompson fall beneath the category of journalism when the narrator appears everything but reliable?

My response to the problematic question is this: Thompson knows exactly what he wants the reader to understand and he uses any means possible to achieve the desired understanding. In a way, Gonzo journalism behaves like a fiction short story. An author desires the reader to feel a certain effect and uses the story to achieve the desired feelings. (Thompson did indeed trip acid and other drugs while in Las Vegas. He based Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas upon his acid trip adventure with Oscar Acosta. But he warped the truth in order to attain his goal of describing the “American Dream” to the reader.) Thompson believed that this approach advocated a certain truth that was otherwise difficult to achieve.

In a 1973 issue of Rolling Stone, Thompson stated, “If I’d written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

Melungeons: Mysterious Origins of an Appalachian Subculture?

R.T. Smith

Or maybe “subculture” isn’t the right word, nor “race” nor “ethnicity.” Whether born of the invisible incursions of Portuguese, the wayward Welsh led by Madoc, the intermarriage of whites (Lost Colony survivors among them) and Indians, the weddings and progeny among Sub-saharan Africans and Europeans or other nearly-untraceable groups of triracial isolates, the Melungeon people of the Appalachians have long provided an enigma for ethnologists and sociologists, as well as readers, as the mysteries associated with Melungeons have led many writers to treat them as exotic and “Other.”

And it’s easy enough to see how “Melungeon” quickly became a defamatory epithet. I remember being told as a boy that Melungeons (as well as a woodswitch named Sally Soapsuds, ghosts and fugitives from the chain gang) would snatch me up if I didn’t behave. We didn’t live in the Appalachians but in its played-out foothills, and all I was told about them was: they’re savage, maybe cannibals; they’re dark but often have blue eyes and gums and “English” features; they lurk (importantly loaded word for a boy) in the wilder spaces and don’t fit in with “white culture,” though they’re neither Indians nor African-Americans (not the term of preference back then). With the danger ascribed to them, they also had a kind of outlaw glamor, and I preferred inventing their stories whole cloth to responsible investigating.

A few years ago I did do a little inquiring and read Lisa Alther’s Kinfolks, which chronicles her quest to see if she was part Melungeon. The vague identity of the group was beginning to be adopted by people who yearned to be associated with the exotic; few people until the late twentieth century had ever referred to themselves as Melungeons, but the stigma was transforming to a badge of courage. And now Alther, a card-carrying Appalachian and a novelist, was determined to get to the bottom of the question. She didn’t, but from her book I gleaned what I wanted to know for my own fictive purposes– that the group [s] tended to keep to themselves and to suffer both legal and extemporaneous persecution, that they were convenient scapegoats.

Preparing to teach a course on Appalachian Literature and Identity, I decided to pursue information on this group, to see if the whirlwind of questions about their source and nature could shed some light on the larger quest of Appalachians to shed stereotypes and reveal their actual selves, individually and collectively, to shed the trappings of Snuffy Smith, Jed Clampett and the cartoon moonshining hillbillies so many associate with American highlanders.

The two most extreme theories strike me as too simple and untrustworthy: 1) the whole notion of Melungeons is fabricated by offspring of white persons and persons of color to dodge the long-standing prejudices against the latter; 2) some exotic group — formed long ago from intermarriage of rogue (or lost) explorers, Native Americans and strays– has a cultural identity called “Melungeon,” which would clearly delineate them from mainstream Appalachians.

Although phrases like “Melungeon culture” are scattered through the texts from the many theorists, I’ve yet to read anything about Melungeon music or handcrafts, religious practices, dialect, poetry or cuisine separate from Appalachian culture, so I’m very curious to hear about their distinct crafts and ways. The good news in this may be that the people once called Melungeons from afar and who now identify as such were just about as homogenous (or diverse) as other Appalachians. It’s true that both Alther and her scholarly cohort Wayne Winkler conclude that the demographic is growing more and more rare, due to the ease of Melungeons in assimilating, shadowing into our now-diverse culture. However, none of this diminishes the angst that arises when someone looks in the mirror to ask the question that sets the stage for Hamlet: Who’s there?” In Chris Offutt’s story “Melungeons,” one of the principals the title refers to recounts being threatened as a schoolboy that “the Melungeons will get you.” Imagine what a scourge to one’s sense of self that must have been.

One of the difficulties in tracing the history of Melungeons (the word may come from the French melange, though there are other theories, Turkish words, Saxon, Portugese) is that migration theories abound, and all can be argued for without resorting to high myth or low reasoning. However, I have not found that the Melungeons are known for distinctive religious practices, particular music, a recognizable dialect or body of folk lore or craft. They seem to be amorphous, a melange indeed of many people whose appearance set them up for exclusion and who sometimes found themselves, as the shunned or hounded often will, banding together for defense.

Recent DNA studies tell us more about the formation of the Melungeon identity that we ever knew before, and I’m still sorting out what I think of them, but I can’t recommend a better place to begin an inquiry than with Offutt’s story (from Out of the Woods. The Melungeons in the story act out of a stern and painful code, but they do it in the midst of beauty and for reasons anything but chaotic. It’s a story about feeling who you are, constructing who you are, embracing who you are, regardless of the consequences, and it suggests, especially by the story’s ending, that dignity is achievable among even the least conventional subcultures.

I’d love to receive some comments on what I’ve put forth her or omitted to say. The comment field appears below.

The Rebel Yell

R.T. Smith

I can’t quite get the Rebel Yell (the warcry, not the Kentucky bourbon) off my mind today because last night in the quiet and lamplight I read the essay “How to Spell the Rebel Yell” from Elena Passarello’s new book Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande, 2012). Of course, I’m a pretty easy target, living as I do in the village where the Confederacy is buried, sort of. Lexington VA houses, in W & L’s Lee Chapel, the remains of Robert E. Lee (and almost every other Lee but Anabelle). And Stonewall Jackson, whom Passarello cites as a possible source of the battlescream, is buried in the town’s (surprise!) Stonewall Jackson Cemetery. Since childhood hours with Bruce Catton’s and Douglas Southall Freeman’s books (and Foote’s, among other, since), I’ve wondered if that chorus of banshee-wildcat-muleskinner yodelscreams really could curdle blood, and how much was from terror, how much to terrorize.

Passarello has wondered about it a lot harder than I ever did, and she’s searched the records of the day, mustering the various descriptions — historical, literary, hypothetical — towards a narrative that eschews (a word I will not say aloud, as it sounds like the antithesis of the yell) certainty in favor of lively possibilities.

Did Jackson tell his men at Manassas to “yell like furies,” and if so was he asking for a wilder and less sane cheer than the clearly martial and organized “Huzzah!” he’d learned at West Point? This is one of Passarello’s points of departure. She cites the writings of British and American ear-witnesses at Manassas and Arthur Freemantle, who heard it on more than one occasion as he studied and wrote about the war. I’m particularly taken by her notions that it might have been like the outcry in the original word scramble at Babel and that it’s meant to make the foe wonder, “How does a body go about attacking a bunch of freaks like these?”

The plot thickens when our astute narrator starts looking at the ways people have spelled the yell for both literary and archival purposes. In the end, she cites James Weldon John’s effiorts in his novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and concludes that “a sound which induces terror is a sound which cannot be mapped.”

And she can’t resist a quick survey of what other ethnicities and cultures shout or chant on the edge of bloodletting. It’s a peculiar list, but nobody else seems to have a yell that sounds like Hell. Maybe Wilfred Owen would have described it as like the voice of “a devil sick of sin.”

For Stonewall the sound was “sweet,” for Ambrose Bierce it was “ugly,” but the uncontested truth is that Passarelle’s own writing is carefully pitched and modulated, hypnotic and surprising, musical, erudite without being prissy, reader-friendly even when it challenges preconceptions. I can’t wait to sit down and hear the whole collection this weekend, maybe even croon and yawp along.

P.S. Passarella was the first woman to win the annual Stella Screaming Contest in New Orleans. She’s not all theory.

Lawless, Reckless, Shapeless, Shameless

R.T. Smith

I went to see Lawless because I read Matt Bondurant’s historical novel The Wettest County in the World and thought it rich, well written, though problematic due to its shifting points of view. And because I’m about to begin teaching Appalachian Literature, a category the book sort of falls into, though the author is a a northeastern Virginia native with Franklin County roots (plus a set of brass knuckles on the family gun rack). As I was watching the story unfold, with all the close-up gore (including testicles in a Mason jar) I’d expect from a teen slasher film, I started wondering what I’d tell my students, if they went to see the film. So I tried to make two lists, good and bad, but they kept bleeding over into each other in an ugly way. (Bleeding is one reason the county is so wet — think The Road, The Proposition — same director.)

The music is generally effective, some of it period and regional, the rest written in imitation of the real thing. The particular sacred harp hymn they chose always stirs me, and some of the tunes written by Nick Cave and others have some good licks, but I keep wondering, Why not use only music from the period and place? Old time songs usually leave Cave in the shade.

The cinematography was indifferent, though the dwellings are well rendered — dreary, scabby, ill-lit, make-do. The glimpses of religion seem pretty authentic, and they’re wise not to tie their imagery to a specific sect. I only wish for more nuance than we get. After all, it’s got to be an interesting mountain church that allows a young girl to pick mandolin at a barn dance awash with stump whiskey. The juxtaposition of the African-American funeral and the barn dance was a nice touch, too.

The images of the moonshining “industry” are various and convey something of the ingenuity of these folks, who seem pretty doltish in most other matters, their code portrayed too simply to allow for the inconsistencies they display (a cripple boy’s murder is cause for community unity and action; a cousin’s brutal tar-and-feathering, not so much). And who does all that woodchopping to keep the distilling process going? And do these people ever eat, other than a feast at the end like an episode of Blue Bloods?

This film isn’t really about mountain culture, however, or even about moonshining. It’s about a family so enterprising (and almost indestructible in the manner of, as the author tells The New Yorker‘s Tad Friend, Rasputin) that too much isn’t quite enough — more, bigger, fancier, nastier. The elements of the culture (storytelling, for instance, or the impact of poverty on the non-shiners) are given a wink and a nod, then abandoned as the filmmakers follow Jack’s developing greed, pretension and panting wannabe posing. For the few minutes he was on the screen, I felt that city gangster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman) was more interesting to the screenwriter (Cave) than the other characters, especially the women, both of whom (Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowski) seem capable of more than they’ve been given. But then, this is a movie about men’s men.

Two real serious problems:
1. the lack of development or depth in the characters (most obvious in comic book melodrama villain Charlie Rakes, played with slick zeal by Guy Pierce), a too-impressionable bantam of a boy, a laconic tough paterfamilias, an angel, a hooker (or hoofer) with a heart-a-gold, various elected corruptioneers, snickering city slickers, an angry and protective preacher/father.
People are so busy filling their stock costumes and mugging for the camera that we don’t see much of the work of survival in the mountains. A pig gets slaughtered and two roosters spar, horses cavort to reflect blossoming love between two human colts, but the business of running farms is conspicuously absent. And now I see where I’m going. Exactly how moonshining fits in with the culture’s other labors and its overall economy — that would help rescue the movie from some of the stereotyping. And do these dogs hunt?
2. The Pollyanna ending with no accountability: “we was rough and bloody, but when prohibition ended we scaled back our appetites and settled into the nicest neighbors you’d want” (to paraphrase). The history behind the pseudo-western (jalopies instead of stallions, guns galore, white hats and black) involves all the political maneuvering before and after the trials that accompanied this little war, not to mention an understanding of why tax on liquor, even before Prohibition, was different and spurred the coastal and city tuckahoes and the highland cohees into conflict and mutual-contempt. And why it’s so much more profitable to still your corn instead of trucking the shucked ears to market.
And by the way, in this movie, where’s all that damn corn coming from? All that invisible hoeing . . . .

But I guess I’m being a trifle foolish. Matt Bondurant wrote a book rich with cultural insight but also filled with just enough of the feuding and fussing and rough customers to bedazzle filmmakers who want to make a shoot-em-up, cut-em-up, bash-em-down hillbilly adrenalinefest. Unless you’re looking for cultural and personal insight or are averse to seeing monstrous assaults and superhuman recoveries while the principals try to suss out the main plot line Cave means for them to follow, Lawless won’t hurt you, but The Wettest County in the World has it beat, hands down. It might not hurt to rent Thunder Road from Netflix or their ilk before you go, just for comparison’s sake.