Yellowhammer Press

Dear Walker,

I couldn’t be more pleased at the acceptance of your novel, though I had no doubt about it ever since I read the opening pages.  What I hope now is that you’ll come off the notion that you don’t want to go on with the work.  The novel is just what Lawrence called it, “the one bright book of life.”

The recipient is novelist Walker Percy; the novel in question is Percy’s seminal The Moviegoer.  The letter continues thus:

By the end of the month I expect to have killed Stonewall Jackson dead as a mackerel; which makes an excellent stopping place before I tackle the complexities of the Vicksburg Campaign.

The letter’s author, Shelby Foote, was hard at work on his own masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative.  His sprawling 3 volume, 1.5 million-word masterwork on the American Civil War took more than 20 years to write and is arguably the definitive work on the subject.  I say “arguably” because critics assail the fact that it reads more like a novel than “proper history,” something I consider to be a success rather than a failing.  If you want a line-by-line breakdown of the conflict, try some Bruce Catton.  Foote, on the other hand, crafts a heartbreakingly beautiful tale of the conflict while avoiding the tacky sentimentality of Ken Burns.

Percy (the adopted nephew of Lanterns on the Levee author William Alexander Percy), on the other hand, spent years honing his fiction and working on what Foote dubbed, “his apprentice novels.”  The Moviegoer, with its portrayal of New Orleans stock broker Binx Bolling’s post-war suburban ennui, would go on to win the 1961 National Book Award.

To be frank, I’m writing this entire piece to recommend Jay Tolson’s The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy.  Though most of the correspondence is from Foote (who, as a friend accurately points out, has the definitive Southern accent — when I imagine what God must look and sound like, it’s Shelby Foote), the collection reveals a deep bond between two masters of their craft and lays bare the anxieties, failings, ambitions, and ultimate successes of two giants of literature, Southern or otherwise.

School friends from Greenville, MS, Foote and Percy keep in close contact for over 40 years.  While Foote labors for decades on what he simply refers to as, “the narrative,” Percy soldiers on and writes Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and several other novels as well as scholarly articles.

Tolson’s collection is not only valuable as a connecting thread between two sharp literary minds; the book itself is readable from cover to cover, expertly edited and footnoted with explanatory bits for the more ambiguous references.  For fans of either writer, it’s a must.  If you’re new to one or both, it works as a pretty good introduction to the context of the works’ creation if not the works themselves.

Further reading:

UNC: The Walker Percy Project

YHP: There is exactly one way to make a mint julep

One of our very own, Jane Allen Nodine, presents a new exhibit of her encaustic art  at the Myst Contemporary Gallery in Spartanburg, SC.  The exhibit opens today (1.21) and runs through February 16.  If you’re in the area, show some support!

• The Appalachian Photographers Project features 18 photographers from the Southern Appalachian states.  Their work is a broad and varied view of the Appalachian South.  Our own Maury Gortemiller is represented.

• It’s a great month for music. Both Southern Cultures and Oxford American have produced Southern music issues and both are accompanied by CDs filled with gems.  “Well Whatever” by The Kingsbury Manx is currently at the top of my playlist.

Much of Faulkner’s work is, arguably, unfilmable.  Rendering Go Down, Moses or As I Lay Dying on screen would simply show them as narratives, unable to properly convey the depth of characterization and power of his characters’ internal monologues.  1958’s The Long, Hot Summer, however, attempts a more modest feat.  Based on one of Faulkner’s minor novels, The Hamlet, and with a considerable nod to his short story “Barn Burning,” Summer follows Ben Quick (Paul Newman), a scion of the Snopes family if ever there was one, through his rise in the esteem of the Varner family.  The Varners, led by Orson Welles as sodden patriarch Will Varner, run the small town of Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi like their own private fiefdom and Quick is eager to ascend to their level.

To say that director Martin Ritt plays it safe here is an understatement.  In 1958, a big budget movie about the South knew better than to touch on the issues of social and racial inequality that course through Faulkner’s work.  Ritt crafts a safe, “Sunny South” version of Faulkner with jovial black servants and scores of drawling but affable locals.  He hasn’t quite translated Faulkner to the big screen so much as he has sanitized him and extracted from his revolutionary fiction what amounts to little more than a gassy boy-meets-girl story.

Summer tells us less about Faulkner than it does the society that gave birth to it.  Ritt, once an accused communist whose schooling at North Carolina’s Elon University shocked him into a fascination with the rigidly stratified South, leaves no hint of his personality on this film.  The whitewash of Faulkner’s South is so weak-kneed and treacly that at one point, Ben Quick compares the size of a bedroom in the Varner manse to the size of his entire family home, prompting the black house manager to nod in a sort of familiar agreement, a scene seemingly designed to cement a bi-racial “us versus them” approach to Southern poverty.  Modern viewers’ eyes will roll early and often.

Still, Summer’s box office and critical success speak volumes about the prevailing view of the South, at least in contemporary cinema.  Watching this film, one gets a feeling that “it’s not as bad as all that,” that the black underclass is perfectly content to serve the aristocracy, that the grinding poverty of rural whites consisted of little more than lazily chewing tobacco outside the general store, and that the lily white flower of Southern womanhood need only receive an injection of strong farm stock to rescue her from the effete man of the New South.

If it’s Faulkner you want, you’ll only find him between two covers.  The Long, Hot Summer, however, plays less like “Barn Burning” and more like Song of the South.  Skip this and see The Accountant. Twice.

View the trailer here.

The black eyed peas and turnip greens have settled and the new year is upon us.  YHP is growing and we’re looking for contributors.  Brannon and I were exceptionally busy at the end of last year, and as a result we didn’t have enough time to devote to this site.  What we hear from our readers is that they want more!  More artists, more essays, more reviews.  We can’t do it alone, so we’re on the lookout for qualified contributors.

We need both regular contributors and occasional essays.  We’re looking for regular (at least monthly) contributors in the following areas:

• Art
• Book Reviews
• Literature (fiction and poetry)
• Food and Drink
• Society and Culture

Brannon’s artist profiles and my reviews and essays aren’t going away.  We’re just growing and we have a readership that wants more than my weekly updates.  If you have your finger on the pulse of some piece of the Southern puzzle, let me know.  Even if you don’t see your specialty here, try me.  If it’s interesting, we’ll publish it.  Want to write 250 words on Southern cheese?  I love it.  500 words on how your local watering hole is a perfect microcosm of Southern culture?  Send it over.  A photograph or a series of photographs that you’re particularly proud of and illustrate something interesting?  Yes please.  In short, give us your best and help contribute to a growing Southern institution!

Email me at ryan@yellowhammerpress.com with column suggestions, contributions, or any other feedback you’d like to give.  Happy New Year!

At the moment, I’m somewhere over what I believe is Pennsylvania, happily on my way out of New York and into Atlanta, and from there on my way home to north Alabama.  The view is wonderful — the snowbound landscape mimics Andrew Wyeth’s subtle pallet of gentle browns, greys, blues, and broad swathes of unspoiled white.  In a few hours, I’ll be home with my family on our little mountain, the last quiet hurrah of Appalachia.

I’m thinking about you.  Our readers, our fans, our friends.  In 2010, you’ll see a different Yellowhammer Press.  More content, more contributors, more artists, and a few surprises.  More interviews, certainly.  Our readership is delightfully broad and disarmingly enthusiastic.  When I hear from you (and I love hearing from you), it’s always something wonderful.  For those of you who have stuck with us and helped us grow in 2009, I promise you a vastly improved 2010.  I hope each and every one of you has a wonderful holiday season.  Stay tuned.  It’s only going to get better.

George Singleton is man, myth, legend, and possibly the greatest all-around son-of-a-bitch the South has ever produced.  I’ve written briefly about his recent collection The Half Mammals of Dixie and recently finished his delirious novel Work Shirts for Mad Men. The Southeast Review has a collection of anecdotes about Singleton in their collection The Cult of George Singleton. Any man who has stolen Funyuns gets an open drinks invitation from me automatically.  Now if I could only get him to read my fiction…

• Oxford American has a list of The Best Southern Novels of All Time.  1o novels, more or less all considered the greatest hits of the Southern Canon.  How many have you read?

• Finally, the surreal.  What’s more Southern than Sweet Home Alabama?  Love it or hate it, there’s something hysterically odd about hearing this perennial barroom favorite performed by a Finnish rock band backed the Soviet Red Army Choir.  I can’t wait for the comments on this one.

Once again, one of the best portrayals of rural Southern life comes from Ginny Mule Pictures.  The production studio behind the Oscar-winning short film The Accountant (and very possibly my favorite film of all time), led primarily by actor and director Ray McKinnon and actor Walton Goggins, is now responsible for the understated but forceful film That Evening Sun.

That Evening Sun, adapted from the William Gay short story “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” finds aging farmer Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) at war with a violent redneck named Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon). After packing Abner off to a retirement home, his son Paul (Walton Goggins) rents his sprawling farm to the drunk and vicious Choat.  Abner returns home to find his beloved farmstead taken over by the Choat family (played exceptionally by Carrie Preston and Mia Wasikowska).  Unable to regain his farm by legal means, Abner wages a quiet war of wits with the Choate family.

Admittedly, the film leans heavily on a performance by Hal Holbrook that is generating some Oscar buzz already.  His performance alone, portraying a Depression-era farmer at the end of his days, embattled with a redneck squatter as well as his only son make That Evening Sun worth seeing.  As subtle as it is powerful, Holbrook’s performance doesn’t prop up the film so much as it does steer it; That Evening Sun is written and directed well enough not to ask Holbrook to carry it on his back.  Instead, the rest of the film seems to orbit his performance, the other characters darting in and out between brief flashbacks of his youth.

Of course, no review of a movie about the South would be complete without a check of the accents.  Holbrook, McKinnon, and Goggins are all bona fide Southerners, so their accents were natural and without issue.  I’m happy to report that both Carrie Preston and Mia Wasikowska delivered expertly, without a single tinge of Dukes of Hazard.

That Evening Sun is in theaters in limited release.

Julie Püttgen’s Cloudmapping series is a spontaneous reaction to “a set of givens.” Exploring the revelatory aspects of artistic creation and the narratives that inadvertently stem from the creative act, Püttgen’s paintings are the nucleus of the multimedia collaboration Unless & Until, with text by JS van Buskirk, music by James R. Carlson, and animation by Matt Gilbert.

Carrie McGee utilizes organic and inorganic materials to create serial installations whose suspended pieces explore the intersection between natural and industrial forms.

We’re happy to welcome them to YellowhammerPress.com and look forward to sharing their work with our readers.