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Yes, it was a wonderful post full of thoughtfulness, love, acceptance, and while the author wrote of it being "dark", I saw it as full of light. It's the characters of the small towns that made life worth living.
I personally knew so many of these people named Gip, Daze, Doc, Boss, and Doebuck. I wish I had the talent of a Jesse Stuart so I could write the stories of the Nuckols Hall of Fame. Yes, the Hall does exist, but more as a tombstone than a living monument.
The character of Kentucky is not just a mountain property, from the tip of Pike County to the New Madrid Bend (a part of Kentucky which can only be accessed from Kentucky by driving out of Kentucky) there are stories of humanity as louroclou brought to life in the form of a loved uncle.
Thanks, folks, for the kind words! And thanks to stx for those great quotes from Hunter and Jim James, both of whom are from Louisville, but have the wild and strangeness of the country in them.
As windwalker says, " I don't find that kind of care among most of the "enlightened" intelligentsia, who, at the end of the day, are more sheeplike in their thoughts, than the wild creativity of folks like lou's uncle. " Coming back home to Louisville from Rochester, part of my sense of relief was leaving behind the Northern liberal self-satisfaction. I say this reluctantly, as a political liberal myself - but there is something so much more comfortable about the playfulness of mindset here. I always felt a little off around our hip, world-traveling, sophisticated friends up there: what was missing was a sense of playfulness, of delightful errancy, of self-deprecation, of surreal oddness that is part of even the most 'enlightened' of folks down here. Yes, 'sheeplike' is often what I felt from our Rochester friends - a kind of doctrinaire openness that wasn't really open much at all.
Windwalker... where did you teach? I taught in a public school in Rochester - pretty much inner-city, though for much of the time I was there we had a small core of middle- to upper-middle class kids. Due to the ugly politics of Rochester, the apartheid of the county, by the time I retired, our school was about 90% minority. I always say, quite accurately, that my kids went to Harvard -and to Attica. I have several former students who have written books (some with dedications to me, bless 'em) and kids who have died in gunfire or gone to prison. I had one kid who had killed three people on an Army base in Texas use me, his 9th grade English teacher, as a character reference. He's still on Death Row... When I look back on my 37 years of teaching (including 2 in India), I don't know how I dealt with all those stories, all that life, all those fulfilled dreams and broken promises. It was, in retrospect, all too much...
Coming back home to Louisville from Rochester, part of my sense of relief was leaving behind the Northern liberal self-satisfaction. I say this reluctantly, as a political liberal myself - but there is something so much more comfortable about the playfulness of mindset here. I always felt a little off around our hip, world-traveling, sophisticated friends up there: what was missing was a sense of playfulness, of delightful errancy, of self-deprecation, of surreal oddness that is part of even the most 'enlightened' of folks down here. Yes, 'sheeplike' is often what I felt from our Rochester friends - a kind of doctrinaire openness that wasn't really open much at all.
Yes! Well-said. I, too, am quite liberal but often feel out of place because it never felt like my blunt, wild, creative Appalachian self was ever considered good enough (or maybe that's just me, my therapist would say!) I missed the self-deprecating humor that didn't take everything sooo seriously.
I remember the good liberals coming down to do "mission work" for the poor Appalachian kids in the 1960's. I'm grateful for what they brought--a sense of horizon of another world beyond that of dark narrow river valleys--but not for the smugness that sometimes showed up that was all about self-satisfaction for having done good for someone lesser, not less fortunate, but lesser.
I'm in the northeast now after teaching in a state university in TN. I went and observed a public school classroom and promptly went in a switched out of the teaching certificate degree I was in. It wasn't the kids who got me; it was the teachers who were beyond caring by that point due to obscenely high class sizes that made real teaching impossible and horrible administration run by local politics. I figured I wouldn't survive the effects of my continual anger and head-beating-against-the-wall in such a system, and I was right.
I bow in honor of good English teachers in public schools. I learned to write because an English teacher spent her life editing papers every night after school. My sister now teachers h.s. English, and the stories she tells are enough to fill a book that would be rejected for a lack of verisimilitude because no one can believe what's really happening to folks. We'd rather believe the hype.
I teach religious studies now to grad students who think they know the mind of God despite my stories of real people and real complex situations like what you've experienced that you'd think would disabuse them of that notion. I'm confident that a year's worth of pastoring and just plain life will work wonders on them, though.
I worked as a youth pastor and saw a reality I rarely hear about in today's media. A whole mess of life--of kids who needed to be taken out of their homes only beaten harder because I dared to call social services who did absolutely nothing. I saw bright kids wasted, strung out on drugs or babysitting their alcoholic parents or hooking up their little brothers to dialysis machines at home while their single mother worked as a nurse to pay for a house they couldn't afford and the insurance they had to have to keep the little guy alive. I accepted the bloody clothes of a beautiful innocent girl killed by a drunk driver from the mortician to give to her parents devastated for years by the tragedy. You know the scene. For every Harvard kid, there's one who ends up in hell. You have to be a special person to do that day in, day out, and just keep going with a broken heart. It's incredibly wonderful in many ways but sometimes ya feel like you've lived three lives in one, and it's exhausting.
Again with the bowing to you in honor.
I wanted to go to the northeast after living in the south because I missed the witty intelligent conversations I knew among the learned, only to find things far more parochial here (a rust belt city) than in the new south. Original thought seems to have vanished into derivative footnotes. Along with creativity. Creative folks no longer inhabit bright salons but dwell in dark ghettos made beautiful by colorful salvage art comprised of dumpster diving finds.
I was looking forward to the northeast's real, blue-collar ethnicities scrapping for a better life with the powers-that-be that I remembered from childhood. But again . . . sheep. Seems they've been pretty much beaten down by healthcare problems, unemployment, family disintegration, random city violence due to drugs moving in to take root in the toxic soil of despair while the rich grow richer and less responsive to people's needs.
My goodness, I'm getting old! "When I was young and people actually cared for one another before they freed the female slaves . . ."
For all our progress, maybe we'd be wise to preserve not only our Victorian houses and parks but our characters, our creativity (no matter how weird or wild), our sense of humor and love of life, and our down-home caring for one another, especially the aged, infirm, and children.
Thank you for the sound of your voice, windwalker. Talk is rich and sweet, and it is good to hear stories and tell them. I was reminded of the poem I always used to start off my years with: Robert Sund's "Bunch Grass #37." I went looking for a link to it on line and found this:
Scroll to the bottom and there's a video by Louisville's Will Oldham, one of the dark poet-singers I mentioned earlier.
The internet is full of people longing for real front-porch bull****ting. Wild ideas, real stories, good lies, joshing and speculating... how we need them, how hard they are for kids to find fingering their badly-spelled cel phone lives.
I love the movie Slacker... I used to use it in my creative writing class. The movie is set in Austin and is basically a series of tangentially connected monologues, rants, takes, visions by a bunch of mostly college age kids. It's talk, pure talk, pure personal rant... and it hints, in a crazy, sometimes obscene way at the sanctity of talk... Down here in the South, we have at least a bit of a grip on the value of words, just words...
Last edited by louroclou; 03-06-2008 at 12:46 PM..
Thank you for the sound of your voice, windwalker. Talk is rich and sweet, and it is good to hear stories and tell them. I was reminded of the poem I always used to start off my years with: Robert Sund's "Bunch Grass #37." I went looking for a link to it on line and found this:
Scroll to the bottom and there's a video by Louisville's Will Oldham, one of the dark poet-singers I mentioned earlier.
The internet is full of people longing for real front-porch bull****ting. Wild ideas, real stories, good lies, joshing and speculating... how we need them, how hard they are for kids to find fingering their badly-spelled cel phone lives.
I love the movie Slacker... I used to use it in my creative writing class. The movie is set in Austin and is basically a series of tangentially connected monologues, rants, takes, visions by a bunch of mostly college age kids. It's talk, pure talk, pure personal rant... and it hints, in a crazy, sometimes obscene way at the sanctity of talk... Down here in the South, we have at least a bit of a grip on the value of words, just words...
"Getting and spending we lay waste our powers." Wordsworth
Amen to missy's post! Great link to Mark Burnett's blog! Thanks!
I love to visit nursing homes just to hear the old folks tell stories in their own words. There's just something about the human voice and presence.
I once visited a church in the middle of nowhere in TN to teach Sunday school on Genesis 1 & 2--the creation account. It was mostly a bunch of farmers, some of whom hadn't graduated 8th grade. Hollywood would have sat where I was and cast them all in Inherit the Wind as creationists. I took a chance, knowing farmers are some of the wisest folks I've ever met. I explained some of the thoughts of Berdayaev (a philosophical theologian) to them on God and creativity, and they had no trouble with the concept, lapping it up and asking better questions than my graduate seminar had. "I always kinda thought like that," one old guy said. "Never heard it said out loud, though."
When I read Sartre for the first time, I thought the guy knew my grandmother cause he was saying many of the same things: life's what you make it.
I like the idea that we need a Bull****ing place, like my Grandma's porch, which, when I was kid, I thought was magic because it gathered all kinds of different folks from all over the US--extended family mostly and their friends and kids (now grown with their kids) whom my grandparents helped raise when someone couldn't for whatever reason. My grandparents raised six kids on a railroad machinist's salary and there was always plenty of food to share with whoever showed up--the neighbor's kids, the pastor, second and third cousins from Fla or Colorado or across the road. We'd sit there and argue politics and religion and what was wrong with society--all the things my father said were forbidden in polite company. In the kitchen were raucous discussions of sex and childbirth among the women. In the TV room were the Atlanta Braves or the Pittsburgh Steelers where I learned the intricasies of football strategy and male bonding rituals they gave me access to.
Maybe I'm just missing my grandmother who died this past year, but I think we need more intergenerational bull****ting places than we have these days. Places where people really talk to one another and listen and can nuance replies based on shrewd discernments--replies that are dog honest but not hurtful. Honest, intelligent conversation. Where does that occur outside of classrooms anymore?
That being said, I have students who can't TALK to people. They go online for discussions and in person avert eyes with the same people they talk to online. What's up with that?
I don't want to lose face-to-face communality (she said online!) Yet the internet is performing some of these functions, isn't it? But not in embodied presence, which I think is somehow important for creating an ethical society where people care for one another instead of just getting theirs.
I think that people are BOLDER online than in person. They don't have to deal with the true reactions people have online like they do on real life. I also think it is a fear of rejection.
I think that people are BOLDER online than in person. They don't have to deal with the true reactions people have online like they do on real life. I also think it is a fear of rejection.
Yeah, I think that's true today.
I guess my reminisences (never could spell that word!) make me think that face-to-face honesty with one another is something we've lost, but maybe those are child's dreams.
From all I've read on here, the perception is that Louisville is one of those places where you can really connect with people (unless you're a latent sociopath). Is that indeed true? Or is it a surface friendliness that can shoot the breeze with folks but not much else?
Thank you for the sound of your voice, windwalker. Talk is rich and sweet, and it is good to hear stories and tell them. .....
The internet is full of people longing for real front-porch bull****ting. Wild ideas, real stories, good lies, joshing and speculating... how we need them, how hard they are for kids to find fingering their badly-spelled cel phone lives.... Down here in the South, we have at least a bit of a grip on the value of words, just words...
You've just hit upon why noplace else feels like, "Home" to me. I grew up here in the south end of Louisville. I was brought up by a doting family and nosey neighbors. When we have lived elsewhere, it's always felt so lonely! But here in Louisville, the neighbors come out of their houses, they talk to you over fences, on porches, standing in driveways. A few years back my mother built a large covered front porch on her house, and put up a swing... in the rain, in the snow, in every season, you can find neighbors stopping in to sit a spell on the porch and talk to her.
Southerners are just friendlier, and KY is the northernmost southern state.
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Ramblings of an old middle-aged fart
) I missed the self-deprecating humor that didn't take everything sooo seriously. 
despite my stories of real people and real complex situations like what you've experienced that you'd think would disabuse them of that notion. I'm confident that a year's worth of pastoring and just plain life will work wonders on them, though. 
What's up with that? 
!) Yet the internet is performing some of these functions, isn't it? But not in embodied presence, which I think is somehow important for creating an ethical society where people care for one another instead of just getting theirs.
