Foster Dickson's Blog, page 35

Dirty Boots: “Country Music”

For the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have been watching Ken Burns’ new Country Music documentaries on PBS. Restraining our urge to jump forward, we began with the first episode, which covered the Depression-era roots in early radio shows, and have enjoyed both learning and reminiscing as we’ve worked our way through subsequent episodes. We just watched the next-to-last one, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?, 1973 – 1983” last weekend. There’s one more to go.

[image error]My wife and I have completely different experiences with country music. Hers centers on a childhood that had this music as its soundtrack, with a father who loved George Jones and Ray Charles. She is less concerned with artist names or esoteric anecdotes than with enjoying a good song and having fond memories of a few in particular. By contrast, mine began with a childhood awareness that came mainly from crossover hits, and my teenage attitude was that country music was terrible. I didn’t really “discover” country music — real country music — until I was in college, and only then through acts like Bob Dylan and The Byrds.

Even as a latecomer to country, I see that Burns’ documentary series has real strengths and weaknesses (if I may be so bold). Understanding that it would take hundreds of episodes to do a more thorough job, these seven cover a lot but also leave gaping holes. They focus on the big guys — Jimmie Rogers, Hank, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, Flatt, Scruggs, Loretta, Merle, Dolly, Willie, Waylon — and tell of the major producers whose names we may not know, but some folks get more attention than seems necessary. While I respect Marty Stuart’s role in modern country music, I question his ubiquity in this series, especially considering how the sixth episode hardly mentions hit machines like Kenny Rogers and Alabama. Thankfully, Burns gives real time and attention to Armadillo World Headquarters and to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, but also gives quite a bit to Tom T. Hall and Jeannie Sealey, two names many modern fans wouldn’t recognize. I’ll give Burns props for handling Charlie Pride’s story tactfully, a task that Pride himself helps along. Personally, I don’t enjoy the “Nashville Sound,” so the limited emphasis on singers like Eddy Arnold didn’t bother me, but the absence of the Allman Brothers Band did. (“Ramblin’ Man” is a great country song.) Moreover, there wasn’t the scantest whisper of the name David Allan Coe, whose 1975 “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” is, after all, the “the perfect country and western song.”

Documentaries like these are, more than anything, fodder for arguments among over-educated self-appointed critics like me, the kind of people who’ve read Frye Gaillard’s Watermelon Wine and watched Heartworn Highways. Having come to country music through my own volition, not through my natural habitat, I’ve got a more intellectual approach to “three chords and the truth” than a fan whose roots lie in smoky honkytonks and gas-station cassette tapes. However, one great thing about country music is: those good ol’ boys and people like my wife will never let high-minded interlopers like me and Ken Burns ruin it for them. No matter what happens, the integrity of sharing the stories and perspectives of common people will remain at the core. And speaking of integrity . . . I’m already looking forward to the passage of the “bro country” phase, and hopefully, a couple-dozen years from now, the next generation’s Ken Burns will gloss over them, too.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Love + Marriage: The Fitzgerald Museum’s Annual Literary Contest

[image error]Last year, it was “What’s Old Is New.” This year, it’s “Love + Marriage.” The submissions period for the Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest for students is open. For more information, please see the guidelines below— and please feel free to share them with any parents, teachers, students, and organizations that may be interested, as well as with any media outlets that may be willing to spread the word. As contest coordinator, I’ll be glad to answer any questions that folks may have, or questions can be directed to the museum.

The Fitzgerald Museum Literary Contest: Love + Marriage

F. Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald were daring and revolutionary in their lives and in their art and writing. One hundred years after their 1919 wedding in Montgomery, Alabama, the Fitzgeralds’ literary and artistic works from the 1920s and 1930s are still regarded as groundbreaking, and The Fitzgerald Museum is seeking to identify and honor the daring and revolutionary young writers and artists of this generation. 

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Multi-Genre

Categories: Grades 9–10, Grades 11–12, Undergraduate

General Guidelines for 2019 – 2020:

The Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest is seeking submissions of short fiction, poetry, and multi-genre works that exhibit themes of love and marriage. Works with traditional forms and styles will be accepted, yet writers are encouraged to send works that utilize innovative forms and techniques. Literary works may include artwork, illustrations, font variations, and other graphic elements, with the caveat that these elements should enhance the work, not simply decorate the page. 

The submissions period is open from September 1 until December 31, 2019. Works will be judged in three separate age categories, so please be clear about that category. Submissions should not exceed ten pages (with font sizes no smaller than 11 point). Each student may only enter once. Awards will be announced by March 16, 2020. Each category will have a single winner and possibly an honorable mention.

Submissions should be sent to fitzgeraldliterarycontest@gmail.com with “Literary Contest Submission” in the subject line and relevant information in the email. Due to issues of compatibility, works should be attached as PDFs to ensure that they appear as the author intends. Files should be named with the author’s first initial [dot] last name [underscore] title. For example, J.Smith_InnovativeStory.pdf.

This year’s judges are Kwoya Fagin Maples for the undergraduate category and Joe Taylor for the high school categories. Maples is the author of the poetry collection Mend, teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and is currently an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Taylor is a professor at the University of West Alabama, an editor at Livingston Press, and the author of six novels and story collections. For more information, contact the Fitzgerald Museum or contest coordinator Foster Dickson. 

A Southern Movie Bonus: Spooky, Scary, Southern Sampler

In October, everybody loves horror movies. Even people who don’t like horror movies. All of the movies listed below are set in the Deep South, are available on streaming services, and can satisfy a Halloween-time craving for a spooky, scary movie.

Squirm  (1976)

Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

The Beast Within  (1982)

Voodoo Dawn (1991)

Skeleton Key  (2005)

#throwbackthursday: The Death of Dub Taylor, 1994

Even though you don’t recognize his name, you do know Dub Taylor, who died on this day twenty-five year ago, in 1994. Taylor was a character actor whose career began in the 1940s, [image error] and his undeniable raffish charm led him to infamy, in part for playing ne’er-do-wells, buffoons, and drunkards. He was a staple of 1950s and ’60s westerns, and later of movies set in the South, including 1962’s Sweet Bird of Youth, 1970’s tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . and The Liberation of LB Jones, 1975’s Poor Pretty Eddie, 1976’s Gator, 1977’s Moonshine County Express, and 1981’s Soggy Bottom USA. Alongside , who played Otis the drunk in The Andy Griffith Show, Dub Taylor did a great deal to establish and perfect the modern TV-and-film caricature of the shiftless, carefree Southerner who was harmless but also useless. Dub Taylor was 87.

(Hal Smith also died in 1994, in January of that year. Smith’s career was mainly in TV, and in addition to Andy Griffith, he played on such Southern-ish programs as The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gomer Pyle USMC, and Green Acres.)

 

Dirty Boots: The One-Year Mark

If you read what I post here on Welcome to Eclectic very often, you may be able to tell that I like columns.  Not the kind that hold up buildings, the kind that appear in newspapers (and now online). Even as a teenager, when we got the daily paper at our house, I tended to browse the news but read the columns from regulars like Dave Broder, William Raspberry, Thomas Sowell, Lewis Grizzard, and Rheta Grimsley. Having no idea who was liberal or conservative, or why that mattered, I developed an unlikely affinity for George Will. As an adult, I’ve particularly liked David Brooks and EJ Dionne, and becoming an avid watcher of PBS NewsHour in more recent years has brought Mark Shields and Michael Gerson into my purview. Closer to home, I read Josh Moon in the Alabama Political Reporter, John Archibald with al.com, and Jeff Martin in the Montgomery Independent. I just like the column as a literary-journalistic form. If hard news is the cake, and pictures are the frosting, then columns are the sprinkles.

However, I don’t have the credentials to be a traditional newspaper columnist. I’ve never been a reporter, nor a news editor, and I would imagine that these columnist jobs are fairly coveted in the journalism profession. I can’t imagine a middle-aged rookie like me getting to walk right onto the Editorial Page staff and claim a seat. So, a year ago, I began doing what the internet has allowed so many of us to do: ignore formal conventions, defy accepted norms and practices, and self-start at whatever I please.

[image error]“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” was named after my penchant for wearing dirty boots most of the time, even as dress shoes, even in the summer heat, and pays a little homage to one of my favorite Sonic Youth songs. It has been a weekly smattering of whatever crosses my mind or my desk or both, in usually less than a thousand words. There have now been about fifty installments – I did take two weeks off last summer – and I’ve gotten some nice comments about some of the posts, particularly the pre-Lenten “Ugly Words for Ugly Thoughts,” the Alabama-centered “Our Last-ness,” and the recent “When Reading Meant Everything.”

To me, a column is about perspective. Though I’m a Catholic, not a Confucian, I think that old Chinese philosopher put it pretty well when describing how a thoughtful person ought to look at this world:

Cultivated people have nine thoughts. When they look, they think of how to see clearly. When they listen, they think of how to hear keenly. In regard to their appearance, they think of how to stay warm. In their demeanor, they think of how to be respectful. In their speech, they think of how to be truthful. In their work, they think of how to be serious. When in doubt, they think of how to pose questions. When angry, they think of trouble. When they see gain to be had, they think of justice.

In this age of division and polarization, more of the perspectives we read ought to come from notions like those than from the buttressing of partisan platforms or from efforts to sway political polling. Maybe just that’s my Generation-X, anti-corporate cynicism talking, but I don’t think so.

Nonetheless, it has been a pleasure writing these columns over the last year, and I think I’ll continue them for the time being. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll continue to.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this column or any of the posts on Welcome to Eclectic , consider making a donation to keep the site going.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

The 14th annual My Favorite Poem reading @ ASFA

It isn’t easy to talk a group of teenagers into giving up their Friday night for a school field trip, but when they’re Creative Writing students and when the event is a poetry reading and when the place is the Alabama School of Fine Arts . . . nearly half of them still said yes. Last Friday night, I took about a dozen students to the 14th annual My Favorite Poem reading, which is organized by Jim Reed Books. This was our second year going to the reading, last year’s invitation having come alongside a very kind and generous fundraiser for our school, which had then just burned. The Creative Writing faculty at ASFA have been nothing if not gracious toward us, and that solidarity has meant a lot.

[image error]

Though it’s only a brief tradition at this point, we went once again to The Pizitz Food Hall for dinner beforehand. It also isn’t easy to find food options for a group of teenagers with varied tastes, but this place does well. The Pizitz, which is on 2nd Avenue North, is a historic building from the 1920s that has been repurposed mainly into apartments, but the ground floor contains a high-end food court with choices ranging from pho and mo-mo to poké or chicken-and-waffles. There’s also a little Birmingham-centric shop that sells shirts, et cetera from the Yellowhammer Print Shop in nearby Glen Iris. This time, at the food hall, I ate a cheeseburger with bacon jam at The Standard, which was delicious— and bought one of their t-shirts, of course, which was printed by Yellowhammer.

After we ate, traffic getting to the reading was a little mucky, since apparently the circus was in town on Friday night. My first idea was that a concert at the BJCC was causing the tie-ups driving in, but a man in the lobby of ASFA told me what was going on. I didn’t doubt it, since I’d just had run-ins with a few clowns who were blocking intersections.

[image error]The My Favorite Poem reading is pleasingly atypical for two reasons: first, it features a mixture of writers and people who don’t write, and second, its focus is on sharing the poems we read, not on the poems we write. This year’s reading included poems by folks you’d think would be there – Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Robert Frost – and some we might not have heard-of yet, classics and new. The event’s founder Irene Latham was one of the readers this year and explained how it all got started through the Favorite Poem Project. My two students read “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye and  Nick Flynn’s “Cartoon Physics, part 1,” and as is tradition, event organizer Jim Reed ended with Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” a darkly comic and highly lyrical ballad about a Southerner who freezes (almost) to death in the Yukon. On the way out, we were handed copies of ASFA Creative Writing’s literary journal Cadence, which is particularly handsome this time – black-on-black with spot varnish on the journal’s title – and the readers received a hardback copy of Autumnal Heart, poems by Alabama’s Sue Scalf, who passed away last year.

Even though it’s only about ninety miles from our school to theirs, I don’t see the ASFA Creative Writing folks nearly enough. Daily life carries us all from home to work and back home, and writers tend to be kind of solitary anyway. So it was also good to chat with TJ Beitelman and Kwoya Maples about how things are going. For the last few months, I’ve been picking my way through their two new books – TJ’s This is the Story of His Life and Kwoya’s Mend – and took the opportunity while we were there to get those signed. Though the styles and substance of the two books are dissimilar, both are intelligent, well-crafted, and poignant collections. And in addition to being good writers, they’re also good people. These are folks we’re lucky to have here in Alabama.

All that was left after hearing some poems and munching on some Cheetos and cupcakes at the reception was the dreaded nighttime drive home from an out-of-town school field trip. (I can only sigh when I write that.) By 8:30 or 9:00 PM, our school day had lasted more than twelve hours. We’d eaten, done what we came to do, acted silly, and burned off some steam. Now, we were just ready to be back home. Thankfully, the normal people are all at their homes by that hour, so it cleared the road for us abnormal people to make good time.

 

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Winding Back Roads of Southern History”

[image error]This past summer, I went out to Arizona to see my Uncle David, my mother’s older brother who left Montgomery for Phoenix in the early 1970s, a few years before I was born. I hadn’t seen David and my Aunt Laurel in seventeen years, but the visit would still have to be a brief one. We arrived on a Friday, and my wife’s birthday was coming the next week, and moreover Alabama’s primaries were, too— and I wasn’t going to be out of town for either. Two days seemed like enough time to catch up, and for my two children to get to know them a little bit, but not enough to impose too badly.

While my kids and I were at their house that weekend, Dave and I mostly sat on the back porch by the pool, swilled cold beer in the dry heat, and swapped stories and observations about his Alabama and mine. Dave had come up in the 1950s and ’60s, during a wild-and-woolly time, while I am a product of the 1980s and ’90s, which had its own wild-and-woolly-ness. We covered quite a few topics in a short time, including our family and my work as a writer, and about the latter, Dave asked me something that I’ve been thinking about in the months since: You’ve spent a lot of time writing other people’s stories, he said, what about yours?

Read the whole post

 

Feeding the Family, Part Three

*If you haven’t already, you should probably read Part One and Part Two first.

This is harder than it should be— eating healthier and finding ways for my family to do the same. Since I’ve begun paying closer attention, the remarkable nature of our food conundrum, which is described in documentaries, in podcasts, in all types of media, has become more tangible to me because . . . it really is easier to obtain and eat unhealthy, processed, packaged food than to obtain and eat healthy, fresh food. 

With everyone in my family working and going to school, and having two children involved in youth sports, those daily deals with the Devil are easy to make: running through a fast-food drive-thru, or shopping at the store for things we can pop straight into the oven. And it’s not just the kids’ activities that affect our decisions; I spend an hour each week in our local adoration chapel, am on the board of two non-profits, and my wife and I both have periodic meetings after-hours. When afternoon and evening obligations chop up that block of time between 4:00 PM and bedtime, any ideas about cooking have to fit between the pick-ups and the drop-offs. That’s challenge enough.

However, since beginning these efforts to eat better and shop smarter, other peripheral issues have also come to my attention through reports about food and eating. The first of the two came last summer at the National Sustainability Teachers Academy, where I learned that Americans waste or throw away 40% of our food. This news isn’t new, even though it was new to me. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the amount wasted averages to about 400 pounds of uneaten food per person per year. Notwithstanding the shameful idea that each of us, me included, throws away 400 pounds of food, the below infographic shows that we’re not just wasting the food itself:

[image error] Source: NRDC

Before attending that teacher academy, I hadn’t really thought about how food waste is also water waste, fertilizer waste, and fuel waste, all of which were used or consumed in the process of bringing it to our refrigerators and plates.

Once again, I’ve found that I’m as bad as anybody about contributing to the quagmire I now want to escape, including when it comes to food waste. I also learned in Montana what a Life Cycle Analysis is – obtaining a comprehensive understanding of what resources are used to bring a product to market –  and have been thinking about it every time I clean out my fridge: dish after dish containing a one-third of a cup of spoiled this followed by nearly a half-pound of spoiled that. My wife’s aunt always says that it’s a sin to throw away food . . . I think she’s right. The question – this effort has been fraught with questions – is: what do we do to change it for the better?

The second of the two epiphanies came last month, when I saw that the United Nations issued a report saying we all need to eat less meat, because its production is one of the factors that is driving climate change. I’ve written before about getting annoyed with doomsayers and their apocalyptic pronouncements, but two things made me pay closer attention this time: the UN’s Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change published the findings, and there are actual solutions offered for veering off the doomsday course. They focused here on the need to alter our agricultural practices worldwide, because the ecological stress of large-scale meat production is overwhelming the land. In short, the whole human race needs to move to a plant-based diet. Rather than change the food system from the top down – producers to consumers – one aspect of the solution will be to change it from the bottom up. If we choose to eat less meat, then we’ll buy less meat, and farmers will produce less meat when demand drops.

While I hadn’t been shooting for becoming a vegetarian, what I’m hearing is that we all need to be close to it, because the planet isn’t going to support us otherwise. The problem for me, beyond enjoying cheeseburgers and fried chicken very much, is hunger. When I don’t eat any meat for a day or two, I’m downright hungry and feel like I’ve barely eaten at all. The other day, we went to Zoe’s after Mass, and I ordered a falafel pita and roasted vegetables, cleaned my plate, and still wanted more to eat. People can tell me that it’s better for me and for the planet, but when my belly is still growling when I’m finished with a meal, my reactions are less friendly than if I were satisfied.

If that weren’t enough, among the insights I’ve gotten, another glaring problem has arisen: trash. I’ve been astounded at how much packaging ready-made foods leave behind after the food is gone. Wanting to keep my son away from Lunchables, which are loaded with salt and contain nothing green, I’ve shifted his attention toward healthier lunch options: making his own sandwich on some good bread and coupling it with these packages that have green apples, pretzels, cheese, and caramel dip. But the plastic containers are still a problem . . . Realizing this and trying to do my part, for my birthday, I got a set of stainless steel lunch containers, that are at least keeping me away from Ziploc bags. Small changes, man, small changes . . . 

Though it’s only beginning, this foray into foodie consciousness and sustainability has taught me a valuable lesson already: for people to change, the healthy, sustainable way must get easier. As it is now, it is so easy to eat processed food, throw away the leftovers and the packaging, and put one trash can at the street twice a week. It’s also easy to ignore the resources that go into our food – fuel, water, chemicals – because we don’t see them go into our food. I keep hearing that we’ve got until 2030 to straighten out our habits or climate change will become even more severe, and I think about what that means for my family. My wife and I will be in our mid-50s, looking toward retirement, and our kids will be in their 20s, looking toward starting lives and families of their own. Notwithstanding the larger picture for all of humanity, I’d hate to spend my retirement in scalding weather with exorbitant food prices. It makes more sense to me to fortify the future by sacrificing some convenience now, which is what this effort is all about.

 

A Look Back at “Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South,” part one

[image error]I can’t believe that it has been ten years since Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South. The project was funded by an Arts Teacher Fellowship from the Surdna Foundation and entailed a nearly a years’ worth of travel, interviews, readings, and news-watching to learn more about my home state of Alabama. During its fifteen-year timeframe, the Arts Teacher Fellowship, which was later renamed the National Artist Teacher Fellowship, provided funding for arts teachers to explore a subject, practice, or art form to then take back into the classroom. For me, that meant enhancing my knowledge of the controversial and problematic place where my students and I live. Readings in major state histories gave me a better sense of our past, and travels took me to see new things that were happening, new projects or businesses or people who were taking Alabama in a different and hopefully better direction.

My self-assigned reading list was thorough but admittedly not flawless. The four books I read were the multi-authored Alabama: History of a Deep South State, Wayne Flynt’s Alabama in the Twentieth Century and Poor But Proud, and Frye Gaillard’s Cradle of Freedom. These books constituted a broad overview from territory days through the 1990s, a thematic overview of the century we just ended, an examination of poor white culture, and a narrative of the state’s Civil Rights history. In addition, I also followed news alerts with the keyword Alabama, which was lively since the years 2009 and 2010 had national championships for both Alabama and Auburn and had Gov. Bob Riley going buck-wild over gambling. (The major work that I chose to leave off my list was Albert Pickett’s 1851 History, because my project was forward-looking and my time was limited.)

[image error]Starting out in August 2009, my travels kept me close to home. I spent some time back in my old neighborhood, which had changed dramatically and become somewhat dilapidated, and in Montgomery’s downtown, where I passed some time as a kid. I also wandered around in eastern Alabama, near Lake Martin, where we spend a lot of time. On those trips, I went off the usual track to see what was else was around there, including going further north than I usually do, through Alexander City to the mythical community of Peckerwood. There wasn’t much there, but I still had to see it for myself.

September got me into the thick of it. Traveling into Alabama’s Black Belt, in the western part of the state, was a natural first choice, since this region is heavy with history that affects me daily. This time, I made a loop through Selma, Newbern, Greensboro, Livingston, Thomaston, and Burkville. The formal interviews for this trip were with Andrew Freear, director of The Rural Studio; Joe Taylor, editor and publisher of the University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press; and Barbara Evans, an activist and organizer of the annual Okra Festival. Though these two- and three-day trips were a little bit strenuous, they were far beyond worth-it, allowing me to see parts of the state and meet people I might not have otherwise.

To see some of the images from that trip into the Black Belt, scroll down.

[image error] Butterflies in downtown Selma

 

[image error] Rural Studio students and their skate park
[image error] Beautiful blue skies in the Black Belt
[image error] Joe Taylor of Livingston Press
[image error] At the Rural Heritage Center in Thomaston
[image error] Barbara Evans’ Civil Rights museum and art gallery Annie Mae’s Place in Burkville

Coming next: Part two, containing a retrospective of the latter months of 2009.

#throwbackthursday: “The Life and Poetry of John Beecher,” 2009

It was ten years ago this month that my third book with the very long academic title, The Life and Poetry of John Beecher, 1904 – 1980: Advocate for Poetry as a Spoken Art, was published by Edwin Mellen Press. The book was based on my master’s thesis for the Master of Liberal Arts program at Auburn University at Montgomery. At the time of its publication, it was the only book about Beecher, though Angela Smith’s Here I Stand was since published in 2009.

A descendant of the abolitionist Beecher family, John Henry Newman Beecher was a prolific writer, editor, poet, journalist, and social activist who rebelled against his privileged upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama after experiencing the working conditions in the steel mills as a teenager. After a bit of success as a poet in the 1920s, he worked as a New Deal programs administrator in the 1930s, then volunteered for the Navy’s first racially integrated crew during World War II. In 1949, Beecher was blacklisted for refusing to sign a loyalty oath and spent the 1950s as a rancher, letterpress printer, and independent publisher. Beecher’s return to mainstream society in the 1960s led him to cover the  Civil Rights movement for Commonweal and Ramparts magazines, and his poetry received greater attention. His Collected Poems, 1924 – 1974 was published by Macmillan in 1975. However, after his death in 1980, Beecher’s works went out of print, and he faded into obscurity until a volume of selected poems, One More River to Cross, was published by NewSouth Books in 2003.