A Sketch that Sends Me Scratchin'
I am so happy when I run across some literary writing that gets my hair up, dries my throat, makes the interest bead. I have to call it sexual --especially since it's of that variety of sexuality that falls less to the cock & hole family. Many entries ago, I had found something of tortured similar sexual interest in Samuel Beckett.
Last night, I picked up -- for the first time! -- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (I am interested in looking at literary and photographic representations of poverty.) In the edition I got, Walker Evans (the photographer for the book) gives a portrait of James Agee (the Tennessee native writer):
... He could be taken for a likable American young man, an above-average product of the Great Democracy from any part of the country. He didn't look much like a poet, an intellectual, an artist, or a Christian, each of which he was. Nor was there outward sign of his paralyzing, self-lacerating anger. His voice was pronouncedly quiet and low-pitched, though not of a "cultivated" tone. It gave the impression of diffidence, but never of weakness ... .
His clothes were deliberately cheap, not only because he was poor but because he wanted to be able to forget them. He would work a suit into fitting hm perfectly by the simple method of not taking it off much. In due time the cloth would mold itself to his frame. ... it did seem sometimes that wind, rain, work, and mockery were his tailors. ... He got more delight out of factory-seconds sneakers and a sleazy cap than a straight dandy does from waxed calf Peal shoes and a brushed Lock & Co. bowler.
Physically Agee was quite powerful, in the deceptive way of uninsistent large men. In movement he was rather graceless. His hands were large, long, bony, light and uncared for. His gestures were one of the memorable things about him. He seemed to model, fight and stroke his phrases as he talked. ... [His talk] wasn't a matter of show, and it wasn't necessarily bottle-inspired. Sheer energy of imagination was what lay behind it.
...He could live inside the subject, with no distractions. Back-country poor life wasn't really far from him, actually. He had some of it in his blood, through his relatives in Tennessee. ... In Alabama he sweated and scratched with submerged glee.
... All you saw of it [his Christianity] was an ingrained courtesy that emanated from him towards everyone, perhaps excepting the smugly rich, the pretentiously genteel, and the police. After a while, in a round-about way, you discovered that, to him, human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls.
Reading this made my eyes narrow, made me pull at my collar.
(And I have to admit a certain imagined familiarity since I grew up a mere 30 minutes from where he went to Episcopal boarding school [after his father died], just miles of field and a mountainside from the "campus".)
Last night, I picked up -- for the first time! -- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (I am interested in looking at literary and photographic representations of poverty.) In the edition I got, Walker Evans (the photographer for the book) gives a portrait of James Agee (the Tennessee native writer):
... He could be taken for a likable American young man, an above-average product of the Great Democracy from any part of the country. He didn't look much like a poet, an intellectual, an artist, or a Christian, each of which he was. Nor was there outward sign of his paralyzing, self-lacerating anger. His voice was pronouncedly quiet and low-pitched, though not of a "cultivated" tone. It gave the impression of diffidence, but never of weakness ... .
His clothes were deliberately cheap, not only because he was poor but because he wanted to be able to forget them. He would work a suit into fitting hm perfectly by the simple method of not taking it off much. In due time the cloth would mold itself to his frame. ... it did seem sometimes that wind, rain, work, and mockery were his tailors. ... He got more delight out of factory-seconds sneakers and a sleazy cap than a straight dandy does from waxed calf Peal shoes and a brushed Lock & Co. bowler.
Physically Agee was quite powerful, in the deceptive way of uninsistent large men. In movement he was rather graceless. His hands were large, long, bony, light and uncared for. His gestures were one of the memorable things about him. He seemed to model, fight and stroke his phrases as he talked. ... [His talk] wasn't a matter of show, and it wasn't necessarily bottle-inspired. Sheer energy of imagination was what lay behind it.
...He could live inside the subject, with no distractions. Back-country poor life wasn't really far from him, actually. He had some of it in his blood, through his relatives in Tennessee. ... In Alabama he sweated and scratched with submerged glee.
... All you saw of it [his Christianity] was an ingrained courtesy that emanated from him towards everyone, perhaps excepting the smugly rich, the pretentiously genteel, and the police. After a while, in a round-about way, you discovered that, to him, human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls.
Reading this made my eyes narrow, made me pull at my collar.
(And I have to admit a certain imagined familiarity since I grew up a mere 30 minutes from where he went to Episcopal boarding school [after his father died], just miles of field and a mountainside from the "campus".)