It’s hard to overemphasize the passivity of tubing. It is sloth ingeniously disguised as adventure. Though you are outside, you may as well be in your living room watching television.
Filed under: the South.
Tag: oxfordamerican
G&G Me With a Buccellati Silver Spoon! The OA Editor Takes Down the Competition :: Oxford American
An extended, worthwhile critique/rant on Garden & Gun. OA Editor Marc Smirnoff talks a bit about willful editorial blind spots, like G&G’s intentional avoidance of politics, religion, and football. And race:
The South’s progress since 1966 is what needs to be celebrated, not the fact that a native magazine ignored the historic issues and deep struggles of the era. The growth in consciousness wasn’t a pretty process—wasn’t pretty enough for the pages of Southern Living—and it wasn’t even a process that all wanted. But nothing, in the end, has made the South more “civilized” and “gracious” than that growth.
(via)
G&G Me With a Buccellati Silver Spoon! The OA Editor Takes Down the Competition :: Oxford American
I wish I could find online Gerald Early’s essay, “Dancing in the Dark: Race, Sex, The South, and Exploitative Cinema”. It was far and away the best thing I read in Best African American Essays: 2009, but it looks like it’s hidden away in Issue 57 of the Oxford American, subscribers only.
In any case, Early talks about self-mythologizing Southern culture, American gothic, blaxploitation and sexual taboo. Case studies include D.W. Griffith films like The Birth of the Nation, His Trust, and His Trust Fulfilled; Gone with the Wind; I Spit on Your Grave; Free, White, and 21; Murder in Missippi; Black Like Me; and To Kill a Mockingbird. Read it if you can find it.
Mark Larson 