Sometimes I think of writing a Southern Wholesome Novel, as distinct from Southern Gothic, and then sometimes I think nobody'd want to publish it any more. The story I've been playing with, from time to time, since grade nine, is so wholesome it's romance-free. It's about a family of three generations but I still think it works best with the focus on the teenagers. Totally non-commercial. Of course that means it's a natural choice for Amazon...but hasn't everybody gone off Amazon now?
Fiction, Horror
First of all, when there's a YouTube channel that claims to offer Shocking True Stories, you know it's a venue for fiction, right? E-friends have written for these channels. Priscilla Bird had one of her Baker National Forest fables solemnly read as a true story on a Bigfoot channel.
But what's with the "Appalachia Horror" genre? I think I know.
Ooohhh, the isolation! Fear the isolation! No street lights, no noise from rude neighbors at night? That's not peace--it's daaanger! Something's likely to go horribly wrong if you're not where your social worker can take care of you and know where you are! You might be offline! The government couldn't surveil you! Horror! Horror! We must seal all the entrance points and federalize all the rural land so that people can't be in the danger of being alone, seeing real dark and real stars at night--doing horrible things to each other--like dying of a then-incurable disease in peace in their own homes, which many people really did a hundred years ago. (Yes, what you might find in an "abandoned" house might still be sad, even gruesome--as it might be, anywhere. People die; sometimes the process is messy.) Or like teaching each other how to live independently of the Internet and the housing programs and the big government to make sure you never get anything better than everyone else has.
There are people who should be afraid of the Appalachian Mountains. The social workers and big-government theorists should be. These low and nurturing mountains, where nobody ever needs to starve or freeze, make them irrelevant and obsolete; they have to change, to become fully human, or else know themselves to be useless. (I'm in favor of that.) People of good will respect one another enough not to want to trespass on other people's land, and have very little to fear from the mountains. Although, if the socialists take over, that will change; the Global Community Forces will no doubt come in to ferret out every last surviving Southern Baptist.
What makes a noise like a child laughing that doesn't sound natural? Or like a cell phone, or like a day-flying bird singing at night? Mockingbirds, for one thing. The guilty consciences of trespassers and of writers with evil intentions, for another thing.
If what you feel in the Appalachian Mountains is fear, and it's not the healthy fear of encountering an unknown growling dog or an indignant land owner, then by all means to back to California or some other "Blue State" with lots of big government to make sure to "equalize housing opportunities," after anything happens to the remaining decent neighborhoods, by herding all the former home owners into housing projects with lots of homeless addicts lying in puddles outside their tax-funded flats. The horror stories there are real but at least you'll be safe from the uncanny, or at least unfamiliar, feeling of being alone in (an unusually benign part of) Nature. Though not, of course, from the possibility of a guilty conscience following you home.
Knitting
I'm delighted to see that Carol Fun is knitting again. I don't know why a leg injury put me right off knitting, the year I had one, but it did. She's had a leg injury and...I hope this pair of socks means she's feeling much much better.
Music
Aaron Copland.
Horst Jankowski.
Procol Harum. (Sometimes people discover their favorite albums floating around on YouTube...)
Angelo Badamati, TV composer ("Twin Peaks").
Spencer Davis.
Tom Petty. Some links are to the Traveling Wilburys recordings on which TP was not usually the featured singer.
Moody Blues.
Robin Williamson. (I started to type "Robin Williams." LOL. Wishful thinking. No relation.)
Alessandro Moreschi. (Not a fan of opera? Neither am I. He flourished about a hundred years ago and was remembered as "The Last Castrato." You've been warned.)
Traffic.
Atlanta Rhythm Section.
Neil Young. Does not deserve a rant on the subject of how men block out self-awareness and improvement by exaggerating self-blame, because I think he's exaggerating that to the point of self-parody already.
ZZ Top.
Mark Knopfler.
Some young person who's presumptuous enough to call herself "Buffy," no family name. Hmph. "Buffy" implies Sainte-Marie, not some random twenty-year-old. This "Buffy" has talent, but Buffy Sainte-Marie she is not.
J.J.Cale.
Emancipator.
R.E.M.
Tchip-Tchip.
War, the band.
Matthew Halsall.
Police Behaving Well
Joe Jackson says he used to be a cop, so he's especially appreciative of Good Cop Joshua Swisher, who saved a motorist's life at some risk to his own.
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