Summer Waning Strawberry Moon
A focus on America hits me about the time the summer heats up. Something about the lazy, hazy, crazy days tickle my American gene. ( apologies to Carreen, but it’s the adjective of my youth ) I’ll read a novel or history of the American Revolution, look more deeply into some aspect of the civil war, that sort of thing. Not this year.
May be my immersion in ancient Rome, Kate’s surgery, the bees, the garden, I don’t know, but this year I haven’t got that Fourth of July feeling. And here we are almost on the date. My firecracker lilies have more patriotic oomph than I do this year.
Over the last year I’ve watched the HBO series, True Blood. Yes, I have a thing for horror novels and horror movies that don’t involve slashing, screaming college girls and chainsaws, which, admittedly, pares the crop down pretty far. OK, there may be the occasional screamer in true blood, but they are adults for the most part.
Anyhow, True Blood is Southern Gothic. It trips the divisional biases about the south, the bayous and the culture of Louisiana which Ann Rice exploited in her novels like Interview With The Vampire.
Which leads me to my point. Whew. Took long enough. The culture of the south, or the sub-cultures we describe as Southern are well known: confederate flag, shotgun, pick-up truck with rust or plantation life with mint juleps and chattel slavery or a misty Cavalier life with belles and beaus courting among live oak trees and traveling to Savannah or New Orleans or Mobile. You know. The stereotypes, and that’s all they are, are clearly formed and ready for plucking in a fictional setting.
If, however, you wanted to draw on similarly clearly formed stereotypes, let’s say archetypes in both cases to get off that word, of the North, or the Midwest, my home for all my life, what would they be? I’m not sure. Farms with cows. Basketball. Factories and factory workers. None of it has the same, pardon the expression, bite. This is the kind of thing my American jones often picks up on and runs with it. Maybe I’m not all that far off from the fourth of July after all.