Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Strawberry Moon<\/p>\n
A focus on America hits me about the time the summer heats up.\u00a0 Something about the lazy, hazy, crazy days tickle my American gene. ( apologies to Carreen, but it’s the adjective of my youth )\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not this year.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 And here we are almost on the date.\u00a0 My firecracker lilies have more patriotic oomph than I do this year.<\/p>\n
Over the last year I’ve watched the HBO series, True Blood.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 OK, there may be the occasional screamer in true blood, but they are adults for the most part.<\/p>\n
Anyhow, True Blood is Southern Gothic.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Which leads me to my point.\u00a0 Whew.\u00a0 Took long enough.\u00a0 The culture of the south, or the sub-cultures we describe as Southern are well known:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You know.\u00a0 The stereotypes, and that’s all they are, are clearly formed and ready for plucking in a fictional setting.<\/p>\n
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?\u00a0 I’m not sure.\u00a0 Farms with cows.\u00a0 Basketball.\u00a0 Factories and factory workers.\u00a0 None of it has the same, pardon the expression, bite.\u00a0 This is the kind of thing my American jones often picks up on and runs with it.\u00a0 Maybe I’m not all that far off from the fourth of July after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Strawberry Moon A focus on America hits me about the time the summer heats up.\u00a0 Something about the lazy, hazy, crazy days tickle my American gene. ( apologies to Carreen, but it’s the adjective of my youth )\u00a0 I’ll read a novel or history of the American Revolution, look more deeply into some … Continue reading What is the Midwest?<\/span>