Friday, May 10, 2013

Books, Thoughts, Image, Action: Tobacco Road


No matter how strange the world may seem, there's always something even weirder around the corner.

Picking up another Gogol tome again while moving around some books the other day, I started looking on other shelves and remembering.

Here's a book that's a quick read, one I can never put down even though it's unsettling, bizarre and, in some ways, pitiful. Why? Because like Gogol, it's absorbing.

Where in Gogol, a man might wake up and find his nose missing, in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932), Granny might be hiding behind a chinaberry tree, thinking about turnips.

Once you've got these kinds of word images in mind, they tend to plant themselves for good. And I ain't fall off no turnip truck, neither; nor was I borned yesterday. How's 'bout you?

Today's Rune: The Warrior.

1 comment:

the walking man said...

"Lenny didn't mean no harm"