Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2 of 3)

12/19/2019

From the time when her first short stories and novel were published, O’Connor was identified as a writer with a rare kind of gift. Her specific brand of genius allowed her to adapt powerful religious principles, aesthetic technique, and social observances to create highly original and often shocking literary art which leaned heavily toward the Gothic and grotesque.

She painted with words in the same manner she painted with colors. Stroke by carefully-rendered stroke, she created broken-soul characters who were oddly warped by the jarring impulses of their own scarred personalities, a condition which could make them as misplaced within the confines of their own skin as it could within society.

The Church of Hazel Motes’ Truth

One archetypal example is Hazel Motes, the anti-hero main character in Wise Blood described by Gooch as “a slightly demented saint in the making.” Motes could also be described as a prototype for any number of O’Connor’s characters driven by pain and confusion to rage against their perception of divine, or human, authority over their lives. Hazel Motes is bold enough to propose starting “the Church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” His own ambitiousness and the ambiguities of human mortality inherent in anyone’s life defeat his intentions and ultimately lead to his destruction.

It is not only the daring with which O’Connor wrote such tales as Wise Blood that made her an exceptional writer but an ear for true-to-life dialect and a command of language that enabled her to bend narrative prose into lyrical poetry like this:

“The smokestacks and square tops of buildings made a black uneven wall against the lighter sky and here and there a steeple cut a sharp wedge out of a cloud.” Or the following: “The outline of a skull was plain under his skin and the deep burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared.”

Such statements, beaded as they were with strong philosophical nuances, would make any writer in any language an exceptional one.

The N-Word Factor

For many African Americans, O’Connor is not an easy read because her fiction is very true to the Southern rural language of her times. That means the word “nigger” tends to flow like breath out of many of her characters’ mouths with such a total disregard for its social, political, or spiritual implications that their use of the word might prompt many a hardcore rapper to reconsider his or her fondness for it.

The degree to which O’Connor herself may have been racist is an issue biographer Brad Gooch does periodically address: “She had returned to settle in a society predicated on segregation and had taken on its charged voices and manners as the setting of her fiction.”

In short, from O’Connor’s perspective as a literary artist, to avoid racially derisive language, and in some cases customs, would have meant dodging an ugly truth rather than confronting it head-on. Moreover, readers should note she was far from being alone in this regard among white and black American writers in the previous century.

NEXT: Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (final part 3)

If you missed part 1 of Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor and would like to read it Please Click Here.

Author

Aberjhani is a multi-genre author of history, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and journalism. His most recent book is Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah.

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Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

12/19/2019

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Flannery O'Connor Wonder & Enigma title art graphic for Aberjhani's Postered Chromatic Poetics.

Among the biggest surprises to come my way in 2019 was an invitation to give a talk and sign copies of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah at the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia. Health issues prevented me from accepting the initial invitation but I am now slated to give a presentation in May 2020. The plan is to also have available for signing a forthcoming book in which I recount adventures and misadventures involving three iconic writers: O'Connor, James Alan McPherson, and John Berendt.

Any literary biographer will tell you writing a book of meaningful depth on an influential author requires a ton of research involving what other writers have already said about the subject. The following are reflections on another scribe's brilliantly-informed perspective, first published by AXS Entertainment as: "Events, Books, Highlight Flannery O’Connor’s Legacy."

Regarding a Gifted Child

One of the words most frequently used to describe Flannery O’Connor is “paradoxical.” Exactly why that word is such an appropriate one is demonstrated with informed passion and masterful skill in Brad Gooch’s finely layered biography: Flannery, A Life of Flannery O’Connor.

The fact that the mystery of O’Connor’s life and work continues to draw increasing attention in the twenty-first century is amazing when considering how steeped it is in the language of her times—the very racially-charged South of the mid-1900s–– and when noting her early death from lupus at the age of thirty-nine.
Gooch begins his story by revisiting a moment which would remain a reference point of both humor and symbolism throughout O’Connor’s remarkable life. He takes us to the author’s childhood home in Savannah, just off Lafayette Square, where in 1930 she was visited by a news cameraman “to record her buff Cochin bantam, the chicken she reputedly taught to walk backward.” While a chicken may have been the first bird to enhance her public profile, in her personal essay about the incident, The King of the Birds, O’Connor noted “My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peacocks.”

Her childhood penchant for reversing the accepted order of things might be read as nothing more than weird if attributed to another five-year-old. Because it is O’Connor, it may instead be viewed as one early hint of a creative sensibility which in time would create and coax characters into acting out challenging dilemmas of the human condition as she observed it. Biographer Gooch’s narrative is particularly astute when it comes to his evocation of how that sensibility recognized its own value and instinctively preserved itself within “a regulated and meticulously organized world within a world.”

Flannery O'Connor quotation art graphic by BrainyQuote.

Her tactics included the creation of poems, cartoons, and booklets in which she presented portraits of Edward O’Connor, her adored businessman father, and the resilient Regina Cline O’Connor, her mother. They also included somewhat restrained rebellions against the authority of the nuns, at St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls, whose job it was to help shape her character into one reflecting modern Catholic grace and values.

Loss and Suffering

Like nearly all Americans who grew up during the 1930s, Flannery O’Connor’s childhood was marked by the economic ravages of the Great Depression. Her father lost first his real estate business, then a succession of jobs until he was forced to accept a position in Atlanta in 1938 and moved his family to Milledgeville, where in time his daughter would become one of its most famous citizens. Even more notable than the family’s financial up and downs was Edward O’Connor’s death from lupus at the age of forty-five in 1941. His daughter was then fifteen.

Each turn of fate in Flannery O’Connor’s life as recounted by Gooch seems to have reinforced her personality with powerful measures of theological insight, focused creativity, and humor. A couple of years following her father’s death, she noted: “A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder.” Most people stop at the “grief” part and allow themselves to simply wallow in it until ready to move on. The mystery of the “wonder” continuously pushed O’Connor forward.

Flannery O'Connor: Acts of Redemption from Elizabeth Coffman on Vimeo.

At the age of twenty-five, in December 1950, she was told she was suffering from a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, but two years later learned her true condition had been hidden from her. Sally Fitzgerald, one of her closest friends, told her she was suffering from the same disease which had killed her father. By the time she learned her actual condition, she had already distinguished herself as an aspiring writer at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop and as one from whom great things were expected at the renowned Yaddo Artists’ Colony. Her status as a professional author rested mostly on a number of short stories published in prestigious literary journals and on her now classic 1952 novel, Wise Blood, published just a month before learning about her medical fate.

Such “devastating knowledge” might have reduced another sensitive soul to a simmering puddle of depression from which they might never have recovered. As Gooch points out:

“She did not know whether she would be allotted the same three years of borrowed time as her father, following his diagnosis, or if indeed ‘the Scientist’ possessed a miracle cure. She had her doubts.

She also had her faith and intellectual passion, both of which helped her to confront the enemy known as lupus. (Gooch’s report on how doctors treated individuals with the disease in the 1950s is particularly interesting in light of the Food and Drug Administration’s 2011 approval of a drug called Benlysta as a treatment option; the authorization marked the first time in fifty-four years a new drug received such an endorsement.)

NEXT: The N-Word Factor: Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2)

Author

Aberjhani is the author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savanna and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. He is also an accomplished artist & photographer.

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Floating along: A Review Essay on Duncan McNaughton’s Somewhere in the Stream (part 1 of 2)

11/26/2019

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(Postered Chromatic Poetics title art graphic by Aberjhani)

Just before I took off running from Hurricane Matthew as it slammed the southeastern United States in 2016, presumably courtesy of the still-raging global climate crisis, I wrote the following notes on Duncan McNaughton's contemporary poetry classic, Valparaiso (Listening Chamber publishing, 1995):

As seen through the lens of this reader's experience of his work, McNaughton is a hunter and gatherer of significant meanings, and names, obscured by time and human negligence. Both a dissector and a sculptor of forms (as well as formlessness), a skillful translator of elusive moments crammed as much with pointless absurdity as with essential insights.....

Three years later, following a very narrow miss from Hurricane Dorian, I opened a copy of his SOMEWHERE IN THE STREAM (Blue Press Books, 2019). With this latest addition to the impressive and too often overlooked corpus of McNaughton's titles--now in fact time is the time for publication of a volume of his collected works--for some reason I felt a little less threatened by upheavals of physical-world conditions. Hurricanes seemingly indicative of negligent environmental stewardship, flaming tempests of political corruption, and suicidal addictions to war and hate fueling suicidal addictions to drugs and violence all took less of a toll on my personalized corner of the world. Maybe there was a reason for that.

A reader contemplating the title of this most recent volume of grace, wit, wisdom, and genius from someone often dubbed a poet's poet might suddenly ask: "Somewhere in the Stream" of what exactly? Potential answers--at least for those unfamiliar with McNaughton’s earlier works or unaware of his connections to genre-influencing poets like Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Diane di Prima--could turn out to be as ambiguous or obscure as they might precise and informative.

Since the poet is McNaughton, stream of individual consciousness gives us one good possibility. So does stream of collective memory, or of human comedies, absurdities, tragedies, antipoetic ironies, and language. It makes sense also to consider the stream of life, or existence, in general. How it manifests, flows, diverges, halts, dims, or glows to the rhythms of its own self-determining frequencies with seemingly little, if any, regard for human intentions constitutes a recurring observance, if not an actual theme, in many of the 51 poems contained in this collection.

Published by Blue Press based in Santa Cruz, California, Somewhere in the Stream (2019) is the latest poetry collection by renowned poet and educator Duncan McNaughton.

So why does any of this matter? Because McNaughton's sensibility is one which surfs brilliantly through history, layered philosophical concepts, and rhythms of multiple languages with startling ease to collect observations well worth the attention of Gen-Z, Millennials, Baby Boomers, and Traditionals alike. Tagging along gives the feeling at times of accompanying an interdimensional space explorer seeking confirmations of intelligence and civilizations outside boundaries of known planetary systems. Or popular literary conventions. As such, his poemized captain's log (if you will) documents the many strange contradictions of what it means to be human.

Read the short title poem at the volume's beginning and you are immersed instantly in a sense of intimate familiarity:

Always an empty space out
front for my Rocket 88

The Blue Chrysanthemum, Rue Parallèle,
Joanne's boîte,
corner Rue de la Vieille Lanterne
I'm usually here, at the bar, about
this time of night, left foot on The Stone

Aznavour at the piano

Everyone who matters to me drops in

Arthur! Ça va?

Here, space in the physical (on the page) sense appears to underscore prominence in the emotional sense. A thorough embrace of human intimacy, romantic and otherwise, unimpeded by space or time, is one of the great gifts of McNaughton's poetry--and also one of its respectable challenges. On a planet home to billions where so many still find themselves condemned to a strangling sense of alienation, the poem lets readers share in the luxurious comfort of knowing a place exists where one is always expected and always welcome. It allows the narrator to become anchored in affirmations of community tinted with soul-sustaining beauty.

This sense of community as represented in McNaughton's poetry has never been restricted to zip codes, national boundaries, or even a single period of history. It has always welcomed the voices of different poets and thinkers grappling with the frequently-cruel and yet often-humorous demands of existence itself. With that in mind, his poems may read as engaged conversations, private letters, public editorials, or notes to a singular self taking inventory of a singular life. Many of those "who matter" the most do indeed "drop in" for cameo appearances in the pages of SOMEWHERE. Among them are both historic and more contemporary poets and authors such as: Bill Berkson, Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, Jack Collom, Robert Grenier, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer, Osip Mandelstam, Colin Christopher Stuart, Walt Whitman, and D.H. Lawrence--just to give a quick sense of the wide range of literary territory this astonishing title covers.

How a given society judges or misjudges some of the most powerful, if not necessarily most influential, voices humanity has produced is not always encouraging. In "AT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS,"(caps McNaughton's) for example, the narrator observes:

The small man alone in the corner is
William Blake. Interesting smile.
Fewer and fewer care.

With Blake, one of the original titans of Romanticism, sitting ignored in a corner, the elephant in the room is the huge unasked question about our modern times. When an over-dependence on technology methodically shortens attention spans and ruling oligarchs pass demagoguery off as democracy: how wise it not to care about the sustained life-example of a poet-artist such as Blake?

NEXT: Floating along: A Review Essay on Duncan McNaughton’s Somewhere in the Stream Part 2

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Reaping the Rewards of Best Practices and Sweet Serendipity

6/25/2019

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"Best Practices & Sweet Serendipity" art graphic by Aberjhani.

I'm a big fan of those moments when a proven best practice confirms its value by yielding the kind of positive results I like to refer to as: sweet serendipity.

The best practices in this instance are revisiting, revising, and relaunching a promising book project which stalled for one reason or another. The concluding sweet synchronicity is that instead of engaging readers this summer with just the single newly-released nonfiction title, Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah, I am now able to broaden the spectrum of interaction with the first trade paperback release of my high-fantasy novel, Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player.

The Practice of Persistence

This is how it all happened: about three years ago I announced on LinkedIn that Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player had become part of a then innovative book streaming service. Many readers were therefore able to enjoy the adventures and misadventures of its young offbeat characters online. But those who prefer the experience of holding a physical book while reading were unable to do that with the digital innovation.

Overwhelming competition caused the streaming service to shut down. Should that have meant the end of the book's accessibility as well? Not hardly.

I communicated with members of Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing team about releasing a trade paperback edition of the novel. At the time, the work I'd already started on the Postered Chromatic art galleries combined with deadlines to complete chapters for Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah (ISBN 9789388125956) made it impossible to spend the time needed to make changes requested for Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player (ISBN 9781977037473).

However, once the number of prints in the art gallery reached an acceptable level and DREAMS made its initial debut with a respectable sales ranking and promising focus group feedback, after some three years I was able to turn my attention back to SONGS. Last week, the folks at Kindle informed me the title had gone live and was now available.

Even readers who are not lit nerds like me and certain friends can appreciate the virtually simultaneous release of a memoir like DREAMS and a novel like SONGS. Such synchronicity is not completely unheard of in publishing but unusual without the influence of a major traditional organization.

Adapting to Multiple Format

Although the novel's paperback release was delayed, the issues with which it deals makes it exceptionally timely. The impact of celebrities on everyday culture, effects of war on individual lives, the pull of suicide on fragile psyches, and the persistence of love in the face of relentless horror are realities to which many can relate. Even when they unfold on more than one plane of existence.

Imagine combining the new reality TV show Songland with the paranormal series The InBetween with some metaphysical rock and roll and evolving superheroes thrown into the mix. That will give you some idea of what makes the book unique and why different readers have been drawn to it in different formats.

The 514-page trade paperback represents more than just a single win for a single individual. With today's numerous media producers (Hollywood, Netflix, etc.) in constant search of stories adaptable to films, podcasts, and audio-books, the musical component of the title makes for some exciting possibilities.

Hashtags like #StoriesOutOfGeorgia (despite threats of decreased production due to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s controversial “Heartbeat” abortion law) and #ItHappenedInTheSouth have become useful for introducing production reps to the novel as well as to Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah. We can call that kind of exceptional combined potential one more example of sweet serendipity deriving from a steady application of best practices.

NOTE: This article was first published here on LinkedIn.

Aberjhani
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2019

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Springing Forward with Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

3/23/2019

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"Simply by allowing its darker-hued brothers and sisters to openly discuss ideas without having to constantly justify, defend, or survive the color of their skin, whether in classrooms of the great Sorbonne or while walking un-hunted down a boulevard, Paris [France] made a crucial contribution to what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance and to the legacy of African-American intellectual traditions in general." from Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah quote, art graphic, & new 2019 book by Aberjhani. Click image to pre-order.

The basic image in this quotation art graphic was derived from visual studies prepared for the works of art which have become known as Harlem Renaissance Deja Vu Numbers 1 and 2 canvases. The work seen above was modeled after a famous photo (photographer unknown at this point) of a young James Baldwin holding a copy of his essay collection, No Name in the Street. In the poster graphic viewed here, this author is seen holding a copy of the forthcoming title, Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah (ISBN 978-9388125956) currently slated for release May 1, 2019. It is also now the focus of a new blog-site you can check out by clicking either the art graphic or this link: Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

With actress Regina King having won Golden Globe and Academy Awards for her portrayal of Sharon Rivers in the film adaptation of Baldwin's classic novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, plus the critical acclaim garnered by the 2016 biopic, I Am Not Your Negro, the iconic Baldwin is possibly more famous now than ever before. And No Name In Street, of course, has gone on to become an American literary classic.

The personal essay style utilized in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah may or may not reflect some of Baldwin's influence. He is referenced in the stories "Cities of Lights and Shadows and Dreams," and "Trees Down Everywhere" but any stylistic similarity is not intentional. Contemporary authors who grew up reading Baldwin, as I did, are more likely than not to have been influenced by him to one degree or another on one level or another.

Connecting and Disconnecting

The observation noted in the above quote about the city of Paris's connection to the cultural arts revolution known as the Harlem Renaissance might seem out of place in a book titled Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah. In fact it is not. One reason is because the book is being published during the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance.

Another is because Savannah, like Paris, also has strong ties to the event which is generally recognized as having lasted throughout the 1920s going into the 1930s, but which endured to a lesser degree well into the 1940s. That such an unlikely connection can be identified between the Harlem Renaissance, Paris (France), and Savannah (Georgia, USA) is one more example of how the phenomenal movement transcended geographical boundaries and strengthened the case for harmonious interactions between multicultural communities.

I first explored that three-way connection in an essay titled The Harlem Renaissance Way Down South, and now revisit it in the aforementioned story, "Cities of Lights and Shadows and Dreams." The narrative stands as a good metaphor for one of the primary concerns highlighted in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah: how we connect and why we sometimes disconnect during disruptive, or stagnant, moments in our personal lives and shared public histories. Measuring, determining, and applying the value of such awareness holds possible advantages for many more than the denizens of just one city or region.

Aberjhani
100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance

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Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2 of 3)

The Church of Hazel Motes’ Truth

The N-Word Factor

Author

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

Regarding a Gifted Child

Loss and Suffering

Author

Floating along: A Review Essay on Duncan McNaughton’s Somewhere in the Stream (part 1 of 2)

Contact the Author-Artist

Reaping the Rewards of Best Practices and Sweet Serendipity

The Practice of Persistence

Adapting to Multiple Format

Contact the Author

Springing Forward with Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

Connecting and Disconnecting

Aberjhani
100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact the Author

Aberjhani

Archives

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Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2 of 3)

The Church of Hazel Motes’ Truth

The N-Word Factor

Author

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

Regarding a Gifted Child

Loss and Suffering

Author

Floating along: A Review Essay on Duncan McNaughton’s Somewhere in the Stream (part 1 of 2)

Contact the Author-Artist

Reaping the Rewards of Best Practices and Sweet Serendipity

The Practice of Persistence

Adapting to Multiple Format

Contact the Author

Springing Forward with Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

Connecting and Disconnecting

Aberjhani 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact the Author

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Aberjhani
100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance