Last week I attended two readings: Rita Mae Brown at the Margaret Mitchell House
on October 27th, and Padgett Powell two days later at the Decatur
Public Library.
Part One: Rita Mae Brown
I’m still mad at myself for not asking Rita Mae Brown my
stock-in-trade question about Southern books, which goes something like this: “If
William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor are the twin pillars of Southern literature,
where does that leave Margaret Mitchell?”
It’s not an unfair question for Ms. Brown who offered some
strong opinions about literature in her 1988 book, Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual. Ms.
Brown, who was promoting her new book, Animal
Magnetism My Life with Creatures Great and Small (Move over James Herriot) spoke
to an older crowd of approximately 50 pet lovers, who were content to ask
questions like “How do you name your pets and do you ever eat them?” (Actually
the latter question was framed more like: “Are you a vegetarian?”)
The energetic, self-winding Ms. Brown (I should have used a
high speed film to capture the movement of her hands) riffed on an array of
subjects: Growing up in the South, the sophisticated forms of communication
between animals (when dogs wag their tails that’s good; when cats curl their
tails that’s bad), the broken contract between humans and domesticated animals
(millions of pets are euthanized each year), 10,000 years of patriarchy that
define human history (men’s efforts to control female sexuality), and the how we’ve become more intolerant
because we don’t ride the bus and mingle with other people. (I take the train,
but I keep to myself.) It’s pretty safe
to say there was no discernable thread to all of Ms. Brown’s observations, (not
to say she isn’t observant and witty). I
don’t think it mattered to the majority of attendees who paid for the
opportunity to join the stampede at the book signing table afterwards for a
brief chat with an author either about pets or perhaps to express their continued
appreciation of Ms. Brown’s most influential book, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973).
Part Two: Padgett Powell
Like Rita Mae Brown, Padgett Powell goes all over the place,
except with Powell he was reading from his new “experimental” novel The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? – a 170+
page book written entirely as a series of seemingly unrelated questions. Of
course to the uninitiated like myself, (admittedly unfamiliar with his work)
what may seem random and disjointed at first, may upon further investigation reveal
a theme or pattern to this work. (My unasked question to Mr. Powell was: How should
a reader approach this book?)