Stories. Brent picked this out for me as a Christmas present based on
the title alone, and reading it in public did seem to invite more
comments from random strangers than usual. Bottoms deliberately blurs
the line between fiction and nonfiction as he writes about the South
and its people—the writers, the artists, and the rednecks. Each
one of these pieces is a work of art. I got a sharp shock of
recognition a few paragraphs into "A Seat for the Coming Savior," an
essay about janitor James Hampton, Jr, who created the folk art
masterpiece The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium
General Assembly. I had read it a couple years ago in a magazine,
and I remember thinking then how I wanted to read more of the author's
work. A sentence from "Secret History of Home Cinema":
"The person who talks endlessly about progressive politics, who rambles
on about French deconstruction and friends' dissertations and David
Cronenberg's sexualizing of technological gadgetry and the
pre-postmodern self-effacing irony of Chaplin and Shepard's dialogue in
Paris, Texas and how that film was really about human
suffering, you know; the person who talks about writing a book
about you can't remember what, but it seemed deep at the time you first
heard it, at the end of your first-date/get-to-know-each-other/casual
thing, as the two of you smoked a joint and later had your first kiss
and thought of making love but didn't because you wanted it to be
special, meaning semi-sober, and later, after a nice dinner and
conversation and maybe discussion of the greater philosophical
questions concerning love and the soul and whether people actually had
soul mates, which made you laugh a little, even though secretly
you were hopeful, wanting more than anything an easy human connection,
love, or something like love, without all the fucking work."
Another one, from "Intersections":
"Wishes she could explain, in one coherent breath, explain how it's
important to her to understand deep aesthetic theories of painting and
art, and to know the history and progression and movements of art,
understand that art is, as she once read somewhere, a finite sphere and
how the artist, the serious artist, must know, in her own particular
way, that sphere and then hope and work and sweat to create something
that can survive on the outer edge of that sphere and, hopefully, make
that sphere grow as it must."
Read this book!
I tried to save the world, but it didn't work out.
—Richard Selzer
| 
Heidi J. De Vries
