His wife sat next to him on the porch. Out of the corner of her sight she watched him breathe like a man in the middle of a heavy labour. She’d see him stand up and look down the road and say ‘Alright boys, time to go.’ every time he heard an engine, or what might have been an engine, gearing in the distance. She’d sit silent when he realised no one was coming and shook his head in frustration. She’d have time to think ‘What can I do?’ just before she fell back into the muddled fadedness that was taking up more and more of her days.

She’d start remembering her mother and her mother’s children - eleven in all, and she the oldest - and how her mother would fry up big chunks of pork fat to pour over greens and onto bread. Then she’d be there, in the kitchen, fourteen years old and holding a cast iron skillet, tilting and turning it, with the heat from the stove so real and hot she could feel the burn on her face. She’d turn around to talk to her mother who was saying something about the baby in the other room, and she’d think, just for a second, ‘How good momma looks for a dead woman.’ And as soon as she thought it, ‘dead’, she’d think ‘That’s right. Twenty five years now’ and that was always enough to bring her back. To the sun on the porch and to her to husband. His white hair and impatient stance. Looking, watching, waiting…

“You haven’t lived until you’ve been to a Piggly Wiggly. And that’s all I have to say about that!”

——-

On the night Cosby Puckett was murdered most of the town – and all of the Bean Boarding House - were bunched up in a brush arbor down by the river waiting for Brother Ernst Muncey to preach from the book of Isaiah. Like the prophet, Brother Muncey had seen Christ’s glory and had come to tell about it. As the miners and their families listened to the missionary from Mercer beat on about Kingdom Come and Glory, the only daughter of Octavia nee Bean and John Paul Puckett was on her way to discover the hereafter for her very self.

This short has been getting a lot of play time around the house lately - since my sister-in-law urged every one to “Vote for Maybe One Day by Chris Cottam” because “It’s great. And he is my lovely friend.”

Well, we did. And, it is. Beautiful. Really. Everything from the lighting to the writing. Especially the writing. And the lighting. (Okay, it’s all great.)

To celebrate the launch of the new Samsung i8910 HD mobile phone, four top Directors were commissioned to capture life in High Definition. The four minute film ‘Maybe One Day’ was the winner. Watch it and you’ll see why.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth; quickly too utter oblivion drowns them. But what in any case is everlasting memory? Utter emptiness.

He died. Five years ago. I still can’t say his name, or hear it said, without losing my breath. Without feeling like someone has set their lips to mine and sucked all the air from me. Forcibly.

It hurts. A real physical pain. And reminds me, every time, of Giles Corey. Crushed to death. Beneath heavy stones and boards. Peine forte et dure. Beneath the weight of a word. His name…and the color of the paper the funeral home printed his service details upon.

Families have their sacred cows. Some of us make our own. He was mine. But in a good way. His name was Blue. And for whatever reason, I’m thinking about him today.

Last night I had a dream about a man.

He told me about his life. How he was born in his momma’s bed, and raised in the cornfields. His daddy was a farmer. From way back.

“One day daddy’s gonna die in that corn.” He looked at me and winked. “But not until I die first.”

He talked about his brothers. How he watched them being pulled under by the river. How he wondered what it would be like. To be gone. Just like that. In a flash and in a flood. Boys. Buried in a watermelon patch.

He carried a camera. Wanted to teach. To write. He took my hand. In long slim lines, we drew his name in the dirt. I asked if he knew my name. He said one day, part of him would. But not yet.

He liked fancy suits. Vests and friends and bowler hats. Red ties.

“They’ll show up better. After I’m dead.”

He hands me the camera. I take his picture. He looks like my brother. He looks like this…

He said he had a wife. She liked to laugh. She worried. He knew why.

He sang about how hard things were. Constant sorrow. Hell on Earth. Whiskey in a bottle.

“Sometimes people need to believe. That it cant get any worse. Even if it means somewhere, somehow, it gets better.” He just wanted to run. “I didn’t know.” He looked at me and cried. “No one ever told me.”

I said it didn’t matter. Because someone knew. Even if he didn’t. Everything would be okay.

He said he liked blue. The color of his baby’s eyes.

“It’ll show up good in pictures. Even after he’s gone.”

“Flannery O’Connor’s fiction also explores this distinctly Southern paradox through the symbol of the “old child”. Like Faulkner, she creates child characters who are disillusioned by the inactivity and lack of belief in their parent’s generation and subsequently construct their identity on the model of an elderly figure, only to suffer a tug of loyalties between the past and the present which embitters the child. The difference with O’Connor is that the discrepancy she seeks to capture is not between the Old South and the New South but between the Christian promise of Redemption and a modern nihilism and as a result her “old children” suffer both a spiritual and physical progeria. Her “old children” are more freakish and grotesque than Faulkner’s but they still emanate from the Southern question of how to incorporate past myths in articulating an identity in the present…”

- Conan O’Brien

If anyone knows the owner of this little masterpiece please can you let me know so I can credit them…

Conan O’Brien was smack at the top of my ‘People I Must Meet’ list long before I discovered an old thesis he wrote while at Harvard on literary progeria in the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. Back when angelfire and geocities were knocking around proper, someone posted the piece in it’s entirety. It has since been removed.

A few hours ago I was sat watching Confessions of a Shopaholic - it may not be the worst movie ever, but it’s a pretty close approximation - and my brain felt so ashamed. Then I started thinking about PeaBoy and Conan O’Brien and how that’s comedy. And this somehow led to me requesting a copy of “The ‘Old Child’ in Faulkner and O’Connor” by Conan Christopher O’Brien from the Harvard Depository.

Let’s face it, seriously….could the man get any cooler?

I can’t remember the first book trailer I saw. But I know it was in late 2005/early 2006 - and consisted of a series of quirky photos set to music and subtitles with a note on the end that went something like Coming in May 2006. Well, they kept coming and these days some rival their motion picture counterparts.

Take this little darling. A book trailer for My Sister Jodie, a young adult novel by British author Jacqueline Wilson. Fabulous. Hands down best book trailer I’ve seen. Not at all surprised the trailer, by Anna Lavelle, came out on top at this year’s Bookseller Book Video Awards. (Presented by Play.com, in association with Random House Group, The Bookseller and the National Film and Television School.)

Any other brilliant book trailers we should have a look at?

In the U.S. Mother’s Day had it’s origin in West Virginia. Did you know that? The modern Mother’s Day holiday was created by Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia, as a day to honor mothers and motherhood.

On May 12, 1907, two years after the death of her own mother, Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her and embarked upon a campaign to make “Mother’s Day” a recognized holiday. She succeeded in 1914 when the day became nationally recognized. By the 1920s, Anna Jarvis had become soured by the commercialization of the holiday. She and her sister Ellsinore spent their family inheritance campaigning against the holiday. Both died in poverty.

Jarvis, says her New York Times obituary, became embittered because too many people sent their mothers a printed greeting card. As she said,

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A petty sentiment!

Anna Marie Jarvis never married and had no children. (Wikipedia)

The Guardian asks you to write the first 150 words of a novel for the chance to win a hotel stay in London with Orange award ceremony tickets, books and a Blackberry

The Guardian has teamed with Kate Mosse, the author of Labyrinth and co-founder and honorary director of the Orange prize, to offer budding writers the chance to win a top prize in the Guardian Orange First Words competition.

Kate has come up with the title of a new novel - The Letting Go. All you need to do is write the first paragraph (up to 150 words) before the closing date of midnight on Monday May 18 2009. The Guardian will whittle down a shortlist of 10 intros and Kate will pick the winner and two runners-up, which will be published on the Guardian website.

First prize is two tickets to the Orange prize for fiction awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on June 3, with travel to London (from the UK) and an overnight stay in a luxury central London hotel, a Blackberry Pearl 8120 and a complete set of the Orange award for new writers 2009 shortlist.

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