Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
The temptation in writing about someone as witty as Roy Blount Jr. is just to rear back and quote. So let’s put temptation before us, with a sample of what’s to be found in his latest book, “Long Time Leaving”: •tOn Truman Capote: “his writing did over time tend to break up in the opposite but complementary directions of mistiness and nastiness (until all the romance was gone and he was reduced to a mode we might call desiccated indiscreet)”•tOn pretentious academic studies of the blues: “the Garons have heaped upon the supremely no-nonsense Memphis Minnie, of all people, a load of flummery. They present us with an enormous wad of tulle and bubble wrap and tell us there’s a wildcat in there.” •tOn religion: “I never heard anyone say ‘What would Jesus do?’ when I was growing up. We knew Jesus would most likely do what he did do – something crazy by community standards, some far-out-liberal, crucifiable offense, something we weren’t about to do.” •tOn dogs: “I have been unable, so far, to find a very gratifying petting surface on a poodle. Where a poodle is fluffy, I can’t get any traction, and where it’s close-cropped it’s like petting a nubbly carpet. I prefer a dog that’s somewhere between a chicken and a baseball to the touch.” •tOn Bill Clinton: “The big galoot still tugs at us personally, like a two-year-old trying to drag us over to the candy counter.” If that’s not enough to persuade you that Blount might well be the finest American humorist since James Thurber, then you need to read this book anyway. Dave Barry might be more skilled at exploring the weirdness to be found in the flea markets and garage sales that constitute American culture, and David Sedaris (unless you are one of those who are shocked, shocked to learn that he makes stuff up) might be better at locating the hilarity behind the frequently painful episodes of his personal life. But no one has a finer ear, is a more talented listener, and is better at getting what he hears onto paper than Blount, whether he’s doing a spot-on parody in which William Faulkner plays mixed doubles tennis with Zasu Pitts, Clark Gable and Dorothy Parker, or he’s re-creating the kind of conversation you might hear at a Southern dinner table. You might call Blount a deconstructed Southerner. His latest book is a collection of essays on some of his favorite things: food, music, books, movies, friends, places and politics. But because roughly half of it is made up of the columns slugged “Gone Off Up North” that he wrote for the Oxford American magazine, it’s largely about what it means to be from the South – in Blount’s case, Decatur, Ga. – but not of the South, or at least not the South as imagined by some Northerners and Left Coasters, a place largely inhabited by clones of Jerry Falwell, Snuffy Smith and David Duke.Blount, who characterizes himself as “a pre-baby boom liberal Southern Democrat living in semirural Massachusetts,” has now spent about two-thirds of his life out of the South. “The Enlightenment is essentially what I left home looking for, and I found it,” he tells us. The South is a nice place to visit but he doesn’t want to live there. Yet he is ineluctably a Southern writer. “I maintain you can’t live in the South and be a deep-dyed Southern writer. If you live in the South you are just writing about folks, so far as you can tell, and it comes out Southern, For all we know, if you moved West, you’d be a Western writer. Whereas, if you live outside the South, you are being a Southern writer either (a) on purpose or (b) because you can’t help it. Which comes to the same thing in the end: you are deep dyed.” Humorists don’t win Nobel Prizes in Literature, more’s the pity, even though the craft of being funny is far more arduous than that of being serious, as the labored examples of countless newspaper columnists and blathering bloggers show. As some actor or other is said to have proclaimed on his deathbed, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Blount’s special gift, the one he shares with such towering figures as Thurber and Mark Twain, is a kind of sprezzatura: He makes it look easy.The greatness of Blount is not only that he’s witty, but also that he’s wise. “A book,” he tells us, “ought to be something that a person can read the way a person is meant to eat chicken: something with plenty of unabashed and also intimate flavor, ruddy and deep-dyed flavor, flavor hard to separate from the structure, flavor that is never really exhaustible.” “Long Time Leaving” is that kind of book. So pull up a copy and dig in.
I'll be straight with you, content wise I wouldn't rate the book as a 5 star. It's not exactly what you'd call 'meaty' or 'deep.' You don't really come away from it with any thoughts. And some of it is repetitive. But you will NOT regret the ride. I listened to this on audiobook because I enjoy his voice so much, which was worth it on one hand for the sheer relish and joy he packs into every sentence, and for the accents I wouldn't be able to pull off in my head. It made long drives short, and long hours of database entry bearable. But on the other hand I regret it because I can't go back and find a page, and highlight my favorite passages. Like the one about the Jack Russel Terrier being a dog in concentrate, and that maybe if you steeped him in molasses for awhile you'd get a Black Lab. And you can't really pass along an Audible download to your friends. In fact, I had to go buy another copy just because I knew a friend who's taking a nonfiction class right now, who could get a lot of technique out of it. I can't think of a much better way to sum up a good book than this. I got to the end, and I was sad, because there wasn't any more.
What do You think about Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South (2007)?
Roy Blount, Jr. is one of my favorite panelists on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which I listen to religiously every week. Naturally, I was interested in reading his writing. This collection of short essays and humorous pieces, however, is hit and miss. Most of its failings, however, could have been relieved by a good editor. There are far too many pieces that go over the same themes, same issues, same ground. If some tough choices had been made, this could have been an excellent 200+ page book. As it stands, though, we get around 400 pages, leaving the reader with the unfortunate impression that the book was just thrown together in a hurry without a guiding editorial intelligence. It's a shame, really, because when Blount is funny, he is really funny. I laughed out loud at many points, but I have to admit that I didn't technically finish the book. There's something wrong when both those things are true.And what's wrong here is lack of editing.
—Ellen
Blount is absolutely hilarious—but smart in his commentary—in this book! Would highly recommend the audio, as who could read it better (with all the accents and colloquialisms) than the author himself. I don't LOL often (seriously... that might be the 3rd time I've written those letters together, because seriously... how often do you LOL all by yourself???) but for real, I really did laugh out loud in my car several times all by myself listening to this book. It helps that I'm of the liberal persuasion and have similar political views as the author, but I imagine that most folks would find some humor in his work.
—Betsy
I love Roy Blount, Jr. He explains the troubles that come with being a liberal Southerner--on the one hand, we're often embarrassed of things happening in our states (particularly in politics, such as the new Oklahoma Global War on Terrorism license plate). On the other hand, it's annoying how people from outside the South act like a) all Southerners must be KKK members and b) there are no race problems in any other region of the U.S., and particularly not up North. And at the same time, our current cultural climate defines liberals as somehow "inauthentic" Southerners with no right to speak about the region.The book is a little hit-or-miss; some of the essays, especially the literary criticism and some of the ones where he imagines conversations, can be a little tedious. Also, he repeats anecdotes and quotes in a lot of them, since they're mostly taken from columns published in various magazines and newspapers since the early '90s. When you're reading them all at once, it gets annoying to see the same anecdote or story five times.But when Blount gets it right, he's brilliant. On pg. 198 he explains that "For Southerners, the price of irony is eternal vigilance." The essays in which he exactly captures the duality of the Southern thing, as the Drive-By Truckers would say, are the best reading I've stumbled across in a long time.
—Gwen
