zodiac3 May 2004

I think it's a bum cadence, and worse, it doesn't make any damn sense. I got the thing about the fear of a dead mother while delirious a few months ago with the superflu and posted it because it's right next to JBH's about a poet hanging himself and because it somehow appeals to me as a Southerner, despite myself.

I suppose on the most straightforward level, the mother is the betrayed motherland, which is how we actually think of it down here. Yes, we are a sick, sad people. Haven't you ever read any O'Connor? She's my thesis, by the way. And that, too, strikes me as faintly sad and absurd right now.

The clay is on his Oxfords from his youth in the South. The mother's not really dead. Oxford is, incidentally, the Mississippi hometown of Faulkner.