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topmixtrends · 6 years

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PATTERSON HOOD has been leading the Drive-By Truckers — a country-rock band with a hip-hop attitude — for more than two decades. Along the way, the Alabama native has become, in song and in prose, one of the sharpest observers of Southern culture and society since C. Vann Woodward, W. J. Cash, and the Southern novelists he read as a kid.

The Truckers’ latest album, 2016’s American Band, was widely hailed as one of the year’s best and as the group’s most directly political: its songs took on the killing of Trayvon Martin, the worship of the Confederate flag, the nation’s madness for handguns, and the role of the band’s native region in the whole mess. Hood, like fellow Trucker Mike Cooley, grew up near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and his father, David Hood, is the longtime bassist for the R&B studio’s famous rhythm section.

For many years based in Athens, Georgia, Hood moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2015. The Drive-By Truckers have just launched a US tour that brings them to Los Angeles’s El Rey Theatre on February 9.

SCOTT TIMBERG: Let me start at the obvious place. In your writing, you often look at the South, at the complexity of the region’s history. And there’s a whole bunch of writers who’ve done this before: Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. I’m just wondering what, if anything, these people have meant for you?

PATTERSON HOOD: I probably first became aware of that type of thing, as a genre of literature, when I was assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. That was the first book I was forced to read at school that I actually loved and connected with. I fell in love with it, and the character of Atticus Finch reminded me of a very beloved relative of mine, who was kind of like a second father to me — so I really connected hard with that. And then later, in high school or in college, I read Faulkner a bit … I was too young to really get it. But it was a short story, “Barn Burning,” that I first read, and that was a good entry point, because I totally dug it, and got it, although I don’t think I would have been ready to read As I Lay Dying or anything. I love reading. I’m a fanatical reader.

And that goes back to childhood for you?

Maybe off and on. I remember times in childhood when I read a lot. I loved Old Yeller as a child — I really loved that book. And like everyone, I read Charlotte’s Web, although I don’t think I liked it as a kid. I read it to my son, actually, a couple of years ago, and fell in love with it. But I don’t think as a kid I was able to get past the fact that it was romanticizing a fucking spider. I have arachnophobia, so it was a bit of a leap on that one. So yeah, I went through periods of reading and not reading, I guess because it reminded me too much of school, and I hated school and everything about school at that time. I had to get past rebelling against it in order to enjoy it.

Yeah, I think a lot of us, especially boys, go through that phase, even if they become serious readers later. So when you were reading Harper Lee and the Faulkner story, and maybe some other stuff, what did you respond to, what made you want to go back to it, besides the fact that it was about the part of the country you live in? Did you feel it helped you make sense of the South?

Yeah, I probably just responded to the dialect, because that’s the way my people talked. And I responded to some of the manners — you know, the manners that everybody had, even the villains, who were these kind of ignorant, white trash, really terrible people in To Kill a Mockingbird. They still had a certain amount of decorum about them. When they weren’t spitting in Atticus’s face, there was still a certain amount of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” involved. And that was beat into me as a kid, you know.

So even though terrible things were happening, in a way, you felt like you were home?

Sure, sure. And I had a similar thing with R.E.M., early R.E.M., I fell in love with them really early. About two weeks before Murmur came out, I got turned on to Chronic Town, and in the press in those days, people talked about, “Oh, you can’t understand the lyrics, you can’t decipher what he’s saying.” But these things tended to be colloquialisms, which I could decipher. There’s a song by a side project called The Golden Palominos, and I remember reading a review by someone who couldn’t decipher what Stipe kept saying, like the hook. And it’s “fixin’ to go” — that’s all he’s saying is “fixin’ to go,” he’s fixin’ to go!

Of course, there’s more to being Southern than just a manner of speech. When did you get a sense that a key element of Southern literature was the question of race? How did Southern literature change the way you understood black people or the racial rift in the region?

Yeah, I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t aware of race, and the South’s role in that story. I don’t think there was ever a point in my life that I wasn’t, at some level, aware of it, because of what my dad did. He made his living playing on Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett records, when they literally weren’t allowed to go out to dinner with him, and so he brought that home, you know — the anger over that came home with him. And we’d see George Wallace on the television screen and my dad would just start frothing at the mouth. But we have family members who I’m sure voted for Wallace, and whom I love dearly.

So there was always that disconnect. I was also aware of the generation gap, of the ’60s, the cultural revolution that was playing out in my family too. My parents came of age in the ’60s, and my dad smoked pot, and rode a motorcycle, and had a beard and long hair, and my mom wore go-go boots and hot pants … And I spent an enormous amount of time with my grandparents and my great-uncle, who were from the Depression generation. And so I kind of viewed the counter-culture, the culture clash, from a front-row seat as I was growing up, and I think that’s probably part of my attraction to dualities in my writing and the stuff I do.

It sounds like you didn’t need Harper Lee to show you that race was an obsession in the South — you were seeing and living that every day.

Absolutely. And it’s funny, because I haven’t read the other book of hers that came out. I own it, and I plan to — it’s really just a matter of time … I’m aware of its flaws, but I do want to read it, because I’m interested in that. I’ve actually written a piece, a song that kind of deals with that, because when a New York Times critic actually reviewed the book, it was the week after I moved to Portland. I read that piece in The New York Times, and I literally broke down and cried. I got so upset at Atticus Finch. I got really, really mad for a couple of days.

And then I had this epiphany that it’s absolutely right, that it was important. I believe that she was of sound mind in deciding to put that out, because I think it was important — not to disillusion everybody of their hero, or to make everybody that named their kid Atticus wince — but because that’s how it was. That is the truth.

We’re talking about the fact that Atticus, who’d been this hero of racial justice, became sort of a segregationist, a racist …

It made me mad and upset, but once I got past that, it totally rang true to me.

In the ’30s he was defending this man who was wrongly accused. It offended him on a human level that Tom Robinson was accused of a rape he obviously didn’t commit, but that don’t mean Calpurnia could sit at the table with Atticus at dinnertime. That’s a different line. When African Americans were demanding equality, that crossed a different line, and all of a sudden Harper Lee saw her father, her beloved father figure — who to her represented the side of right and justice — all of a sudden she saw him as a hypocrite. And she wrote this thing first, in anger, and then she went back and wrote, from the view of her childhood, the book that everyone knows and loves.

That rang so true to me, and I wrote a song that, at this point, has never been recorded. I’m still hoping to do something with it. It’s called “At a Safe Distance.” When you look a little closer, not at a safe distance, you tend to see things that aren’t so pleasant — you see the cracks. It really rang true to me; I wish it didn’t.

I guess you could say this about all literature, but it seems that, more than any other, Southern literature is based on history. I wonder if you ever went back and read any Southern history, journalism about the South, about the Civil Rights movement, or any of that? You’re kind of born into the middle of the Civil Rights era — ’64, right?

1964, yeah. I was born either at the last moment of the Baby Boom, or at the first moment of Generation X. I’m right on the cusp, as was my mother, who was born the day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, which is the official start of the Baby Boom. Her birthday’s August 5, so with the time change, she was probably born about the exact moment that the Baby Boom started.

So yeah, all of that fascinates me. I’m obsessed with the Robert Caro books on Lyndon B. Johnson, which goes back to the duality thing, because he was the ultimate dual president. I mean, he was the best and the worst, and sometimes at the exact same moment. Sometimes he would say the worst thing possible when doing something amazing, and vice versa. He could be surprisingly eloquent as he’s just fucking you. He’s a never-ending source of fascination to me, and the fact that such a gifted writer has literally spent 50 years of his life chronicling this guy — I get off on that too. I’ve read all four books that have appeared so far, and I’m eagerly awaiting the fifth and final one.

Was Johnson a sort of Texas racist who grew up and saw racial reality? Or was he an opportunist?

He was all of the above. Caro’s take on it, I think, is that he is all those things, and more, at the exact same time.

When people say, “Oh, he didn’t really mean that — he just did the Civil Rights thing because he knew it would be good for his historical legacy.” Well, sure, he knew it would be good for his legacy, but he very well knew that it meant the South wouldn’t vote Democrat again for 50 years, which it hasn’t. It was the beginning of the great migration of Southern Democrats to the GOP. And when he did those things, he purposefully fucked over people who had helped him his entire career.

And yet, he was absolutely a Jim Crow guy for most of his career. And all of those things coexisted within him at the same time, and I think all along. He did have some awakenings at a young age, he did know extreme poverty, and he taught at a school that was pretty much all Latino students. And I think he was very moved by their plight, and he took that with him forever. And yet he was willing to put that in a box and not deal with it for many, many years, building a career as the LBJ that the Kennedys hated so much.

Your dad’s music, and the music you play with the Truckers, it’s all grounded in the blues and R&B. And the Truckers were founded, in some ways, as an homage to hip-hop …

Sure, sure. Though none of us would have tried to rap. But we were immersed in it. I really responded to how hip-hop seemed to be telling you the news — what was going on right now. Modern-day country was more about retro things. I wanted to sing about what was happening now, but in a country style.

Did any of this lead you into African-American literature, especially essays, from the South or elsewhere?

I got into it really late, really recently. Through reading Ta-Nehisi Coates I tried to learn more about James Baldwin, and then I Am Not Your Negro came out last year, which was so amazing. There are so many books; I’ve only scratched the surface. I can spend the rest of my life reading every day, and not even read a fraction of the things I’m really interested in.

Anything you’ve gone back to and loved the second time?

I love Mark Twain. I made it a point to reread Huckleberry Finn at a much older age, after loving it as a kid. Reading it in my 40s was great. What a remarkable piece of work. I do like reading the classics. I was turned on to Hemingway really late. I responded to the style — it’s like the opposite of Faulkner, whom I also love. Instead of long sentences, reall short, concise ones. I respond to both forms. Hemingway’s stories are so devastating; there’s no way to improve them. I loved A Farewell to Arms. I stumbled upon it accidentally. I was at my in-laws’ house and may’ve been sick, was cooped up, it was a rainy day. They had the book; I picked it up, read the first chapter, and couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing in like a day and a half.

Your old bandmate, Jason Isbell, is reputed to be a very literary cat. Did you guys turn each other on to books and writers when you were in the Truckers together?

We probably have more since we quit playing together. When we were playing together, we were in the eye of the storm. That was a crazy time. He turned me onto Peter Matthiessen, a trilogy of books that he rewrote as one book, Shadow Country, set in Florida in the Everglades, post–Civil War, when they were first settling that part of the country. It was kind of the last frontier. All of these outlaws that had been put out of business in the West being ended up down there. It was riveting — and one of Jason’s favorite books. He’s very well read, and a great writer in his own right.

Your last record, American Band, was your most explicitly topical. You wrote about racial violence and social tensions that were exploding around you. Did your reading of essayists, novelists, or anything else help shape that album?

I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me when I was in the midst of writing that record. I had already written “What It Means,” and I was going through a period of questioning: Did I have a right to write such a thing? Reading his book, I kept asking, “What can I do?” Maybe this is a small part of what I can do. Maybe there does need to be a goofy white dude, in a rock ’n’ roll band, with the following that it has, that can say Black Lives Matter. Maybe that is important. I didn’t write that song from the perspective of a black man being shot by police — I wrote it from the perspective of a goofy white dude, like me. Seeing this happening around me and saying, “This is wrong. Why are we at this place in 2017? Why is this still a thing?” And unfortunately, the song doesn’t have answers, it’s just questions. But at least questioning is a start, a beginning.

Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

The post All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Patterson Hood appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2nwKRsu

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jenlarsen · 7 years

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getting better at the truth

So this one time I wrote a young adult novel and this one unhappy reviewer tore it to complete shreds. She was very, very unhappy. I think I can be forgiven for saying she frothed, because I feel a little bit like there was froth, because she was so mad, and maybe some metamaphorical spittle and definitely some wild-eyed rage that I never really quite totally understood.

She was mad because a character said that the size she was, a 20, meant she was fat. Ashley, my main character. Ashley was a size 20, nearing six feet, fairly athletic. And was called fat by the people who love her, the doctor who examined her and approved her for weight loss surgery.

And this reviewer was not having it. In her review she tossed up a picture, a lineup of all these beautiful bodies, women in their underwear, all of them in a continuum of heights and weights, and the reviewer pointed at the photo and yelled SEE THAT’S NOT FAT HOW DARE YOU.

(see above. They're not fat. But I am not sure I understand the argument, really. Because are the tall ladies a size 20? Imagine a tall girl, size 20. She is powerful and large. And the ladies in the photo, they’re all beautiful, but my character? She’s just not depicted.)

But also–BUT ALSO. The reviewer, she says this, that my idea of "fat" is wrong and harmful and damaging as if I don’t know what fat is. As if I haven’t been told my whole life I was fat. When I was a size twelve I was "fat," and when I was a size 32 I was fat. I have always been fat.

And that’s because as it turns out, the world would have you believe anything above a size ten is fat. A size ten is kind of fat. A size eight is borderline. A size six is pleasingly plumpy.

So yeah. Are you fucking kidding me? If you’re a size twenty and nearing six feet tall? The world is going to come pounding at your door and shoving notes under it and crawling through your window and shouting down your chimney that you are hugely horribly fantastically miserably fat and you should be miserable about it.

A doctor will tell you that too. Because BMI is a lie. And if you are tall, and you’re a size twenty, and a lot of that is muscle? They’re going to open their eyes real wide at your grossly exaggerated imaginary BMI number because it’ll be off the FAKE IMAGINARY BULLSHIT CHARTS.

And that was the point. Ashley, my character, she had the world telling her she was fat. Doctors would get on board with telling her that she’s fat, no matter how low her blood pressure was and how good her blood sugar is.

How do I know? Because I weighed 316 pounds and my blood pressure was perfect and my blood sugar was divine and I was perfectly healthy and hearty and could have lived a thousand healthy hearty years and they still laid down a red carpet and flung sparkles into the air and sung me forward with choirs of angels down the path to weight loss surgery. A whole team of doctors and nurses and a psychiatrist. All of them were more than happy to greenlight gut surgery.

This book. It was far from perfect, and nowhere near the book I wanted it to be, but it was the book I could write at the time, and it was more pure unadulterated My Heart than I really ever expected it to be.

It was about this girl who was pressured by outside sources to lose weight; no, not just lose weight, change who she was completely by surgically altering her body so it wasn’t the body she was born with, because the body she was born with wasn’t good enough to go around in public with, to be worth something in, to love.

And I ended up writing about Jolene, who was gendered as a boy when she was born but knows she’s a girl. Her sense of self is rejected by her parents; her sense that her body is hers, and belongs to her, and isn’t wrong, it’s just not seen correctly by narrow minded people who think a gender and a genital are the same thing is violated over and over again.

And I ended up writing about Laura, who has one black parent and one white and both vaguely worry that if she’s not serious, not impeccably perfect with a solid career path, she won’t make it in the world, won’t be taken seriously, won’t get anywhere, even if they can’t come right out and say “racism.”

It was a book that got unexpectedly complicated and despite the fact that I wish I could tear it all down and rebuild it so it isn’t as naive and a little weird and not at all where I wanted it to go as it turned out to be.

But it’s real. It’s all real, as close to real as I understand real, as close as I could get to understanding other peoples’ experiences and skin and lives. As close as I could burrow inside my own fear and doubt and pain and all the ugliness I’ve dealt with from the time I was old enough to understand that fat was a bad thing and I should cry when the other kids explained that that’s who I was. Fat. Who? Fat.

You’re not supposed to respond to reviewers. I know that because this reviewer does more of that frothing thing when she yells about the sanctity of reviews and the purity of opinion and the sacred bond between the reader and reviewer, the hands-off respect that a writer must afford her reviewer, no matter what, however when. The reviewer is goddess, the writer is supplicant.

I’m on board. I have two books and a bunch of stories and I’ve never responded to a review before.

But this one has chafed me for such a long time.

And listen, this is going to be self-indulgent because it has made me kind of mad, for so long. This is going to be the culmination of all the times I’ve composed a long and frustrated essay all in my head about WHY WHY WHY it’s just–wrong.

Every author thinks the bad reviews are wrong and the good reviews are also wrong, but those are the nice people. I am one of those authors obviously. Most authors are aware that we’re being ridiculous about that, and I’m one of those authors who knows that to be true.

But this review.

This one–this one, it feels to me, comes from a reviewer who found something in the book that–oh god, there are so many ways to put it and all of them are as vaguely offensive as her reading of the book. I don’t want to say triggered, or set her off, or act like I am her psychologist–and more on that later. Something about my book specifically made her very angry in a very personal way. I don’t know what it was, but I know it hurt my book, and my sales, and thus she has done her job as she had hoped to.

She’s wrong. She is wrong. I think she is wrong. She didn’t read the book, or she skimmed it, or I don’t know what. It’s not the body size thing–though I can tell you from my own personal time being fat in the trenches and full of self loathing and pelted from all sides, that I think she’s wrong about that.

It’s that she gets every detail wrong. She gets character details wrong and plot details wrong and just everything she writes is as if someone used Siri to send a garbled text to her about the book, or she skimmed it, or she rage-blanked and wrote in a fugue state where reality was abusively spanked and then suspended, I don’t know.

I have feelings about this. I have specific details to point out about this, if I let myself consider it for too long. I have a tiredness about this. I have a lingering frustration.

I was so baffled when I read it for the first time. I really, really was.

You’re not supposed to respond to reviews, but ESPECIALLY YOU ARE NOT supposed to personally respond to reviews. You ALSO oughtn’t write the reviewer and say hey, so, I’m sorry you didn’t like the book. I saw that you’ll be at the con I registered for awhile back–can I buy you a cup of coffee?

I thought I was being super chill and cool. I’m an adult, the review–I don’t agree with it, but I’d be interested to hear why, how, where that conclusion came from, because I sort of see what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I understand why you are so angry and I would like to know.

I really wanted to know. I thought it was safe to chat at a con. She declined my invite politely. I already had a ticket, and when I recognized her at one of the parties–I chickened out. I wanted to say hi, but I was afraid to and feeling really vulnerable. Possibly I made Big Eyes at her when I thought about saying hi but mostly I stood in the corner with a friend and we talked about booksandthings.

Second time I saw reviewer, at the Margaret Atwood party, the friend I was with said TALK TO HER NOW (the reviewer) and I went and I said hi, I wrote that book you hate? And I tried to explain that I understood that she had a feel about it, but I didn’t understand the feel, and I wanted to understand the feel, and I used to be fat, and–

And I had a wine, and was so nervous but was trying to be sincere, and I was an awkward mess and I soon fled in the face of her un, dis, interest in the discussion.

I meant to @ her on Twitter or drop her a note or something and apologize for the awkwardness, but she read it as Crazy Stalkwardness and I had never been more ashamed in my life.

I made her mad AND I scared her. That’s a good feeling, except the opposite of that. (It fucking sucked and I felt like a monster.)

This shit is hard. You write things that are important to you and sound like they might mean things to other people, and then you set them free in the world and you learn that you are a garbage fire made of living trash and you melt into an ecological disaster.

And that could be true. It’s not up to you to say someone’s wrong. I can say as emphatically as I like SHE IS WRONG AND THAT IS WRONG and flail flail flail. But is she really? Because that’s her experience of your book.

Or you push back a little and say no, okay, I respect your experience but also, I don’t think I’m a garbage fire, not really. It’s your opinion that is this one here about sucking; it’s my opinion that is this one here about trying my best to say the truth.

It’s best to push back INTERNALLY, though. That’s my advice to you, young authors.

Seriously, though. Young authors, look at the reviews you’ve gotten from people who are picking up what you have put down, from the kids who aren’t out, from the kids who struggle with their body no matter what size it is, from the kids who feel like yeah, you captured a part of their family life or their inner voice and it they feel understood. You get a thank you card in the mail and you remember that you’re doing okay. You don’t get any of that, and you just try to do better every single time.

You do your best to only do good in the world. You appreciate it when you feel like you have. You hope to do better when you realize someone is hurt or dismayed or angered by what you’ve done.

You always hope to do better, every time. Whether or not they’re right. Whether or not you’re wrong.

She’s wrong, but she doesn’t know shit about my life and my intentions and hopes and whatever the fuck. I’m wrong, and I don’t know fuck about what moves her and shaped her and how she’s lived and who she is.

It’s subjective. It’s exhausting.

It’s what happens when you publish.

I have gone through hating my book and hating myself to accepting that this was the book I had to give, and the person I was when I wrote it, and I did the best I could for the people I was writing for–the girls who just wanted to know that they weren’t alone for thinking it was bullshit that they were being called fat, but also filled with fear that those people were right. Because it’s so hard to be strong when everything else in the world is telling you that you’re probably wrong.

I didn’t think I would want to keep writing, but I want to keep writing. I think that I have struck a balance somehow between how I think a reader would react (which is tinged just the tiniest smidge by fear, to be honest) and how I tell the truth.

To be clear: I’ll always tell the truth. I’m just going to get even better at it.

#future perfect #jen larsen #harper children #epicreads

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