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Heidi J. De Vries

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March 21, 2002
Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks
Greg Bottoms
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



   



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The Fallen Curtain
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The Gormenghast Novels
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