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While reading about copper mining out in the wild west, I came across this term, “company towns”. I was hot off of reading a Jane Jacobs collection, so I was curious if this was another one of those types of planned communities that Jacobs always bitched about.
Essentially, it’s a crappy little two-horse town where pretty much all the stores and homes are owned by the one company that also employs everybody. Some were packed with oodles of amenities like churches, schools, and parks. Others were slapped and stapled together, particularly those linked to mining operations. They usually bloomed in places where extractive industries (coal, metal, lumber, etc.) had established monopolies. Though they also could show up around other enterprises, large dam building projects; the garrison societies of peak war manufacturing; the Soviets even had “atomgrads” to stow away their nuclear scientists. And sometimes they happened organically and unplanned in towns that already existed but had a business that moved in and over time became the majority’s employer.
Company towns tended to be substantially exploitative of both whatever resource they were harvesting and their labor force. However, there were some idealists in the mix, and this is seen in the late-19th century trend of “model towns”. These were built by high-minded industrialists appalled at the congested conditions most laborers were living in. They believed that by building a healthier environment for employees, they would make for a more productive company. Well-intended at times, but nonetheless a demonstration of the kind of power a company’s owner had over the lives of those they employed. This ability to socially engineer the lifestyle of the laborer to the benefit of the company’s bottom line is the nightmare fuel of union reps.
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AN ANNOTATED READING OF BETWEEN TWO AGES, BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, 1970, PAGES 19-26
Previous Entries: Chapter three, Chapter two, chapter one, introduction
This chapter leads from the argument that the Third World is an inevitable victim of the Technetronic Revolution. It’s an argument that has aged decently in some ways, less so in others. The evolution of globalized markets, particularly after the internet became a common household utility, has led to many market collapses (One Example: In the late 1990s Thailand’s currency crashed and nearly all the finance houses that were in deep in US Dollar debt were closed after the government failed to keep the baht at a fixed rate with the dollar, leading to a loss of confidence in not only the Thai market, but nearly all the emerging Southeast Asian markets, and investment capital fled from the region) that governments and banks alike were unable to foresee. Citizens of such countries have commonly reported a sense of helplessness as global market forces either touch their country and change it out from under them, or leave them behind completely. On the other hand, globalization has brought wealth to places that would have otherwise been left behind. Such places lose their young working population to emigration and fail to entice not only newcomers, but new enterprises. In some regions globalization forces a kind of stability that previously would have relied heavily on the personality of the day’s dictator.
Brzezinski argues that whether less developed countries grow rapidly or slowly during the Technetronic Revolution, most of them will suffer intensifying feelings of psychological deprivation. A loss of purpose, of optimism, of life goals and national self-esteem. With a world increasingly electronically entangled, absolute or relative underdevelopment will feel more intolerable. It will feel even worse as the more advanced countries move beyond the industrial era at a time when many countries have barely begun to enter it. As a reminder, this book was published in 1970, the Iron Curtain was still up and African nations were still getting a handle on post-colonial governing.
“It is thus no longer a matter of the revolution of rising expectations. The Third World today confronts the specter of insatiable aspirations.”
Through the ages preceding the 20th century, the response to insoluble social problems was fatalism. The ills plaguing society were seen as part of the universal condition. Church doctrine backed this; poverty was inevitable, illness was inevitable, disaster and loss were inevitable. In the Modern and Post-Modern eras, the response to such issues is frustration. They are now seen as a particular phenomenon that the materially fortunate classes are not afflicted by. Brzezinski cites urban ghettos in the United States as an example and uses them as a small-scale analogy to the global position of the less developed countries of Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The issues in American ghettos and underdeveloped regions is not caused by the absence of change, and in some cases not even insufficiently rapid change. By the time of Brzezinski’s writing, several under-developed countries had achieved sustained rates of growth (South Korea, Taiwan, and Ghana, for example). Rather, the social frustration experienced in these settings arise from a growing feeling of relative deprivation, of which they are made more acutely aware due to the spread of education and communications. This same phenomena was part of what made India so difficult for the British to continue to hold onto. Middle class and wealthy Indian youth would go to Britain for their education and return home with a keen sense of what was lacking in their country but flourishing in the West. Brzezinski predicts that passive resignation in such places will be usurped by active explosions of undirected anger. This transition is one of the reasons the Iron Curtain collapsed so rapidly within some couple of years in the late 1980s to early 90s.
Through the ages preceding the 20th century, the response to insoluble social problems was fatalism.
Prospects for Change
Brzezinski admits that it is nearly impossible to predict the economic and political development of underdeveloped nations. He believed Latin America the most likely to make reasonable progress, potentially reaching the economic levels of advanced states by the 1990s. This is somewhat of an overshot, but most of Central and South America is at least doing better than they were in the 1960s, though they don’t come close to the numbers seen in North America. Continuing on, Brzezinski assumes that pockets of development will increasingly dot across Africa and Asia, so long as there is relative peace and political stability in the region as a whole.
That said, the overall prognosis is not optimistic. To illustrate this, Brzezinski lists the projections for per capita annual gross national product (GNP, though now we refer to this as GNI, Gross National Income) in 1985 against the projections for developed nations.
NATION Brzezinski’s Projection for 1985 Actual Numbers in 1985 Nigeria $107 $213 Pakistan $134 $107 Indonesia $112 $167 India $169 $100 China $185 $97 United Arab Republic* $295 $200 Brazil $372 $514 United States $6510 $5285 Japan $3080 $3900 Israel $2978 $2279 * UAR refers to Egypt alone by 1985, Syria had seceded from the union in 1961, but Egypt chose to keep the name for a while. Brzezinski notes that for the years between 1965 and 1985, per capita GNP was likely to double in the advanced countries listed above (they mostly did), while for a single Nigerian this increase will only be $14, for a Pakistani it’s $43, $12 for an Indonesian, $70 for an Indian, $88 for a Chinese, $129 for an Egyptian, and $92 for the common Brazilian.
Brzezinski then shifts to a common concern of the era, the threat of overpopulation caused by economic growth. He argues that this threat involves a crucial social-political dimension. Overpopulation contributes to the breakup of land holdings, which further stratifies and complicates the rural class structure and thus creating widening disparities that intensify class conflicts. Widespread unemployment is also probable in this environment. Citing reports from the International Labour Organization, by 1980 Asia’s labor force was expected to have increased from 663 million to 938 million while the number of new jobs is expected to increase by only 142 million. (I’m not sure of the exact numbers, but there were a lot of papers published about massive labor migrations in and mostly out of Asia in the 1980s, which seems to agree or at least rhyme with the predictions here.)
Widespread acceptance of birth control was not expected to counter this because the economic outlook in terms of per capita GNP would only marginally improve in comparison to the figures anticipated for advanced nations. If the population of Indonesia experienced no growth at all between 1965 and 1985, it may have a per capita GNP of $200 instead of $112; for Pakistan, $250 instead of $112, and so on.
In the 1960s popular theories predicted that by 1985 large pockets of poverty would still exist, but mass starvation, mass homelessness, and the rampant spread of disease will generally be eliminated. It’s acceptable to say that widespread famines have mostly been brought under control. Mass homelessness is another matter that depends greatly on how one defines “mass”. Homelessness rates in poor and wealthy nations have ebbed and flowed, today in the 2020s West we’re seeing a visible increase. The spread of disease has calmed down, though plagues like Covid, Swine Flu, and SARS are proof that global sickness is still a possibility. And though the underdeveloped countries will still be comparatively poor, their people will have greater and more immediate access to worldwide transportation and communications systems. These networks increase access to medical care, food, clothing, and financial aid through international assistance. In all of this, the surplus commodity production of the United States will be increasingly relied on.
Brzezinski accurately predicts the utopian visions of globalism’s most optimistic proponents. That greater international planning in terms of international commodity agreements, transport arrangements, health regulations, finance, and education would make for more orderly approaches to the social problems caused by backwardness, slow growth, and the widening disparities in standards of living. The widening scales of communications would allow instant responses to sudden disasters, where aid could be mobilized and moved across the globe faster than ever before. To demonstrate this sentiment, Brzezinski points to changes brought about in Asia and Middle East by their (at the time semi-recent) agricultural revolutions. Mass educational campaigns and the introduction of new cereal types and fertilizers brought about an upsurge in productivity, with Thailand and Burma already having become grain-exporting states before the time of Brzezinski’s writing. The cumulative effect of such successes, for the optimistic globalist, may bolster the confidence of national leaders in their ability to handle other seemingly insoluble problems and lead them to embrace modern technology for its potential to improve the quality of life in their states.
Even so, the fact remained that material conditions in the Third World could not keep pace with the factors that make for psychic change. The changes that were in evidence by then were being brought about by education and communications, and those changes in psyche were necessary to stimulate greater receptiveness to innovation, such as peasants accepting the use of fertilizers. But these facilitators also prompt an intense awareness of inadequacy and cultural backwardness.
Brzezinski believed that the future potentials of socio-economic transformations in the Third World could be better informed by a comparison to Russia during the turn of the 20th century. There the Industrial Revolution outpaced mass education; literacy followed, rather than preceded, material change. Revolutionary movements of the era strove to close the gap by politically educating (i.e. radicalizing) the masses.
“Today in the Third World a subjective revolution is preceding change in the objective environment and creating a state of unrest, uneasiness, anger, anguish, and outrage. Indeed, it has been observed that the faster the enlightenment of the population, the more frequent the overthrow of the government.”
Brzezinski’s view was that the gap between awakening mass consciousness and material reality was widening. Between 1958 and 1965, the percentage of working population in underdeveloped nations in fields other than agriculture only shifted substantially in one country, Algeria. Housing, physicians per thousand inhabitants, and household consumption did not show significant advances and in some areas a decrease was seen.
The changes that were in evidence by then were being brought about by education and communications, and those changes in psyche were necessary to stimulate greater receptiveness to innovation, such as peasants accepting the use of fertilizers. But these facilitators also prompt an intense awareness of inadequacy and cultural backwardness.
The Subjective Transformation
Circling back to advances in communications and education, Brzezinski notes that these elements altered the subjective environment in poor nations while objective conditions changed sluggishly. The number of radios in Indian households went from 1.5 million to 6.4 million between 1958 and 1966. Similar enough figures are seen elsewhere in the Third World. At the time of the book’s writing, the television age was only beginning in those regions but was predicted to become generally available by the 1980s.
Access to higher education also grew rapidly. In India, between 1958 and 1968, the number of students went from 900,000 to 1.9 million students in nearly 3,000 colleges and 80 universities. In Indonesia the rate of student growth was 30%, and it was 50% in the United Arab Republic.
Increased access to education comes with specific problems. Access to advanced technical training is too limited to sustain extensive modernization and the Third World was still very stagnant in intermediate technical education. Further, the capacity of many of the poorer countries to absorb trained personnel is inadequate, and it results in a class of dissatisfied college graduates. These predominantly come from legal and liberal arts facilities, and they are unable to obtain gainful employment that matches with their raised expectations. While this problem is acute in several countries, it could be aggravated by the introduction of automation in the over-employed factories and bureaucracies of the less developed countries.
These problems are made worse by the low quality of most of these higher education facilities.
- In India: “At a generous estimate, perhaps 5 per cent of the mass of Indian students in institutions of higher education are receiving decent training by recognizable world standards. … In most places academic standards have fallen so low that they can hardly be said to have survived.”
- In South Asia: “Teaching in South Asian schools at all levels tends to discourage independent thinking and the growth of that inquisitive and experimental bent of mind that is so essential for development. . . . The South Asian peoples are not merely being insufficiently educated; they are being miseducated on a huge scale.”
- In Latin America: “By now it is fully recognized that education in Latin America has fundamental shortcomings, that there is a high illiteracy rate, and that the educational system bears no relation to the requirements of economic development, quite apart from the serious deficiencies that exist in other basic cultural respects”
Poor quality education of this sort contributes to the emergence of an inadequately trained class of frustrated young people susceptible to radicalism and utopian appeals. This trend has many parallels seen among the 19th century intelligensia of more backward regions of Europe like Russia and the Balkans.
In order to obtain quality education, a small portion of the students — either through especial talent granting them scholarships, or because they come from wealthy families — go abroad for school. Exposed to advanced foreign cultures can encourage them to adapt to foreign styles and ways of life, and even to remain forever abroad. Essentially, they opt out of their own society either internally, or simply by never returning. Brzezinski was right about this, today we call it brain drain. In 1967, almost half of the total number of engineers, scientists, and medical personnel who emigrated to the United States came from underdeveloped nations. In the late 1960s, this number was expected to rise for years to come.
The cumulative effect of these factors allows for a turbulent and amorphous political pattern. In general, the political stack in less developed countries had its peasant masses at the base, still primarily occupied in manual labor and mostly illiterate, but no longer parochially restricted to their immediate environment by landowners or geographical distance. Transistor radios establish immediate contact with the national society and can create awareness of their material or national deprivation. The next level in the stack is a rapidly increasing urban population that is comprised to a large extent of post-peasant city dwellers seeking more economic opportunities. Above that is a pseudo-intelligensia, which makes up a small percent of the overall population and is typically made up of relatively young people who have acquired some form of advanced education. In these poor countries, as mentioned previously, the quality of this education is often middling at best, resulting in many of this class living poorly and developing the feeling that society does not provide them with the opportunities to which their education entitles them. This group is highly susceptible to militant xenophobic movements. At the top of the stack is a relatively well-educated but narrow elite class that struggles to achieve both stability and progress (Iran), or to delay or prevent reforms (some Latin American countries) because their privileges rely too much on the perpetuation of the status quo.
These “global ghettos” have parallels to the racial slums of the United States. Stated previously, the problem in American cities is not the absence of development, but the perception that even rapid change will not bring much benefit among the poor in the near future, and from the growing realization that the wealthier classes are becoming morally uneasy over the material gap. Brzezinski argues that this combination can create a sense of acute deprivation that cultivates intensifying political hostility toward the outside world. Further, he claims that this hostility was made possible by the increase in the number of black Americans receiving higher education, therefore becoming capable of providing the energizing leadership for the expression of previously suppressed grievances. Another factor was the migration of a large number of black Americans moving to cities in the 19th century, removing them from the traditional, white-dominated rural life into direct contact with the spectrum of urban white population. Here, attempts at reform contributed to further tension and friction, and in some cities prompted the dominant community to adopt a reactionary posture against change.
American racial slums have grown in a pattern similar to the huge impoverished urban centers of Asia. There, cities inhabited by impoverished masses have grown rapidly because of rural poverty and resource insecurity.
“The parallel between the ghettos of the global city and the racial slums of the United States can be extended to the problems faced by the intellectual political elite of the Third World. In the United States “integration” has so far tended to mean the selective assimilation of a few individuals who can conform to the prevailing norms of the dominant community; however, their assimilation also means, the loss of talent and expertise to the black community, in which the less educated’ more militant “pseudointelligentsia” increasingly provides charismatic leadership to the masses by exploiting reverse racism. In like manner, the established social elites of the Third World have tended to emulate the life styles of the more advanced world, and to emigrate into it either directly or vicariously.”
The Political Vacuum
The vacuum that results from domestic and international brain drain, Brzezinski claims, is filled by an indigenous pseudo-intelligensia whose views are taped together by doctrines advocated by the likes of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Ibram X. Kendi, etc. (My examples) 19th century European Marxism, originally addressed to an urban proletariat that had only recently left rural life. Now it gets romantically adopted to the conditions of industrially stunted 20th century global ghettos.
“The revolutionary intellectual is a virtually universal phenomenon in modernizing societies. No one is as inclined to foster violence as a disgruntled intellectual. It is these persons who compose the cadres of the less responsible political parties, who make up the narrower entourage of demagogues and who become leaders of millenarian and messianic movements, all of which may, when the opportunity is ripe, threaten political stability.”
In these contexts, external aid intended to overcome the specific condition of under-education and poverty, becomes an additional point of friction. In the United States, government aid programs are resented by blacks and whites for some similiar and also some very different reasons across economic classes. On the global scale, accusations of “neocolonialism” have been used to stimulate the suspicions of the masses regarding the political motives of the economic aid coming from advanced countries. In turn, accusations of graft, corruption, and inefficiency have been lobbed by donor counties against the recipient nations.
Economic aid poses another danger as well. It can at best be only a partial response to a condition that has profoundly psychological as well as material origins. Assistance can only be effective if the recipient country can cultivate a sense of popular enthusiasm and a greater sense of purpose is created. This requires native leadership that knows both how to energize the masses and how to utilize foreign aid intelligently. Moreover, even if those in authority are capable of balancing these two elements, they have to contend with the fact that their reality can be changed only gradually, while popular mobilization on behalf of progress can be attained quickly by stimulating mass enthusiasm and emotion.
This brings about a dilemma that governments are forced to confront. To admit the reality of the slow speed of progress is to deprive themselves of the support of the masses and to risk yielding the political initiative to radical demagogues. Stirring up the masses on unattainable goals invites an eventual explosion except for in cases where that mobilization becomes a vehicle for subordinating the people to centralized, bureaucratic control of the sort seen in Communist states. The distance between promise and attainment is further widened by the government’s need to obtain the support of the propertied and more educated groups, which requires the rulers to tread lightly so as not to disrupt the traditional social order. They’ll put loopholes into the laws or leave them unenforced for the privileged classes.
Brzezinski believed that feelings of resentment would grow as the disparities between the Third World and developed world widened. He believed that by the year 2000 the spctrum will have expanded from the few most advanced post-industrial technetronic states (the U.S., Japan, Sweden, Canada), to some dozen mature industrial states, to the 10-15 underdeveloped states existent in the late 1960s that will have reached the levels of the early industrial states of the era, to the large group of nations still in a pre-industrial stage, and finally to those still in extremely primitive conditions. In those nations that were in the early industrial and pre-industrial stages in the 1960s, which contained the majority of the world’s population and had been experiencing only partially impactful progress, will by the year 2000 be the likely centers of volatile political activity, resentment, tension, and extremism.
In this prediction, Brzezenski found it difficult to believe that democratic institutions — derived from Western philosophies but functional in only the more stable and wealthy Western nations — will endure in countries like India or develop elsewhere. To him, the most likely outcome was sporadic turbulance in individual countries and a turn toward dictatorships that are based on internally oriented, though socially radical, unifying doctrines that combine xenophobia and charisma in the hopes that it may provide the minimum stability necessary for imposing socio-economic modernization.
Just as in urban ghettos in America, this may create a tenser relationship with the more prosporous nations. Cold War rivalry stimulated the concept of developed nations providing assistance to the backward nations of the world. From the U.S.S.R., to keep American influence out, from the U.S., to keep Soviet influence out. Brzezinski was writing while still in the thick of the Cold War, but worried that when it wanes this East-West rivalry would be replaced by North-South animosity.
I ran out of credits trying to fix the Hammer & Sickle on this, but I liked the image too much to ditch it.
On the next sick sad world: Global Fragmentation and Unification
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Anomie is a social condition characterized by the disintegration of moral values, standards, and guidance for individuals. It often arises from conflicting belief systems, leading to a breakdown of social bonds between individuals and their communities, affecting both economic relationships and primary social interactions. For instance, alienation can escalate into a profound inability to engage in typical social scenarios, such as securing employment or fostering successful relationships.
The term, often interpreted as normlessness, was popularized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his seminal works, The Division of Labor in Society (1893) and Suicide (1897). While Durkheim did not explicitly use “normlessness,” he described anomie as a form of “derangement” and an “insatiable will,” referring to the “malady of the infinite,” where unfulfilled desires only intensify. Anomie typically emerges from a dissonance between personal or collective standards and broader societal expectations, leading to moral deregulation and a lack of legitimate aspirations. This condition reflects a deeper mismatch, rather than mere absence of norms.
In his 1893 publication, Durkheim introduced anomie to explain the disconnect between collective guild labor and evolving societal needs, particularly when guilds were homogeneous. He likened redundant skills to mechanical solidarity, which hinders adaptation due to its rigidity. In contrast, a labor division based on diversity reflects organic solidarity, characterized by adaptability and sensitivity to change.
Durkheim noted that the conflict between these forms of solidarity is such that one cannot coexist with the other. In an organic context, anomie is absent, as awareness of mutual needs fosters evolution in labor division: “Producers, being near consumers, can easily gauge the extent of needs to be fulfilled.” However, when an opaque barrier disrupts connections, relationships become infrequent and erratic. As a result, producers lose sight of market boundaries, leading to unrestrained and chaotic production.
Durkheim’s analysis of anomie particularly addressed the effects of industrialization, highlighting how mass-regimentation can resist necessary adaptations due to its inherent inertia. This resistance contributes to cycles of disruptive collective behavior, such as economic instability, which require substantial momentum to overcome.
According to Durkheim, traditional religions often provided the shared values that the anomic individual lacks. He argued that the division of labor, intensified by the Industrial Revolution, prompted individuals to pursue self-serving goals instead of the welfare of the community. Robert King Merton further developed the concept of anomie in his strain theory, defining it as the gap between societal goals and the legitimate means to achieve them. An individual experiencing anomie may aspire to societal goals but find themselves unable to attain them through accepted channels due to structural barriers within society.
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By the mid-19th century, only Great Britain and Belgium had a majority of their populations residing in urban areas. The Census of 1851 revealed that agriculture remained the largest employer in British industries, closely followed by domestic service. The concentration of economic wealth and rapid urbanization were evident in the remarkable expansion of British towns. After 1850, this trend became particularly pronounced with the emergence of large urban centers, which later evolved into what we now call “conurbations.”
“In 1800 London, Paris, and Berlin had, respectively, about 900,000, 600,000, and 170,000 inhabitants. In 1900 the corresponding figures were 4.7 million, 3.6 million and 2.7 million. In that year Glasgow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Vienna all had more than 1,000,000 inhabitants each.”
A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts, pg. 332
These urban centers epitomized the trend toward urbanization in regions where industrialization first gained momentum, drawing individuals in with the promise of wealth and job opportunities.
As the 18th century drew to a close, a nostalgic yearning for rural life began to surface, coinciding with the initial phase of visible industrial growth. The 19th century ushered in a wave of aesthetic and moral opposition to city life. Urbanization was often perceived as detrimental and unhealthy, associated with subversive elements. Conditions in burgeoning metropolitan areas frequently proved dire for the impoverished, with London’s East End showcasing some of the most shocking examples of poverty and disease. In France, the “dangerous classes” of Parisian poor preoccupied the government for much of the century, serving as a breeding ground for revolutionary movements.
Concerns arose that these expanding cities could foster resentment toward society’s leaders and serve as a potential revolutionary force. Cities became seen as incubators of ideological dissent, dismantling traditional behaviors and offering a fertile ground for new social reforms and ideas. They provided anonymity, allowing individuals to escape the oversight of priests, landowners, and neighbors that characterized rural life.
As literacy rates improved, fresh ideas began to challenge long-held beliefs, with atheism and irreligion becoming particularly pronounced. At that time, religion was viewed as the cornerstone of morality and social cohesion. This realization prompted a series of efforts in both Protestant and Catholic nations to reclaim the cities, leading to the establishment of new churches in industrial suburbs and the development of missions that combined evangelism with social outreach, educating clergy about the realities of modern urban life.
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House Dion
After my last visit with the Directory recorders, the House Dion incident was shelved. The Directory sent their secretaries for files and closed the whole thing. Apparently, I’m the only one they bothered to tell because Inspector Rory sent me over a surveillance report he had for Paul Dion. I very much intend to keep it, if for nothing other than spite. And of course, I intend to share it here.
Enjoy:
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
There are two sub-genres of fiction that aren’t full seek-em-out Favorites, but that I’ll always have a soft spot for. These are Southern Gothic and the hippie novel. The best thing about Southern Gothic is I can’t even explain it. Judging by what I’ve seen when I’ve tried to read any definition of the term, no one else can either. It’s the byproduct of what I call True Weird. Cities have plenty of True Weird. It’s those wandering souls you see screaming at a tree like it stole from them, wearing a bed sheet they pulled out of an overflowing PlanetAid bin and tied around their unhealthy neck like a cape. Cities also have a disproportionate amount of LARP Weird. Pretenders desperate to be seen as quirky or eccentric. Art scenes are especially infested with this personality. They aren’t weird, they just want you to think they’re cool and unique because they blow half their income on vintage nunsploitation tapes or wall-to-wall displays of the Disney obsession that they dragged into their fully grown years.
But rural people, these are the ones that are True Weird. Rural people are weird in a way that a pretender couldn’t even dream of. No one out-weirds rural people, and that goes for rural people in any country. Southern Gothic novels are almost always concerned with rural people, and these novels themselves are intrinsically always weird. Half the time, particularly with Faulkner, I have no idea what is actually happening in these pages but I’m having a great time anyway. All the suffocating prose, the cryptic aphorisms, the meanness of everyone and thing. Great times. But Flannery O’Connor isn’t like this. She was a terse and sardonic broad who laid her writing out flat and undecorated. Getting her start in 1950, she seems ahead of her times, or maybe she’s just more timeless than the more obnoxious members of her generation, those self-proclaimed pioneers like Kerouac and Burroughs.
Born in Georgia, died in Georgia; her thirty-nine years of life seem completely devoted to peacocks and writing. But still she traveled. Showing up late to the Iowa Writers Workshop to ask for a spot with an accent no one could understand. Getting wined and dined by the NY publishers while privately, eternally, laughing at them.
This collection was pretty robust. I would doubt there’s a short story of hers that isn’t in here. For those who like her, or think they’d like her, the collection I found is a version from some publisher called Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Similar to my other short story collection reviews, I made a short note after each story, but not all of them will be covered about here.
The Geranium
An old Southern cabin dweller’s failing health forces him to move in with his daughter in New York City. With nothing to look at but a neighbor’s geranium, the geranium becomes way more important than it should. One day it disappears and all that is symbolized becomes a matter of life, death, and madness.The Barber
Best opening line of the collection: “It is trying on liberals in Dilton.”
Favorite line of the story: “You a Mother Hubbard?”
This story is probably over 70 years old, yet small town politics remain the same in spite of our x-topian technology.Wildcat
Like the Don Quixote windmill scene, but in Georgian English, (“Lord waitin’ on me now”). Instead of Don, it’s a freaked out old man in a rickety wooden farmhouse. Instead of windmills, a wildcat terror that comes in the night.The Crop
“Miss Willerton sat down at her typewriter and let out her breath. Now! What had she been thinking about? Oh. Bakers. Hmmm. No, bakers wouldn’t do. Hardly colorful enough. No social tension connected with bakers. Miss Willerton sat staring through her typewriter … Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm. Sharecroppers! Miss Willerton had never been intimately connected with sharecroppers but, she reflected, they would as artsy a subject as any, and they would give her that air of social concern which was so valuable to have in the circles she was hoping to travel!”This is what I imagine most modern journalists do when they start scouring whatever social platform they leech half their main content from.
The Turkey
Young dummy chases a turkey to death and runs to town expecting people to lift him on their shoulders and cheer. The turkey trophy gets left to stiffen and rot while the boy runs red-faced into the night.The Train
An old man can’t tell black people apart and the stress of it all sets him off into some psychedelic fit.The Peeler
A street hawker with a shiny new potato peeler brings together an uncommon crowd, among them a blond proselytizer and his daughter, Sabbath, the newcomer town idiot, and a freshly converted yet fiercely devout atheist with an axe to grind. The atheist harries the father-daughter team while the idiot follows on his heels. Scenes of ego fly before the atheist retires to the home of his new devotion, the town prostitute.The Heart of the Park
Idiot and Atheist find themselves together again when the Idiot, going about some freakish routine at the town park, is descended upon by the Atheist as he takes in his afternoon peeping from the bush by the park pool. The Atheist demands the address of the proselytizers so he can go argue at them some more. The Idiot holds the details hostage as he forces the Atheist to spend the day being his friend. After a round of milkshakes, an hour yelling obscenities at zoo animals, and a gawk at a shrunken man under glass, the fun comes to an end with the Atheist whipping a rock at the Idiot’s face.A Stroke of Good Fortune
Ruby and Bill Hill hadn’t eaten collard greens in five years and sure as shit weren’t going to start now.Enoch and the Gorilla
The Idiot appears alone in this one, harassing a gorilla this time, one set up for a show who can shake hands. The Idiot gets geared up to yell at the beast, but the warmth of its hand pressing his is the first show of kindness he’s received since arriving in town. That is, until the gorilla responds to the Idiot’s exuberant introduction by leaning forward and telling him to go to hell.The River
A preacher promises miracles in the river, the river that leads toward the Kingdom of Christ. One man who doesn’t need no fool preacher decides to go looking in the under-currents for that divine kingdom.The Displaced Person
Hell is other peacocks.Good Country People
One-legged girl goes off to college a year and turns into a huge asshole. To spite her mother she changed her name from Joy to Hulga. After a further act of rebellion involving a traveling bible salesman Hulga finds herself stuck in a treehouse and robbed of her prosthetic leg.You Can’t be Poorer than Dead
A bootlegger dies and his nephew can’t stay sober enough to get his body in the ground.Everything that Rises Must Converge
A young man finds catharsis when his mother gets her wig knocked around after a mis-step in race relations, that is, until her bad blood pressure bestows the youth with a mortal lesson.Revelation
“Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” A woman almost dies from this.A Good Man is Hard to Find
Grandma doesn’t wanna go to Florida, and the old betty is proven right when a detour ends in her whole family getting murdered.Make yourself odd, buy a copy here.
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The biggest big-deal graduate level creative writing program in these United States. Meeting every year at the Dey House of the University of Iowa’s extensive campus, it admits 2.7% to 3.7% of applicants per year.
The philosophy of the workshop is that writing should be a technical and rigorous pursuit. The Workshop is an intense scene.
“The model constantly exposed students to outside opinions on their fiction and created a pressurized atmosphere that forced students to reign in their emotional reactions and consider their work analytically.”
Rather than indulge the artsy whims of their students, the Workshop aimed to ground and refine them. For better or worse, the Workshop was swarmed from the 1970s on with students who dreamed of being shithead journalists and creative nonfiction writers. If you resent the snark and self-sniffing cleverness of today’s journalism, Iowa may deserve some of the blame. Add it on the stack of how Generation X pulled the last ladders up while singing “Woe is me,” all the way to the bank.
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“A pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.”
The spiritual and likely virginal duchess of Deep South Georgia, USA. O’Connor’s name burns on by right of her grimly cynical Southern Gothic prose. More approachable than Truman Capote, more coherent than William Faulkner, she wrote about one and a half anthologies worth of short stories and a couple of novels before dying at the unfulfilled age of 39.
What did she love? Peacocks, mostly. She bred and raised them on her farm. Why? Who knows; they lay useless eggs, eat fussy diets, and the males live only to look pretty and hope they get laid for it, like all Southern gentlemen. Presumably she also loved her mother, or maybe she was just stuck with her after the father died from lupus. She likely loved God in her own skeptical Irish-Catholic way.
All but the first and last of her stories are set in Georgia. These settings mimic the towns and abysses that she knew best. But Flannery isn’t some oblivious bumpkin. After graduating on an accelerated track at Georgia State, she showed up late to the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In spite of her tardiness, she was admitted by the crowned lecturer and second-ever director of the Workshop, Paul Engle. He found her accent incomprehensible and had to ask her to write what she was trying to say to him on a piece of paper. She wrote: “My name is Flanner O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer’s Workshop?”. Engle asked her for some writing samples and, after reading, waved her in.
“Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself.”
Paul Engle
After finishing at the Workshop she stomped around New York City for a bit but ultimately lived out the rest of her days back in small town Georgia with her peacocks and her mother. Despite her mostly isolated life she had a sharp sense of humor that she capably transferred to text, as well as an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior.
She died slowly. Diagnosed with her father’s killer when she was 27, she finally succumbed to it in the August of her 39th year.
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House Dion
I’m startled awake by the awful ringing of a midnight call. One of the Watchers from Fauxpool called in a red flag to the Lowland office. The Lead Inspector there, I don’t know the name yet only that he’s new, immediately escalated the call to me. I listened to the whole message but I could have stopped at “Lowlands” and known I had to get my boots on. When I get a call in the small hours it’s always in the Lowlands and requires an In-Person visit. I’m hardly awake, but as I said, I only needed to hear where I’m going. I brace myself for it the same no matter which House is causing all the trouble. The call was for House Dion, which means it’s 50/50 odds that I’ll be seeing Paul or Rose this time. I do hope it’s Rose, I’d prefer an easier night.
There’s only one good thing about these late-night calls, and it’s an exquisite one. The under-rails are completely empty but for me and whoever is steering this iron worm. In the daylight hours, I find the under-rail more unbearable than the much-maligned standard rails. At least up there, though it may be sticky and stinking of the mysterious puddles hardening in the seats, everyone minds their own business. Those passengers have made an art out of avoiding each other. But on the exclusive under-rail, we may as well be a moving meet-and-greet party for us drab cogs of the State. I shouldn’t say that though, I’m a pretty important cog, so I’m approved for after-hours access to the under-rail. I wonder if there are others, or if this conductor drifts from post to post alone. Maybe he enjoys some mischief within the privacy of his cabin, it’s all the same to him anyway, passengers or not. I’ve wondered if he enjoys the emptiness as I do. Clearly, I’ve thought too much about it. The funny part is I don’t even know if there is a conductor, or if all the faith has been placed in some sturdy, old computer.
I refresh myself on the details of the call once I’m in the railcar. A Closed-Door incident that became External after an estimated time-lapse of 10 moments. How informative. I don’t even mean that sarcastically, some of these Houses really do follow a pattern of outbreak. The last time I had to do an In-Person visit for House Dion was when Rose, the matriarch, had slept through her scheduled interview with the Directory for the third time and she had a lot to loudly say to me.
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