#harry crews

[agirlnamedbone]

LYDIA LUNCH ph. Jose Porroche for Dazed Magazine

[undergroundrockpress]

Illustration by Morgan Kane, 1970.

[iamdangerace]

[hammerheadmarc]

read www.hammerhead.blog

[heraclito71]

Nunca quise ser completo. No admiro a las personas integrales ni a su trabajo. Hasta donde puedo ver, nunca nada bueno en el mundo ha sido hecho por personas integrales. El buen trabajo lo hacen personas con bordes dentados y rotos, porque esos bordes cortan las cosas y dejan una huella, un diseño.

Harry Crews.

[innocentiusxiv]

The Carnivorous Lamb / Go Tell It on the Mountain / Sula / Mathilda / The Gospel Singer / Lolita

Books starting after it's too late

[spilladabalia]

Kim Gordon

Photo by & © Dave Markey

[dare-g]

My final reads of the year! I ended up reading 110 books in 2022!!

[heavywithfire]

On Outsider Faith in The American South

On Monday, only two other mothers showed up, and we ended up talking about religion because, as Harry Crews pointed out, every conversation in the South is theological in nature.

We all came from ex-Christian backgrounds. “A��� was former JW turned atheist with a santero-in-training husband. “D” grew up in a Black Baptist family but views Christianity as a colonizers’ faith. D said that the part she hated about living in the South the most was how Christianity wormed its way into everything, and I surprised them by saying that was something that my faith benefited from.

Because in the Christ-haunted South, people do believe in great power. In the land of snake-handlers and hand-layers, I can exist—as something other but still as something serious. I might get treated as an adversary, but it's always as a worthy one. I am believed if I say what I am, what I can do. My faith is treated as real, and I am not (for the most part) treated as crazy.

I know that’s not the case everywhere. In California, with its soft-handed woo, people were fine to manifest and charge crystals, but tell them a cow tongue filled with glass would make quick work of what ails them, and they look at you in horror. The same happened in graduate school in Texas, when a few of us southern-born were trying to explain to our Yankee and Middle-west peers that having a grandmother who spoke to the dead isn’t improbable or a sign of madness, that it’s less exotic than having one who used to be a fan dancer.

Even during my thesis defense, I had to explicitly state to my committee of New Englanders that ghosts were a fact of my life, my reality, and that my work as a “fabulist” has to be viewed through that lens.

And while I have complicated feelings about my hometown and even more complex feelings about living in Florida (a move I made for the love of a person, not a place) I am so grateful that I have been able to seek treatment for my mental illnesses in Caribbean cities.

Because it only took about an hour of research to find a maternal mental health specialist who both took my insurance and practiced Brujería. And while my faith isn’t Afro-Caribbean (I am as pale as pre-boiled pierogi) my therapist understands what my spirituality entails and doesn’t write it off as madness.

That I can have a therapist who I can come to and say that I feel so alone because my deity has not used my body as a vessel to come through and speak through me in such a long time, and for her advice to be trying a different approach to reach trance state, is an incredible gift. And she isn’t even the only one.

Years ago, when I told my Analysist about being called by my deity, about the visions I had—full blown hallucinogenic episodes by another’s standards—she offered me advice on how to process them, because she had those experiences too.

And I just don’t know if that would be the case if I was seeing an Irish-Catholic shrink in Boston. Maybe it would. Maybe plenty of therapists are willing to accept that communication between the dead and the divine is a two-way street, no matter where the location.

But I can’t help but feel that because this land is so old, that it’s taken as truth that something larger is always lurking out beyond the pine, that all of that faith bubbles up in the same way. It’s why listening to old Appalachian Baptist choirs feels like hearing an invocation.    It’s why Searching for The Wrong Eyed Jesus has always felt like such a reflection of my own experience, even though I’m the farthest thing from it. (I grew up in deep Catholic country, far removed from protestant Pentecostalism and lacked all musical talent.)

This is not to say that the religious grip on the South isn’t fucked up. It would have been great to not have almost died from my wanted pregnancy due to complications and draconian abortion laws that made doctors hesitant to treat. It would be lovely to not have to worry about what the fuck public education will look like in this state in five years, if my daughter will be allowed to learn about anyone brown or queer.

But this is to say that outside of the context of that Old Time Religion (both the Abrahamic kind and the others), I don’t know how I’d be treated. I don’t know if I would be understood, and I don’t know if I would be treated as having sound mind and body. Besides, where else would I go? Denver? New York? Either of the lily-white Portlands? Please. I can survive fundamentalist hatred, but not half a year of winter. Jesus.

[cynthiabertelsen]

Hog Butchering Time with Harry Crews

Pork Cuts (Copyright 2012 Bearings LLC) I came within ax-handle length of hog butchering only once. And that was enough for me. My grandparents lived agrarian lives and they carried over many of their habits to their small acreage in southern California, where they raised chickens and rabbits for their table. I, on the other hand, grew up in the shadows of a land-grant university. The cows in the…

[thebandinicorner]

Harry Crews: Guilty As Charged

[biblioklept]

Mass-market Monday | Harry Crews' A Feast of Snakes

A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews. Ballantine Books, first edition, first printing (1978). No cover artist credited. 165 pages. While the cover designer and artist aren’t credited, there is a signature on the back which I believe is “Gentile.” If anyone has a guess as to the artist’s full name I’d be happy to hear it. From the novel: not quite a recipe for snakes: When they got to his purple…

[jonathanjudge]

[laszonasabisales]

Harry Crews- El cantante de góspel. Prólogo de Kiko Amat. Editorial Acuarela/Antonio Machado

[definitelynotisabel]

wtf do people without fandoms do with their life? like actually what do you do when you don’t have something to dangerously obsess over. the last time i wasn’t a part of a fandom was in fourth grade.

[abbystanaccount]

The Salt Lake Crew on their way to Jackson 🏕️