Comments on: Book Club Kickoff: Jujitsu for Christ

By: LarryJ

LarryJ — Sun, 27 May 2007 04:11:19 +0000

In case anyone’s still interested, Jujitsu for Christ is supposed to be reprinted this year, 2007. Keep an eye out.

By: PrettyFakes » Blog Archive » Pretty Fakes Book Club: The Endening.

PrettyFakes » Blog Archive » Pretty Fakes Book Club: The Endening. — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:05:07 +0000

[...] o a cross between “Thomas Pynchon and Lewis Nordan” –Prof. Fury looks at Marcus’ quest –Gorjus talks about Leon’s quest to form a superhero team like the Blackhawks [...]

By: PrettyFakes » Blog Archive » Pretty Fakes Book Club: Jujitsu for Christ by Jack Butler

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:52:14 +0000

[...] Club Selection: Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ. [UPDATE: Our discussion has begun! Click here to join in.] Now, what do you need to know about Jack Butler before you read this book? Maybe nothing. [...]

By: bulb

bulb — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:38:16 +0000

Thanks for the PDF of that article.

By: Professor Fury

Professor Fury — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:23:54 +0000

For those interested in Butler's take on the reality and persistence of "the South," I've uploaded a pdf of his essay "Still Southern After All These Years," from The Future of Southern letters, to yousendit--click here to download it.

By: brd

brd — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:55:50 +0000

Loved Sue’s thoughts. Need to think about all more than I can do in workaday world. bell hook, my new favorite person, says that feminism and the fight against racism are inextricable. The interweaving though is pretty complicated as was played out in the leadership battles of SNCC and SCLC. For the black “Daughters of Freedom”, the hierarchy of priorities in that struggle for freedoms were clear. . . i.e. they couldn’t begin the feminist struggle until race issues were settled a bit. (Now, though,—digression—the priorities are interestingly different, with, I think, black females having an advantage in the workplace over their male counterparts.)

I will have to think about the Scared of Revolution reference.

Re: non-violence, I think that it is in fact the only radical position, the rest being pretty standard issue.

Fury, for clarification about the real or not real south, I guess I’m saying that it is home that is real. Everyone has home. Some homes are similar but none identical. It is illusion to try and establish categories based on “red clay”. The categories don’t bring us together, but drive us apart.

By: Sue

Sue — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:33:55 +0000

Gorjus, just to clarify, I referred to both southern and northern radicalisms. I think my syntax in my way may there have gotten.

Prof, you’re totally blowing my mind on the whole blue/green thing.

By: Professor Fury

Professor Fury — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:03:54 +0000

Yeah, but how do I know that what’s blue to me is blue to you? Maybe what I think is blue you think is green. Kidding. That’s a really good point on the legal aspect of things—the concept of “Mississippi” as various characters in this novel see it may be imaginary, may have nothing to do with the real lives of people who live in the social/political/geographical space called “Mississippi.” But that space is abso-darn-lutely real in very physical, material ways. (Ditto for race—yes, it’s a social construction, but that’s not something you can explain to the man at the poll tax station). And of course, in some ways, that legal system has not only “real” effects on people, but also serves to perpetuate particular ideals of who is a real “Mississippian”, etc.

By: gorjus

gorjus — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:00:43 +0000

I also have to tag in on whether Mississippi was "real" or not. I appreciate the philosophical evaluation, but I often look at things from a legal aspect. Actions which in other states--even in the South--would have been common or everyday could get you killed in Mississippi or Alabama. The Freedom Rides illustrate this point, among many, many other terrible events. Mississippi and Alabama (among several other states to varying degrees) were separate societies where the laws and beliefs of the rest of the country did not apply. Even our newspapers were infamously biased; as is tacitly noted in the book, there was nowhere to turn for truth of any kind. In response to this media "whiteout," Medgar Evers and others started the Mississippi Free Press in the 1960's. At one point, a judge actually held Mr. Evers in contempt for criticizing (in print)the jailing of Clyde Kennard (discussed above). Can you imagine that hapenning today? The case had to be litigated to the state supreme court. Mississippi wasn't just real, it was . . . too real.

By: Professor Fury

Professor Fury — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 14:55:18 +0000

Woo! Good stuff. First, BRD, to defend Welty from your scurrilous slander (kidding. Sort of). You compare Morrison’s take on the “Old South” to Welty’s. But Welty rarely wrote about the “Old South.” In “The Burning,” a few other stories. And when she wrote about a modern planter family trying to keep the OS alive, as in Delta Wedding, they come in for what seems to be to be a pretty harsh critique for their narcissism, their insularity, for the hypocrisy and violence with which they treat their black laborers. It’s a subtle critique, maybe, and of course made all the tricker by the fact that Welty does love the Fairchilds, as she loves all her characters. So I think Welty’s treatment of Southern history, of race, etc, is a lot more complex than you suggest here (though plenty of people lobbed the same complaints at her—Diana Trilling reviewed DW and said Welty was living in “cloud-cuckoo land.” And a recent critic has said that we should consider Welty one of the “great bigoted modernists,” along with Faulkner/Hemingway et al. I don’t buy that idea, necessarily, but even that indicates a more nuanced engagement with the ideas of race/identity/etc that you mention. And of course, Morrison on Welty: “Eudora Welty writes about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing—it’s the way they should be written about.”

To tie your question about the “mind” of the South in w/ Sue’s question about whether “the South” exists—just because “the South” is a construction, that doesn’t mean it’s not real, that it doesn’t exist. Race is a fiction. But race exists. Cash wrote The Mind of the South, but as various folks have pointed out, what he was describing was the mind of the white North Carolinian South—that he’s overextrapolating from his local sample. There are a lot of different “Souths,” and people have had a tendency in the past to treat only one South as the “real” South, and the other things as not Southern at all. Anyway, so just because “Mississippi” is in Roger’s or Marcus’s imagination, that doesn’t mean it’s not real to them, that it doesn’t affect their lives in real, material ways.

Sue, your ideas about the role of gender in the way that Marcus and ERG experience race is really persuasive. One of the only times that she does venture out of her domestic sphere, she walks in on an intimate moment with Roger and June—June, whom, the novel tells us, is the very embodiment of standard-issue pretty white 1960s-era Mississippi girl: “True, she was a freckle-faced girl with a pug nose, but …. if you were white and lived in Mississippi and didn’t want to marry a freckle-faced pug-nosed girl, you were in trouble” (64).