Customer Reviews

Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I got this on audio because I don't just love Blount's writing, I love his voice and the way he says things and phrases them, I even love his pauses. His accent got me through a near 2 year exile in the Great Forsaken Flatlands (Kansas City, MO) where a kind word much less a familiar turn of phrase was hard to come by -- so I really wish I could have given this book the full five stars. But, well, I just found it uneven. Some really good stuff mixed in with stuff that felt like it was just there to fill up the page, or the time if you were listening on audio. Still and all, every essay had something worth taking away from it and that's more than you can say about most things you read. And when Blount is good, he is charming, funny and right on.

Besides being a brilliant specimen of that endangered species, The White Southern Liberal, Blount is about as funny as any humanoid on the planet. "Long Time Leaving," an anthology of some of his occasional pieces, proves a little repetitious at points (how many times do you need to remind folks that "y'all" is plural?) but it offers a fine selection of his more amusing material. Few writers are capable of more deadly similes: For example, Blount's observation that Lewis Grizzard is to Southern humor as Stuckey's pecan logs are to Southern home cookin', or that Garth Brooks songs are like Waffle House waffles "except that every now and then a Waffle House waffle hits the spot." Blount flits from topic to topic like a fly on fertilizer, but that only serves to underline his point that Southerners aren't great abstract thinkers; they're more at home with the concrete and particular, which is their peculiar strength.

Despite being ensconced-or maybe because of-in the Berkshires, Mr. Blount casts an uneasy eye on contemporary Southern life and the larger American political scene. One gets the sense that since his Massachusetts neighbors and New York coworkers feel compelled to call upon him to explain certain Southern folkways and news events that the author has taken the time to distill his childhood and college years in the South into a bourbon that fuels his philosophizing.

The book is a collection of his essays that have appeared in various periodicals from the mid 1990's and later-food, travel, covering the KKK, life in Manhattan, the blues, a pinch of this and a smidgin of that. You have to have lived a couple of decades-mid 1950s and up would help-to get some of the references-or be willing to investigate the names, dates and places Mr. Blount mentions. You can read a couple of the essays before bed or a whole section on a lazy Sunday morning-it's easy to pick up and put down without losing track, kind of like an ongoing conversation with a friend. A well read, post graduate educated, erudite friend who hides behind the visage of a good ol' boy. The porch light is on and someone is definitely at home...

One caveat-the author is enamoured of a certain joke he uses to illustrate a point. Mr. Blount please get another line besides the "Do you believe in infant baptism? "H--l, I've seen one!"

OK--I'm from up North, I will admit that directly---and it is important because when I first began to read this book, it seemed as though I were wading through verbal Mississippi mud. (Thus the 3 stars and not 4: these are stylistically difficult essays & may not feel accessible to all readers.) It's obvious that Blount is brighter than most, more well-read and beautifully educated---but boy, is his writing style convoluted. It's like listening to Huck Finn all grown up! But persevere, because difficult prose or not, this Huck Finn has something worthwhile to say, and he says it with marvelous humor, candor, and charm. Oh, and while I was reading the book, my 15-year old daughter saw the back cover (which I had missed) and said the book was worth buying for THAT alone.

Great Listen! Roy Blount Jr. has been an editor at Sports Illustrated, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, written numerous books, and still finds himself called on to explain to his New England Liberal friends "why do Southerners eat dirt?" and "have you eaten squirrel?". Narrated in his own Georgian drawl, it's a hoot! You'll pee your pants!

I have been a Blount reader since "What Men Don't Tell Women," but had not taken up one of his books for some time. In this one, Blount's characteristic tone of bemused tolerance and appreciation is sometimes subverted by the type of stock political comments by which Blount's adopted tribe -- Northeastern liberals -- identify each other. Although Blount maintains a clear-eyed balance on vexed issues of race relations, southern and northern, in succumbing to the tendency of Southern liberals (his term)to be "more Catholic than the Pope" in matters of politics, Blount seems to be playing to the biases of his adopted region even as he seeks to dissolve biases regarding the realm of his origin. Whether that defensive reflex obscures a more considered but unarticulated approach is unclear, but Blount's resort to hackneyed derision in that context creates a sour aftertaste and raises questions regarding his judgments in areas about which a reader may be less informed.

When Blount ruminates on the South without trotting out his political credentials, however, he can still offer insight and even delight. His many appreciations of Mark Twain in this volume, for instance, expand one's appreciation of the strengths and tensions Twain's Southern background lent to that most American of writers. He matches that perspective by noting the extent to which "Southern culture" is African-American as much as Anglo/Celtic, one result of which is the influence that the South, riding the coat-tails of the all-pervasive African-American culture of the 20th century, has had on the United States generally. Corresponding to related and more extensive analyses by writers that have included Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, the import of such a felt observation is enhanced by Blount's perspective as a white Southerner. Alongside such a welcome illumination, petty political snark is an unpleasant distraction.

Great book. However, it is much better in Audio Format!!! The author's reading makes it an instant one-man theater. The audio book also gives you an idea how he meant for certain things to be said. So my impression is that you get more out of this book by listening to Roy Blount Jr. reading it. We got lots of laughs out of it. And used it as an entertainment when we have guests over, especially the part called "The Way Folks Were Meant to Eat". At this point all our friends and neighbors got exposed to this book :)
Some parts of this book are on a long monotonous side. But they are minor comparing to the rest. So over all this book is great.

Having heard Roy Blount Jr. on A Prarie Home Companion, and reading poetry in Keillor's compilations, I became fascinated with the lilt of his voice and the life he breathed in others' work as well as his own. So when I read of his book Long Time Leaving, I downloaded it from audible expecting a treat. Some parts of the book are good, such as Blount's intimate descriptions of his childhood, and of the collective private customs from his part of the country that make up the intangibles of a culture. The downfall of the book, which seems to be a downfall of a lot of southerners writing about the American South, is that his tone becomes increasingly defensive and petulant as the book goes on, like an inevitable apologist trapped outside of the truth by the sacred bonds of birth. Blount seems unable to refute what are in his estimation errors in history or reputation without including that edge of deeply personal defensiveness. He writes about "us," rather than "them," but he doesn't have the peace or perspective to do a good job.
I'm still searching for a writer who can lucidly explain the miasma that is southern heritage. Maybe then people who live outside the south can have some understanding of what the great mystery is. Blount writes with irritaton about the New Englanders who don't understand southern ways. But he describes the southern approach to life as emotional rather than rational, regional rather than national--why should the burden of understanding be on the forthright?

Blount's excessive references to food also make the book drag. There's only so much you can reasonably squeeze out of word play and the color of southern cooking and food customs. They seem very unappealing to me. I also wish Blount had elaborated on the meaning of some of the drawn out verbal exchanges, social gestures, etc. that he seems to think are obvious.
I was dissapointed in Blount's remarks about his "homeland" and expected better of him.

I absolutely love Roy Blount Jr. as a panelist on NPR's Wait! Wait! Don't Tell me! But I found the essays in this book not to be my cup of tea. They seem to wander aimlessly, and they're filled with obscure references that I just don't get (and I have a PhD!). I'm sure they're great for some people, but not for me.

For a humorist there was a great deal oflisting of music and literary items. Many articles were quite boring.