Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern Comforts [Paperback]

Burkhard Bilger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2002

Burkhard Bilger vividly captures a world that lies outside the familiar images of life in the United States in the twenty-first century in eight superbly crafted essays about little-known corners of the South. It is a world in which grown men catch catfish with their bare hands, crowds of people cheer on chickens as they fight to the death, and a woman moves into a trailer home when her house burns down just so she can continue hunting 350 nights a year. Bilger records the eccentric and sometimes downright bizarre behavior he encounters with humor and wit but nary a whisper of mockery. In essays that combine history, anecdotes, and personal observations, he describes each activity, its origins, its dangers, and its pleasures. But Noodling for Flatheads is much more than a survey of unlikely pastimes. Through lively portraits of the participants, Bilger illuminates the obsessive individualism that is at the heart of the American spirit.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There are some preconceptions about southern traditions that need to be clarified. Moonshining is no longer the pastime of grizzled Deliverance yahoos, but a multimillion-dollar business laced with SWAT-style raids; squirrel brains probably aren't responsible for neurological disorders; and in Louisiana, a good cockfight is fun for the whole family. These are some of the enlightened reports delivered by Burkhard Bilger as he explores the stereotypical, eclectic habits of southerners from West Virginia to Oklahoma. Despite Bilger's journalistic pedigree (he is an editor with The Sciences and Discover, and has credits in The Atlantic and Harper's, where his cockfighting piece, "Enter the Chicken" previously appeared), he slips into nostalgia just enough to romanticize a squirrel hunt, or raise a game of backwoods marbles into an Olympic march of glory.

Bilger kicks off the tour from his hometown in Oklahoma, where he "noodles"--thrashes a limb around in catfish-thick waters--hoping to land a fabled 80-pound monster with his bare hands. In Louisiana he challenges the misgivings any nonenthusiast might have about cockfighting. Even though it's illegal in most of the country, the bloodsport is thriving in the Bayou State, replete with trade magazines, well-produced venues, and American Kennel Club-worthy breeding strategies. The same passion for efficiency goes into the moonshining business, where Bilger is taken under the wing of one of the few shiners willing to lead him through his sourmash operation. A few nights later, however, Bilger is on the other side, on a raid with the local sheriff. Squirrel-brain consumption is still popular in hamlets throughout Kentucky, even after a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine blamed a neurological disease on the dish. Frog legs, one Georgia entrepreneur claims, will soon replace chicken, and southern cooking--the kind that features chitlins, pigs feet, and collards--has become haute cuisine in Atlanta. Back in Oklahoma, Bilger connects with a coonhound trainer during a long night's raccoon chase, and he follows the success of a backwoods marble team who shaped their shooters in the granite-strewn streams of Tennessee. Bilger treats each eccentric character with a distant respect and hints at the melancholy of losing tradition, no matter how bizarre. --Lolly Merrell --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

It's refreshing to read a book about Southern subcultures that doesn't bog down in easy caricature or yet another Confederate flag discussion. Bilger, a journalist and features editor at Discover, writes with deadpan grace to capture half-buried worlds, linking the vivid participants to a larger historyAwhether it be the transatlantic heritage of soul food, the legal and illegal sides of cockfighting in America or the evolution of coondogs since the time of "the father of coon hunting," George Washington. The title essay describes the squirmy practice of "noodling" one's bare fingers inside a catfish's underwater hiding place until the toothed fish bites hard enough to be hauled to the surface. In his exploration of Louisiana cockfighting, Bilger pulls off something that easily could have backfired: he contrasts the rooster farm of John Demoruelle (where the cocks are pampered like feathered celebrities) with the anonymous violence of the modern chicken factory. As Bilger tours a Tyson chicken facility, the spectacle of the young birds riding passively to their conveyor-belt deaths complicates the reader's feelings about the comparatively glorious (but bloody) lives of the gamecocks. In other essaysAabout a South Carolina "moonshiner's reunion," an Oklahoma coon-treeing competition and a visit with Kentuckians whose delicacy is squirrel brainsABilger always sees past the freak show to get the full, resonant story, often of older cultures retreating before the new. Readers who liked the Southern exotica of Confederates in the Attic or Mullett Heads should enjoy this promising debut about "the forgotten folkways [that] still inhabit our back roads." (Sept..
- still inhabit our back roads." (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (May 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684850117
• ISBN-13: 978-0684850115
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #620,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Noodle away, September 5, 2000

By 

J. Griffin "McMurtry Fan" (San Antonio, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Noodling For Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts (Hardcover)

Bilger calls himself a gonzo journalist, and it may take just that type of writer from the fringes to head out in search of folks who eat squirrel brains or play rolley hole (a marbles game). Yet he proves greatly sympathetic to his subjects (more so than gonzo god Hunter S. Thompson, for example). In the hands of a Faulkner or a Flannery O'Connor, the tales of bullfrog farmers and coon hunters might have become Southern gothic grotesqueries. But Bilger paints them in vividly human colors in ways that might even make you want to go noodling for flatheads (a most unique method of catching catfish). This is a fun look at the lives of people we rarely encounter.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Turn off your tv -- there's an amazing country out there, July 22, 2001

By 

Anita "anitareads" (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Noodling For Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts (Hardcover)

This is storytelling at its best. I first read one of the essays in this book in the New Yorker and right away I knew I'd be looking to read everything that Burkhard Bilger writes. This book contains eight essays but I think of them more as real-life stories. In the table of contents each essay title has a subtitle. Even they are a pleasure to read, each one beginning with the words "In which". To give you an idea of what I mean, here's the subtitle for the essay on moonshining: "In which the age of the microbrewery meets the modern police state, with intoxicating results".

In the introduction the author tells us how he started writing these tales about the South. He was living in Massachusetts and decided he wanted to get a coonhound which he knew, and missed, from growing up in Oklahoma. But finding a coonhound in New England wasn't easy. He says "A few people had heard rumors of such dogs, but none had actually seen one in the flesh." He ended up at the home of a breeder who handed him a magazine "American Cooner". The author said "It was the strangest publication I had ever seen." And so began his journey in search of life outside the popular culture which is all most of us know, beyond the "range of most antennas".

Each of the essays is about a tradition, or sport, or way of life that is in danger of dying out, some of them illegal, some not. He visits a woman in Oklahoma who breeds coonhounds and hunts racoons more than 340 nights a year, a man in Kentucky who hunts and eats squirrels, and a man in Georgia who owns a fish hatchery, frog farm, and wild hog preserve. Each of these stories is, in the end, about people and this is where Bilger's writing really shines. He knows how to write about people better than almost anyone else I've read. I read alot of non-fiction and profiles of people and I know it's not easy to write about people in a way that gives the reader the sense that they now know that person, at least a little. The writer spends a few days with someone, hangs out with them, talks to them for hours. Then he has to sit down and from all those hours pick just the right details, just the right quotes, just the right observations, to make that person seem real on the page. And Bilger has mastered that art.

Beyond the people, he also puts the stories into a larger, sometimes historical, context. In the story on cockfighting he goes to Louisiana where some people are reluctant to talk to him even though it's one of the few states where the sport is still legal. He tells about the popularity of the sport in different parts of the world and in the early history of America, when it was not only legal but a "fashionable amusement". In fact it didn't begin to be banned until the 19th century, and New York in 1867 "became the first city to ban all blood sports." The author talks about the efforts to outlaw the sport in the few states that still allow it, and he does mention animal rights activists but he doesn't interview any. He doesn't seem to be trying to write an unbiased account, and if there's any doubt about where the author's sympathies lie, that doubt will be dispelled by the time you get to the last paragraph of this essay which gives us his view (brilliantly written, I think) of modern civilized America.

The final story is about marbles. Yes, marbles. A specific game called rolley hole, which he tells us "is to other marble games as chess is to checkers". It's about the near extinction of the game and how it was revived by a folklorist, and how the revival led to, among other things, an international competition in England. Even if you know nothing about marbles, even if you've never heard of rolley hole, this story will have you on the edge of your seat wanting to know what this is all about. But in a larger sense this story is also about how and why life is changing in our country and whether anything can be done about that, even by a well-meaning folklorist. The last few pages are reflective and philosophical and I was left not quite sure whether to feel sad or hopeful.

Make no mistake about it, the author likes the people whose stories he tells. He writes about each of them with great warmth and affection. And reading this book made me feel happy to be in this world with all its strangeness.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yikes? Who knew?, September 17, 2000

By 

Jussi Bjorling - See all my reviews

This review is from: Noodling For Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts (Hardcover)

Most of us who live outside the South have adopted the "New South" image, consisting of budding high-tech nodes, car plants in South Carolina, and, of course, the Atlanta Olympics. Bilger shows that unique southern traditions, including those squirrel brains, are still around and thriving. He is not judgemental (although he doesn't seem too anxious to relocate), but rather paints a detailed and sympathetic portrait of a unique and still vibrant rural southern culture.