Harry Crews Part Two-THE GOSPEL SINGER: RGBIB 268
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- čas přidán 23. 08. 2024
- We head off into the pre-tech non-futuristic horizons of our new, disimproved, low-CGI bathtub bathtaculars! No white board! No theme music! Just the master bather, you know, master-bathing!
Get Grandma! This is the sort of Neo-primitive book tubing she may fondly remember from her youth!
I would love a re-release of the hawk is dying. Been wanting to read that one for a while.
Yeah and they're hard to find even in old paperback editions, which are often quite expensive...s
I escaped the Catholic church with only minor brain damage, guessing Harry used humor as a defense against the southern fundamentalists. Thanks for bringing Crews forward ….
Lot of good ex- or non-ex-Catholic writers and readers, I've always found that interesting...
@@Scottmbradfield survival of the fit!
In the 1930s I lived with Mack and the boys.
Little known fact-the late Herman Wouk started out as a writer on the Fred Allen Show-I'm not kidding.
Hermie was my roommate. We used to joke that he was "Wouk" before being "Woke" was cool. s
Scott, I mentioned Barry Hannah last week as possibly being part of that Grit Lit tradition. i think Charles Willeford and Davis Grubb might fall under that category also. I think of The Black Mass of Brother Springer and Night of the Hunter when I think of religious crooks in the south. And Davis Grubb books may be more difficult to find than Harry Crews books.
Yeah Grubb is one of my favorites, and Night of the Hunter both the book and the movie. (I didn't know it was hard to get Grubb's books, they used to be in every used book store. I'll start looking!) Willeford does sort of fit into that group as well. I like what I've read of Hannah (not much) and have heard many crazy stories about he guy!
I really hope Penguin House is planning to release the rest of Harry's novels in print and audiobook. They also did an audiobook of A Childhood and The Gospel Singer, I really enjoyed both.
I hope so too, Blake. Crews is your Poet Laureate of Bacon County! Keep his memory safe!
Never heard of him but he sounds interesting. The part about eating chickens reminds me of the recent Guillermo del Toro move "Nightmare Alley" which is very good if you haven't seen it yet. I believe the movie is based on a novel of the same name which I'd like to read some day. The chicken-eaters are hopeless alcoholics that the carnival manipulates into eating chickens in return for booze.
Yeah Gresham, big noir novel, I've missed the movie so far... then of course there's Faulkner, who inspired many of these writers with pretty "grit" novels like SANCTUARY and AS I LAY DYING...
@@Scottmbradfield I actually picked up a copy of _The Sound and the Fury_ a couple of days ago in a library book sale. I tried to read it in High School but I couldn't make heads or tails of it so I gave up. I thought I'd like to try it again as an adult.
@@sufficientlyoldskool i love that book and Faulkner but he can be really frustrating at times… I’m rereading As I Lay Dying and will talk about it soon… s
Mr. B., I personally preferred your appearances on the Jack Benny Show in the 1940s whenever you filled in for Phil Harris whenever he was stuck in the drink tank.
Thanks for remembering, Chris. But what you may not remember is those were the old pre-radio Jack Benny Shows when we were still delivering each weekly program by mule and buckboard to nearly a million audience members! Boy, those were the days...
@@Scottmbradfield Munching on Grape-nut-flavored Jello and chain-smoking Luckies!
@@chrisoleson9570 Those were the days!
From my Goodreads review:
“I’ve been stared at enough to know I don’t want to stare at anybody else.”
The novel is a typical Crews offering. It has over the top sex scenes, women with voracious sexual appetites just waiting to wrap themselves around The Gospel Singer and Southern men barely able to contain their violent urges. It is peppered with scenes from small town life and freaks and even non-freaks who would not belong anywhere else except these swampy landscapes. It is like an early warning about the dark side of religious fundamentalism, the futility of becoming famous and the power of crowds. I was reminded of the 1957 Elia Kazan film, A Face in the Crowd while reading about young girls throwing themselves at The Gospel Singer. Remember that great scene were young Lee Remick goes wild with Andy Griffith ogling at her from the stage? Anyway, Crews knew a thing or two about being a celebrity. Yes, you have beautiful women throwing themselves at you. But the public persona is total fraud and The Gospel Singer is losing his soul trying to keep up the act. Wonder what Crews would have said about today when people anywhere in the world, can sit in front of their computers and target and pull down men and women born with extraordinary freaky talent.
Great review. Yeah, I also loved Face in the Crowd… s