Weekend assignment: The book that describes me

This weekend's assignment from Scalzi is:

Weekend Assignment #8: Name the book that you feel would best describe you to a total stranger.

Now, I would have picked something by William Faulkner, like Knight's Gambit (1949).  But Scalzi specifically excluded any "primary religious text."  So  I obviously can't use Faulkner. 

So it will have to be two books, not one:  Life and Death in a Small Southern Town: Memories of Shubuta, Mississippi by Gayle Graham Yates (2004) and Faust, Parts 1 and 2 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808 - Pt. 1, 1832 - pt. 2).

Life and Death in a Small Southern Town

I mentioned Yates' Shubuta book once before, including the fact that I grew up there.  I've been meaning to write a review of the book ever since then.  Scalzi's weekend assignment is incentive to get started on it.  This is not a privately-published book; it's an actual scholarly study published by LSU press.  She's presented scholarly papers based on her work at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, and at Cambridge University in England.  I had no idea European intellectuals were so interested in Shubuta!

One of the striking things about Yates' book is that it's part sociology, part history, part personal narrative and part literature.  And the literary part is mostly in the skill with which she weaves the various strands together.  She covers the same ground with a different emphasis and perspective each time as you read through the book.  The effect is create a sense of the many ways that "place" happens and is experienced by people.

Place is partially buildings and landscapes and other physical structures.  But place is also communities of people, people who live in a process of classes and races and religions and families and businesses and various kinds of interactions with each other.  And all of these things change over time.  Yates' narrative creates a powerful sense of that process.

For example, one of myfavorite moments among many in the book comes when she's discussing the name of the town.  Like many Mississippi locations, Shubuta is an Indian name, which came from the local Choctaw dialect.  She makes a very good case that the town name like means "smoky waters," which has an elegant sound to it.  But she also mentions that local folklore has an alternative version, complete with an origin story or two to go along with it, which says the town's name means "sour meal."

There is a story of how Shubuta got its name and that the name means "sour meal" in Choctaw that has been often told over the years.  It appears in a booklet by upper-class Shubutan Frank Ledyard Walton, Shubuta, On the Banks of the Chicasawhay River, which was written in 1947 and was quite familiar to the local people.  [Former Mayor] Florence Busby and I talked about the various accounts of how Shubuta was named and what it means as we climbed around the river bluff near the site of Choctaw Shubuta.  She laughed her deep infectious laugh, and concluded, "It probably means 'smoky water' but I like the 'sour meal' story better.

I told Florence that's exactly what I would have said.  Florence is a longtime friend of mine and my family's.  She was the first woman ever elected mayor of a town in Mississippi, and she was arguably the best mayor the town every had, though she would probably give her late husband George that distinction.  Florence and I always enjoy talking politics.  She's probably more a hardcore Democrat than I am, though I try to keep up.  I remember back in 1996 saying something mildly nice to Florence about Bob Dole, the Republican Presidential candidate.  She let me know very quickly she didn't want to hear me saying any wishy-washy nonsense about some Republican candidate.

But back to the book.  She actually managed to dig up an impressive amount of material about the early settlers in the area.  The first European settlement in the area was at Hiwannee just south of Shubuta, which is where she's really from, though she claims Shubuta as her home town.  (Just so you know, I grew up inside the town limits.)  It was French Jesuits that established the settlement.  The Jesuits were such zealous warriors for God and the Pope - not necessarily in that order - that theywere willing to go into wildernesses that no other European would go near.  Most of North America was first explored by French Jesuits.  But the permanent American settlements around Shubuta didn't come until 1830 or so, years after Mississippi's admission to the Union as a state.

The first time I went to Shubuta with my wife, who is Austrian, I told her she may have been the first Austrian every to set foot in Shubuta.  I couldn't have been more wrong!  The first store in the town was set up in the 1850s by a Jewish Austrian immigrant, Moses Greenhood, who later changed his first name to Morris.  There is a pond in town named after him.

Life and death still continues in Shubuta.  A young man from Shubuta was recently killed in the Iraq War, Damian Heidelberg, 21.  Jerry Mason, who privately published a complilation of documents, archival information and photos of the town and set up this Web site, is currently on duty in Iraq.

One of the more interesting passages in the book is about how the post office is one of the most important points of contact for people in the town.  There is no home delivery of mail in town, so everyone has to come to the post office to pick up the mail.  You're very likely to run into someone you know there, and to hear a piece of local news that you weren't yet privy to.

Faust

Faust is best known from Part 1, which includes the story of Faust making his bargain with Mephistopheles (aka, the Devil), his courtship with Gretchen and her tragic end, and little scenes like Mephistopheles doing magic tricks in Auerbachs Keller (Auerbach’s Cellar) in Leipzig.  Auerbachs Keller is still there.  I had dinner there once, and it was good.  The have a statue of Faust and Mephisto at the top of the staircase to the cellar.

The second part is much longer and is actually more interesting, though less well known.  It has five acts.  In Act 1, Faust and Mephistopheles party with the Kaiser (the emperor)and wind up causing a bit of chaos.  There's a very funny scene at the end, where Faust and Mephisto are putting on a show for the Kaiser's court, where they conjure up the spirits of Helen of Troy and Paris.  Faust falls in love with Helen immediately.  But the ladies of the court stand up in sequence to comment on her, not unlike you might here women today commenting on Britney Spears.  "Look at her! She's fat!"  "Oh, she's not pretty at all."  "Look at her! Look at what a slut she is!"  Faust keeps trying to jump into the scene while Mephisto tries to calm him down.  In the end, Faust winds up blowing the whole scene up in a big cloud of smoke, and Mephistopheles winds up having to carry him out, with Mephisto muttering:

Da habt's irh's nun! mit Narren sich beladen,
Das kommt zuletzt dem Teufel selbst zu Shaden.

(Now there you have it!  When you burden yourself with fools,
that eventually brings the Devil himself to troubles.)

Act 2 sees the creation of an artificial human called the Homunculus, and then Faust and Mephistopheles head off with Homunculus to Persia, where they encouter all sorts of mythological figures.  Faust is looking to find Helen of Troy, Homunculus is looking for the secret of becoming human and Mepistopheles is just freaked out because all these eastern mythological creatures are just too weird for him.  This one is really spectacularly bizarre.

In the third act, Faust finally gets to deal with Helen directly.  Her husband Menelaus means to put her to death, but Faust has managed to get himself his own castle and protects her.  Faust and Helen have a romance and even a son, but the son gets killed.  And Helen’s just a spirit, after all, and she goes away in the end.  She dies in his arms, and he’s left with her garments, which become clouds and carry him away.

In the fourth act, Faust and Mephisto have, sort of like our current neoconservatives, talked the Kaiser into a disastrous war.  By the end, the Kaiser laments, in words that echo Mephisto’s earlier more humorous lament:

Die Sünd’ ist gross und schwert, womit ich mich beladen;
Das leidige Zaubervolk bringt mich in harten Schaden.

(The sin is great and serious, with which I have burdened myself;
The tiresome magicians are bringing me into hard troubles.)

In the fifth and final act, Faust is trying to expand his own realm, but death finally catches up to him.  Mephisto then wants to collect on his contract, but he grumbles that it’s just not as easy as it used to be.  Before, he says, they died, you got their souls and you could go about your business.  Now, the souls want to linger with the body, and all kinds of things can go wrong with the contract, etc.  And, indeed, various heavenly figures, including the transfigured Gretchen, come to rescue Faust in the end.

Now, even though Goethe is considered the Shakespeare of the German language and Faust his greatest work, until the year 2000, the entire play had never been fully staged.  For one thing, some of the scenes in Part 2, especially the weird stuff in the second act, would have been technically difficult if not impossible in Goethe’s day.  For another, the entire thing takes about 16 hours of stage time to perform.

But director Peter Stein put a production together of the entire thing, which I saw in Vienna in September 2001.  I remember the time easily, because it was a week and a half after the 9/11 attacks, and it was touch-and-go as to whether my flight would still be available.  But it was,fortunately.  It was staged over two days in a factory that had been converted to a theater.  After each scene, the audience would get up and go to a different stage, which helped keep everyone awake.  And also meant everyone got a close view at some point.

It was great to see it staged live.  I hadn’t realized until I saw it how much singing and dancing is included.  The Homunculus was portrayed as a young boy inside a glowing glass globe.  The final scene, with a ramp coming down from heaven, was really spectacular, and the scenes in Part 1 in Faust’s study were very well staged.  We get our first glimpse of Helen in Part 1, and Stein staged it as a naked Helen looking into a mirror, so that the audience sees her face only in the mirror.  The staging was inspired by a 1651 Diego Veálzquez painting called Venus with the Mirror.

And that reminds me, one that that surprised me was that in some of the scenes, the actors and actresses were nekkid!!  Right there in public!  I was shocked, shocked to see such a thing.  I thought, these decadent Europeans are as bad as I’ve heard people say.  But I didn’t want to be unfair.  I thought maybe they had costumes that just appeared that way.  So I looked really closely and, sure enough, they were really nekkid!  I was shocked, I tell you, shocked!  I would never have gone if I had known they would have something like that in it!

So, those two books, Life and Death in a Small Southern Town and Faust would give a stranger a could picture of who I am.  That’s me, somewhere between Shubuta and Auerbachs Keller.