Flannery O'Connor

i just finished reading "the violent bear it away" and oh boy what a novel. she wins a place above other southern writers in my heart by cutting out a lot of the poetic bullshit and just rocking this wild yet terse style. not to say there is no poetry, but it's all tightly knit into a solid prose framework. anyone know what her religious stance is? there were definitely some moments where i felt like i was reading the words of a modern-minded nostic, but apparently she is quite religious if the writeup on the back cover is to be trusted.

i think she was Catholic. she's awesome

yah very very much a catholic - its more apparent in wise blood iirc

http://www.amazon.com/Habit-Being-Letters-Flannery-OConnor/dp/0374521042/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254880614&sr=8-1

^^^ a good rec if u want to no more abt o connor and her feelings abt religion

all her non-fiction writings are essential. it's all essential, really.

here's two lectures about o'connor and wise blood from a Yale course that get at her literary application of religion:

http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945/content/sessions/session-3-flannery-oconnor-wise-blood
http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945/content/sessions/session-4-flannery-oconnor-wise-blood-cont.

yah scott otm but habits of being is a really good resource if u dont want to read everything

everything that rises must converge was physically painful for me to read btw - wounding in its clarity - ha so sappy abt her but its the best way i can say it

wow thanks u guys, such a lively response!

Catholic? Yes indeed.

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice in the day when they say: This is right, whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may.

-- Habit of Being

what sticks out the most about "the violent bear it away" was how tensely dramatic it gets-like when rayber follows tarwater to the church in the middle of the night-but is always funny. as serious and painful as it is is also has this undercurrent of absurd humour. i think this kept it from being too much of a beatdown, which i usually don't enjoy all that much.

a good man is hard to find is possibly my favorite book ever written.

previous thread: OPO: Flannery O'Connor

She certainly was Catholic. I went to her church and the house she lived in til she was 13 last weekend:

http://www.flanneryoconnorhome.org/

They have her monogrammed perambulator in the first room! Well worth a visit if you're ever in Savannah (and anyone could have a good time there for at least 2 days).

Ever read her letters?

i'm reading them right now!

Love her and her letters! Has anyone checked out the new biography by Brad Gooch?

No to bio or letters ... btw you can hear her reading A Good Man... on the Criterion DVD of Wise Blood.

also, the restoration of her childhood home seems to have been largely financed by Hollywood schlockmeister Jerry Bruckheimer and his wife.

Criterion DVD of Wise Blood

I haven't seen this! Is it good?

Jerry Bruckheimer

What!

Her letters are great! I've been wanting to read ehr bio for a while now.

I sold most of my books a while back but could not part with her Complete Stories, one of the few I kept.

^^ I find it hard to part with books anyway, but hers are definitely keepers. The Violent Bear It Away will always be in my re-reading rotation.

Criterion DVD of Wise Blood

I haven't seen this! Is it good?

yes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt_nSL1Hw1s

yes:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/wise-blood/1528

Thank you, both of you! I've got to see this!!

Someone finally translated a collection of her essays and letters in Italian language: absolutely great stuff. I loved to death her novels and short stories, but I've been utterly blown away by reading this. So painful, so joyous.

conan o´brien was talking about her on the WTF podcast. he said that while reading "wise blood", you think its some alchoholic, hard living, cruel bastard who died at 50, that had written the book. Instead its a sweet southern church going lady.

finally read wise blood lol it was totally horrifying

the lol there is v literal

flannery would most likely approve of those reactions, depending on where you located the humor. the horrification is the more obv component.

Her letters are marvelous.

Yes

There's this thing with writers like her where the amount she wrote is so relatively small yet SO good that you feel a _real_ physical pang that she didn't live long enough to produce another novel/stroy collection or two

but there is something kinda perfect about such a great small body of work like that. she said so much and its all kind of hard to improve upon. just ask katherine anne porter or carson mccullers. they said it all so well early on. same with truman capote.

you could study flannery's work forever. there is a lot there.

its like the famous lou reed *my week beats your year* kinda thing. just one of her stories would be the crowning achievement of a lot of writer's careers.

Really liked the movie; Huston always filmed his astute literary choices with great respect, it seems. One thing that really impressed me--along with the perfect casting of Brad "My gaze beats your rant" Dourif as Hazel Moats---is the way he got how 70s Southern streets could pass residents as well as transients through different decades, if not centuries, moment by moment (Letters to the Editor could do the same; still can)

yea the movie was surprisingly faithful, and not bad at all, but the book is just something else

John Huston is widely regarded as the director who was always most true to the text and intent of any book he adapted to film, no matter what book it was. Apparently, he was a bit miffed to discover that Wide Blood wasn't really anti-religious at heart, but he stuck to what was there regardless.

Wide Blood?! I guess I was being a wise acre.

O'Connor isn't anti-religious: she's contemptuous of Pharisees.

Huston would have liked it better if he could have sunk his teeth deeper into religion using O'Connor's book as his means, but he swallowed his disappointment I guess.

Finally saw the Huston film. (Yes, it took me two years.) It's extremely well-cast (Dourif is perfect) and very faithful to the book, but it's missing something. Some level of grotesquerie, I guess. The actors do their best, but everything around them is so normal.

This is really quite awful, but if you're curious...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-vyUQx5Yss

O'Connor in the age of Islamophobia:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/12/10/the-displaced-person/