Let Us Now Priase Famous Men

I've known a few other folks who've read this book, and have seen some real differences in opinion.  Some thought it was just beautiful, some really loved it's content, some thought it was pretentious, others thought it was just a dressed-up screed.  So, then, a few questions to get us conversing.  Answer which ones you will, as you will:

1--What's your gut reaction here?  I mean that in senses both broad and narrow.

2--Agee and Evans originally had an assignment from a magazine--Fortune, to be exact--to investigate sharecroppers and write a magazine-length story.  It obviously turned into something much bigger and grander, and was never published in Fortune..  Nevertheless, the journalistic impulse is still there, in a mutated way.  What do you make of the shifts in genres here?  Sometimes it reads like a play, sometimes like a piece of journalism, sometimes like a novel, sometimes like a poem.  Why does the book need to be written from so many different aspects, in so many different forms, to accomplish Agee's purpose?

3--Building off that last question, what does Agee seem to think the truth of the book is, the truth of these people's lives is?  It's hard to tell when he's being journalistic and when he's being a novelist (which was his other trade).  Which reveals the reality of the situation of the sharecropper better, fiction or ostensibly truthful journalism?  What does this tell us about how we understand our own contemporary problems?

4--What do we call this book?  How do we label it?

5--Do the photographs work with Agee's text or not?  Is there tension between what they present?  If, indeed, this is so, then why do Agee and Evans agree to pair them?

6--To my reading, this is a book with a very big dose of that great bugbear, liberal white guilt.  Does this negatively affect the book?  Or is it absolutely necessary?

Looking forward to a nice discussion, and hope my selection wasn't too out of left field for everyone!

October's Book

We had some nice conversation (and productively divergent opinions) about Melissa's selection for August.  Let's continue the good and work towards picking up more momentum with my selection for October, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

It is hard to say what this book is; it is not a novel.  It is not journalism.  It is not an essay.  It is not history.  It is not poetry.  It is not a drama.  Yet it is somehow all of these things at once.  It is a book of many different and disparate parts, but, like the many different and disparate parts in a symphony, they all work together.

I will warn you:  it is not a short book, yet it is not particularly difficult to read.  But, it demands that you take it slowly, that you chew each morsel fully before you swallow it and, even after that, you still are left wondering sometimes what it was you just ate, what flavour you just tasted.   It is an immensely sad book.  It is a book full of liberal white guilt, yet also a book full of pride and power and strength.  I come from white trash, and thus it is my book, yet it also deeply foreign to me.  It is respectful and exploitative, it is a book of the artist as teller of truth and lies.

Let us read it together, and discuss it together the first week of October.