Flannery O'Connor

           

            On Monday in the late morning I started reading the last five sections of Nietzsche’s last essay in “A Genealogy of Morals”, but I got sleepy and went to bed for an hour and a half. When I got up again I had no problem finishing it. It seems to be mostly an argument against asceticism, but I’m going to try to read the whole book again to get a better grip on it.

            By the early afternoon it had been a full day since I’d put the cats outside when the exterminator came. Jonquil had come back in not long after I’d opened the back door and Amarillo returned a couple of hours later, but Daffodil was a no show. I think that I recall her staying away for at least a day after one of the bedbug treatments the previous autumn.

            I received a warning message that I had less than a gigabyte of space on my computer. I burned the King Crimson Thrak box set onto a DVD, which, after I’d deleted it, freed up four and a half gigs, I deleted some TV and radio shows that I already had on disk and I also got rid of a set of Adrian Belew albums of which I’d downloaded two files because I hadn’t known for sure at the time if they were the same. There were about five extra songs on one, so I just moved them over to the other and deleted the extra file. I freed up a total of eight and a half gigs. I’ve got more things I could get rid of if I need to.

            I finished reading Sinclair Ross’s “The Painted Door”. A lonely Prairie wife cheats on her workaholic and neglectful farmer husband who has gone out in a snowstorm. I won’t give away the ending.

            I read Flannery O’Connor’s dark story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” about an average 1950s southern US family on a road trip into the deeper south while there is an escaped murderer called the Misfit on the loose. After revealing themselves along the way to be moderately (though probably normally so for the era) racist and generally unpleasant people, the grandmother manipulates them to veer off course down a dirt road to look at a house she remembers. Just as she realizes that her memory is wrong, the cat she has been hiding gets free and jumps on her son, the driver, causing their car to roll over. Then the Misfit shows up.

I didn’t know anything about the author as I was reading the story, though I was thinking that it might be a fashion conscious Gay man because of the attention to detail in the description of the way the stylish grandmother was dressed. It turns out though that O’Connor was female and a southerner and that Catholicism played a major part in her writing. I didn’t pick up anything Catholic in the story. It seemed to actually poke almost sadistic fun at the over the top Bible thumping of the US south.