White Trash Cooking
The secret life of the South’s favorite Cook-book
Don’t open someone else’s icebox
A Confederate general and a gay man who liked cole slaw have more in common with each other than with a Yankee.
North Florida may not seem a promising site for a literary scene — for one thing, it’s awful humid — but forty years ago the Gainesville area was home to a set of trailblazing gay writers who drew on the traditions of southern literature in innovative and sometimes shocking works. At its center was the playwright Cal Yeomans, a Florida native who returned to the area in 1978 after years in Atlanta and New York. There he befriended Ernest (Ernie) Mickler and Andrew Holleran, writers who in different genres used the resources of gay and Southern culture to write hilarious, horny, and heart-rending dramas, novels, and — wait for it — cookbooks.
Yeomans, born in 1938, was the senior figure — although in 1978 he had little aesthetic achievements to show for his forty years. He had spent the previous decade unsuccessfully trying to make it in the world of avant-garde theater, writing absurdist, …
The Equinox
Great astronomical event summons serpent God from temple
The day when we have the most in common
Light spreads into darkness, not the other way around
Like all of the best gods, Kukulkan is not visible most of the time. His head, a gaping maw of serpent badassery, is fixed in place at the base of his temple in southern Mexico. Most days, his body is absent. Twice a year, a one-two punch of astronomical reality and Mayan insight come together, creating the massive, undulating body of a serpent out of shadow and stone.
Equinoxes are the great astronomical equalizers. Halfway between the solstices, the Earth’s tilt is neither towards nor away from the Sun. All of us, regardless of where we are on our shared planet, experience similar lengths of day and night. It is not quite true to say that day and night are equal on the equinox, however, for reasons both trivial and profound. With the help of an atmosphere, you see, light spreads into darkness, but darkness does not spread into light.
At the solstices, we are at astronomical extremes, the position …
GPS
Purple mountain majesties, amber waves of grain threatened by artificial navigation systems
We are all Uber drivers now
Tiny metal bugs, traversing the grid
The great French philosopher of the quotidian, Michel de Certeau, argued that “space is practiced place.” What he meant by this is that while places are given spatio-temporal locations, commonly assented to, space is the particular way we choose — both as individuals and groups — to inhabit or otherwise traverse them. Private ownership and other property titles and exclusions on land use necessarily impede some people’s ability to “practice place,” while enhancing others. But really, the means we’ve commonly employed to practice place for a long time now were already grossly circumscribing our personal space.
Before we began sitting in the little metal cells we call cars, we were sitting in slightly larger ones called railway carriages. There’s an interesting coincidence (but maybe there’s really no coincidence at all) between the entirely novel view from the train experienced by 19th century travellers …
