Long Time Leaving Read Online Free PDF Page B

imperialistic about it. I don't see why Hank and Peggy Hill, and maybe old Dale Gribble, can't be Democrats. Boomhauer, I don't know. But I say to Howard Dean: Before you start reaching out, picture yourself as a visiting character on
King of the Hill,
and ask yourself how you would go over. I'm not saying be fraudulent or desperate. I'm just saying—well, here's something Chet Atkins used to say to people of the North: “I'm not talking too slow, you're listening too fast.”

First, Tell Me What Kind of Reader You Are
    W hen people of the Northeast ask what I do, I long for one of those professions that would certify me to respond as follows:
    “Before I answer that question, I am ethically obliged to inform you that as soon as I do answer, our conversation will be billable at $200 per hour or portion thereof—and the answering of the question itself shall constitute such a portion, as will what I am telling you now, retroactively.”
    That would dispense with a lot of the idle conversation in which I find myself bogged down in the Northeast.
    “What do you do?” people ask.
    I say, “I'm a writer.”
    And people of the Northeast don't respond the way you'd think people would. They don't say, “I knew a writer once. He could never sit still in a boat,” or “Yeah, that's about all you
look
like being, too. “What do you do, make it all up, or do the media tell you what to say?” or “Uh-huh, well, I breed ostriches.” I could roll with any one of those responses. One reason there are so many Southern writers is that people of the South either tell a writer things he can use, or they disapprove of him enough to keep his loins girded, or they just nod and shake their heads and leave him to it. But people of the Northeast act like being a writer is
normal
    “Oh,” they say with a certain gracious almost-twinkle in their eye, “what kind?”
    “What am I supposed to say to that? “Living”? “Recovering”? They'll just respond, “Oh, should I have heard of some of your books?” I don't know how to answer that question. And I'm damned if I'm going to stand there and start naming off the titles. That's
personal!
Can you imagine Flannery O'Connor standing there munching brie on a Ry-Krisp and saying, “Well, there's
The Violent Bear It Away…
.”
    People of the Northeast don't seem to think it
is
all that personal. They seem to think that you can find out about books by having a schmooze with the writer, in the same way they might think you can find out about whiskey by chatting up someone in personnel down at the distillery.
    “What I want to do, when somebody asks me what kind of writer I am,is sull up for several long seconds until I am blue in the face and then, from somewhere way farther back and deeper down than the bottom of my throat, I want to vouchsafe this person an utterance such that the closest thing you could compare it to would be the screech of a freshly damned soul shot through with cricket song and intermittently all but drowned out by the crashing of surf. But I was brought up to be polite.
    I was also brought up Methodist and went to graduate school, so I can't honestly say what I want to say: “Self-taught annunciatory. I received a vision out of this corner, of this eye, at about 7:45 p.m. on January 11, 1949, and since that moment in earthly time I have been an inspired revelational writer from the crown of my hat to the soles of my shoes. And do you want to know the nature of that vision?
    “The nature of that vision was a footprint in the side of an edifice, and the heel of it was cloven and the toes of it was twelve. And how could a footprint be in the side of an edifice, you wonder? Especially since I stood alone at the time, stark naked and daubed with orange clay, in a stand of tulip poplar trees some eleven miles outside of Half Dog, Alabama, way off a great ways from the closest man-made structure in any literal subannunciatory sense. That footprint could be in the side