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1mirrani
Okay, so this book I read from the Public Libary because I needed a book on Snakes for the Year of the Snake challene, which is a community on librarything based on the Chinese calendar. The year 2013 will be the year of the Snake (technically starts in February this year) and the goal is to read at least one book each month that deals with or has a snakes as a part of the story.
I thought this would be all religion and such, but because it was written by someone who is NOT a snake handler, who is coming in to try and understand the culture, it's done VERY well. I highly recommend it because it helps you to understand the religion, but it also helps you to understand the culture. The idea of "south" has changed and I was shocked to realize that I was not as southern as I originally had thought... none of my family was, really. Times have changed and the culture is dying. Very, very interesting realizations in this book. It also deals with genetic memory, btw... The author does some research, finds out his family way back might have been snake handlers and maybe that is why he is so fascinated.
The peculiarity of Southern experience didn't end when the boll weevil ate up the cotton crop. We didn't cease to be a separate country when Burger King came to Meridian. We're as peculiar a people now as we ever were, and the fact that our culture is under assault has forced us to become even more peculiar than we were before. p xiii
This is the start of realizing that this isn't just about god and serious preaching and snakes. There's a whole culture behind this snake handling business, and it's a part of everyone, not just the handlers themselves.
In the country, they put their evil spirits in colored glass bottles hung on trees. But let me tell you what we do with evil spirits in the City. We start with coal that a bunch of our male ancestors died getting out of the ground. We heat it in ovens till it gives off poisonous gasses and turns to coke, something harder and blacker than it was to begin with. Then we set that coke on fire. We use it to fuel our furnaces. These furnaces are immense things, bulb shaped and covered with rust. You wouldn't want one in your neighborhood. We fill the furnace with limestone and iron ore and any evil spirits we find lying around. The iron ore melts in the coke-driven fire. Impurities attach to the limestone and float to the top. What settles to the bottom is pure and incredibly hot. At a precise moment, we open a hole in the bottom of the furnace, and molten iron cascades out, a ribbon of red so bright you can hardly look at it. When I was a kid you could stand on the viaduct above the Sloss furnaces in downtown Birmingham and watch the river of molten iron racing along the ground, incandescent, inexorable, and so unpredictable that a spark from it flew up one night while my father's friend, Ross Keener, was leaning over the rail of the viaduct, flew up and put out his eye.
That's the kind of South I'm talking about.
Here is how things change. To go from putting glass bottles in the trees to tearing up the countryside... This is what's happening. Basically recycling versus waste. It's a shame, not just for the environment, but for the people. So much is lost when you lose what was.
There are moments when you stand on the brink of a new experience and understand that you have no choice about it. Either you walk into the experience or you turn away from it, but you know that no matter what you choose, you will have altered your life in a permanent way. Either way, there will be consequences. p2
This was just great... Maybe a little clumsily written in some tiny area somehow, since I felt like the flow of it was lost right at the end, but the idea is awesome.
"Tell me, Mrs. Summerford," he had asked during crossexamination, "did you and your husband ever breed these snakes?"
"Why no, sir," she said. "They did that themselves." p39
I had a HUGE laugh at this.
There are snakes, and there are snakes. Some are literal, some not. While I was handling common water snakes in a sewer at the end of our street in East Lake, people were taking up rattlesnakes in a church a few blocks away. We didn't know them. They didn't know us. we might as well have occupied parallel universes, except for one thing: we had come from the same place. We were border dwellers. We had sailed our promised land. We had entered the mountains and come down from them again. We were the same people. And all of us were handling one kind of snake or another. p151
The writing through this book is just so well done. I honestly can't say enough about it.
The shadows thrown by the mountains were black and razor-sharp across the roadway. I realized how much I'd always hated this about churches, the inevitable darkness on the underside of any human enterprise. Envy. Bitterness. The division that always seems to doom even the best of intentions. I was guilty of all that, too. p209-210
I just liked this. That's all.
"If we can't love one another here on earth, there ain't no way we can make it to heaven," he said. p212
True.
"I've been hurt before, many times, Brother Dennis," Charles says. "Let me tell you, the bite of the serpent is nothing compared to the bite of your fellow man." p237
Sometimes people say something and it's just powerful. Even when they don't mean it to be.
We might have been spared the night's discomfort, but we wouldn't have known how the story would end. And stories have to end. Endings are the most important part of stories. They grow inevitably from the stories themselves. The ending of a story only seems inevitable, though, after it's over and you're looking back, as I am now. p238-239
The story at the end is like god, a good comparison and a perfect completion of the book as a whole, but I can't reveal any of it, so you're just going to have to pick up the book sometime yourself.
I thought this would be all religion and such, but because it was written by someone who is NOT a snake handler, who is coming in to try and understand the culture, it's done VERY well. I highly recommend it because it helps you to understand the religion, but it also helps you to understand the culture. The idea of "south" has changed and I was shocked to realize that I was not as southern as I originally had thought... none of my family was, really. Times have changed and the culture is dying. Very, very interesting realizations in this book. It also deals with genetic memory, btw... The author does some research, finds out his family way back might have been snake handlers and maybe that is why he is so fascinated.
The peculiarity of Southern experience didn't end when the boll weevil ate up the cotton crop. We didn't cease to be a separate country when Burger King came to Meridian. We're as peculiar a people now as we ever were, and the fact that our culture is under assault has forced us to become even more peculiar than we were before. p xiii
This is the start of realizing that this isn't just about god and serious preaching and snakes. There's a whole culture behind this snake handling business, and it's a part of everyone, not just the handlers themselves.
In the country, they put their evil spirits in colored glass bottles hung on trees. But let me tell you what we do with evil spirits in the City. We start with coal that a bunch of our male ancestors died getting out of the ground. We heat it in ovens till it gives off poisonous gasses and turns to coke, something harder and blacker than it was to begin with. Then we set that coke on fire. We use it to fuel our furnaces. These furnaces are immense things, bulb shaped and covered with rust. You wouldn't want one in your neighborhood. We fill the furnace with limestone and iron ore and any evil spirits we find lying around. The iron ore melts in the coke-driven fire. Impurities attach to the limestone and float to the top. What settles to the bottom is pure and incredibly hot. At a precise moment, we open a hole in the bottom of the furnace, and molten iron cascades out, a ribbon of red so bright you can hardly look at it. When I was a kid you could stand on the viaduct above the Sloss furnaces in downtown Birmingham and watch the river of molten iron racing along the ground, incandescent, inexorable, and so unpredictable that a spark from it flew up one night while my father's friend, Ross Keener, was leaning over the rail of the viaduct, flew up and put out his eye.
That's the kind of South I'm talking about.
Here is how things change. To go from putting glass bottles in the trees to tearing up the countryside... This is what's happening. Basically recycling versus waste. It's a shame, not just for the environment, but for the people. So much is lost when you lose what was.
There are moments when you stand on the brink of a new experience and understand that you have no choice about it. Either you walk into the experience or you turn away from it, but you know that no matter what you choose, you will have altered your life in a permanent way. Either way, there will be consequences. p2
This was just great... Maybe a little clumsily written in some tiny area somehow, since I felt like the flow of it was lost right at the end, but the idea is awesome.
"Tell me, Mrs. Summerford," he had asked during crossexamination, "did you and your husband ever breed these snakes?"
"Why no, sir," she said. "They did that themselves." p39
I had a HUGE laugh at this.
There are snakes, and there are snakes. Some are literal, some not. While I was handling common water snakes in a sewer at the end of our street in East Lake, people were taking up rattlesnakes in a church a few blocks away. We didn't know them. They didn't know us. we might as well have occupied parallel universes, except for one thing: we had come from the same place. We were border dwellers. We had sailed our promised land. We had entered the mountains and come down from them again. We were the same people. And all of us were handling one kind of snake or another. p151
The writing through this book is just so well done. I honestly can't say enough about it.
The shadows thrown by the mountains were black and razor-sharp across the roadway. I realized how much I'd always hated this about churches, the inevitable darkness on the underside of any human enterprise. Envy. Bitterness. The division that always seems to doom even the best of intentions. I was guilty of all that, too. p209-210
I just liked this. That's all.
"If we can't love one another here on earth, there ain't no way we can make it to heaven," he said. p212
True.
"I've been hurt before, many times, Brother Dennis," Charles says. "Let me tell you, the bite of the serpent is nothing compared to the bite of your fellow man." p237
Sometimes people say something and it's just powerful. Even when they don't mean it to be.
We might have been spared the night's discomfort, but we wouldn't have known how the story would end. And stories have to end. Endings are the most important part of stories. They grow inevitably from the stories themselves. The ending of a story only seems inevitable, though, after it's over and you're looking back, as I am now. p238-239
The story at the end is like god, a good comparison and a perfect completion of the book as a whole, but I can't reveal any of it, so you're just going to have to pick up the book sometime yourself.
