Just in case I'm not around after today, it could be that we had the big one out here on the left coast.
I hope not because I think I may have found a new favorite novel. If nothing else, Jack Butler's incredible Jujitsu for Christ has entered my personal top five. I'll give it a few days to sink in, post my minireview on Monday, and then I may make the claim that it has topped the list. All I can say at this point is "Wow! Where has this book been my whole life?" Rake deserves a lot of the credit for pointing the way to the novel, most recently in his nomination of Butler as an underrated writer.
Like Rake, I'm baffled as to why Jujitsu for Christ is out of print. The copy I got my hands on was a discard from the Columbus, Mississippi, library, and something tells me that they may not have replaced it. After all, it is in very good condition except for the library stamps marking a few of the pages. In fact, it looks as if it has never been cracked open. There's a part of me that wonders if the literary gestapo may have seen some of the dirty words or read a few of the more racy scenes and demanded its removal. But that may be giving them too much credit. They would have to read it first.
To give you an idea of what you're missing if you don't find a copy of this novel immediately, I'm going to transcribe what I believe to be one of the best descriptions of just how unbearable Southern heat and humidity can be. Butler is writing about Mississippi's humidity--and this passage is just part of a larger theme and an even longer description of a Mississippi summer day--but it could just as easily apply to Alabama's or Georgia's or Louisiana's.
A Mississippi summer is an awesome and boggling thing, a slab of steaming time, a hundred cubed: a hundred days at a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity. Resin bulges in big globby tears from the trunks of the pines, a sheet of paper wilts in your hand--by noon you can wipe your face with it like a handkerchief. You wake up glued to the sheets, the window fan puffing like someone out of breath huh huh huh huh blowing rags of wet exhalation over you. You think that's the sound of the subconscious mind after a few years, a window fan laboring unnoticed near you, and you get where you can't sleep without it. A lot of older Mississippians, they have air conditioning now, but somebody should market a tape of a window fan running so they could get a little sleep.
So it's morning and you rip off the sheets like Johnson and Johnson tape and go outside in your shorts. The grass is grey with dew, every blade bent in a drop-loaded curve. The trees drip. Things are soggy. The sun is just over the treeline and steam rises from the ground, the entire Gulf of Mexico soaked up during the night and filtered through buckshot mud and red clay and now evaporating back into the air.
Breakfast you have half pound of animal fat with some eggs and pork stirred into it and some biscuits for binder, so all day a thin film of grease comes over your face. Wipe it away, cold water in the basin and towel off, and five minutes later it's back.
Ten o'clock you can't believe the hammer blows of wavering heat. You've had your last rational thought of the day. It makes the headlines believable, the way everything shimmers unreal. Your mind shakes like a Shadrach air. The last scrap of fog is gone, partial pressure of water vapor is way down as the ambient heat skyrockets. The blacktop pools with liquid asphalt, barefoot children trying to skip across to the store for a Nehi (their folks make them do it to kill the hookworms burrowing into their feet). The children get stuck and squeal. Squeals turn to screams, but the sound is far away and tinny, sound doesn't carry in this heat, or maybe your ears have melted. The children char, collapse on themselves, subsumed in the asphalt. All winter their parents will drive over their trapped bones. By January the old folks' brains will have cooled off enough to wonder what happened to the kids.
I want to say that the humidity factor has never to my knowledge been taken into account in descriptions of Hell. You talking eternal fire without no humidity, a Mississippian is gonna think you mean Heaven or Southern California....
Ah, now you're on the trolley.
Posted by: Rake | February 02, 2006 at 03:06 PM