Southern neogothic

Just back from my tour of the American hinterland. From the very beginning it was clear that this place is different. The pick-up trucks; the difficulty of buying beer; the Cowboy Jesus music from most of the radio stations. And that was in northeastern Pennsylvania. Deliverance Country is but a stone's throw west of the Hudson.

That's unfair, of course, and a bit exaggerated. (Except for the part about pick-up trucks. On the northeastern seaboard, all vehicles are either SUVs or minivans. In the backwoods, some of them are pick-ups.) But if your experience of the USA is of New York or Boston, it can be a bit of a shock to discover how much of the country is, well, Southern--even the parts that fought so bravely and effectively in putting down the treacherous 'Confederacy'.

Of course, 'Southern' doesn't mean what it once did. No doubt there are still moss-festooned derelict Big Houses and backroad barbecue pits to be found. In most places these days, however, the Big House has given way to corralled herds of McMansions, and when you go out to eat it will likely be to an Applebee's®. Alarmingly, almost all the country music I heard over the radio was appalling glossy insta-pop with a few jangly tones tossed in for atmosphere; Britney Spears for rednecks. (Fortunately, the rental came equipped with a CD player, and a sackful of George Jones and Johnny Cash helped in crossing the bad patches.) To judge by a couple of weeks' examination, much of contemporary America might as well be a suburb of Dallas.

It's odd to find myself saying this, but I could have wished for a bit more good old-fashioned Southern weirdness. (I mean the good kind of weirdness, not the febrile dirt-road rococo of Faulkner and O'Connor.) As it turns out, that kind of weirdness is out there, if you know where to look for it.

Burkhard Bilger does. A few years ago I read a strange and wonderful magazine article about southerners catching catfish by reaching into dark underwater holes. (The trick is to shove your arm down a big catfish's throat and, when he chomps down, drag him out of the water. Learning to distinguish a catfish hole from a water-mocassin's nest is an essential skill.) Shortly thereafter I was delighted to learn that (i) this article and others like it had been collected into a book and (ii) its author, Mr Bilger, was someone we knew in Brooklyn. If you haven't read Noodling for Flatheads yet, I'll wait for you to run over to Amazon and order it.

Bilger has been settled in northeastern exile for years now, and his day jobs (writer at the New Yorker; editor at Discover) are paradigms of urban modernity. But he still hears the call of the wild, and answers it so we don't have to. He meets moonshiners and their eternal enemy, the revenooers (when he wins the confidence of the latter, they break out an array of confiscated jugs for an impromptu tasting). He introduces us to cockfighters, frog farmers, connoisseurs of squirrel brains and, of course, fishermen with unorthodox methods. Noodling for Flatheads is a pick-up barrelling across the hollows and bayous at high speed, but never condescends to its subjects. Though Bilger does come across a few marginal specimens, most of the people he meets are intelligent and thoughtful, hold down jobs, and so forth. In short, they're not very different to you and me--except for their connection to ancient, bizarre and (often) vanishing folkways.

We've long since moved back to Europe, but when I saw Bilger during our recent visit he gave me some happy news to carry back to the old continent. His book has just appeared in German translation, as Katfisch, Bourbon, Hahnenkämpfe. The Germans should be grateful. So many of them have a fascination for American life, and here is a part of it most of them will never have heard of. I must take a look at it myself; his translator, Ilse Rothfuss, will have performed a work of genius if she has succeeded in conveying the sound and feel of some of the dialogue in this book. (I tried myself to think how it might come out auf Deutsch, but all I got was Bavarian.)