Download Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South (Unabridged Selections) AudioBook Free
“I left the South in search of the Enlightenment. I’m pro-choice, in favor of gay marriage, and against creationism and the war in Iraq. But both my parents’ people are deep Southern from many generations, and I spent a little on the third of my life, including the presumably most formative years (toilet training through college), living in the South. Mathematically, which makes me just about exactly as Southern as the American people, 34 percent of whom are Southern residents. Nonetheless it goes deeper than math—my roots are Southern, I sound Southern, I love a lot of Southern stuff, so when my [Northern] local paper announces a festival to ‘celebrate the spirit of differently abled dogs,’ I react as a Southerner. I believe I care the maximum amount of about dogs’ feelings as anybody. It really is hard for me to imagine a dog with three legs minds being called a three-legged dog.”
A sly, dry, hilarious assortment of essays—his first in more than ten years—from the writer who, according to The NY Times Book Review, is “in serious contention for the title of America’s most cherished humorist.”
This time Blount focuses on his own dueling loyalties over the great American divide, North vs. South. Scholarly, raunchy, biting and affable, ol’ Roy takes on topics ranging from chicken fingers to yellow-dog Democrats to Elvis’s toes. And he shares experiences: chatting with Ray Charles, rounding up rattlesnakes, watching George and Tammy record, meeting an Okefenokee alligator (also named George, or Georgette), imagining Faulkner’s tennis game, and being swept up, sort of, in the filming of Nashville. His yarns, analyses, and flights of fancy transcend all standard shades of Red, Blue, and in between.
Roy on language: “Remember when there is lots of agitated discussion of Ebonics, pro and con? I kept waiting for you to definitely say that if you acquire white English, you can become Clarence Thomas, whereas if you acquire black English, you can become Quentin Tarantino.”
Roy on eating: “Just how folks were meant to eat is the way my children ate as i was growing up in Georgia. We ate till we got tired. Then we went “Whoo!” and leaned back and wholeheartedly expressed how much we regretted that people couldn’t summon in the strength, right then, to consume even more.”
Roy on racism: “Anybody who claims . . . not to have ‘a racist bone’ in his or her is, at best, preracist and has a longer way to go than the rest of us.”
Blount’s previous books have included reflections over a Southern president (Jimmy Carter), a novel about a Southern president (Clementine Fox), a biography of Robert E. Lee, a celebration of New Orleans, a memoir of growing up in Georgia, and the definitive anthology of Southern humor. Long Time Leaving is the capper. Maybe it won’t end the Civil War finally, but it can clarify, or aptly complicate, divisive delusions on both sides of the longstanding national rift. It’s a comic ode to American variety in addition to a droll assault on complacency North and South—a glorious union of diverse pieces reshaped and expanded into an American classic, in one of the very most definitive and esteemed humorists of our own time.
