The subject of the last Administrative Note was Flannery O’Connor and her posthumous, and perhaps unintentional collection Mystery and Manners. I finished said volume a couple of weeks ago, and, needless to say, there’s been little improvement in my prose, which continues to be straightahead, if abraided with semi-colons and other detritus, vulnerable to digressions, with little of O’Connor’s inclination towards bringing opposites to the discussions, in some picturesque way, in a paragraph. Her tendency to do so sometimes seems just a trifle repetitious, see The King of the Birds.
I am reminded that she regards as sardonically fortunate the loss suffered by the South in the American Civil War, the South’s ‘Fall’ as it were, and a gift to the ‘Southern Writer’. How that affects the undercurrents of the writing of O’Connor and her Southern colleagues is a fascinating question that I haven’t the time to research.
