From the Editor

It was 1968, which was a different time (as all time is), the same in its violence and need for change (as all time is). It was in Paris, which was the same but different (as all places are), where Roland Barthes sang  "La Marseillaise" to the same tune but with different words: "... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Aux armes citoyens / formez vos bataillons / Marchons, marchons / Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons.

However, if you have ever talked to an author, now or then, you know that news has been greatly exaggerated.  Authors are still the breathing corpuscles that they are but with their own web sites now.  And readers, today, they never had it so good.  Yet I am not ready to reverse the lyric to make it rhyme to my liking; that is, "the birth of the author must be at the cost of the death of the reader."  Buy my words, buy me, buy what I tell you to be true. That's a lot to buy, but the reader always reserves the right to believe according to one's own intelligence.  Caveat Emptor.   After all, reader and author are of the same species, if Larry Brown can be believed.  "Anybody can do what I do," Brown told Gary Hawkins, film maker of The Rough South series," ... it just took longer than I thought it would."  From fireman to writer in only eight years, from avid reader to prolific author, just buy a typewriter and work at it.

The argument sounds esoteric enough until you get into English Departments, and all the campfires that light up in the darkness of the curriculum night.  The cult of the reader versus the cult of the author -- it is a kind of nationalism that takes on a Palestinian homeland reality.  Literature people vs. Theory people; Tech Writing people vs. Traditional curriculum people: an historical battle about power and influence, blood and heritage, the full meaning of life and a life full of meaning, and it's been going on so for so long now that it's almost like you can tell who they are by what they look like -- a sort of literature-language profiling.  "See that one coming down the hall, that one, the one with the horns, that's a cotton-picking blasphemer if I ever saw one and that one with the tail, an old-hat Pharisee."   You could say worst things about this war of words.

But I can say this: Their armies are well-equipped with their own weapons of mass destruction.  Canons to the right and canons to the left.  One side led by the likes of Generals Milton and Shakespeare and Major Faulkner, Colonel Woolf, and Corporal Emily Dickinson, and the Other (no pun intended) led by Marshal Derrida, Emperor Foucault, Commander Kristeva, and Viceroy Roland Barthes.  The ongoing carnage makes an otherwise pleasant journey quite like an NPR morning report of the dead in Baghdad.  Even though this is a war of ideas fought from house to house in the hallways of the head, the effects on morale reach far into heart of any English Department, if I may be permitted to use anatomical metaphors at will without being too manipulative.  And if you would further permit me to be reductionist, which I suppose is the arrogance of any author, it's not a matter of reader or author, of killing off this one or that, or having cavities or having your teeth cleaned (well, maybe except in the latter case that seems to be universally true) it's a matter of finding common ground and understanding, without suffering a significant body count, or worse, a head full of empty teeth.

Imagine how hard it is for Arun Gandhi's Institute for Nonviolence to find common ground and understanding in the land of homicidal maniacs -- Memphis. Oh "If Beale Street Could Talk." (Who wrote that? Does it matter?)  Arun Gandhi, who was in Greenville recently, quipped, "They love their guns in Memphis."

Here I am babbling again, when all I really wanted to do was relate to you this anecdote about another train ride.  Perhaps I am trying to make the anecdote more significant than maybe it is, but then again, it may be more significant than I first thought it was or hoped it might be.  (As you can see, you really can't depend on the stability of the mind of the reader, especially when they harbor secret authorial dreams of power.  Talk about an unreliable narrator and reader -- I'm your man.)

Recently on the train from Alabama to Washington along the Southern Crescent Amtrak line, a strange woman sat next to a strange man because that's what one does on trains. There are no assigned seats.  The man, dressed down in cotton dockers and middle aged loafers, hair graying at the temples, eyes creased with the furrows of too many summers in the sun, greets an elderly lady, nicely dressed, pleated skirt, three-quarter length, white blouse, the kind that grandma used to wear before polyester, and shoes, well polished, flats, blue, can't tell the brand (don't know that much about women's shoes which I hope is not indicative of a deeper ignorance of which I may not be aware).  As the train ambles on through the Georgia, South Carolina wild lands, they talk.  All sorts of things pass by, and trash the likes of which the imagination can not bear, unless you like the fiction of Brett Easton Ellis, and then you would think the ride pastorally poetic.  Who cares about the train line beautification program, anyway?  There are no license plates to fund it.  Meanwhile, their lives get shared: children and children's children and folks along the way who care about this and that and for some reason have contributed to their world view.  A few hours pass by, and they have lived on the common ground, checking off the places and people and attitudes that shape and reshape the nation and its people.  George Bush included. Finally the train stops and the words come quick, "It was so nice to talk with you, sorry I didn't introduce myself.  My name is Walter Gowan." And the strange woman answers, "Oh I am Harper Lee. It was nice to meet you."

Watching the woman named Harper Lee exit the train, who can say he will not remember that ride or the words that were spoken so casually to pass the time as any stranger would do.  Even Roland Barthes might have raised an eyebrow.  Language speaks, indeed, but it also sings like a mockingbird, just for people to hear and enjoy, no matter the levee or the dam that broke, or the rain that's overdue.

And no matter his politics, old Walter Gowan will not be able to help himself later that night when he looks it up and reads again: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.  They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.  That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."  [And the author. q.e.d.]