Ha!

Continuing to work on that pesky article has led me to The Real South:Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction, a book by one of my former grad school teachers, Scott Romine. You don't need me to tell you what a smart book it is. The blurbs on the back cover do that quite well. (Okay--just one choice cut: "With The Real South, Scott Romine shows why he may be the best critic ever to come out of the venerable Chapel Hill southern studies program." That's pretty good, right?) 

Anyway, this one little chestnut made me laugh out loud so I thought it was worth sharing, a fine example of how funny this book can be at times: "But if Southern Living conjures a kind of imagined community, it is attenuated community that fails one of Benedict Anderson’s primary criteria for the nation: no one is willing to die for it. There is some comfort, I think, to be taken in that” (15).