Hi pals, Start with LSD in Appalachia, plus banjos and Beat poetry. Add a fishing vest, a beer gut, and Deer Hunting with Jesus, and you've got Joe Bageant, roving chronicler of red-state dispossession. Bageant was more than "America's Most Literate Redneck," says John Lingan in The Baffler no. 27. He was the "avenging angel of the forgotten rural hippie movement." Tree-huggers are the natural allies of trailer trash, Bageant insisted, and the mainstream left went wrong when it disavowed them both. Read on, here. (Fun fact: Bageant's chatroom name was "ScreamingMan.") Over in our poetry section, we've got something new: a view of John Berryman—"He came into the Grolier / carrying his head, / hungover like death"—courtesy William Corbett. Hey, thanks to everyone who joined us this week in Cambridge for our bLab happy hour. The talk was bleak, the beverages dismal. Let's certainly do it again! The Baffler |