Word: digged
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...Offering an industrial-strength dose of Southern's own special brand of high weirdness, "Now Dig This" contains some of the most profound, and downright silliest, things the man ever came up with. It is, in short, the "next book" Southern fans have been waiting for all these years...
...Besides two wonderfully candid interviews with Southern - in which he notes, among other things, that the film director is, for the most part, "an interfering parasite," and "much of your time [as a screenwriter] will be spent in a creative wasteland" -- the single most revealing piece in "Dig" is "King Weirdo," his ode to his first literary hero, Edgar Allen Poe. Southern's singular fascination for Poe's duplicitous frame device in "A. Gordon Pym" -- which insists that the story you're reading is an account of actual events submitted to Poe -- is reflected in several of his own short...
...most extreme and hysterical inclusions in "Dig" are short "letters" Southern concocted for the "National Lampoon" and the private amusement of his friends. Affecting an offhanded style, Southern gleefully raises the bar for bad-taste humor in these pieces, delivering bizarre gross-outs and politically incorrect (understatement) proclamations while tweaking various bastions of civilized behavior. Although the letters read like spontaneous creations, lacking the craft and precision of Southern's best work, their surprisingly crude contents do satisfy his cardinal rule for successful writing: namely, that it possesses the "capacity to astonish...
...magical era, an era of change and astonishments" pervades the book. Southern's status as one of the forefathers of "New Journalism" is reinforced here with "Grooving in Chi" a first-person account of the "police riot" that occurred at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. "Dig" ends on a somewhat somber note, though, as '60s survivor Terry recalls good times he shared with old friends (including Frank O'Hara and Abbie Hoffman) in a series of eulogies and tribute articles. These pieces make one lament the fact that Southern never got around to writing his proposed memoirs. Taken together...
...While "Now Dig This" is an entertaining, well-assembled collection of Southern's writing, the "greatest hits" book he himself put together, "Red-Dirt Marijuana" (1967) shows the true depth of his talent, as the reader sees him adopting different styles and narrative voices, and nailing every one. The contents include Faulkner-like tales of a Texan adolescent (later reworked into "Texas Summer") , an inner-city delinquent saga, a blissed-out, Kerouac-like account of a road trip, a journey into the mind of a tormented worker in the Paris metro, and an artfully drawn portrait of a wannabe hipster...