Curing the Cross-Eyed Mule: Appalachian Mountain Humor (review)

remote clearing. Later he fancied a number had been painted on the door, but he couldn't be certain. The next day, back in Virginia, he began a wide painting of a wheatfield with a stockcar hovering over it. The field was a million candles of fountaining light, each painted distinctly, and the race car a rush of thunder. Later he realized the secret inspiration must have come from Dali's "Last Supper," as well as the field at the edge of the flat woods .... One critic said the power was in the contrast between the ancient and the modern, and quoted Henry Adams from "The Dynamo and the Virgin." Another saw evidence of a schizoid attraction to both gentleness and violence at once. Only the columnist for the Atlanta paper saw a feeling for the miraculous , a retelling of the Ascension, power transcendent to nature. But now his despair has returned, more bitter than ever-and once again, seeking a place to end his life, a place where paradoxically he can feel "truly at ease," he walks the old fields and pastures. And each step evokes memories-of the dam he and his brother had made, the Eicnics he and his mother and brother ad taken along the edge of the hill pasture, the log barn from which his grandmother had seen Halley's Comet. The land claims him in a moment which seems more like epiphany than death-as if, in the final seconds, he becomes one with "the stubbled fields and creek." Morgan catches this convergence in prose unweighed by so much as a superfluous word. "Blinding Daylight"-and the dozen stories that precede it-remind the reader that Robert Morgan was first, and remains , a poet, with a poet's sensitivity to detail and nuance. I found his themes of memory and despair greatly enriched by references to the country landscape-a place eternal in the imagination, but, alas, ephemeral in reality. As I finished The Blue Valleys, I wondered-where will the Robert Morgans of the next century find inspiration if not in blackberry thickets and wheatfields-or, at least, pasture "gone to thorn and bastard pine?' This landscape, these people are our heritage. Robert Morgan isn't going to let us forget them. -Carol Collier Jones, Loyal and Billy Edd Wheeler, editors. Curing the Cross-Eyed Mule: Appalachian Mountain Humor. August House. 211 pages. $8.95 paper. The joke thieves are at it again. Following the success of their Laughter in Appalachia, editors and incurable storytellers Loyal Jones and Billy Edd Wheeler have stolen another book bag of humor from jokesters all over Appalachia , plus a number of outlying regions . And nothing is sacred-not courtship and marriage, not education or old age, not preachers, not politicians, not city folks, not doctors and nurses, not even good-old-boy hunters. In fact, many of our sacred cows are slaughtered and offered up on the altar of humor. But that is, after all, a main purpose of comedy: to poke holes in pretense, hypocrisy, tomfoolery, pomposity, and facades of all shapes and denominations. The thieving editors freely admit that they have lifted stories from any source not tightly locked, including donations from readers of their first collection and Earticipants in a festival of Appalachian umor held at Berea College in the summer of 1987. Although there is perhaps less folk material in this sequel, there are still many good stories that reflect authentic mountain ways and sentiments. In addition to stories supplied by the editors, there are a number of celebrity contributors, including country musician Chet Atkins, authors James Still, Harry Caudill, Wilma Dykeman, and Jim Wayne Miller, newspaper publisher Al Smith, the late Courier-Journal 61 columnist Allen Trout, historian Thomas D. Clark, physician and politician Grady Stumbo, former Kentucky governor Bert Combs, and the late Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Many stories are traditional tall tales or updated reruns but others are developed out of recent experience. With crisp and gainful insight, John Stephenson of erea College profiles his job as a college president: "I work hard all day, but I go home and sleep like a baby-sleep two hours, wake...