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Terry Southern Month is Serendipity Month

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Terry Southern Month

It has been brought to our attention that June, 2010—Terry Southern Month—happens also to be the pub month for David Tully’s critical bio “Terry Southern and the American Grotesque.”

A sample:

Southern was a Southwestern humor variation on Poe and Hawthorne. In rewriting their tales as a teenager, recasting their images and events in more contemporary terms (as he began with his version of Pym and continued to do until his death), he reintroduced us to an America that, in the words of Greil Marcus, “No one has exactly inhabited before”: a twilight, unconscious dream-world, halfway between our plastic, waking pop culture America that we all share via TV and the Internet—and death, the abyss, the other side, another world.