Just around the corner

"Noodling For Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern Comforts" by Burkhard Bilger; Scribner; 256 pages; $24

Cockfighting pits. Moonshine stills. Chitlin dinners.

Interstate highways don`t go to them, but all these attractions American society has outgrown and now finds embarrassingly tacky and primitive, or just plain embarrassing, are still out there, spread through the Southern U.S. landscape, if hard to see for all the trim lawns and suburban homes of the New South.

This other world - where relics of our pre-Internet, pre-MTV, pre-Eurostyle past persist - is the subject of Burkhard Bilger`s book with a title so obscure to mainstream life as to be in another language: "Noodling For Flatheads."

To noodle for flatheads is to reach into the mouth of a catfish and grab hold of its innards.

The subtitle of Bilger`s book is "Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern Comforts," which would lead one to think he is writing about the South. He is not.

Not entirely, anyway. He is writing about us, about who we used to be and who some of us still are. He writes about that complicated thing we call human nature and how it stubbornly refuses to limit itself to the categories nominated by mainstream media.

"After half a century of television," Bilger observes, "it`s easy to mistake our sitcoms for ourselves - to imagine that there`s no more to popular culture than Barbie dolls and TV theme songs. But forgotten folkways still inhabit our back roads ... "

That`s a qualified "forgotten," by the way. Forgotten by movies, newspaper stories, books, television shows. It`s "forgotten" in terms of being on the radar scope of a cafe latte-drinking, cell phone-talking society.

But out there off the freeways and the television screen, the pastimes Bilger writes about are popular enough to sustain, for example, American Cooner magazine, which he describes as "a fat, glossy monthly, chock-full of ads."

American Cooner is all about coon hunting - that is, raccoon hunting - and coon dogs. Feathered Warrior is a magazine about cock fighting, still legal in Louisiana.

These pastimes, as well as others that Bilger takes a look at - the consumption of chitlins, frogs and squirrels; a particular game of marbles; and the long-standing Southern mountaineer tradition of making and running (transporting and selling) moonshine (illegal homemade liquor) - continue today "hidden in plain view," as the saying goes.

Bilger calls these "worlds that exist just around the corner, through the looking glass of American life." He brings to his subject a researcher`s intrigue with the unfamiliar, an engaging reluctance to rush to judgment, a curiosity about how things began and a breadth of perspective.

Thus we learn that Asian cockfighters were selectively breeding birds for ferocity 3,000 years ago. That for 1,000 years in England, cockfighting was "the sport of schoolboys, country squires and kings." That the "Kama Sutra" recommends cockfighting as one of 64 arts that every sophisticated woman should know.

Neither does Bilger allow us to tiptoe around hypocrisy. Do we shudder delicately at the prospect of cocks battling to the death? Bilger notes, "American factories slaughter some 7 billion chickens a year." And the killing floors aren`t pretty.

An eloquent writer, Bilger reveals to an uninitiated reader the tender and subtly musty taste of chitlins (hog intestines), and the arcane delights of a moonlit Southern night and the music of dogs baying in woods.

- Jeanne Freeman Brooks

(c)Copley News Service

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Author: Jeanne Freeman Brooks