A 1969 still from Columbia Pictures' "Easy Rider"
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Clearly a labor of love, the book is carefully structured, with Southern's serious thoughts on literature, cinema, and drugs bracketing his work as a short-story craftsman, a critic, a New Journalist, and a writer of blissfully puerile "letters." The pieces were selected and edited by Nile Southern, writer and son of the Grand Guy, and Josh Alan Friedman, musician, author of the terrific "Tales of Times Square" and a series of venomously funny cartoons, and the son of brilliant novelist Bruce Jay Friedman.
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 stories, including the marvellously titled "Heavy Put-Away, or a Hustle Not Wholly Devoid of a Certain Grossness, Granted," found in this collection. An account of a mean prank worthy of Flannery O'Connor at her darkest, "Heavy" is one of Southern's most pointed comments about human nature, and a perfect example of his crisp, succinct approach to writing (one can think of several crime novelists - e.g.think Donald Westlake - who would have spun "Heavy" into a full-length "scam" novel).
The 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."
Naturally enough, the spirit of the '60s, "a 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, "Grand Guy" and "Now Dig This" do an admirable job of filling that gap - as well as increasing the average reader's awareness of Southern's strange and marvelous legacy.