Isn’t it fascinating that despite all of our clocks and attempts to quantify and anticipate it, that time itself has agency? This image reckons to a day in Galveston. It was December of 2015 and I had research work wandering the gulf. My colleague in anthropology, who also happens to be one of my favorite writers, Joseph Russo was living in an RV park in Beaumont, while doing ethnographic fieldwork. We met up for a few days and time was slow. We rented this cart and pedaled along the gulf singing Lucinda Williams songs and watching migratory birds. The cart creaked and rattled, the surf was gentle, and our voices diffuse. It felt as if the sun was not moving and we could pedal down that bird-shit covered asphalt into infinity. I like to think one version of us is still pedaling there amidst a song.
But the other parts, the parts that returned the cart and eventually said see you later and graduated and moved away and got jobs in other places, are here to tell you about Joseph’s new ethnography: Hard Luck and Heavy Rain. This book, born from his time Beaumont, will generously usher you into what he calls an ecology of hard luck stories. These stories are crafted with a rich quality of presence that carefully stops to listen while looking closer at a region that is all too often overlooked and little understood. If you don’t know what ethnography is or how it it can be used to bring worlds to life, this is the book for you. If you know what ethnography is and how it can be used, this is still the book for you. In profoundly divisive times, Hard Luck and Heavy Rain forges new ways of being with rural Southeast Texas and it’s people. These pages will fold you into a place in which time is not quite time as you know it and you can not ask for a better guide, a more wildly attuned ethnographer and truly gifted writer, to accompany you.