Robert Lee Hodge is pictured on the dust jacket of Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. Hodge, whose special talent is imitating bloated corpses, appears burly and gruff and, well, pretty scary. Sword in hand, he looks as though he could cut your throat in one swift slice and not even flinch.

Hodge is a Civil War reenactor, a hard core reenactor-a trekkie if you will. He was one of the many individuals Horwitz shadowed for inspiration for his latest book, which is a travelogue of sorts. In Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz explores the South's fascination with the Civil War and how it's become a "Rorschach blot in which Americans" see "all sorts of unresolved strife: over race, sovereignty, the sanctity of historic landscapes, and who should interpret the past."

Hodge is not alone. Many people are still enthralled by the Civil War, including Horwitz, who uses it as a lens to view contemporary culture.

"It's a mix of travel, history, and journalism; it's basically a journey through the South looking at all the ways in which the Civil War is still with us...whether it's reenactors who go out and replay the great battles of the war or debates over the rebel flag and what it represents. All the racial questions concerning remembrance of the Confederacy, and also just visits to battlefields and other historic sites and what they're like and what one sees there," Horwitz says.

As a child, Horwitz became a huge Civil War buff, mainly thanks to his great-grandfather, Isaac Moses Perski, an immigrant from czarist Russia. His poppa Isaac passed down the obsession. Even though his family wasn't here during the time of the Civil War and had no blood ties to the war, he became riveted by it, just like millions of Americans. He begins the book asking the question why that is and why the war keeps pulling us back.

"While I was reporting the book, I became a reenactor. I felt I needed to get my hands dirty and understand this hobby from the inside, so I became what they call a hardcore reenactor," Horwitz says.

Hardcore reenactors go beyond shooting out battle scenes with blanks and dressing up in old clothes. They often starve themselves to achieve the "gaunt, hollowed eye" look of actual Confederates. They speak only in 19th century dialect.

"They try to totally inhabit the mind and body of an 1860s soldier. When they sleep at night, they'll spoon, which means they sort of roll up and clutch each other to keep warm," Horwitz says, "In fact, they don't even like battle reenactments because how realistic can it be if no one's actually dying? They're sort of wistful that live ammunition and Civil War diseases aren't part of the mix...they're quite extreme."

Horwitz describes in great detail the colorful characters he meets along his journey, including the growing number of women reenactors who play civilian roles such as nurses and laundresses. He also meets up with a Scarlett O'Hara impersonator and the oldest-living Confederate widow.

"I think there's tremendous nostalgia, especially at a time when contemporary life seems kind of sterile and anonymous and we all work in big office blocks staring at computers, for this period that seems more authentic and a time when the great American virtues of self reliance and stoicism were in evidence. It's largely escapism and nostalgia that drives this," Horwitz says.

Civil War reenacting is not necessarily an obsession with the horrible aspects of the past, according to Horwitz. Rather, reenactors want to embrace the pageantry of the war, not issues such as slavery or state's rights.

Horwitz wanted the book to be entertaining, and yet still confront the serious issues. While it's a "fun ride" through places like Charleston, New Orleans, Richmond, and Kentucky, it also forces you to look at the harsh realities.

In one chapter, "Dying for Dixie," he addresses the murder that occurred in Guthrie, Kentucky a couple of years ago over the rebel flag.

"In this particular chapter I question what the rebel flag represents and why people are still willing to kill each other over it," Horwitz says.

Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and war correspondent, wanted to mix the light and humorous with the dark and serious in this book.

"I wanted to be honest to the material and not try and even out the tone. I just decided to tell the book as it happened, the journey as it happened. I mean life's like that, sometimes it's funny and sometimes its not."

Horwitz has been all over the country with his book in the past year and finds that while Southerners tend to be more defensive about the subject matter, they seem to enjoy the humor in the book.

"I think folks in the North still tend to see the South very much through the prism of race and they sort of unfairly dump on the South as a place where all these terrible things happen when in fact problems such as racism and violence are nationwide. In many ways I think the South has made greater strides than the rest of the country in addressing racial issues, but there's still a sense in the North that somehow there's this wicked part of the country where these things go on, and they really need to be looking at what's going on in their own backyard."

Confederates in the Attic is Horwitz's third book, following Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia, and One for the Road: Hitchhiking Through the Australian Outback. He currently writes for The New Yorker. Horwitz will be at Joseph-Beth on June 27 for a reading and signing at 1pm.

Also in Town
A Different Kind of
Southern Landscape

Place Not Forgotten: Landscapes of the South from the Morris Museum of Art is an exhibition of paintings which celebrates the beauty of the South. The University of Kentucky Art Museum has received a grant for this exhibition, which includes over 39 oils and watercolors. Paintings by artists such as William Aiken Walker and Elliott Daingerfield will be displayed from June 27-June 25, 2000 in hopes that their work be rediscovered and reevaluated.

"A number of the artists have worked in some obscurity by nature of geography, and they haven't really been fully appreciated until recent years," says Harriet Fowler, director of UK's Art Museum, "It's a beautiful show and it's interesting to look at the perceptions of the South, to look at what's nostalgic, and what may be a little less so. I purposely cut off the show at about 1940, from antebellum days in the early nineteenth century up to 1940 because I think nostalgia is a big part of all of this."

Fowler hopes that this exhibit will generate a whole dialogue that questions whether there is such a thing as a Southern landscape.

An illustrated catalogue, due out in September, will accompany the art work and will include essays on landscape by Southern writers including Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, John Egerton, James Baker Hill, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, Robert Morgan, Gurney Norman, Chris Offutt, and Sarah Tate.

"Southern writers have received critical due for many years, but Southern art and artists have not. Folk art has, but Southern academic art has not; We're in the middle of a national renewal of interest in the South," Fowler says.

The grant for this exhibition came from the Museum Loan Network, which encourages smaller institutions to borrow works of art from larger facilities that have extensive holdings in a particular subject. The Morris Museum, located in Augusta, Georgia, is devoted especially to Southern art.

"To be able to focus on just Southern landscapes is something we haven't done here in Lexington, and I've been wanting to do this for a long time," Fowler says.

The UK Art Museum is open from noon to 5 pm, Tuesday through Sunday. -KF