Southern Bookman

Eulogy for Sports of the Times

Grantland writer Bryan Curtis examines the demise of The New York Times' Sports of the Times column, which for years appeared seven days a week and distinguished the newspaper's sports coverage.

As Curtis relates, the column is pretty much defunct. Retired columnists Dave Anderson and George Vescey occasionally return to do columns, giving glimpses of lost excellence. The column in its glory days regularly showcased some of the newspaper's best writers, such as Red Smith and Robert Lypsyte as well as Anderson and Vescey.

The Times sports editor gave Curtis a strained explanation for the column's absence, saying the newspaper can't find the right writer or writers to do it. Strong staffers like Jere Longman would rather stay with feature stories. Please - the country is loaded with young and talented sports columnists who could write Sports of the Times with style and distinction. I have one candidate - former Times writer Jonathan Mahler, who now does an online column.

One of the former group of writers no longer doing Sports of the Times is William Rhoden, who gave the newspaper one of its few black perspectives. Perhaps Rhoden's columns were too edgy for the Times. In fact, Rhoden's disappearance leaves the newspaper with virtually no black voices.

The end of Sports of the Times is just one sign of the newspaper's decline in quality.

Turtle Season

Walking through the yard on this rainy morning, I was startled by a turtle motionless in the grass. It was the second turtle I've seen recently, or perhaps the same one. Although we live about a mile from Buckhead's office towers, we've encountered a variety of animals over the years. A corner of our lot is wooded, and this wild area has been the habitat for rabbits, foxes and deer, which suddenly bound into our cleared backyard for weeks and months, even years, and then are not seen again.

Along with these surprise guests, we've seen fairly permanent owls, hawks and crows as well as a variety of songbirds, especially bluebirds and cardinals. The everyday variety squirrels and chipmunks scurry around, hunted by feral cats. We've also had unhappy experiences with raccoons, rats, snakes, roaches and fleas.

Now, turtles. I've always liked them since my boyhood, when I often found them in woods around our home and kept them as pets for a day or two until they found a way to escape or I returned them to the woods. I've greeted those seen lately like old friends. With their ponderous shells, hooded eyes and pointed beaks, they display a timeless dignity, old souls with long earth memories.

The foxes, rabbits and deer have disappeared. I suppose we're part of a desperate migration as natural areas disappear. Now I wonder what's caused the turtles to appear.

"The Flamethrowers" Flames Out

Rachel Kushner's novel "The Flamethrowers" has failed to catch fire with me after some 60 pages. I'm at the point of deciding whether to invest any more time with the book or jettison it. Lately, I've read several books whose beginnings didn't enthrall me but which I eventually enjoyed. I don't think this will happen with Kushner.

She's talented but the fictional world she seeks to create doesn't fully draw me in. Some novels bring me to a higher level of narrative engagement and I'm carried along as if in a dream. With Kushner, I remain outside of the place she tries to make with her language; I don't enter it.

Kushner displays imaginative ambition in seeking to create historical mileus. Her language is too artificial, self-consciously artistic for me to be transported there.

Esquire Examines Gettysburg

Charles Pierce's excellent politics blog on Esquire's web site gives even more must reading material with Lt. Col. Robert Bateman's series on the Gettysburg campaign, which decided the Civil War and the nation's fate 150 years ago.

Bateman, a military historian, simplifies battle details while maintaining historical authority. So far, he has looked at the preliminary engagements of the cavalry battle of Brandy Station and the infantry clash at Winchester, Va.

With Bateman as guide, readers will relive day by day Robert E. Lee's daring excursion into Pennsylvania and the Union army's repelling of the invaders at Gettysburg, the war's turning point.

Revisiting Mary McCarthy's "The Group"

Laura Jacobs in the latest Vanity Fair breathlessly revisits the stir surrounding Mary McCarthy's best-selling and protean novel, "The Group," published in 1963.

McCarthy, a central member of the Partisan Review circle of leftist intellectuals, examined in the novel the lives of women who graduated from Vasser in 1933. The book's sexual frankness and explicit language broke the day's cultural standards, especially daring for a woman.

"The Group's" popularity like "The Feminine Mystique" revealed the truth of women's desire for greater freedom and fulfillment.

McCarthy was already a provocative cultural figure, known for her piercing essays and brutally insightful criticism. Sexually adventurous, she engaged in a number of affairs and was entangled into a contentious marriage with Edmund Wilson.

Jacobs discloses one juicy nugget: a key character in "The Group" was based on Elizabeth Bishop and played by Candice Bergen in the movie made from the book. When I read Bishop's poems, I'll now think of Bergen.

The Vanity Fair piece brings back the intellectual excitement of a time when books mattered much more. McCarthy wasn't a great novelist - her memoirs such as "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood" are wonderful - but "The Group" opened a new path for women writers, and the American novel, no matter the author's sex.

George Packer's "The Unwinding"

George Packer retells familiar stories of several famous people in his chronicle of America's economic and social decline, "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," so his book is not really an "inner history." His vignettes about the likes of Newt Gingrich, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Warren and the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and libertarian political theorist Peter Thiel are interspersed with stories of unknowns like a Youngstown, Ohio, black woman who becomes an effective community organizer and a struggling uneducated family in Tampa that somehow stays together. The latter stories give the book its true revelatory power and pathos.

The portraits of Carver and Gingrich could have been omitted for the greater development of the real actors of the inner history. Some characters brush with fame and fortune, and they do receive their due, especially a North Carolina biofuels entrepreneur's boom and bust saga. The city of Tampa, seen as the epicenter of the housing bubble and collapse, yields a vivid cast of obscure American heroes from a lawyer who represents homeowners threatened with foreclosure from a Rubic's cube of serial bank companies that acquire their mortgages to a crusading newspaper reporter.

"The Unwinding" gives a compelling narrative of the economic and social forces that led to the recession - Packer traces the fall as a more than 30-year process beginning with the 1972 energy shock. The book, though, falls short of its promise; Packer tries to paint too panoramic a picture.

His conclusions are conventional: that the deck is stacked against the average American, the broken political system is unable to find solutions, Americans are succumbing to fear and ignorance. With all of these pessimistic themes, Packer finds assurance that the faith, ingenuity and work ethic of average people will restore the American dream.

U.S. Open Returns to Merion

George Plimpton said that when it comes to sports literature, the smaller the ball, the better the writing. As with other seeming truisms, this doesn't hold up to extended analysis; some fine writing has been done on basketball and football, European and American, while golf and baseball have drawn too much overwrought blather. But despite the surfeit of pseudo philosophical rhapsodies about the mystical fairways, I have loved reading about golf's history and techniques almost as much as playing the game.

This week, the U.S. Open returns to one of the the game's great courses, Merion, where Bobby Jones closed out his grand slam, Ben Hogan returned from a near fatal auto accident to win the U.S. Open and Lee Trevino beat Jack Nicklaus in an Open playoff. Merion has figured strongly in pieces I've read about major championships and golf's great players.

To get into a three-man Open playoff in 1950 at Merion, Hogan struck one of the most famous shots in golf history, a 1-iron from 220 yards out on Merion's 18th fairway during the final round. A copy of Hy Peskin's well-known photograph of the shot hangs on my living room wall. One of my favorite pieces of golf writing is Hogan's description of the shot in his "Five Lessons," dramatically rendered by co-writer Herbert Warren Wind. In my golfing days, I always drew upon that passage when I had to hit a long iron to a green, visualizing myself as Hogan at Merion.

The Open hasn't returned to Merion since 1981 because of worries that modern equipment would make the cozy layout in the Philadelphia suburb of Haverford too easy. Dear old Merion has been lengthened but still lies a wedge shot short of 7,000 yards. Rains have softened the course, which could make it even less challenging.

I believe that Merion, with its historical legacy, will stand tall against today's battleship-headed drivers, drone golf balls and belly putters.

A New Stack of Books, and Faint Praise for Packer

Back from a weekend trip to Louisiana, I at last posess Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers," thanks to the Atlanta-Fulton County Library. However, I couldn't resist checking out several other books, including Ian McEwan's "Sweet Tooth." I bring home these books when I'm trying to finish George Packer's "The Unwinding."

Catching up on the Sunday New York Times, I'm not surprised that the book review contained a lukewarm review of "The Unwinding," written by the increasingly unreadable Times op-Ed columnist David Brooks. Brooks observes, like everyone else, including myself, that Packer in his nonfiction book echoes the "newsreel" technique pioneered with finer artistry by John Dos Passos in his "USA" trilogy.

Brooks then criticizes Packer for relying on reporting without a theoretical underpinning, such as the Marxism that he says formed Dos Passos' viewpoint. Hmm; I thought conservatives like Brooks thought Marxism bankrupt. I suppose Brooks wanted Packer to make his book as impenetrable as one of Brooks' academic-jargon-ridden columns. Perhaps the Times book review was seeking "balance" in having Brooks review Packer, but choosing him raises questions of fairness.

Summer Reading From the New Yorker

Ready to accompany a brimming pitcher of gin and tonic on a languid summer afternoon, the New Yorker's annual fiction double issue arrived this week. The theme is "crime and misdemeanors," featuring Birgit Schossow's "Big City Noir" cover.

The "crimes and misdemeanors" offerings include a recently discovered story by Dashiell Hammett and a Cormac McCarthy screenplay. Contemporary crime writer George Pelecanos appears with a personal vignette, as does Joyce Carol Oates.

I'm looking forward to reading the magazine, with the extra week before the next issue comes giving me the chance as well to catch up with the last two issues. I've already enjoyed one pleasurable reading experience from the issue that has nothing to do with the crime theme, Stanley Plumly's poem "Brownfields."

The author of one of the best books on Keats, "Posthumous Keats," Plumly, the noted American poet, centers the poem around a visit to Keats' grave at the non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. The poem explores the bits of cultural detritus that civilizations leave behind, ghostly evidence of lives once lived.

My Nook e-copy of the New Yorker gave me the special pleasure of Plumly reading the poem, technology restoring poetry's oral dimension. After hearing his deep voice reading the poem, I went to the mailbox to find the magazine 's print copy. I prefer reading longer pieces on paper, which is how I will go through the "crimes and misdemeanors" issue, but the Nook is wonderful for poetry, providing the poet's voice.

Finishing Renata Adler's "Speedboat"

I persevered to finish Renata Adler's fragmentary novel "Speedboat," first published in 1975 and recently reprinted by the New York Review of Books.

A couple of months ago I disparaged the book, which has a cult following among New York cultural insiders. While I was at first put off by "Speedboat's" hallucinatory, disconnected quality, I began to appreciate its "Alice in Wonderland" illogical logic as I progressed.

The book is a series of fractured vignettes, anecdotes, observations, comic monologues - ranging from dreamlike brilliance to quotidian banality - by the book's narrator, slowly revealed as a tabloid journalist named Jen Fain. Fain's experiences at last cohere into a skeletal narrative structure.

After the passions of the '60s, the book describes the 1970s spiritual malaise: a broken refusal to commit, a dreamy drifting through life in which big and little matters take on the same significance. Roles are confused, systems broken, traditions exhausted, language eroded and men and women wary and brittle.

The book ends on a tentative expression of hope. That is generated by the revelation that Fain is having a child; she wryly accepts motherhood and life continuing.

The book closes with an affirmation: "All the same, all the same, I think there's something to be said for assuring the next that the water's fine - quite warm, actually - once you get into it. You can't miss it. It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime." Adler's strange careening speedboat at last returns to harbor.