Southern Bookman

Robert Caro, dinosaur rock star

Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume of Caro's massive Lyndon Johnson biography, is receiving the kind of attention that books usually don't receive any more. The 78-year-old Caro, who has been working for decades on the biography, has been profiled in the New York Times magazine and Esquire, and the book has been reviewed universally, including Bill Clinton's rave on the front page of the Times Book Review.

Ironically in this era when movies for adolescents generally receive this burst of attention, articles on Caro emphasize his old-fashioned techniques. He works in an office in New York City, writing first in longhand, then on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. Shunning the computer and the Internet, he keeps cross-referenced paper files, kept in metal cabinets, in the once familiar manila folders. He's also drawn attention for his obsessive accumulation of details and the long delays in publication of each volume that has appeared so far. Times columnist Joe Nocera recently ridiculed Caro for this need to account for every minuscule piece of Johnson's life. He also disdained Caro's continued delays in finishing the project. At 78, Caro  has not yet examined the bulk of Johnson's presidency.

While Nocera's hit job smacked of an envious middleweight swinging wildly at a heavyweight, Nocera scored some hits. Caro's compulsive acculumulation of facts, ancient techniques and relentless editing and rewriting can seem pathological. Yet, in reading Nocera's piece, I wanted to defend Caro as one of the last, if not the final, upholders of an ancient tradition of scholarship and writing.

I'd recently read Natalie Dykstra's fine biography of Clover Adams, the tragic wife of pioneering American historian Henry Adams. Dykstra shows Henry Adams as very similar to Caro in his constant uncovering of details and stretching projects into mulitiple volumes. I wanted to tell Nocera that Caro deserves honor and acclaim for searching for the truth no matter what it takes.

Still, Adams finished his massive history of the United States under the Jefferson and Madison Administrations much faster than Caro has done with his work. And, the descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams later published his "Education of Henry Adams" and "Mount St. Michel and Chartres."

As as reader, I bailed out of the Johnson project after Caro's first two volumes. His look at Johnson's years as the master of the U.S. Senate bogged down in legislative minutia. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the "Passage of Power," Caro's  account of the Kennedy assassination, which captivated me. I'll probably make an effort to read the entire book, which begins with Johnson's effort to gain the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, examines his lost years as Kennedy's vice president and ends with Johnson's leadership in passing landmark civil rights legislation.  The look at Kennedy's presidency from Johnson's viewpoint promises to give a fresh account of "Camelot."

By the way, the title "The Passage of Power," strikes me as odd. This has a passive tone, as if the power passed to Johnson in some magical, mysterious way. It almost sounds as if it were a normal passage of power, as happens when an incumbent ends his two terms, or loses an election. The title's bland construction denies the historical reality that Johnson gained power because of the assassination.

Ed Sanders Remembers the Fugs

I'm finding it all too easy to buy books for the Nook. The cost is less per book than in a bookstore, but clicking that little tab quickly adds up. 

My latest ebook purchase is "Fug You," the memoirs of Ed Sanders, one of America's overlooked cultural heroes. How ironic that I would follow Ed's career into the ebook era, when I first encountered his work on vinyl 33-rpm records when he was the leader of The Fugs and a solo artist who produced one of the great albums, the "Ed Sanders Truckstop." I have also read many of Sanders' books, including "Tales of Beatnik Glory," poems and "The Family," the best book written about the Charles Manson trial. Even when he was publishing iconoclastic works such as his "Fuck You, a magazine of the arts," Sanders stood outside of the bohemian counterculture.

Like another satirical genius of the '60s, Frank Zappa, Sanders has a conservative side that allows him to look critically at the excesses of the philosophies that took root in the '60s. As with Zappa, Sanders' songs take a broad aim, examining middle class conventional society as well as the hippie, left wing culture that brewed its own deadening conformity in rebelling against "the bourgeoise."

Like Sanders, Zappa first produced classics as the leader of a band. Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Sanders' Fugs produced brilliant satire that showed a firm grasp of a range of musical styles, not only in melody but with lyrics. Then both of them produced ground-breaking work as single artists. While Sanders also wrote poems and books, Zappa moved into different realms as a producer on Bizarre and Straight records, with such imporant works as a album of Lenny Bruce's Berkeley concert and Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica." 

While Zappa's music grew more sophisticated and self-conscious with its models on jazz and classical music, Sanders found a similar model in country western and swing. Both found rich troves in early rock and rhythym and blues. Like all great parodies, Sanders "Truckstop" not only makes fun of country motifs, but shows great love and respect for them. As with Zappa making great rock and jazz while parodying them, Sanders makes great country and swing music.

Sanders with his blue collar characters such as "Johnny Pissoff" showed an early understanding of and sympathy for working class anger that most '60s writers lacked. Zappa understood a different class, a more suburban, California-mall-oriented group, while Sanders captured the feelings and cultural touchstones of truckers and plumbers and carpenters, haunted by Jesus, sex and booze. Sanders' humor is more free-swinging and guttural than Zappa's. The Fugs, who also included the late Tuli Kupferberg, were part of the New York village scene that also produced Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, while Zappa came from the Southern California freeway-oriented musical mix. While turning to country, Sanders and the Fugs kept the Lower East Side influence; while Zappa remained rooted in Laurel Canyon.

Sanders' self styled "investigative poetry" is too programmed and topical, but I'll always remember reading his "Poems for New Orleans," on the abuses in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His poems put these in a more memorable and compelling form than the countless magazine articles and books about the storm's aftermath. As with all of his work, he shows a jazzy, free-form sensibility along with a deep knowledge of New Orleans' history and culture. I bought that book in Cambridge Square, then spent a nice morning in Harvard Yard reading it. Sanders' poems, like his other works, are viscerally entertaining.

The Fugs' name, like that of his new memoir, comes from the euphemism that Norman Mailer used in his celebrated first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," for the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon f-word . This nod to literary culture is another hallmark that set Sanders apart; he has a strong knowledge of American poetry and fiction, with Fugs songs making references to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle (HD). He references Homer and the Iliad in "Truckstop."  Unlike some anarchists and bohemian figures, he had a strong reverence for books and writing, a desire to preserve and celebrate the literary culture. That's why his book on Manson displays such deep understanding; Sanders knows and is part of the nihilistic cultural waves that produced Manson, but possesses the disgust and foreboding of a cultural conservative.

At 72, Ed Sanders continues to provoke and entertain. Reading him, I am saddened that Zappa didn't live to see the social media era. But I'm thankful to have Sanders still among us. 

American literature is blessed with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth who continue producing vital work into old age. Sanders, for all of his idiosyncrasies, can stand among them.

 

Encountering the Nook

Now I've entered the e-book world, having received a Barnes & Noble "Nook" for Christmas. I've used the Nook for reading the celebrated "Pulpwood," the collection of magazine writing by John Jeremiah Sullivan. After reading orgiastic reviews by the New Yorker's James Wood and others, I wasn't that blown away by Mr. Sullivan, whose work struck me as remote, and emotionally un-engaged. Too much about him, not enough about his subjects, although he did introduce me to an old blues song I'd never heard of, 'Last Kind Words Blues."

I also used the Nook, which always reminds me of the old nasty word for female genitalia, to purchase Patti Smith's memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. I also downloaded quite a few classics, either free or for $1, such as Alexander Pope's translation of "The Odyssey," James Joyce's "Ulysses," etc. In some ways, I find the Nook easier reading than a book, easier to rapidly skim through, so I thought I could at last finish Joyce's work and others. In searches of what's available on the Nook, I've found some puzzling and distressing omissions. One day, I suppose, I'll try movies, TV shows and movies on "The Nook."

Speaking of magazine writers, I've read two pieces, Wood's and one by David Brooks, that calls all magazine pieces "essays." The term can refer to pieces used to be known as "articles," i.e. factual works based on reporting. I thought the term essay referred to personal, reflective pieces, although an author can write an essay on subjects outside of the self, such as books, paintings, cities, places. Yet, I was curious that the term essay has been expanded. Is this a cover for the blending of fact and invention? Would celebrated pieces such as Norman Mailer's look at Vietnam Moratorium Day, or Tom Wolfe's look at the Merry Pranksters, be called essays, not reporting? 

On a trip to New York, I discovered a recently released collection by a vintage New Yorker writer, Wolcott Gibbs. He was a triple-threat man, doing articles, short stories, theater reviews, "Talk of the Town" pieces. His most famous piece, I suppose, was the paradoy of old Time-ese, "Backward Ran the Sentences Until Reeled the Mind." Reading Wood's piece on Sullivan, which claimed for Sullivan territory covered long ago by New Journalists like Mailer, Wolfe and Gay Talese, I felt a similar dizziness.

 

Farewell, Christopher Hitchens

At Christopher Hitchens' death, I recall in some amazement how much of his work I've read. Before completing his memoirs, "Hitch-22," I regularly read his columns in Vanity Fair and the online magazine Slate, as well as collections of his essays. I first started reading him years ago in "the Nation," when he was an unalloyed member of the left. I've also read some of his other books, such as his appreciation of Orwell.

Reading his book reviews for the Atlantic in his recently released volume of collected essays, I return to my earlier opinion that he was at his best writing about literature, although he perhaps was better known as a political and social polemicist. Although he never wrote fiction or poetry, or at least published any, he possessed as a critic a perception of imaginative writers' purposes and how well they accomplished them.

At times in his political writing, I felt he was a fraud, a charlaton with opinions a bit too glibly stated. He was always, though, an engaging writer who challenged thought, an examinatioin of my own opinions and conceptions. I liked his swaggering, wise-guy personality. His takedowns of Mother Teresa, Kissinger and Bill Clinton remain in my memory, bolstering my skepticism and natural propensity to shun idols.

His final writings gave excruciating details about the progress of the cancer that killed him. A final piece in the current Vanity Fair vividly renders the pain and humiliation of a terminal patient. It reads like great fiction, making me wish that he had written novels and short stories.

He dies at 62, the same age my father died of cancer nearly 30 years ago. Hard to imagine the world of thought and language without Hitchens' distinctive voice.

Shakespeare Troupe Moving to Fort Greene

The New York Times had an interesting story Saturday morning about the Theater for a New Audience Shakespearian theater moving from Manhattan to Fort Greene in Brooklyn, where the city is funding a new $47.5 million theater for the company. The move drew criticism from black residents and artists, who say the move catering to, as the Times said, works of a "Dead White Male" playwright. Said Laurie A. Cumbo of the Musem of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, "We have a role and respnsibility to act as a community so that these institutions that we're building first and foremost benefits the people who live" here. Then we can think about the hipsters, the yuppies, the Manhattanites and that sort of thing."

I can see the need for the city to fund works of emerging black playwrights, along with works from other groups. Artistic merit, not ethnicity, should be the standard. However, while Shakespeare the man might be white and dead, his plays have remained alive for more than 400 years, and speak to all of us. The belief that Shakespeare doesn't relate to black audiences shortchanges them. The article says the Theater for a New Audience does three plays a year; surely other companies and artistic genres can use the theater some of the time. It would be a good gesture for the theater to open itself to contemporary plays, including those of black writers and performers.

The building of the theater recalled to me that Shakespeare's own company built the Globe Theater in London. What does it say about our time that in the Elizabethan era, a theatrical troupe could afford its own stage, not depending on the queen to fund it. Of course, today the theater must compete with much more entertainment offerings. The wealth of "The King's Men" can only be duplicated in mega performances on Broadway, which also continues to struggle along with symphonies, museums, publishers,etc. 

 

 

Garry Wills' Effervescent Adventures

I've read many of Garry Wills' books and articles over the years, finding compatible his mix of erudition and clear writing. I especially liked his book on Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," in which he explored the rhetorical sources of the great president's work. Another favorite was his small biography of St. Augustine. However, I was disappointed by later works on the Gospels and Jesus' life. These books, although showing Wills' deep learning and strong Catholic faith, I found difficult to read. Whether Wills' talent to keep me absorbed in difficult material had faltered or whether my concentration abilities had declined I cannot say with certainty; probably a bit of both.

One day, I heard Wills interviewed on "The Bob Edwards Show" about his new book, "Outside Looking In, Adventures of an Observer." Wills was captivating in discussing his memoir, based on his reminisces of characters he had encountered during his dual life as a journalist and academic. Wills claimed himself an outsider because he was an academic doing magazine journalism for Esquire's Harold Hayes and the National Review's William F. Buckley and a journalist in the academic world of Northwestern and other schools. Despite his high success in both realms, he didn't really feel like he was really a "member" of each guild. While a a strong Catholic, learned in classic Greek, who recites the rosary every day, Wills also feels apart from the Catholic faith, in opposition to papal doctrines, which he discounts with deep historical knowledge.

The Wills interview made me want to read the book. I searched for it in a Borders in San Francisco, but it was absent from the bio section, although a computer search claimed it was in the store. Then, I found it in my familiar neighborhood Borders. At first I resisted, the went ahead and bought it, one of the few books I've purchased in several months, finding my library excellent in offering new books.

I consumed the somewhat slight book in a couple of days. Like recent memoirs of Larry McMurtry, the Wills' book shows evidence of quick writing and superficiality, yet that very lightness makes it entertaining. Wills encounters a diverse cast of characters, from Jack Ruby to obscure MLK lieutenant James Bevel, to Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, James Hoffa, and others. The book gives a quick and accessible history of political and literary culture from the 1960s through today. The most vivid portrait is of William F. Buckley, showing his zany energy and charm. Also captivating is Wills' account of his relationship with his wife Natalie. "Outside Looking In" was like a letter from an old friend, with whom I share a similar outlook. Yes, I understood perfectly Wills' frequent feeling of being "Outside Looking In."

Tom Yuill: "I Want the Poem to Be Itself, to Be a Realized, Complete Work of Art"

      I met Tom Yuill for all of two minutes last summer in the Grolier Poetry Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. In our brief chat before he hurried off to catch a plane, I learned that he was a poet, so I quickly asked if he would participate in a Southern Bookman interview. He heartily agreed before rushing off into the bright morning. I repaired to nearby Harvard Square with Tom's collection "Medicine Show" (University of Chicago Press) and his e-mail address. I spent an hour or so seated on a bench as students and teachers ambled by, finding myself entranced and excited by Tom's poems, which combined formal elements with daring flights of expression. Elizabethan and modernist echoes blended with sounds of the blues, Texas honky tonks and cowboy songs. Themes of rebellion, family loyalty, allegiance to the past and tradition, and the desire for escape and freedom meshed in artistic counterpoint. Since then, we have developed a warm friendship via e-mail. Now in mid-autumn, here are Tom's responses to my questions. Tom teaches at Boston University, where he studied with one of the first subjects of the Southern Bookman interviews, Rosanna Warren. 

Your fine book “Medicine Show” contains a multitude of characters, moods, voices and settings. A key is the poem “Several Histories” (freely after Hikmet) in which you say “into being came three worlds/ Where I still live.” The collection explores these several histories, and perhaps more than three worlds. How do these histories and worlds correspond and interact?

I guess the whole thing together is a strange panegyric. The arc of the book, its plot, is one way the different “worlds” interact. The tongue in cheek swagger, artifice and naivete of, say, “Ode to the Wind” give this sass-laden paean to free will the right tenor for the first section, in which the poet is not yet cognizant of the depth of his confusion. The adaptations of Villon in particular but also of Corbiere and Catullus appear like consoling blues tunes, Hank Williams songs or — to me at least — hymns. They echo present pain and thereby give solace and bring needed empathetic companionship. By the time we get to “Several Histories” the poet character of the book is more attuned to his devastations and to his joys. Hikmet’s wonderful poem is often translated as “Two Loves,” so mine is really an occasion in a little lyric spell to receive the gift of Hikmet’s kind genius and to hear it as I do hear it, through the noise and sweetness of my own disordered memories — “worlds” you might call them — some fairly real, most of them largely imagined.

 I loved the references to the Rolling Stones. How does their music influence you as a poet?

The Rolling Stones are, for me, stunning artists. I was never the kind of person who wanted to rush down to their hotel after the show to try to hang out or the deluded sort who thought he should try heroin because Keith did it. I don’t care what they look like or who else likes their records, whether the new record gets good reviews. It would be my pleasure to meet them I suppose, particularly Charlie, but their music and performances have always been more than enough of a gift, a staggering gift of creative work for anyone who is interested. Keith, Mick and Charlie do something with rhythm that is transformative. Transformative of received influences, transformative to the central nervous systems of people listening, transformative in the highest traditions of art and on a basic physical level. Listen to Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon,” then listen to “Beast of Burden,” for instance. I have no idea if the Stones were trying to do anything in particular there, but the relatively disciplined, infectious cadences of “Havana Moon” seem to me transformed into the peculiarly rollicking, infectious cadences of “Beast of Burden.” Dad taught me what iambic pentameter is so long ago I literally cannot remember learning it. I only remember, at a very young age, knowing what it is.

Where both deliberate the love is slight.

I just knew whenever some teacher asked me about it, what was in blank verse and what was not. So when I write something like, 

The air is hot, it whispers, it has lips.

It whispers like good news…the beer is cold…

I know, having internalized blank verse a long time ago, I have internalized something else as well. perhaps listening to the Stones for 15 years prior to that helped me find my own peculiarities within that pentameter. Not quite iambic, but, for me, for that poem, it’s on the money.   

 
 
You had three different poems titled “Medicine Show.” The way you paced them through the book gave the impression of a wagon traveling to different places. Do you see them as a sequence, perhaps as one poem?

I don’t see them as a sequence exactly, but I certainly see them as connected. I like the impression you got, Louis — thank you. The poem just needed three versions, and the book needed each of them at different points. Should one see the book as a quest upward, or downward perhaps, up Parnassus or down Mount Jackass, the three versions might simply reflect the poet’s gradual internal and external progress. After all it’s easy enough to feel discouraged not being able to improve society, even one’s own corner of it, and most concerned Americans might feel hopeless enough by now about a war one knows about mainly from seeing it on television, a hideously remote reality for something that serious. It’s not that hard to know burying one’s self in a pile of middle class burdens will be, for some, a realistic way to raise children, for others a form of self-burial. The last of the three, of course, is a healing lyric. Your parents are not perfect, and they love you. How much trading pain for pain might be avoided with such revelations? But the other versions have to be there, too.

 I loved the evocations of your Texas childhood and family, particularly the son’s relationship with the father, with elements of rebellion and conflict as well as love. How did you give these personal narratives such universal power?

Such personal narratives had universal power a long time before I came along. Which is not to say I do not deeply appreciate your observation — such poems are, after all, great opportunities for falling on your face as a poet. Texas will always be profound to me. The places we live when we are little often stay uniquely meaningful. I always think Dad, his Dad whom we all knew as Kewpie, and Mom’s Dad, Granddaddy Bell, are the three greatest guys I’ll ever know. By the late '90s it became the norm to treat your father as ridiculous, like Homer Simpson, but rebellion used to be quite normal — beyond whatever Freud articulated. The best popular music of the 1960s is so incredibly good that a lot of cultural moments which were only really valid then became shadow versions of themselves for kids in the 70s, the 80s, even the 90s. Everyone was supposed to try to have their version of what they thought the 60s were. Kids my age wanted electric guitars for Christmas so they could play Van Halen covers. I always preferred the Stones and the Beatles, and I was captain of the swim team in high school and recruited to swim on a Division 1 team in college, so I was immune to some of that influence, but not all of it. For a while I suppose I thought you were supposed to be mad at your father. He was very patient with it for the most part, and eventually I decided rebelling doesn’t have much to do with originality. We returned to the norm then, which for us meant we were very close.   

Your freely rendered translations of poets like Villon, Hikmet and Corbiere reminded me of similar work by Robert Lowell. Is Lowell a strong influence for you?

Robert Lowell’s “Imitations” is very important to me. After my first day in graduate school at BU I took Derek Walcott’s advice and went to the Grolier to buy it. Also at Derek’s suggestion I started rewriting Rimbaud and Baudelaire poems in free verse. Then I had the profound good luck to work with Rosanna Warren, both in the graduate poetry seminar and in her translation seminar. There I studied Dryden’s essay in earnest, along with the usual classic texts from Benjamin, etc. I still find Mark Strand’s Grade A poem “Translation” perhaps the easiest to sympathize with on this vast subject. I am not an expert in foreign languages but a poet who feels uncommonly indebted to older poets, many of whom wrote in languages other than English. My adaptations and imitations should not be understood too differently from, say, the Rolling Stones’ electric cover version of Robert Johnson’s acoustic “Stop Breaking Down Blues.”

The poem “Dallas Skinheads” stood out, combining the diverse elements that make the entire book so captivating. How did you see such disreputable characters as sympathetic, almost heroic?

The poem’s rhyme scheme is an abbc sort of pattern so it has a sonic fabric holding its various elements together. And it is in couplets, so they perhaps whisper the idea of heroics. And of course there is the organization of the poem, which for me is like the organization of images on a rose medallion vase or the weaving together of elements in one of Robert Pinsky’s poems. I never set out to try to write poems like Robert’s, but BU was the only graduate program to which I applied specifically because I knew I had to work with him. He proved to be every bit the mentor I needed as a younger poet, and more. Some influence is bound to show, I suppose. AS I say in the notes, I owe Robert a special debt of gratitude.

I should point out the young skinhead is not a neo-nazi but a social misfit trying to find a way to affirm himself. There is something at least poignant, if not necessarily heroic, in the struggle to affirm one’s self in the midst of confusion. The older lyric from “Streets of Laredo” is often thought of as a light little cowboy song. The Smothers Brothers did a pastiche of it. But it’s about a young man who’s gotten himself fatally wounded for no particularly good reason, and is trying to ask before he dies for some modest funeral. The Mom character in the poem experiences the sudden death of her own mother and begins to slowly destroy herself. The Americans in the Midwest, whose children may be rebelling for reasons unclear to them, may themselves be voting for a president who wants to make possible a winnable nuclear war. Unconscious, destructive impulses are not the private property of the young, even if the young may be the most obvious sufferers of such impulses. And of course, it is a poem about influences. We have free will, perhaps. The question is, do we use it? 

Like Lowell, you have a gift for memorable, striking individual lines that click into the mind like gold coins. Do you work and rework these lines, or are they products of sudden inspiration?

Well, thank you for a great compliment. I compose all the time, always have a pen and scrap of paper in my pocket or by the bed, so sudden inspiration must certainly be part of what I’m doing. But I work on the lines, the stanzas, the poems, all of it, over and over. I have spent years listening to a poem over and over, trying to make sure the rhythms I have on the page are right for the poem itself. I take great swaths of lines, pull three of seven out and fuse them with one or twelve more I wrote at another time. No rules, really, except that I want to the poem to be itself, to be a realized, complete work of art. And, sure, for me part of that is giving it the right lines, not the flashiest lines, not the strangest lines, not the most formally strict lines, none of that. If the lines are memorable I give credit to the poem, that is to say, I said it aloud so many times it must have wrung from itself whatever wasn’t ringing true. As Shakespeare, Lowell, Sidney, Villon, Fulke Greville and Frost teach us, what rings true artistically IS often memorable. Thank you for the kind compliment to those poems.

 What direction is your work taking these days?

My next book of poetry is called “American Bull Terrier.” It has begun as a book about force, Being as Force I guess, in the Heideggerian sense. But it will certainly go from there to become more complex. Dad is one of the heroes of "Medicine Show" — Mom and Dad. Mom is an ethereal presence reappearing throughout, and Dad rests in a big poem right before the last section. So far Kewpie (my father’s father) appears to be one hero of the new one. And my wife, of course, remains a Muse and a beacon. I never worry about formal strategy or such things. I learn about the form of the book as I write, revise and organize the poems.  

 

 

 

A Decline in Passion for Books?

Slate media critic Jack Shafer recently lamented that he no longer reveres books as he once did. Shafer said that he once collected books, stacked them in his home, fondled their covers,and honored authors and books' transcendent cultural value. Now, he says, he rarely if ever even attends a book party.

Book party invitations seem a superficial manifestation of a love for books, but I know what Shafer means. I also don't experience the passion for books I once had. Once the publication of "big" fall books excited me, but no more. I still go to bookstores and libraries, yet it more and more feels out of habit than enthusiasm.

My home is loaded with books from years of collecting. A few old favorites I take down to re-read, such as my old graybound "Norton Anthology of English Literare, Vols. I and II," from my college days. I like being surrounded by books, as Anthony Powell's title said, books do furnish a room. Yet, I do not purchase as many books today as I once did. Fewer and fewer books do I find interesting enough to take home on impulse.

Still, I maintain a stack of books beside my living room chair. Although I detect a falloff in my passion for books, I still feel satisfaction at discovering an interesting book at the library. Poetry books especially still excite me. Perhaps I'm just not taken by those books heralded by arbiters like the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Books still matter to me, but as Shafer reflects, their hold is weakening. I am undoubtedly affected my the general drop in books' importance, along with that of newspapers, magazines and literary journals.

Shafer made an interesting comment about the rise of the Kindle and the e-book, that perhaps they would put the emphasis on reading, not the book. I once considered books, with their cover designs, photographs and artwork, as works of art. With the Kindle, they are more and more vehicles of information and entertainment, not artifacts. Shafer could be right that such devices indicate the primacy of content, the irrelevance of form.

New York Times Glows for Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Wiener recently complained that The New York Times' literary coverage is biased toward white male authors of "literary fiction." Sniffed Picoult in a Tweet, that venue of well-considered literary thought, "Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." Picoult and Wiener whimpered over the massive attention the Times gave to Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Freedom," although the Times wasn't alone; Time magazine put Franzen on its cover.

If such a bias exists, it apparently doesn't extend to "creative nonfiction," a phrase that makes me uneasy. Recently, the Times has twice reviewed black woman writer Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," and this week profiled Wilkerson. Wilkerson accomplished the literary trifecta of having her book reviewed by Times literary top gun Michiko Kakutani and receiving a front-page rave on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The profile of Wilkerson was done by longtime literary journalist Charles McGrath. Wilkerson is basking in the warmth of the New York Times' many suns.

Her book is a massive look at the "great migration," during which a huge number of blacks fled the Jim Crowe South for Northern and Western cities.  The Times reviews, along with a recent strong review in The New Yorker, call the book a major work. In an inspiring show of perseverance, Wilkerson took 15 years to finish the book, interviewing 1,500 blacks who'd left the South. However, she focuses on the stories of just three people, which raises the question whether she decided to aim for commercial attractiveness rather than in-depth scholarly writing of more appeal to an academic audience.

Wilkerson's title comes from the great black writer Richard Wright, who said that the black migration to the North was in search of the "warmth of other suns." Her book draws attention to the horrid South where black men were frequent lynching victims and segregation was deeply enforced. Wilkerson uncovers strange evidence of how deep the system ran; blacks and whites were forbidden to play checkers in Birmingham parks. That thankfully vanished world today seems unbelievable even to those who lived through it, and writers like Wilkerson are to be commended for showing the brutal reality of those days.

McGrath's profile of Wilkerson is readable, yet superficial. He points out that Wilkerson lives in Atlanta, although she "commutes to Boston, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Boston University." While not elaborating further on that commute, the piece says Wilkerson moved to Atlanta in 2001 "for reasons unconnected to the book." Those reasons are never detailed. However, Wilkerson says that she discovered that "she needed to be here, only I didn't know it." She continues, "I needed to look through the exile's heart and feel that distant, rejecting, hurtful feeling," adding "I needed to come here to see what they left."

Undboutedly, discrimnation and racism remain in the South, yet the piece doesn't delve into how Wilkerson "saw what they left." McGrath, nor Wilkerson, ever reflect upon Atlanta's status as a mecca for Southern business and culture, even in the mean old days of Jim Crow. Atlanta's reputation for tolerance has been overstated --a destructive race riot occurred here in the early 20th century -- yet it still offered blacks prospects for commerce, education and artistic expression sorely lacking in the rest of the South. I would have been interested in Wilkerson's views on Atlanta's history and present status as a center of black achievement. But McGrath apparently didn't follow up on this.

Also crying ouf for further elaboration is the statement "... the book, influenced by Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' and the films of Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh, rotates in a novelistic way among three main characters whose stories are interspered with broader, more gneral inter-chapters." Steinbeck, Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh? Creative nonfiction, begone.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" sounds like an deep examination of a major historical subject, although male historians, whether white or black, would wish for similar attention. Also, as McGrath quickly points out, Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times as a features writer for the newspaper. Cynics will likely wonder whether her connection with the paper played a role in the attention giver her book.

The controversy about whether the Times plays literary favorites could only arise in regard to that newspaper, the only one that runs separate reviews in its regular Arts section and in an independent  Sunday book review. Most newspapers around the country are cutting back or eliminating their book reviews. However, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has recently had a resurgence in running reviews and writing about authors, generally connected with the recent Decatur Book Festival. The AJC in a surprising sign of local knowledge, even had its own superficial profile of Wilkerson.

The disturbing trend of reduced book coverage is countered by an announcement I saw somewhere in Internet land that the Wall Street Journal will soon run a separate book review. While this is welcome, I hope the WSJ continues running as well its outstanding daily book reviews, along with its book coverage in the Friday and Saturday "weekend" sections. I'm suspicious that the arrival of a separate book review will lead to the elimination of book coverage elsewhere.

While alarms keep ringing (sorry, Mr. Orwell) about declines in reading, these literary stirrings show an abiding interest in books and publishing, and not only in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Books on a broad number of subjects keep coming out. And the proliferation of events like the Decatur Book Festival reflect a deep and committed love of reading and books.

Yet disturbing signs are everywhere; I discovered this week that the long-established Louisiana Book Festival has bene canceled, because of state budget cuts. This left me with the chilling recollection that a state austerity movement after Huey Long's downfall led to the demise of LSU's Southern Review, later revived. The distinguished LSU Press and Southern Review were threatened by a first wave of budget cuts last year. With further drastic budget cuts looming, and an aversion to increasing taxes, the LSU Press and Southern Revew are again threatened. This year, they are celebrating 75 years of literary excellence. 

 

Yiyun Li's "The Science of Flight" Boosts New Yorker

I've been disappointed by stories written by New Yorker's chosen writers under 40. I generally must be drawn into a story by the opening paragraph, although I sometimes skip ahead to the middle and get hooked by a situation or piece of dialogue there. None of the stories had grabbed me at the beginning, and none had rewarded a leap forward.

On this balmy Labor Day afternoon, I was happy to be compelled from the start by Yiyun Li's "The Science of Flight," in the Aug. 30 issue. Yes, I was two weeks behind in reading the New Yorker. I sat in the Adirondack chair on the front porch with the issue of the magazine, drifting off to sleep from time to time in the pleasant breeze.

"The Science of Flight" pulled me in with the first paragraph, transporting me to a special place that was strange and different, and yet wholly believable. The story was so good that now I want to discover more of her work; she has a new collection of stories coming out this month, "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl."

I also read Jane Mayer's excellent examination of those krazy Koch brothers, "Covert Operations," my original reason for catching up with the issue. The piece on the billionaires who fund political groups fighting Obama adminstration programs and global warming and other environmental initiatives had been the talk of the chattering class when it came out. Mayer did her usual fine job in uncovering the brothers' funding of a number of right-wing, libertarian groups. Of local interest was her reporting that Koch Industries now owns Georgia-Pacific -- its headquarters are a downtown Atlanta landmark. GP, Mayer says, is a major manufacturer of formaldehyde, documented as a carcinogen, which the Kochs are seeking to dispute.

Reading about GP's role in the Koch empire brought me back to all of those times walking through downtown Atlanta when I would be fascinated by the GP skyscraper's optical illusion of lack of three-dimensionality against the sky. Mayer shows that the Koch brothers seek to construct a similar illusion with their schemes, in which their organizations with generic, progressive-sounding names churn out reams of right-wing propaganda that flow through the media. They are also funding the Tea Party movement, reputed to be a spontaneous, grass-roots phenomenon.