Southern Bookman

E-books Hit the Stacks

Anthony W. Marx, head of the New York Public Library, in a New York Times op-ed article today praises the Big Six (not the Original Six - that's hockey) book publishers for increasing the library's access to e-books. Yet Marx's piece makes clear that the publishers have placed severe restrictions on e-book circulation.

Marx, in another context under fire for plans to renovate the library's Fifth Avenue crown jewel, sees e-books as the future. My take-away is that limits on e-book circulation widen the "digital divide" between those who can buy the newest devices and e-information and those who can't. At least Marx is consistent - his plans to rip up the hallowed Fifth Avenue library reading room and create some kind of Internet cafe gave a collective shudder to the intellectual class horrified that the plan would be taking democracy too far, block that cappuccino!

Meanwhile, the irrepressible Tom Friedman, in his adjacent column, comes up with another of his glib concepts. Nowadays, it's a "401 (k) world," says Mr. Tom, meaning that unlike in the old pension-Social Security world, workers have to fend for themselves and acquire ever more rarified skills to survive in the "hyper-connected" world. Mr. Tom finds "a lot of this scary," although it can be presumed that his 401 ( k) looks pretty good. It's cold out there for a pimp, but Mr. Tom can charge nearly $1,000 a head to attend his seminar on this scary, scary hyper-connected world.

As Marx says, - Anthony, not Karl - more and more people are using the library for Internet access, to check e-mail and increase those skills Friedman discusses. Yet library funding goes down and the profit-hungry publishers place limits on e-books.

After all of this, I felt a bit queasy to find on the business page that cash-heavy Apple, the leading maker of smart phones and tablets for easy e-book enlightenment, is issuing millions in bonds, essentially acquiring more cash by raising debt. Apple reportedly will use some of that money for dividends to shareholders. If only I had bought Apple Stock, my 401 (k) would look much brighter and I could afford to acquire whatever skills Mr. Tom somewhat murkily says I will need for the scary 401 (k) world. I might even be able to attend one of his seminars, or figure out how to download e-books from the library to my Apple-made I-Pad. Marx says many folks don't even know they can download e-books from the library. I tried to download some to my Nook, but all the books I wanted had a long waiting time, as admittedly is the situation with old fashioned paper books. Marx's article makes clear why.

Perhaps we could go back to that other Marx and say "workers of the world unite" but that boat has apparently already sunk in our 401 (k) world. Groucho Marx might give us a bit of insight too; I'm sure his clips can be found on You Tube.

If the Big Six makes you dizzy, there's always the Original Six: all of them are in the NHL playoffs for the first time in ages. The best bet for the Stanley Cup, an ESPN analyst says, are Pittsburgh and Chicago, two cities that make me nostalgic for the old non-hyper-connected world.

More Writing Tips From John McPhee

John McPhee in this week's New Yorker continues his primers for writers, discussing how he goes through several drafts before giving his articles and books that trademark polish. His confession of despair, turmoil and frustration in producing the all-important first draft offers encouragement to struggling scribes.

For grammar nerds, McPhee's piece devolves into a discussion of such points as when which can be used to modify a restrictive clause. He affectionately recounts tussles with the New Yorker's formidable copy desk, giving tribute to the magazine's longtime grammarian, Eleanor Gould, whose name lives on when copy editors "Gould" a proof. McPhee's piece brought an amusing follow up from copy editor Mary Norris on the New Yorker's web site about why the magazine spells traveler traveller.

...The Wall Street Journal today had a charming piece about sax player Sonny Rollins. I was amused at Rollins's (New Yorker style, as McPhee discusses) comment that at age 81, he has less energy for practice, often playing his instrument for just three hours. Three hours! I'm lucky to last for 30 minutes at the piano.

...Farewell to George Jones, one of America's great originals. A distinctive voice and a wild character.

Valdosta Nights: Football Life in a Southern Town

Drew Jubera's "Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team" goes beyond its hyperbolic title with a rich, in-depth look at a small Southern city and its passion for high school football.

More than just a sports book, "Must Win" uses the 2010 Valdosta Wildcats season to examine education, race, religion, teen life, religion, hip hop, poverty, and urban problems. Along with that, sports fans will find a wealth of high school football lore.

Jubera, a longtime colleague of mine at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, spent a year in Valdosta to chronicle the Wildcats' 2010 season under new coach Rance Gillespie, hired to restore the Wildcats' declining football dynasty.

Once nationally known as the country's top high school football power under legendary coaches Wright Bazemore and Nick Hyder, Valdosta had declined in the 1990s after Hyder's unexpected death, of a heart attack in the school's cafeteria at lunchtime. With white flight and a falling population, the old inner-city school had watched nearby Lowndes County High rise in wealth and football power.

Jubera presents an engaging history of the town's football rise and fall, giving fascinating details of the city's and region's past and present along the way. Valdosta, on the eastern edge of U.S. 84 football crescent that swings through south Georgia, is the last stop on i-75 before tourists reach Florida. That geographical distinction has allowed the city to build a tourism industry based on interstate hotels and restaurants. Jubera delves into the area's agricultural past of turpentine production, when black workers were brutally exploited. He shows how that past echoes into the present day, when many black members of the Valdosta team are beset by poverty and violence.

The book is populated by an interesting group of characters, from longtime Valdosta boosters desperate to restore the glory days to football-addicted coaches and stressed teachers and parents. The most memorable characters are the handful of players whom Jubera highlights in heartbreaking, funny and endearing ways.

At times, Jubera's attempts at hip-hop flavored effects fall short, but those are rare blemishes. "Must Win's" intensely regional focus, as with Faulkner, gives it universal appeal. The book deserves national attention and readership.

An Atavistic Publishing Venture

The New York Times' media watchdog David Carr reported this morning that old media turned new media mogul Barry Diller is involved with a new e-book publishing venture with Atavist, a Brooklyn startup that offers an e-book platform for would be publishers, writers and pundits. Atavist's original mission, as related to its name, was to provide a format for publishing old-fashioned lengthy pieces in the new e-world. Looks like the bright young kids have hit the jackpot with the new venture, to be called Brightline.

Brightline will seek to compete with the e-book heavyweight Amazon, which has already signed up some bigtime publishing and writing talent. It's striking that "content" remains the vital ingredient, no matter the format. Stories are a key part of human nature, whether told orally over the campfire, written on scrolls or transcribed by monks with pens, produced by printing presses, or, now, by electronic pulses.

As the e-book world churns, I am happy with my Nook and a bunch of recent discoveries. The former New Yorker worker Janet Groth's memoir "The Receptionist"  is among my recent downloads. Her recollection of her years at the magazine, with memories of famed New Yorker writers like Joseph Mitchell and the doomed poet John Berryman, makes me wonder how she remained on the receptionist's desk for 18 years without writing for the magazine. Her ability to set scenes and convey character was sorely needed during former editor William Shawn's late years.

Also, I have on my Nook library poems of Laura Kasischke, discovered through The Sunday New York Times Magazine's piece on Stephen Burt, the cross-dressing Harvard literary critic. Yes, those terms are correct; read the piece. Kasischke's strong vision and original use of language in her collection "Space, In Chains," stand out.

Of course, I remain a denizen of the old print world. I discovered in the library a copy of Burt's "The Age of Randall Jarrell," which I checked out, as well as poet/critic Louis Simpson's study of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Simpson, whose poems I once studied when I first started in the poery world, died this week, another fine mind ruined by Alzheimer's. He was one of America's under-appreciated World War II and after poets, with a refined, muted understanding of the desperation beneath American affluence.

As I mourn longtime favorites like Simpson, the fall-like weather makes me glad at the prospect of new literary discoveries, both in the E and old-print worlds.

 

An Affecting Portrait of Robert Lowell, New England Society

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece by a writer I'd never heard of, Sarah Payne Stuart, about buying houses in the old, history-drenched town of Concord, Mass. One of our most memorable vacations included a stay in Concord, where the first shot of the Revolution was fired, and where Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts lived. Stuart delighted me with her lilting, ironic-funny voice. I did a Google search and discovered that she was a member of Robert Lowell's family and had written a memoir about him and his relatives called, "My Cousin, Once Removed."

I ordered the book on Amazon; sorry, independent booksellers. Despite its unimaginative, vanity press-sounding title. the book is a valuable contribution to Robert Lowell studies. As a longtime lover of Lowell's poetry, fascinated by his tortured, manic-depressive life, I savored each word of Stuart's memoir. Along with a sympathetic-repelled portrait of Lowell, she also amusingly slices up Thoreau's work, along with the Concord tourist hype surrounding him. I'll never think of Thoreau in the same way again. Her wry resistance to Walden romanticism is a bracing, if eventually secondary, part of the book.

Stuart, whose claims of not understanding Lowell's poems are a frequent refrain, deftly devastates his work, especially his early, clotted poems. While highly affectionate about Lowell, picturing him as an emotionally pampered, fragile genius at family gatherings, she shows "Bobby" as a perpetual lost adolescent, if that far advanced emotionally. While she shows glimpses of Lowell, nicknamed "Cal" for either Caligula or Caliban, as the self-centered bullying brute oft depicted, her final passages reveal him as a tender, compassionate man, especially with female members of his family. He is shown having a particular kindness to younger kinfolk, such as Stuart herself.

The author's subtitle about madness, money and Lowell's family is apt; money and madness are the poles of the family's long decline, although Stuart's generation, while losing the family inheritance, shows a new creative energy. Lowell's often incapacitating disease was a family curse, at least of the old New England Lowell and Devereux families, if not of the Winslows who married into them. Stuart gives fascinating glimpses through generational studies of all three interconnected families. Stuart's own mother, Lowell's first cousin, like Lowell also spent time in mental hospitals, and Stuart's brother also inherited the mental imbalance. Along with bittersweet laughter, Stuart shows the pathos of such gifted people continually struck by crippling mental breakdowns. Her brother, called Johnny here, is the gifted musician John Payne, who played on Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," and performed with other musicians and now operates an innovative music-education center in Brookline, Mass. Johnny, who shared time with Robert Lowell at the upper class mental hospital McLeans, was later thrust into the crueler public hospital Mass. Mental. A series of electric shock treatments ended Johnny's breakdowns, along with his higher creativity; when Stuart points out that Lowell's breakdowns continued until his early death, I wondered why electroshock wasn't tried on him, although it might have crippled his late burst of poetic power.

Along with her brilliant insights into mental illness, Stuart shows deep understanding of the dynamics of "old money." Most of the money in the book belongs to the eccentric "Uncle Cot," who married Stuart's Aunt Sarah, a major character in the book. "Uncle Cot" is not a blood member of the family, but is a central figure in its existence. With Stuart's mother achieving a personal liberation through opposition to the Vietnam War, and Stuart and her brothers showing a 1960s swing to the left, Uncle Cot ends up leaving his fortune to a museum instead of the new generation, although the museum keeps most of his artwork and furniture in storage. Stuart gives a heart rending cry about the loss of the family wealth: couldn't we have said to Uncle Cot that we were just kidding? 

The history of the tragic-comic families, if sometimes confusing with all of the similar first names, is a fine corollary to Lowell's own "Life Studies." Stuart, a novelist, gives a memorable gallery of characters, especially the families' strong-willed, eccentric women, particularly Aunt Sarah and Lowell's mother, Charlotte. Stuart's mother, Jackie, is another heart-rending force in the narrative. New England and Boston society and its long decline are memorably reflected in the personal lives of Stuart's relatives, with whom she ruefully claims kinship. The author expertly balances the inner geometries of different marriages, including her own, and father-daughter-son relationships. While deftly skewering her family's pretensions and personal foibles, she also shows a fierce loyalty, borne of long traditions and culture as well as blood. 

Stuart is one of the all-too-rare writers these days who understands the power of understatement, the well-chosen right word. At the end of summer, I'm happy to have discovered a new writer whose work I'll continue to anticipate. Her final paragraphs are one of the most beautiful, heart-breaking endings I've encountered in quite a while. Stuart's portrait of Lowell, his tortured wives Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Lady Caroline Blackwell, and his family will make re-readings of his poems even more enriching. Published several years ago, and recognized as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Stuart's book deserves recognition as a classic family history and memoir.

A Crop of New Fall Books

Cooler weather and Sunday newspaper specials about the new arts season sharpen my anticipation about new books arriving for fall. Last week, The New York Times ran a story about a blockbuster season, especially in ficton, with heavyweights such as Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon coming out with new novels.

Such reports belie the gloomy news of the last decade or so about declines in  readers of novels. The new books by tested best-sellers indicate that publishers are not taking chances on new writers or not publishing less commercial authrors. Still, plenty of new writers have their first or second books placed before the public.

Also last week, agreement was reached in the price-fixing case involving Apple and book publishers, so e-book prices presumably will drop, just as Amazon comes out with the new Kindle.

The Times story showed that new books for a new season can still generate excitement. People are still reading, no matter the format.

A Crop of New Fall Books

Cooler weather and Sunday newspaper specials about the new arts season sharpen my anticipation about new books arriving for fall. Last week, The New York Times ran a story about a blockbuster season, especially in ficton, with heavyweights such as Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon coming out with new novels.

Such reports belie the gloomy news of the last decade or so about declines in  readers of novels. The new books by tested best-sellers indicate that publishers are not taking chances on new writers or not publishing less commercial authrors. Still, plenty of new writers have their first or second books placed before the public.

Also last week, agreement was reached in the price-fixing case involving Apple and book publishers, so e-book prices presumably will drop, just as Amazon comes out with the new Kindle.

The Times story showed that new books for a new season can still generate excitement. People are still reading, no matter the format.

Farewell, Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury said he received his education in the public library, so it is apt that I'm writing this appreciation of him in the public library. The science fiction writer died Wednesday at age 91.

With his hardscrabble background, Bradbury was the essence of American democracy, a self-taught author who succeeded through hard work, perseverance and talent. My first memory of Bradbury was reading an except of his "Farenheit 451" in Esquire magazine. I also loved his "Illustrated Man" story, although I stayed away from his Martian chronicles. Another memorable work was his writing manual, loaded with classic advice and inspiration for writers. I recall his anecdote about how he wrote at typewriters for which he had to pay an hourly fee to use. So, I'm now writing this on a computer in which I have 55 minutes. The last thing of Bradbury's I read was a childhood memoir in the New Yorker's current Science Fiction special.

In this age when science and education are under attack, especially from America's now sadly mainstream right wing, the loss of a learned humanist like Bradbury shows the decline of public discourse. The atmosphere of his "Farenheit 451" is all too prominent.

Oscar Wilde's Wife Rediscovered

Didn't watch "Hemingway and Gellhorn" after all, after Mike Hale's pan in The New York Times convinced me that the HBO movie would be cliched and loaded with bad Hemingway dialogue. Sometime when I want to spend two and a half hours reliving the Hemingway myth, I'll probably watch it on On Demand.

In these days of shrinking print products and signs of cultural decline, small advances are worth celebrating. The London Review of Books has mysteriously shown up at the Barnes & Noble bookstand, and I spent several enjoyable hours on Memorial Day quaffing Guinness Stouts and reading the LBR, particularly Colm Toibin's educational and entertaining review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance, and an annotated edition of Wilde's "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Sad to say, before reading the review, I was unaware of Wilde's wife, or the two sons that he fathered with her.

As with so many other previously little known women married to famous men, Constance appears an interesting woman, with an admirable, long-tested loyalty to Wilde. "Feminist" critics and historians continue to illuminate the lives of women who played signicant roles in their men's lives of greatness or notoriety. Not only are these women like Constance Wilde or Clover Adams, whose accomplishments don't match those of their husbands but whose lives are worth examining. They also include those such as Gellhorn, whose more substantial achievements were long underappreciated.

I hope the LBR remains for sale at the Barnes & Noble. A few months ago, the Times Literary Supplement made a similar appearance, then disappeared. When I asked a B&N employee, he claimed the TLS hadn't sold enough copies to remain. I hope the LBR makes the cut; the copy I bought recently was the last one, so perhaps it's selling.

John Sutherland Uncovers History of English Novel

John Sutherland's "Lives of the Novelists" is entertaining and educational. Sutherland displays knowledge of American and English novelists famed and obscure from the 17th century through today. So far, I've made it to the end of the 19th century, with more than 1,000 pages to go. The book's witty capsule bios find value in the little-known writers and deflate the reputations of some of the better known ones, such as Dickens. Overall, the portraits offer an in-depth history of English literature and publishing.

One of Sutherland's strengths, a chatty, informal style, turns into a weakness. The writing is marred by all too frequent dangling phrases, some unintentionally and painfully comic. A learned professor such as Sutherland should not be so susceptible to such sloppy writing. Such constructions, alas, are increasingly common in books, magazines and newspapers.

Despite the tangled sentences, Sutherland is an amusing and learned guide. Apparently, he's read deeply in the novelists he covers, an amazing feat. Reading "Lives of the Poets" is like munching snacks, but the nutritional value is more like sliced carrots than potato chips.