Southern Bookman

David Shields' After Glow

After reading David Shields' "How Literature Saved My Life," I feel as if I've been on a drunk with a self-absorbed, irritating, neurotic, whining mess. Throughout the book I kept wanting to leave and stagger home to my collected T.S. Eliot criticism, yet stayed for another round.

Shields, at age 57, is consumed by adolescent angst, a childish fear of death. To keep this at bay, he chatters about books, writing, literature, art. Many of his comments strive for hip, ironic originality but sink to banality. His riffs faintly resemble a monologue from a Woody Allen movie, only not as funny.

Shields gives a post mortem on the death of the novel, claiming traditional narrative is too slow moving and contrived for our fragmented, distracted, short-attention-span age. He speaks for the immediacy of collage and blogs.

The book itself seeks to meet this aesthetic principle; Shields organizes his work by chunks, some only one or two paragraphs long. As the book builds to its finish, his interludes grow longer and more insightful. While saying he's abandoned the long-unfolding novel, he's actually expressing his anguish over the decline of the novel's culture. He pulls off the neat paradoxical trick, a book, increasingly mediated, about the end of the book.

When thinking about this blog -- ha, ha, Mr. Dave -- I was going to say the book's appeal was just barely above that of the Kardashians, not that I've ever watched. For one thing, we can assume that Shields has read many more books than Kim and family. On the whole, "How Literature Saved My Life" gave more morbid fun than aggravation. Too bad he thinks James Agee wrote "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" while working for Forbes instead of Henry Luce's Fortune. That howler shows one of the misfortunes of publishing's decline: fewer fact checkers.

James Howard Kunstler's "Too Much Magic" Exposes Technological Mantras

James Howard Kunstler in "Too Much Magic" convincingly smashes hopes for techological solutions to the U.S. energy shortage. Kunstler, although others dispute him, says the world has already reached the era of "peak oil," and that such panaceas as shale oil, shale gas (fracking), wind and solar, biofuels and so on won't provide sufficient replacements for petroleum.

Kunstler is thorough in providing reasons why even highly touted alternative fuels won't keep us from the collapse of our oil-based culture. One area he neglects - the book was apparently written late in 2011 - is new sources of oil in the melting Arctic. Shell Oil has begun exploring in the Arctic, although because of equipment problems, it's had to delay its work for a couple of years. So, the polar bears are safe for now, if they can find a patch of ice or two on which to float. The Arctic might provide a new bump in world oil supplies, at least for a few years. Overall, though, Kunstler makes convincing arguments that easily attainble oil is running out, and that such solutions as T. Boone Pickens' natural gas-powered cars are so much "magic."

A couple of years ago, I read one of Kunstler's books, perhaps "The Long Emergency," which devastatingly criticized the suburban auto culture of U.S. cities, singling out my own town of Atlanta as the worst of the bunch. I am also a fan of his weekly blog blasts on "Clusterfuck Nation," which take a more comically sardonic, apocalyptic tone than "Too Much Magic," which searches for a few fleeting rays of optimism.

It sounds as if all we can hope for is a more localized culture, something like a collection of 19th century villages. In his blog, Kunstler expects violent, revolutionary change, while the book leaves open the possibility of gradual change to the new post-oil economy. Unlike the high priest of global interconnectedness and rapid tecnological change, The New York Times' Thomas Friedman, Kunstler sees the world as eventually turning less complex and more localized.

One of the values of Kunstler's book is giving a good synopsis of the collapse of global finance that led to the 2008 recession, from which the United States and the world are still staggering in zombie half-recovery. The suburban-car oriented economy for which he delivers a post mortem likely has more life than he allows, but it will eventually crash. I still have a bit more hope in technologies such as electric cars and wind and solar power than Kunstler, but his book raised my skepticism. Kuntsler makes a persuasive case that both political parties' messages that we can achieve energy self-sufficiency are based more on wishful thinking and delusion than reality. At least President Obama mentioned climate change in his Democratic Convention speech. Kunstler shows that global warming deniers are charlatans exploiting Americans' refusal to face scientific facts. The Republican Party, which once subscribed to the reality of climate change even in the days of W.,  is now in total denial, as the world possibly heads to the point of no return.

"Too Much Magic" is a sobering look at the choices facing the United States and the world as the era of resource scarcity and climate change brings wrenching change. Despite its bleak prognosis, "Too Much Magic" raised my hopes that human beings can find ways to manage a new world, without depending on technogical magic.

My Southern Heritage, Universal Outlook

I've sometimes wondered why I called this venture Southern Bookman, since that implies the regionalism and provincialism I deplore. In my literary interests, I consider myself a member of the Republic of Letters, the historical and enduring fellowship explored by Princeton historian Anthony Grafton in his recent book "Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West."

While I have an international, open-minded outlook, I instinctively and without much thought decided to use the title "Southern Bookman." I am a Southerner, irrevocably stamped by my upbringing in Southern Louisiana, in many ways different from the rest of the South because of its French and Catholic heritage. While I lack much patience for neo-Confederate Romanticism, or the Southern boosterism espoused by the Oxford American, I am in profound ways a provincial Southerner.

As an LSU graduate, I am deeply proud of the university's literary heritage, fostered by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the original incarnation of the Southern Review, and nurtured today with the continued excellence of the literary journal, and the LSU Press. I love the South's literary tradition, rooted in William Faulkner, but contributed to by so many others: Eudora Welty, Kate Chopin, Flannery O'Connor, Roy Blount, Barry Hannah, Tom Franklin, Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and on and on. Among my favorite writers, the quintessential Yankee, Robert Lowell, was strongly stamped by his association with Southerners and his time in the Deep South.

I consider myself as adding to the tradtion of Southern liberalism/progressism, with various branches reaching to Huey and Earl Long, William Faulkner, Ralph McGill, Eugene Patterson,  Walker and William Percy, Hodding Carter (a bitter Long foe in his Louisiana Days), Wendell Berrry and so many others. Like Berry, I respect the Agrarians, rejecting their racism, but seeing much of value in their espousal of  tradition and criticism of modern, monolithic capitalism.

While I revere Lincoln and the Union cause, I have a deeply engrained emotional bond with the soldiers of the South and military leaders like Lee and Jackson. I am an irrational and emotional partisan of LSU football and other sports, although for many years I tried to deny that tribal attachment.

For better or worse, I am a Southerner, a Louisianian, and I suppose, a Georgian, although I've resisted the latter attachement despite living in Georgia for now more than 30 years. I've had allegiances to Sewanee, Emory and the University of Florida. Along with other intellectual Southerners, I deplore the South's poverty, religious fundamentalism, suspicion of outsiders and fresh ideas, violence, self-destructive eating and drinking, and defensiveness, traces of all of which I possess like minerals in my bloodstream. I love the South's colorful language, storytelling, loyalty, sense of honor, love of nature and beauty, romanticism, family consciousness and love of eating, drinking, celebration and ceremony. As these conflicting statements indicate, the best and worst of the South are sides of the same cracked mirror, through which a clear image can be difficult to discern.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to write this type of essay now, so many months into Southern Bookman. For some reason, I felt the need to orient myself to the site's mission, and give some insight into its purpose and outlook.

I've enjoyed doing the site's interviews with a variety of writers, and look forward to continuing this in 2010. I also look ahead to renewing my efforts to cover American and global writing and thinking. As a new year arrives, I am grateful for the many readers and supporters of this effort and happily anticipate the journey continuing.