Southern Bookman

"Pro-business" Republicans' repressive voting law displays hostility toward black professionals

Georgia Republicans' law to suppress minority voting comes as high-tech companies increase their presence in Atlanta, attracted by black STEM workers.

Those black professionals sought by Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other companies will be hampered from voting because of the petulant GOP Legislature's law imposing state control over  local election boards and limiting absentee ballots.

The legislation even makes it a crime to give food and water to voters waiting in line. Those good Christian legislators must have forgotten the Bible story about Jesus asking the Samaritan woman at the well for a sip of water. She would have gone to jail if Jesus had been voting in Georgia.

Republicans' oft repeated pro-business mantra doesn't extend to high-tech companies' desire to recruit black workers.

While high-tech corporations cite the presence of grads from Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown and Clark Atlanta, they also want to attract workers from other cities, adding to the demographic changes that led to Joe Biden winning Georgia's presidential election and Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock capturing Senate seats.

The voting law will discourage young black professionals from moving here from other cities.

Black corporate executives from around the country are urging prominent Atlanta companies like Delta and Coca-Cola to speak out against the law, which they weakly opposed before the legislation's passage.

The law is not as oppressive as earlier proposals, but is still damaging, especially in ending the secretary of state's election authority and allowing the Legislature to remove local elections officials if it doesn't like the results.

An effort to persuade Major League Baseball to move the All-Star game from Atlanta is also gaining force.

The game will honor the late Henry Aaron, known for his quiet civil rights activism and heroism in breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record while receiving volumes of hate mail from white fans.

Enhancing the remembrance of Aaron's legacy, and that of Rep. John Lewis, would send a strong message and not punish Atlanta fans for the actions of an aggrieved political coterie.

Taking more than symbolic action, the NAACP and other voting rights groups have filed federal lawsuits against the legislation.

But the suits' chances are uncertain following the high number of conservative judges taking office during the Trump administration.

Republicans in passing the law show that they're not so pro-business after all. They'd rather suppress black voting power.

 

 

 

Doublethink rules: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to buy publisher of George Orwell

Rupert Murdoch seeks to own George Orwell.

Murdoch's News Corp. announced on Monday a $349 million deal to purchase Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's book publishing unit, whose massive backlist encompasses Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm."

If the deal goes through, big-lie purveyor Fox News Network will be in the same stable as Orwell's novels. Newspeak will co-exist on Fox broadcasts and the pages of "1984."

Murdoch's Harper Collins will also gain rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Virginia Woolff's novels and Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men." 

When envisioning Willie Stark and the corruption of populism, Warren might not have imagined the Republican assault on democracy fueled by Fox News. But his examination of political power and its abuses remains valid. 

Murdoch, in owning the work of Orwell, Woolf, Tolkien and Warren, shows a cynical contempt for the power of ideas. The aging media mogul and political manipulator likely believes that the lies of Fox News will prevail. "Who controls the past controls the future," Orwell warned. "Who controls the present controls the past."

The deal, following the announcement of Penguin Random House's $2.2 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster, will bring further consolidation of the book-publishing industry. The Harper Collins-Houghton Mifflin Harcourt coupling raises familiar fears about a chill on new voices and unorthodox ideas.

Big brother will be watching even closer. Already in charge of the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, London Times and other British newspapers, the Times Literary Supplement and Fox News, Murdoch will own even more of the media industry.

All publishers will be equal, but some will be more equal than others.

 

 

 

Farewell, Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurty's career was as big and undefinable as Texas, his native state and literary landscape.

McMurtry, who died Thursday at age 84, wrote novels, screenplays, essays, biographies, memoirs, literary criticism and history, his voice constant.

For bookish, would-be cosmopolitan Southern men like me, he was a trusted companion, giving advice on how to live with dying myths and relentless change.

For much of his career, McMurtry was slighted by the Eastern critical establishment. For a while, he wore a T-shirt mocking himself as a minor regional novelist.

But, along with Louisiana's Walker Percy, he was an essential writer for those of us Southerners who came of age in the 1960s. As with Percy, I kept reading McMurtry's work through different stages of my life.

I admired McMurtry's early novels "The Last Picture Show," "Moving On," "All of My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers" and "Terms of Endearment," but was more drawn by his nonfiction later in his career.

While McMurtry's fiction declined as he obsessively produced more and more work - later generations probably will look at his later novels more favorably - I owe a debt to his entertaining "Anything for Billy," which revived my interest in books at a time when my passion for reading flagged.

McMurtry's  "In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas," "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond,"  and "Roads: Driving America's Great Highways" would be career-defining accomplishments for most writers. I devoured his memoirs on literary life, the movies and book collecting, as well as his biographies of Crazy Horse and Custer.

Like Joan Didion and Lorrie Moore, McMurtry found a brilliant new career as a literary critic at the urging of Robert Silvers, the late editor of the New York Review of Books, who solicited reviews and reporting from them and other writers.

McMurtry claimed his greatest accomplishment was amassing a collection of rare books, and a valiant effort to make of literary community of  Archer City Texas, his hometown and the model for Thalia in a series of novels beginning with "The Last Picture Show." McMurtry established a bookstore in Archer City with 400,000 volumes, which he culled in an auction a few years ago.

I always dreamed of driving to Archer City and seeing McMurtry standing beside a bookshelf in his store. I never imagined what we would say to each other, but that he would smile and wave, as if expecting me to arrive.

He wouldn't have to say anything. He spoke to me for years.

 

 

Farewell, Elgin Baylor

When I was a boy, NBA teams like the Syracuse Nats, Cincinnati Royals, Philadelphia Warriors and St. Louis Hawks flickered across our TV screen on Sunday afternoons.

Reading the long-vanished Sport magazine, with its glowing profiles of sports stars, I turned into an NBA fan, a rarity among Southern boys raised on college football.

My favorite team was Bob Pettit's Hawks, who beat the Celtics of Bob Cousy and Bill Russell in 1957 to win the franchise's only championship.

But my favorite player was the Lakers' Elgin Baylor. Soaring above the basket, leaping after the ball, Baylor was like a supersonic jet among crop-dusters.

As many commentators said this week after Baylor's death of natural causes at age 86, Baylor was the prototype for later high-flying stars like Julius Irving, Michael Jordan and LeBron James.

Before Wilt Chamberlain scored his 100 points in Hershey, Pa., Baylor held the record of 71, scored against the Knicks at old Madison Square Garden in 1960, as the New York Post's Mike Vaccaro recalled.

A few images remain from my  childhood moments watching TV sports: Willie Mays in centerfield, Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese calling baseball games, Mickey Mantle and the Yankees, the old New York Giants, Bears and Packers, the old AFL Houston Oilers and Oakland Raiders, college football on Saturday afternoons. And Elgin Baylor, flying to the basket.

"This Is Us" brings Nicky home at last

If Nicky Pearson would have gone to Woodstock with his girlfriend, Sally, he would have heard John Sebastian's acoustic solo performance of "Darlin' Be Home Soon," which mesmerized the music festival's huge crowd.

Sebastian's recording of the song with his band, The Lovin' Spoonful, casts a nostalgic glow on Nicky and Sally's fragile love affair during Tuesday night's "This Is Us."

All of the broken hopes of the 1960s play out, shattered like the elderly Nicky's handmade snow globe. Yet, the dream endures at the episode’s end.

Beautifully portrayed by Michael Angarano, the wounded young Nicky rejects Sally's dream of going to Woodstock, then traveling across country to California for a life of hippie freedom. She imagines voyaging the open road with him in her van she calls Pearl, evoking Janis Joplin's posthumous album.

Instead, Nicky, who expresses his fears to his brother, Jack, chooses to stay home with his loving mother, Marilyn, and abusive, alcoholic father, Stanley. Sharing their pride at Neil Armstrong's moonwalk, Nicky can't free himself from his family's emotional entrapment.

Jack, who's left the family home but remains tied to its rituals, would have made the trip with Sally. A previous episode of the show followed his road journey to California with his future wife, Rebecca.

The broken relationship between Jack and Nicky, their close ties a casualty of Vietnam, adds to the episode's drama.

Desperate to reconcile with Jack, Nicky is unable to connect with his brother at a Vietnam reunion. After receiving affirmation from his wartime commanding officer, Jack heads toward marriage and fatherhood, while Nicky withdraws to a solitary, embittered life as a chronic alcoholic.

As the aged Nicky traveling across country to greet his nephew Kevin's twin children, Griffin Dunn endearingly portrays a man discovering his true self after years lost to Vietnam grief and family wounds. His gruff exterior conceals a sensitive, fragile, creative man still fearful of intimacy.

Kevin has named the boy twin for Nicky, whose efforts to cope with the modern world after years of withdrawal flavor the drama with bittersweet humor. He sees his beautifully carved gifts destroyed because of idiotic air-travel regulations; isn't it time for those to be banished from the nation's life?

But Nicky makes it to California, at last accomplishing a replica of the dream envisioned by Sally.

The cross-cultural references continue: Dunne is the nephew by marriage of Joan Didion, whose writings on her native California and the turmoils of the 1960s counterculture are hallmarks of the era's literature. Didion's warmth and insight glow in conversations between her and Dunne in an enlightening Netflix documentary.

"This Is Us" at its best illustrates our battle with the past, what we seek to save, and what we seek to escape.

Directed by "30 Something's" Ken Olin, Tuesday's episode titled "One Small Step" indicates that no matter how long, we can come to see ourselves at last.

 

 

 

 

 

Flannery O'Connor's life, work examined in PBS American Masters documentary

Flannery O'Connor exhibited a saintly devotion to her writing and Catholic religion even before suffering from lupus.

After the debilitating and eventually terminal disease forced O'Connor to return to her Georgia home, she followed a daily ritual of prayer and writing. She bravely led a constricted life of intense pain, living with her mother on a remote farm in Milledgeville, Ga. 

She died of the disease at age 39, leaving behind several daring novels and a collection of masterful short stories. Her letters to friends such as Atlanta resident Betty Hester are considered spiritual classics.

O'Connor's courage and commitment to her work dominate the uneven PBS American Masters documentary "Flannery," which examines her career  through interviews, rare films and photos, readings from her work and a rare TV interview.

Enthusiastic readers Tommy Lee Jones and Conan O'Brien join writers Mary Karr, Mary Gordon,William Sessions, Hilton Als, Alice Walker, Alice McDermott and Tobias Wolff in giving appreciations of O'Connor's novels and stories.

Actress Mary Steenburgen reads from O'Connor's writing, and cartoonish sequences illustrate "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and her final story, "A Revelation."

O'Connor's longtime publisher, Robert Giroux, and friend and mentor Sally Fitzgerald talk about O'Connor's personality. Fitzgerald's recollections come from a three-hour session with her conducted by filmmaker Chris O'Hare, the genesis of the documentary.

The bizarre "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" illustrations aptly illuminate the story's themes. The accompanying excerpts indicate that the story's strangeness might alienate today's readers.

O'Connor's happy, if unconventional, childhood was shadowed by the early death of her father, also from lupus.

After attending an all-girls college in Milledgeville, O'Connor was accepted at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, where she stood out with her thick Southern accent, devotion to religion, and literary genius. She embarked upon a literary career in New York City, falling under the sway of the erratic poet Robert Lowell, whom she met at Yaddo.

Along with Elizabeth Bishop, O'Connor was one of Lowell's platonic literary loves, although the show indicates that she had deep romantic feelings for him. He was married to Elizabeth Hardwick at the time, following his disastrous first marriage to Jean Stafford, like O'Connor an accomplished short story writer not as well-regarded for her novels.

In the early signs of his manic-depressiveness, Lowell converted to Catholicism, which attracted O'Connor. He enlisted her in a nutty rebellion against Yaddo director Elizabeth Ames, whom he accused of harboring communists. Not one of O'Connor's brighter moments, as Gordon says.

After showing debilitating signs of lupus, O'Connor was forced back to Georgia. The black writer Walker's family lived nearby, but she never met O'Connor.

Deceived by her mother that she was suffering from arthritis, O'Connor was forced to use crutches because of bone damage from the cortisone she took. Fitzgerald at last told her the disease was lupus. Aware of her terminal condition, O'Connor wrote until the day of her death in 1964.

The film, produced in cooperation with O'Connor's estate, openly examines O'Connor's racism, keying in on her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Georgia.

Als, a black writer who's developed a mini-career interpreting white women writers (Hardwick, O'Connor and Joan Didion) unconvincingly defends O'Connor with a convoluted claim that she couldn't defy Milledgeville's white supremacy and maintain her artistic integrity.

He also says her physical condition wouldn't allow her to meet Baldwin elsewhere, although the documentary shows the rare TV interview conducted in New York City and details her visits to universities.

O'Connor's work once galvanized young readers like Jones and O'Brien in their college days. Her "Christ-haunted" Southern world looks even stranger today, a foreign country where people's acts and language are incomprehensible.

The documentary makes an earnest case that O'Connor's work remains vital. But many now likely find her work forbidding.

 

 

Emily Stokes named new editor of Paris Review

Emily Stokes was named the Paris Review's new editor, in a surprisingly quick decision announced Tuesday.

Stokes, senior editor at the New Yorker since 2018, will replace Emily Nemens, who recently announced she's leaving the august post to write her second novel. 

“Emily will honor the review's tradition of discovery,” said Paris Review publisher and noted writer Mona Simpson in the announcement of Stokes' appointment on the literary journal's web site.

“I believe she’ll publish distinctive work in a distinctive way, with courage, subtlety, and style.” 

Whooo: courage, subtlety, and style: Founding Paris Review editor George Plimpton must be raising a supercilious smile somewhere.

Stokes' "distinctive way" means a heightened academic pedigree: She's a graduate of Cambridge University and was "a Kennedy Memorial Trust scholar" at Harvard.

She's also held senior editing positions at the Financial Times, T:The New York Times Style magazine and Harper's.

Nemens surprisingly advanced to the Paris Review from co-editorship of LSU's Southern Review, moving from Baton Rouge to Manhattan. She also received her MFA from LSU.

Although Nemens boosted the review's circulation and web traffic, she might not have had enough subtlety and style for the journal's board.

Stokes in her statement in the journal's announcement curiously cited the journal's signature interviews with famous authors rather than the discovery of new writers.

“Like many readers, I came to The Paris Review through its interviews, which show writing to be the hard, inspiring work that it is,” Stokes said.

“Over the years the review has introduced me to new and established writers who have provided the most pleasurable kind of company. After a year in which we have been alone and driven mad by the news, the review's mandate, to publish ‘the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and the non-axe-grinders,’ is a timely calling, and I am tremendously excited and grateful for this opportunity.”

Publishing the non-drumbeaters and the non-axe-grinders doesn't sound so courageous. But welcome to Stokes as the sixth editor in the 68-year history of the magazine.

 

New Yorker editor David Remnick gives guarded praise to Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth

Longtime New Yorker editor David Remnick stepped up to review Blake Bailey's new biography of Philip Roth, one of spring's most anticipated books.

Remnick, who periodically writes for the New Yorker, points out in the magazine's current issue that authors often express horror at biographers pillaging their lives and work.

But Roth cooperated with Bailey, granting him a number of interviews and complete access to his files. Roth didn't seek to control Bailey's views.

Bailey's 900-pound opus arrives April 6, nearly three years after Roth's death, and is receiving extensive critical attention, most of it positive.

The author of acclaimed biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson, and a family memoir, Bailey relentlessly plumbs Roth's affairs, tormented marriages, mental breakdowns and committed literary life, Remnick says, faulting Bailey for scant analysis of Roth's novels.

The Roth book follows Hermione Lee's authorized biography of playwright Tom Stoppard, who unlike Roth remained alive to see the publication of his biography.

Like Roth with Bailey, Stoppard fully cooperated with Lee. Remnick says that Lee turned down Roth's offer to write his biography before he hired Bailey to do the book.

Citing John Updike's conflicted views, Remnick wonders about the value of literary biographies, especially in regard to such a comprehensive and self-absorbed writer as Roth. He concludes that such books can enhance the appreciation of an author's work, but seems less than convinced that Bailey achieved that.

Roth often based his novels on his own life, and wrote several memoirs, yet Bailey apparently uncovered fresh details, especially about Roth's sexual exploits, making for a high gossip quotient.

Remnick writes from the perspective of his friendship with Roth, and his eager reading of Roth's 31 books as they were published. He also had a similar middle-class Jewish upbringing as Roth.

I enjoyed Bailey's books on Cheever and Yates, and will give the Roth book a try, although its length and obsessive detail are daunting. Roth's career has been a source of fascination through the years, which stokes my interest in the biography.

While I accept that Roth is a major novelist, his books either enthralled or repelled me. I saw "Portnoy's Complaint" as a blast of free expression, and admired the mainstream literary skill of "Goodbye Columbus."

Several of the Nathan Zuckerman Books engaged me, but I couldn't stand the insufferable antihero of the lauded "Sabbath's Theater" and found oppressive the overwrought sentences of "American Pastoral" and "I Married a Communist." I lack sufficient imagination to accept the premise of "The Plot Against America." Roth's last books, "Nemesis" and "Indignation," were among my favorites.

After retiring from writing in the last years of  his life, Roth believed that Bailey would give a final assessment of his career. Remnick, and others, believe that Bailey mainly succeeded.

 

 

 

Farewell, Sally Grossman

The lady in red wasn't Bob Dylan in drag.

The beautiful woman smoking a cigarette and reclining on a living room chaise lounge on the cover of Dylan's 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home" was Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman.

Photographer Daniel Kramer took the photo at Grossman's home in Woodstock, N.Y. She, like Dylan's girlfriend Suze Rotelo, who appeared in the cover photo of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," gained fame as a Dylan muse.

Sally Grossman, who went on to manage the Bearsville Recording Studio and theaters in Woodstock after her husband's death, died March 10 in her sleep, according to media reports.

As a young college dropout, she hastened to the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s, working as a waitress at the musical hot spots Café Wha?,and The Bitter End. She likely witnessed Dylan's first performances at the Café Wha?.

Albert Grossman, a pushy overweight businessman who wore ill-fitting suits to scout talent in dark, intimate nightclubs, co-founded the Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan shocked folk purists in 1963 by performing with electric instruments.

In New York City, Grossman signed Dylan and put together Peter, Paul and Mary, who made Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" the anthem of the civil rights movement. Grossman went on to manage artists ranging from Gordon Lightfoot to Ian and Sylvia, Janis Joplin, Richie Havens and the Band.

The physically unappealing Grossman also met and married the young waitress Sally Buehler, who played a significant role in his business. The couple moved to Woodstock, an arts colony in upstate New York, enticing Dylan to move there.

Unmentioned in Sally Grossman's New York Times obituary, Dylan intensified his transformation in Woodstock, writing the songs for the earth-shaking albums "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde."

With several acoustic songs, "Bringing It All Back Home" signaled the transition. When Kramer arrived in Woodstock to take photos, Dylan asked that Grossman be in the picture.

She played significant roles in other bits of rock history: introducing Dylan to her friend, Sara Lownds, his first wife, and remaining silent about the motorcycle accident that caused Dylan to withdraw from touring for several years.

Also unreported in the Times obituary, she was involved in the Band's arrival at the Woodstock house they called Big Pink, where they recorded their revolutionary early albums and the "Basement Tapes" performances with Dylan.

Sally Grossman was not just a mysterious woman in a photograph. She influenced the course of American music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ringo Starr's ever shining light

Ringo Starr is an inspiration.

Serene and joyful at age 80, Starr is  giving a series of media interviews keyed to the release Friday of his five-track album "Zoom In."

Starr recorded the album during the pandemic via zoom and at his home studio, where several of his musical friends wore masks as they recorded. His record, and his related interviews in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal and USA Today to New York magazine, shine a light of hope.

As a member of the Beatles, Starr was overshadowed by the songwriting and musical brilliance of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, as well as George Harrison. Starr mainly played drums, with instinctive flair more than technical precision.

Yet his steady rhythms laid the foundation for the band's music, and his persona was an essential ingredient of the band's mystique. Starr's vocal performance on "A Little Help From My Friends" is among the band's defining moments. His Chaplinesque silent sequence at the end of "Hard Days Night" is a hallmark of 1960s cinema.

But few could have imagined his enduring and monumental musical career when the Beatles broke up in 1970. Like McCartney, he's recorded a number of hit records and enjoyed world-wide popularity.

After achieving sobriety, Starr formed his All-Starrs band in 1989, leading the group and its rotating cast of superstar musicians to a series of recordings and tours. He's displayed songwriting and singing talent little tapped during the Beatles years.

Because of the pandemic, Starr had to cancel an All-Starrs tour scheduled for last summer. But Starr's told several interviewers that he overcame that disappointment by recording new music, leading to the "Zoom In" Ep. He's joined on the record by luminaries such as Dave Grohl, McCartney, and his brother-in-law, the Eagles' Joe Walsh.

In the joyful interviews, Starr says that although he's rarely left his house during the pandemic, he's kept his spirits high by producing artwork and doing daily exercise as well as creating music. He also subscribes to a healthy diet: blueberries and broccoli the mainstays.

He's also published a photo book, "Ringo Rocks: 30 years of the All-Starrs." Over the years, the band's changing lineup has included legendary members of other groups, such as the Band's late Levon Helm and Rich Danko.

Starr's post-Beatles solo career has lasted longer than the life of Lennon, assassinated in 1980, tragically cutting short a brilliant solo career. Starr says he often thinks about Lennon, and Harrison, who died of cancer 20 years ago.

"All you need is love," the Beatles sang long ago. Starr lives by those words every day.