Southern Bookman

Farewell, Billy Packer, longtime voice of college basketball

I associate Billy Packer with a golden era of college basketball.

Packer, who called Final Fours for 34 years as an analyst for NBC and CBS, died this week at age 82 in a North Carolina hospital from kidney failure after a series of health problems.

My love for college basketball peaked when he called games for NBC with Dick Enberg and Al McGuire. Packer and McGuire's odd couple act revealed the game's strategic rigor and poetic beauty.

Although McGuire was the great coach who had led Marquette to a national championship, he was less analytical than Packer, a former Wake Forest star who had played in the final four before it was a national event.

McGuire saw the game instinctively, looking at intangibles and emotion in players' performances. Packer often clashed with McGuire, seeing the game more like a chess match of strategy and coaching.

Packer moved to CBS when the network took over the NCAA tournament, building its national "March Madness" power. He called the big games with CBS lead announcer Jim Nantz until 2008, when Packer's abrasive personality veered from the network's increasing "feel good" kitsch.

March Madness still brings in big audiences, but the game has declined with stars leaving early for the NBA, over-reliance on the three-point shot and the erosion of offensive skills.

Billy Packer held the game to a higher standard, which it often reached during his heyday.

Biltmore Estate a bucolic counterpoint to nearby Asheville

The Biltmore Estate's fantasy of Southern gentility contrasts sharply with the gritty urban reality of downtown Asheville.

George Vanderbilit's gargantuan gilded-age palace, completed in 1895, crowns rolling pastures and walking trails leading to a commercial center of two hotels, a winery, restaurants and museums trumpeting the brief, dilettantish life of Cornelius Vanderbilt's grandson.

The Biltmore baron died in 1914 from complications of an appendectomy, leaving his widow and descendants to visualize his estate as a lucrative tourist venture.

The big house was the crowning achievement of now forgotten architect Richard Morris Hunt, who designed many of the long demolished Fifth Avenue mansions of New York City's robber barons.

Biltmore's lavish  gardens were the final masterpiece of Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed designer of Central Park, who also wrote perceptive accounts of his tours through the antebellum, slave-owning South.

Vanderbilt's fine art collection displayed at the house include two marvelous portraits of Hunt and Olmsted by John Singer Sargent, along with several other works by the artist. Three Belgian tapestries from the 16th century are also captivating.

The house, visited by Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, entertained guests with a billiards room, bowling alley, library and conversation enclaves. Roaring fireplaces heated the sumptuous parlors.

A short drive away, downtown Asheville presents a raucous scene of young hipsters, aging art tourists, young families and Jesus cheerleaders. Reclaimed buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries house music clubs, restaurants, craft shops and the excellent Malaprop's bookstore.

On the other side of downtown lies the sumptuous Grove Park Inn, another landmark of Southern elegance.

The municipal plaza at the center of downtown is a popular gathering spot close to the memorial angel sculpture honoring native son Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe, author of the once-lauded "Look Homeward Angel" and "You Can't Go Home Again," grew up in his family's boarding house, now a tourist attraction.

As we traveled down the estate's winding road leading to the exit for downtown Asheville, I heard the voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald whispering "I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanatorium."

Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of Wolfe's fellow Scribner's author Fitzgerald, died in a fire at an Asheville hospital. At Malaprop's Bookstore, I paid silent homage to the doomed couple.

Visiting my filmmaker sister, who was completing a Hallmark Christmas movie shot at the big house, we stayed at the Biltmore Estate's charming Village Hotel amid a younger generation of wine-lovers and gilded age voyeurs.

On a walk, I passed meadow lands where goats and cattle grazed. Once the estate ran a dairy, but now the cows are beef cattle, raised to produce steaks and hamburgers for the estate's restaurants. The cattle are humanely raised, the estate assures visitors. Nearing the banks of the French Broad River, I heard volleys of gunfire from skeet shooters.

At the estate's Antler Hill Village Deerpark theater, a high-tech audiovisual show and exhibit explored Leonardo da Vinci's brilliant, erratic career.The exhibit features models of Leonardo's futuristic inventions and copies of some of his famous paintings.

The dramatic video show gave flashing psychedelic images of his work. For some reason, galloping horses were a recurrent motif, perhaps signifying the frequent wars of Leonardo's era.

Driving from Atlanta to Asheville along the booming I-85 corridor also revealed striking contrasts. Greenville, home of Furman and Bob Jones universities, and nearby Spartanburg flourish from the sprawling BMW plant between them. Signs announce nearby Clemson University's various automotive-engineering ventures.

After we passed through these successes of the new international economy, Donald Trump was launching his presidential campaign with a speech at Columbia, South Carolina's capital and home of the University of South Carolina. The anti-globalist Trump  appeared with the unctuous Lindsay Graham, the state's long-serving senator, once a fairly progressive ally of the late Sen. John McCain but now a Trump sycophant.

Seeing the young middle-class families at Biltmore, I wondered about their political leanings. They packed the Biltmore wine store, with its rows of vintage whites and reds, and the pretentious shops and restaurants. Republicans, I assumed. But perhaps not.

Beyond a few patches of undeveloped forest, the I-85 corridor from Atlanta to Greenville and beyond is now one metro area. Too bad America turned to automobile transportation rather than the high-speed trains of other developed nations. Electric vehicles might take over one day, but the gasoline-powered SUVs, trucks and sedans will rule for the next several decades at least. Or until climate change brings societal collapse and the new dark ages.

Gilded age scions like George Vanderbilt have been overtaken by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Vanderbilt's heirs claim he possessed a sense of noblesse oblige lacking today, but his monstrous house proves America's wealthy have always yearned for an American feudalism.

Star power burns bright in Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner's memoir "Like a Rolling Stone"

Rolling Stone magazine founder and influential editor Jann S. Wenner's memoir exudes Baby Boomer aspirations, arrogance and delusions.

"Like a Rolling Stone" gives a blow-by-blow account of Wenner's career in the rock and roll fast lane, from the founding of Rolling Stone on a shoestring in 1967 to his giving up control of his Internet-challenged media empire after Donald Trump's election shocked Wenner's cohort of celebrity progressives.

Like images flashing past in a video game, Wenner beams out a dizzying array of famous names, dinner parties, cruises, ski trips. concerts, power lunches and drug-drenched bacchanalias.

While Wenner gives an impressive roll call of of Rolling Stone's scoops and journalistic innovations, his hedonism, egoism and thirsting for celebrity validation exhibit the worst excesses of his generation.

He breathlessly chronicles what he characterizes as close friendships with superstars John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bono, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend, closely linking his magazine to promoting their careers. He also boasts of friendships with recording industry executives, a bit close for a music journalist.

Never resting from the social swirl, he also recalls close relationships with Jackie Onassis, John F. Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Tom Wolfe, Bette Midler and Michael Douglas.

The rapid-fire collision of names, gossip and events makes for an exciting narrative, much more captivating than Joe Hagan's lackluster biography "Sticky Fingers."

As the magazine rises in power and influence, and he launches new magazines like "Us Weekly," Wenner veers further and further away from the modest communal values of co-founder Ralph J. Gleason.

Rolling Stone star writer Hunter S. Thompson's rise and sad decline is the book's tragic centerpiece. Fans of Rolling Stone's classic days will again thrill to Thompson's emergence in the magazine with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and his coverage of presidential campaigns. Wenner poignantly expresses the despair and heartbreak of Thompson's mental and physical downfall, culminating in his suicide.

Wenner nearly met a similar fate. He recounts his recovery from a terrifying health crisis that almost caused his death. But he came back to write his memoirs.

On his last issue of Rolling Stone, he placed young environmental activist Greta Thunberg on the cover.

At 75, he's forever young.

 

All's Not Korrect in spelling today

Dear Benjamin Dreyer: Okay is not OK.

The esteemed grammarian violated the Associated Press Stylebook this week, using the variant spelling "okay" in a witty Washington Post column on "contronyms," words like cleave that have opposite meanings, an apt subject for January, the "two-faced month."

"Okay "would be proper for addressing someone named Kay, such as Katharine Graham, the late Washington Post publisher.

Dreyer, Random House's executive managing editor and copy chief and the author of "Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style," surprisingly doesn't know the AP Stylebook's preferred OK, also recommended by Webster's dictionary.

A Washington Post copy editor should have saved Dreyer from the error. But such misspellings are common these days, even in esteemed publications like The New York Times and Times Literary Supplement.

I often see advisor instead of adviser, protestor in place of protester.

Confusion reigns over the proper use of rein. Principle/principal, capital/capitol, forego/forgo and discrete/discreet are often misapplied.

Spell check gone awry causes some of the errors. But declining editing standards are mostly to blame.

OK?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally Jenkins covers San Francisco 49ers for Washington Post

While layoffs loom at the Washington Post, the newspaper's star sports columnist Sally Jenkins covers the San Francisco 49ers' playoff run.

Jenkins, the daughter of the legendary golf and college football writer Dan Jenkins, displayed old-school sportswriting grandiosity in a Post column describing the 49ers' workmanlike victory Sunday over the hapless Dallas Cowboys to advance to the NFC finals against the Philadelphia Eagles.

In her lengthy sojourn in California, nearly 3,000 miles away from the newspaper's hometown, Jenkins also chronicled the 49ers' opening-round playoffs win over the Seattle Seahawks. Displaying her father's descriptive gifts, she gave a vivid picture last week of California rainstorms drenching the famed Pebble Beach golf course.

I enjoyed Jenkins' impressionistic column in Monday's Post about the 49ers tight end George Kibble's juggling catch of a pass from rookie sensation Brock Purdy to subdue the Cowboys.

But after all of the turmoil about the Washington Post layoffs, Jenkins' extensive 49ers coverage seems strange. Like other sports columnists, she's likely ringing up a sizable expense account.

Jenkins' following a team on the other side of the continent from Washington recalls the glory days when the Post and other newspapers sent big-time writers to important sporting events. But the newspaper's imminent job losses expose the perilous state of once invincible papers like the Post.

The newspaper recently laid off Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah Kaufman. Jenkins makes pro football a ballet.

 

 

 

Stephen Sondheim interviews give engaging portrait of theatrical giant

New Yorker writer D.T. Max conducted a series of interviews with Stephen Sondheim for a magazine profile that never appeared, except for a couple of Talk of the Town pieces.

Intially receptive to the extensive New Yorker piece, Sondheim eventually turned against its publication, fearing it would expose too much of his private life.

But Sondheim fans can glimpse the late composer's generally warm yet prickly personality in Max's "Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim," a compilation of interview transcripts, along with Max's commentaries.

Recorded at Sondheim's townhome at New York City's Turtle Bay and his home in Connecticut, where the musical theater giant died at age 91 in late 2021, the casual interviews reveal a generous, urbane man who fiercely defends his artistic standards.

Sondheim as if talking to the reader gives engaging recollections of his career as a major figure in musical theater, recalling producers, librettists, actors and the production of shows such as "Sweeney Todd," "Company," "Follies," and "Sunday in the Park With George."

Along with theater lore and gossip, Sondheim discusses his composing techniques, fascinating even for those with little understanding of musical theory. Those in a variety of creative fields can benefit from his artistic practices.

In the most entertaining chapter, Max presents a journalistic account of accompanying Sondheim to a PEN writers organization event where Sondheim received an award, presented by Meryl Streep. In the piece, Streep and Sondheim talk about their long friendship, which began when Streep was a drama student at Yale.

Opening a curtain on the sophisticated social life of theatrical artists, Streep and Sonheim look back on enchanted evenings playing charades and other parlor games, some invented by Sondheim. The interviews disclose that Sondheim delighted in puzzles, and once wrote crossword puzzles for New York magazine.

He also loved old movies, classical show tunes, literature and Broadway plays. He was devoted to working each day. At the time of the interviews, he was working on several projects.

While Sondheim comes across as mainly genial and open, he bristles a few times when defending his rigorous standards, such as always using exact rhymes instead of slant rhymes. He even castigated celebrated lyricists like Lorenz Hart for their inexact constructions. In one interview, Sondheim criticizes Cole Porter for what he considers an egregious line in "The Taming of the Shrew."

Sondheim didn't even like his own lyrics written for Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story," believing they were too artificially theatrical.

Max's conversations with Sondheim reveal a man who sought the best in his daily life and his illustrious work. Sondheim's music was his gift to the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discovering Woody Allen's "Interiors"

Fruitlessly searching through streaming land for the Robert Gottlieb-Robert Caro documentary "Turn Every Page," I instead clicked upon "Interiors," Woody Allen's first "serious" drama.

Allen wrote and directed the moody 1978 film, not appearing in the production as he had in his previous comedies. The movie mixes Ingmar Bergman-flavored angst and New York intellectual despair. Not a lot of laughs, except for the unconscious self-mockery of the self-indulgent characters.

The film like Allen's later "Hannah and Her Sisters" explores the wounded love of sisters. Allen's wonderful cast mirrors the generational family dynamics: Maureen Stapleton, Geraldine Page and E.G. Marshall from the old guard and the then new generation of Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, Kristin Griffith, Richard Jordan and Sam Waterston.

Stapleton's appearance late in the movie as the raucous, earthy Pearl brings a welcome shot of energy to the film after long stretches of pretentious New York intellectual dialogue.

Marshall as the patriarch of the family, a successful New York attorney ready for an adventurous retirement, and Page as his mentally fragile ex-wife, an interior designer, give a masterful performance. Keaton, Hurt, Griffith, Jordan and Waterston rise to match their classical acting. .

Keaton, Allen's paramour and muse, stands out as the reflective Renata, perhaps named in homage to the New Yorker film critic Renata Adler. Her implausible success as a poet contrast with the career disappointments of her sister, Joey, played by Hurt, who resembles another winsome star of the time, Carrie Snodgress. Their conflicted relationship is the film's main dramatic fulcrum.

Waterston's performance as a long-haired counterculture radical amusingly displays the same mannerisms and vocal inflections exhibited in in his long-running role as the district attorney Jack McCoy in "Law and Order." Now 82, Waterston is again playing McCoy in a revived "Law and Order."

After unveiling the film's human relationships with dialogue and restricted settings, Allen impressively shifts to film's visual power with images of the sea, a homage to Bergman. Allen's imagery - a vase, flowers, the beach - complements his theatrical language.

The film ends with Keaton and her sisters looking out the window of their childhood home to a calm sea. They are at last ready to move on with their lives.

Allen was more European than other Hollywood directors. "Interiors" opens a different path for American cinema, sadly rarely followed.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Michael Curtis, legendary fiction editor at the Atlantic

C. Michael Curtis was one of the legendary editors who flourished in a brilliant era of literary journalism.

Curtis, known for discovering a starry spectrum of new writers in a 57-year-career at the Atlantic, died last week at age 88, according to a warm eulogy by the magazine's Cullen Murphy and Scott Stossel.

The Atlantic under Curtis' influence helped foster the American short story revival at the end of the 20th century, along with Esquire's Rust Hills and Gordon Lish, the New Yorker's William Maxwell and Harper's Willie Morris.

Murphy and Stossel give Curtis deserved recognition, yet err in not crediting the other magazines. They also fail to point out that the Atlantic ceased publishing short stories for a few years, abandoning a tradition dating back to the magazine's founding in the 19th century. The Atlantic has returned to its American fiction legacy.

Curtis patiently guided writers at the start of their careers. He prodigiously read the magazine's heavy load of submissions, taking time to reply to promising talents.

Noted contemporary author Lauren Groff in Murphy and Stossel's eulogy said that Curtis gave her her first major publication, discovering one of her stories on the magazine's "slush pile," which he religiously perused.

Curtis was a benevolent spirit, the genial model of the civilized man of letters, except on the basketball court, where he was a fierce competitor, as Murphy and Stossel note.

The short story remains a vital form, with writers finding publication in The New Yorker, Harper's and the Atlantic and a thriving community of literary journals.

Even with increasing consolidation of the publishing industry and preference to celebrity authors, short story collections have undergone a mini-renaissance.

Editors like Curtis kept the American short story alive when the genre appeared an endangered species.

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech still a guiding light for America

Martin Luther King Jr's  "I Have a Dream" speech on Aug. 28, 1963, was a masterpiece of metaphor, prophecy and exhortation.

Delivered from the Lincoln Memorial to a huge crowd gathered at the Capitol Mall on Aug. 28, 1963, the speech called on the United States to give full citizenship to black Americans.

The black and white video of the speech, the culmination of the "March on Washington," is from another world.

In the sweltering heat, many of the men wear coats and ties, and the women formal dresses. Many had come from the violent struggle for civil rights in the American South. No public leader today can match King's eloquence.

King's speech and the march pushed President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to increase federal protection of civil rights activists. Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States made a step toward cashing the promissory note of black equality cited by King in one of his brilliant metaphors.

King modulates his resonant voice like a musical instrument, its prophetic biblical cadences ringing with poetic grandeur. He indicts American society for the injustices still suffered by black citizens: segregation, police brutality, political and economic discrimination.

Yet, as his voice swells with outrage and impatience, he refuses to succumb to bitterness. He points out that the destinies of white and black Americans are intertwined, and that the denial of full freedom to blacks also suppresses whites.

Those of us who grew up during segregation knew the South's smothering oppressiveness. Because of King, the South is a much better place now, with much greater diversity, social freedom and economic opportunity.

In the 60 years since King's speech, the country has made significant progress fulfilling his dream of freedom and racial equality. Too much remains undone.

Saturday would have been his 94th birthday.

 

Atlanta History Center documentary reveals Stone Mountain monument's sordid history

The Atlanta History Center's impressive documentary "Monument: The Untold Story of Stone Mountain" gives a comprehensive history of the state-owned Confederate memorial, a legacy of white supremacist Georgia's resistance to the civil rights movement.

History Center President and CEO Sheffield Hale sets the tone for the 30-minute production, available on the AHC's web site. Hale asks whether the massive Stone Mountain carving of Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson represents Georgia's values in the 21st century.

A group of noted historians gives brief but insightful commentaries on the memorial's twisted history. AHC senior historian and curator Gordon Jones stands out with an impassioned analysis of the monument as a symbol of the Confederate lost cause and resistance to black civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.

Former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes offers perspective on the state's racially fraught politics and history.

The carving was begun by the revived Ku Klux Klan and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the early 20th century, but the original campaign ran out of money in the 1920s. The carving was not completed until 1970 after the state took over Stone Mountain, developing the site into a popular state park.

Former Georgia Gov. Marvin Griffin and the Georgia Legislature's massive resistance to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling overturning segregation led to the state purchasing the site and completing the carving. The Confederate battle flag insignia was added to the state flag at the same time.

Barnes recalls his successful effort to remove the Confederate symbol from the state flag in 2001. But strong opposition led to his not winning re-election.

Emory professor Joseph Crespino and Spellman professor Cynthia Neal Spence, along with other commentators, point out that the monument originally celebrated the South's "Lost Cause" mythology, which led to Confederate monuments rising across the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The return of white supremacy in the South brought repressive Jim Crow laws and the horrifying lynching of blacks.

Donna Barron, the daughter of Roy Faulkner, the welder who completed the carving, speaks for those who want to preserve the monument as a historic shrine to those who fought and died for the Confederacy. The documentary shows a new group of young white males demonstrating at the park in favor of preserving the carving, protected from destruction or alteration by state law. 

Removing the monument would likely require dynamite, and the untrained Faulkner's carving is an impressive work of art. An exhibit is under way to give "perspective" on slavery, reconstruction, lynching and the imposition of Jim Crow laws.

Atlanta Beltway founder Ryan Gravel in an article in the British newspaper the Guardian called for the monument to be covered by the uncontrolled growth of foliage.

Hale and the History Center deserve praise for calling for an end to the state's support of an egregious monument to white supremacy.

But destroying the carving would be objectionable. The removal of a work of art, no matter how distasteful, would be a terrifying precedent.

Perhaps some kind of shroud could cover the carving, allowing viewing of the monument by those who venerate it or have a historical interest.