Southern Bookman

Returning to the end of "Silence of the Lambs"

Once again, I witness Clarice Starling kill Buffalo Bill.

"Silence of the Lambs" is one of those movies  whose climax and ending I've seen many times, but I haven't ever watched it from the beginning.

Discovering director Jonathan Demme's 1991 influential horror film Tuesday afternoon on HBO, I again marveled at Jodie Foster's Academy Award winning performance as the young FBI agent Clarice and Anthony Hopkins' chilling portrayal of her unlikely soulmate, the cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Hopkins won an Academy Award for his performance, and the film received the Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars.

Lecter, himself a serial killer, gives Clarice helpful information that leads her to Jame Lamb, also known as Buffalo Bill, who kills a number of young women and uses their skin to make dresses.

Over the years, I've come to know the film's essential moments: Lecter elicting from Clarice her haunting childhood memory about the killing of the lambs and how their screams still disturb her sleep, Lecter's escape from the cage in which he's held through incredible police stupidity, Clarice's suspense-filled tracking of Buffalo Bill, Lecter's call to Clarice from the Bahamas. The film closes with Lecter walking down a crowded tropicaal street, en route to "having an old friend for dinner."

I for years had the same experience with "The Godfather,"always discovering the film on television without seeing it from the beginning. I finally watched "The Godfather" from start to finish when it was re-released to theaters, and I saw it at Atlanta's Springs Cinema.

If "Silence of the Lambs" ever comes to an Atlanta theater, I'll be sure to view it from the first scene.

 

 

A salute to the Wall Street Journal and New York Post

I confess that I find myself enjoying Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

While I disdain and avoid the Post's right-wing columnists and editorials, I avidly read the tabloid's crime and celebrity reporting.

The Post's Johnny Oleksinski is the country's wittiest film and theater critic, and sports columnist Mike Vaccarro writes with a fan's passion and a deep historic knowledge about New York City's teams.

While the curmudgeonly sportswriter Phil Mushnick sometimes heads into "get off my lawn" territory, I often find myself agreeing with his rants against sports announcers' cliches, and the criminal behavior and exhibitionism of NFL, MLB and NBA stars. His criticism of the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell stands out in a media world that genuflects to the shield.

The Wall Street Journal's Saturday edition is a great journalism product, brimming with news, interesting columnists and sophisticated book reviews that put the Sunday New York Times to shame. While I peruse nearly every word of the WSJ's Saturday Review section, I usually throw away the Sunday New York Times magazine and Sunday opinion section mostly unread.

While I don't agree with the conservative stance of the WSJ's editorial writers, they are well-informed on economics and business. They express  conservative viewpoints with authority.

I salute the WSJ for adhering to the traditional editorial page format, abandoned by the NYT and replaced by often dubious opinion pieces. Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman are the only NYT columnists I regularly read.

Murdoch deserves condemnation for polluting American political discourse with Fox News, but his WSJ and New York Post are compelling newspapers.

A good year for viewing Academy Award nominees

After viewing "American Fiction" at Phipps Plaza on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I've now seen all but three movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award.

I suppose I'll see "Killers of the Flower Moon," since I've watched all of the Martin Scorsese-Robert de Niro movies over the years, but the subject matter of "Poor Things" and "Zone of Interest" looks grueling.

"Oppenheimer" with 11 Academy Award nominations is the critical favorite to win the award. I tried to watch "Anatomy of a Fall," but couldn't figure out how to get English subtitles on PrimeVideo. My college French isn't as good as I thought. Well, the dog was good.

"Past Lives" and "The Holdovers" were my favorites on the list, both old fashioned movies about human love and redemption. I also liked "American Fiction's" on-target satire about literary politics and racial pandering.

I found the script and performances in "Maestro" pretentious and overwrought, and "Oppenheimer" too consciously an "important movie." I thought "Barbie" inventive in its visual effects and acting, but the plot succumbed to cliche.

I actually went to theaters to see most of the films, enjoying the experience of being in a dark room with other people watching images on a big screen.

But the popcorn was too expensive.

W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" echoes today

"For poetry makes nothing happen," W.H. Auden observed in his poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," written a month after Yeats' death in Menton, France at age 73.

Yeats died on Jan. 28, 1939, on the eve of World War II. Auden in the poem foresees the war, and decries the pervasive moral and political apathy in which fascism took root and grew.

As the 85th anniversary of Yeats' death approaches, the poem raises alarms for our times.  In another "nightmare of the dark," war rages in the Mideast and Ukraine, and political violence looms.

"For poetry makes nothing happen," Auden observes in the poem. Yet he praises poetry's essential capacity to bring light to darkness. 

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II
    You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
    The parish of rich women, physical decay,
    Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
    Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
    In the valley of its making where executives
    Would never want to tamper, flows on south
    From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
    Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
    A way of happening, a mouth.
III
          Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,
          And the living nations wait,
          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace
          Stares from every human face,
          And the seas of pity lie
          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right
          To the bottom of the night,
          With your unconstraining voice
          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse
          Make a vineyard of the curse,
          Sing of human unsuccess
          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart
          Let the healing fountain start,
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.

Farewell, Melanie, who performed at Woodstock

Melanie was one of the brave musicians who performed at Woodstock with nothing but a guitar, a smile and a song.

"I didn't have a band, I didn't have a roadie," she recalled in an interview.

Like John Sebastian, Joan Baez and Richie Havens, Melanie charmed the crowd of 500,000 with her minimalistic performance. She overcame horrible stage fright to deliver one of the festival's most memorable moments.

One of the most under-rated artists of the 1960s and 1970s, Melanie Safka died Tuesday at age 76 of an undisclosed illness, according to her family. She had been recording an album of cover songs, "Second Hand Smoke," for Cleopatra Records.

A young, relatively unknown young woman, she traveled to Max Yasgur's farm with her mother, Polly.  Before performing, she wanted to escape, but the stage manager said "you're on," so she took the stage. Before performing, she'd had an out-of-body experience, but she quickly connected with the crowd.

As she sang and played her acoustic guitar, a heavy rain fell. The crowd had been told to light candles to hold off the bad weather, one of the festival's charming magical fantasies.

"By the time I finished my set, the whole hillside was a mass of little flickering lights," she remembered.

That inspired her first major hit, the gospel-inflected "Lay Down: Candles in the Rain." She later reached the top of the charts with the frank expression of female sexual desire, "Brand New Key," one of the era's landmark songs. Her cover of the Rolling Stones "Ruby Charts" also reached the best-seller charts.

Fighting the sexism of the music industry, she founded "Neighborhood Records."  She was one of the first women to start a record label.

I never was a fan of hers, but her death caused me to revisit her songs, which hold up well. If released, "Second Hand Smoke" will be her 32nd album.

Over the years, the utopian peace and love of the upstate New York music festival as expressed in Joni Mitchell's anthem "Woodstock" has given way to destructive conservative politics, the advance of climate change, and the corporate domination of elections.

One of Melanie's best songs expresses the loss of the idealistic Woodstock spirit, "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma."

North Carolina Press's "A New History of the American South" gives updated view of region's past

The University of North Carolina's comprehensive "A New History of the American South" encompasses the complex views of the region that have emerged in recent years. 

Edited by UNC history professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the collection gathers essays from an impressive group of academic historians, detailing the region's often perilous history from prehistoric times before 1600 to today.

The encyclopedic book was published under the UNC Press's Marcie Cohen Ferris and William R. Ferris Imprint. Princeton professor Laura F. Edwards and University of Florida historian Jon F. Sensbach served as associate editors and also contributed essays.

Seeking to counter long-held perceptions of the region as politically, culturally and economically backward, the essays uncover the region's diversity with recently discovered information, compelling insights and little known but significant historical figures.

Yet the South's racism, violence and poverty still hold a prominent place in the historians' perceptions.

The early chapters examine the extent and sophistication of the Indian cultures that ruled the region before the arrival of European settlers. The tragic destruction of the Indian nations from disease, tribal warfare and European domination comes forth with searing details. Several of the tribes also owned black slaves.

University of Sydney professor Michael A. McDonnell concludes the book's first section on the region's early history with a revealing overview of how the South figured in the Revolutionary Era.

Southern involvement in the Revolutionary War is also covered at the start of the book's second section, titled "The Long Nineteenth Century," which lasts from the antebellum rule of slave-owning planters to the Civil War and its aftermath.

The section begins with three contributions from women scholars: Edwards' "The South and the New Nation: 1783-1820," Johns Hopkins scholar Martha S. Jones' "The Age of Emancipation" and Northwestern University professor Kate Masur's "The South and the Nation: 1840-1860."

Taking contrasting views of the same fraught period, Gregory P. Downs of the University of California describes the South's complex regions in "The Southern Nations, 1860-1880" and Scott Reynolds Nelson of the University of Georgia unearths the postwar restoration of white supremacy in "The Bourbon South."

The book concludes with "The Twentieth Century," a distressing indictment of the South's benighted ruling class and the economic and social devastation of Jim Crow laws.

A highlight is North Carolina professor Peter A. Coclanis' sardonic account of the region's often disastrous economic development from antebellum days through modern times.

Coclanis provocatively defines the region's "long 20th century" as beginning before the Civil War, and asserts that slavery's destructive effects have persisted until today.

While Southern "Sun Belt" governors have touted the region's pro-business ethos, Coclanis shows that such polices have often led to the proliferation of low-paying, low-skill industries, particularly in states like Mississippi.

UNC's Kenneth R. Janken concludes the book with an in-depth history of the civil rights era, "The Post World War II Freedom Struggle."

"A New History of the American South" with its authoritative analyses deserves widespread use as a college text, countering growing efforts to sanitize the region's past.

 

 

 

Trump supporter's purchase of Baltimore Sun upsets newspaper's staff

Baltimore Sun journalists wanted local ownership.

David A. Smith was not what they had in mind. Somewhere, H.L. Mencken shuddered.

Smith, a staunch Donald Trump booster and the owner of right-wing TV corporation Sinclair Broadcasting, bought the Sun last week for at least $100 million, a high price for the distressed newspaper. For 40 years, the Sun has been owned by companies outside of Baltimore.

In its glory years, the Sun gained fame for its foreign news bureaus and star journalists like Mencken, Russell Baker and William Manchester.

Sun alum David Simon devoted an entire season of his HBO series"The Wire" to a sardonic look at what he perceived as the Sun's initial decline under the ownership of the Tribune Co.

Simon's wife, the acclaimed crime novelist Laura Lippman, also worked at the Sun, as well as political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover.

Like other famous American newspapers, the Sun has suffered massive circulation and advertising losses in the digital age. Its once enormous staff has been severely reduced.

Alden Golden Capital, the despised hedge fund that has ravaged once-great newspapers across the country, sold the Sun to Smith and co-investor Armstrong Williams, who claim they will make the old paper profitable again.

A prospective local owner more to the newsroom's liking, Stewart W. Bainum Jr., sought to buy the Sun from Alden Capital in 2021 for a reported $65 million, but the deal fell through. Bainum launched the online Baltimore Banner, which covers the city with a staff of 70, a bit more than the Sun, which employed 500 reporters and editors at its peak.

Smith in a hostile meeting last week with embattled Sun employees said he's rarely read the newspaper although he's a longtime resident of the long- declining port city. The deal also included the Annapolis Capital and Gazette. A gunman in 2018 killed five Capital employees and wounded two others in a newsroom attack.

A generous GOP supporter who ordered his local TV stations to run pro-Trump stories before the 2016 election, Smith paid for the Sun with his own money, not Sinclair assets.

In his tense meeting with Sun employees last week, Smith cited his Fox 45, known for its investigations of Baltimore's troubled city schools, as a newsroom model although he appears to know little about how a newspaper operates.

His partner Williams assured worried staffers that the newspaper won't suffer mass layoffs, and that he plans to strengthen local coverage. 

Sinclair in recent years has suffered financial difficulties, shutting down several TV stations. The corporation also owns Bally Sports, which pulled out of deals to broadcast major league baseball and NBA games in several cities after declaring bankruptcy last year.

In Atlanta, Bally broadcasts Braves and Hawks games, along with regional college sports and NHL games. The company's Braves broadcasts look shaky after it recently farmed out Hawks games to Peachtree TV. 

Several Hawks productions with longtime Hawks voices Bob Rathbun and Dominique Wilkins have been broadcast on WANF, Channel 46, Atlanta's CBS affiliate. The few remaining Hawks fans now must hunt each night to find which channel will show their team's latest lackluster performance.

For now, the Sun marches on as before, producing well-done stories on the Baltimore Ravens' AFC championship game against the Taylor Swift-Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce Chiefs.

Yet Sun staffers won't receive any comfort from consulting Mencken, who muttered "democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."

The sage of Baltimore foresaw the rise of Smith's hero Trump when he said "on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

 

Greenland's ice disappearing at alarming rate

The disturbing news that Greenland's ice is rapidly melting away received little attention this week.

Greenland loses 30 million tons of ice an hour, according to a report in the Guardian. The ice loss is 20 percent higher than previously thought.

The flow of fresh water rushing into the Atlantic might bring a collapse of ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, causing severe weather disruptions, scientists fear. Rising ocean levels will swamp coastal cities.

Along with the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the massive retreat of Greenland's glaciers sounds the alarm that time is running out to take action against climate change.

The Washington Post this week conceded that the world has already lost the battle to stop temperatures from rising to 2 degrees Celsius above averages in the pre-industrial era. That threshold was reached in the 2023, the hottest year on record.

In an editorial, the Post called for urgent action to reduce global emissions, which keep rising.

Greenland's ice is not waiting.

 

 

Rachel Kushner continues great tradtion of Harper's Easy Chair column

Rachel Kushner's Easy Chair columns in Harper's bring back the joy of magazine writing.

Kushner's sentences give a sense of discovery as she ranges from personal experience to exciting explorations of esoteric subjects.

Like renowned author Bernard DeVoto, who wrote the Easy Chair column from 1935 until his death in 1955, Kushner writes about complex problems with an easy, conversational style.

In her latest piece, Kushner reflects upon the Sentinelese, an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe that violently resists contact with "civilization.".

Living on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago of the Bay of Bengal, the tribe has even resorted to murder to repel outside invaders. They are considered innocent by India's government, a judgment with which Kushner agrees.

The author of the acclaimed novels "Telex From Cuba," "The Flamethrowers" and "The Mars Room" and the essay collection "The Hard Crowd," Kushner displays moral fervor and a sense of adventure. 

From her easy chair, Kushner takes the reader on exciting literary journeys.

 

 

Farewell Joseph Lelyveld, who led New York Times in last years of print newspaper's pre-eminence

Joe Lelyveld presided over The New York Times in the twilight of its dominance as a print newspaper.

Lelyveld, who died Jan. 5 at his Manhattan home from complications of Parkinson's disease, was the last great executive editor of the Times at the dawn of the Internet age.

In an appreciation of Lelyveld written for The Atlantic, Times reporter and newspaper historian Adam Nagourney looks back at Lelyveld's battle to uphold the Times' rigorous journalistic standards as the newspaper entered the digital era and its fast-moving, more sensationalistic news ethos. 

Nagourney, who examined the newspaper's shift from print to multimedia journalism in "The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism," in his Atlantic essay calls Lelyveld "a steward and a symbol of a passing era."

While Lelyveld reluctantly accepted the newspaper's first online venture, he distrusted the new medium. "I never really believed that the digital New York Times could have the same authority and sway that the paper New York Times had," he told Nagourney in an interview.

In a 41-year career at The Times, Lelyveld first made his reputation as a foreign correspondent, winning the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for his 1989 book "Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White," based on his reporting from Johannesburg in the 1960s and 1980s.

After serving as foreign editor and managing editor, Lelyveld held the executive editor's post from 1994-2001, retiring a week before the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. He returned as interim executive editor in 2003 after his successor, Howell Raines, was forced to resign because of the Jayson Blair scandal.

Bill Keller, Lelyveld's successor as executive editor after Raines' downfall, wrote an appreciation of Lelyveld for the Times. In the eulogy, Keller recalled that Lelyveld's book on South Africa inspired him to follow in his  footsteps as an award-winning foreign correspondent.

Nagourney sadly notes that Lelyveld's beloved print newspaper with its diminished circulation and advertising now plays a minimal role at the Times, where digital subscriptions dominate.

Yet, "The enduring quality of The Times' journalism today - whatever platform it appears on - is testimony to the seriousness of purpose that is ingrained in the newsroom and that Lelyveld championed," he says, cautioning that those values remain imperiled in the digital age.