Southern Bookman

Farewell, Dave Hickey, the last gonzo

Dave Hickey like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson brought an intense personal sensibility to journalism.

The last of a generation that began with Wolfe and Mailer's "new journalism," Hickey gained cultish fame with his 1997 collection "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy."

The essay collection champions Hank Williams, Liberace, Stan Brakhage, Norman Rockefeller, Chet Baker and other popular artists with the same attention he gives to Cezanne, de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. In an essay on basketball, he praises Julius Erving and James Naismith's original game rules.

Hickey, who like Thompson and Mailer defined himself as an outlaw rebelling against prevailing cultural strictures, died Nov. 12 at age 82 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He'd been battling heart disease for years.

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Hickey as a child moved with his family to Los Angeles. He ridiculed Texas' provincial boosterism, but never lost the state's contrarian viewpoint. When Hickey was 11, his father, a car salesman and jazz musician, killed himself, a major influence on Hickey's independent outlook.

Rootless as a young man, Hickey opened an art gallery in Austin called "A Clean Lighted Place," which struggled against the Texas capital's parochial aesthetic values. He then moved to New York City, where he managed a gallery, reportedly quitting in protest of a Yoko Ono exhibition.

Discovering himself as a writer, Hickey was editor of Art in America before finding a home as a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, becoming the most famous representative of that school since Jerry Tarkanian's Runnin' Rebels.

In one of the best essays in "Air Guitar," Hickey celebrates Las Vegas for its freedom from New York City and Los Angeles' cultural dogmas. He also loved Las Vegas' wide-open entertainment and gambling culture.

"Air Guitar" and the influential chapbook "The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty," earned him a MacArthur "Genius grant," in 2001, the proceeds of which he fed into Vegas slot machines.

While he appreciated mass popular culture, he also called for a return to rigorous standards in judging artworks. He blasted the contemporary art world for its commercialism and turn from traditional artistic values.

Like his journalistic predecessors, Hickey was accused of machoism, although he considered underappreciated abstract painter Joan Mitchell the best artist of her generation. Feminist critics saw his defense of beauty as elitist. At the end of his career, he published "25 Women: Essays on Their Art." That too was viewed as paternalistic.

Hickey wrote for a variety of publications, including Art News, the Village Voice, Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone. Along with art and popular music, he also wrote about television and the movies.

In "Air Guitar," he recalled the Texas writer Grover Lewis, and Lewis' friendship with Larry McMurtry, ground also covered by a McMurtry memoir.

Hickey biographer Daniel Oppenheimer wrote a warm appeciation of Hickey for Texas Monthly, the first to report Hickey's death.

As Oppenheimer details, Hickey like other literary exiles remained stamped by his native land.

 

Not so fast: Merrick Garland takes aim at Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster merger

The U.S. Justice Department struck a blow for authors with an antitrust lawsuit seeking to block the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

"The deal would enable Penguin Random House to exert outsized influence over which books are published in the United States and how much authors are paid for their work," the Justice Department said in announcing the lawsuit filed Nov. 5 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

Penguin Random House, the largest U.S. book publisher, seeks to buy No. 3 Simon & Schuster in a $2.175 billion deal. As Authors Guild President Douglas Preston noted in a Washington Post op-ed piece applauding the suit, the transaction would reduce the publishing industry's "Big Five" to four.

Further consolidation will likely follow if the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster deal goes through. The huge publishing companies also control smaller imprints, which also compete for authors' work.

Preston helpfully noted that the merger would create a book market "monopsony," a dominant buyer, as well as a monopoly, a controlling seller.

Attorney General Merrick Garland noted that the deal would result in fewer books and less variety for consumers. Perhaps so, but it seems strange that the merged company wouldn't seek to print more books, likely weighted toward cooking, lifestyle, health, self-improvement and entertainment.

As Preston noted, Amazon dominates the e-book market as well as influencing book publishing. Preston's article included the obligatory disclosure that Amazon owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, who seeks monopoly and monopsony control over the U.S. retail market, owns the Washington Post.

The Justice Department a few years ago sided with Amazon in a suit against Apple and the book publishing industry. Preston risked Bezos’ ire by calling for the Justice Department to take action against Amazon's book industry power.

While the book publishers produce a stream of books from right-wing and left-wing perspectives, the industry favors celebrity authors and proven best-sellers. I'm amazed at the flood of books about the Trump administration that shows no sign of abating. Yet each book gives new revelations about Trump's apparent attempt to stage a coup on Jan. 6 and prevent President Biden from taking office.

As right wingers call for removal of books from school libraries, even the burning of books, I can imagine a new Trump administration or other GOP presidency suing publishers for printing books viewed as dangerous. Toni Morrison was targeted in the Republicans' victory in the Virginia governors' race. Can outlawing books be far behind? I'm sure Shakespeare and Dickens will soon be under fire.

Despite qualms about the precedent set by the government suing book publishers, the action will put off the inevitable day when one conglomerate publishes all of the books, newspapers and magazines in the world and sells all of the products. Perhaps our robot masters will ban books altogether, and we will chant "om" to immense computer screens.

 

 

Jack Nelson's posthumous memoir "Scoop" looks back on stellar reporting career

Legendary reporter Jack Nelson was still revered in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom when I went to work there in 1981, although nearly 20 years had passed since he'd jumped to The Los Angeles Times.

Even old-time Journal reporters who'd competed against Nelson's Atlanta Constitution back in the day lionized him.

Nelson in 12 years at the "South's Standard Newspaper" broke an astounding number of stories, including shocking abuses at the sprawling state mental hospital in Milledgeville. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his Milledgeville expose.

Establishing The Los Angeles Times Atlanta bureau in 1964, Nelson gained new heights as one of the courageous reporters covering the civil rights movement across the South. Nelson then moved on to the Los Angeles newspaper's Washington Bureau, where he broke key Watergate stories and gained fame as a television pundit and bureau chief.

Nelson's posthumous memoir "Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter" in the electric language of a good newspaper story traces Nelson's rise from humble origins in rural Alabama and Biloxi, Miss.  He had completed most of the book when he died in 2009 at age 80. His wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, finished the book, consulting his records and notes.

"Scoop" was the nickname Biloxi police bestowed upon the young energetic Nelson when he started his reporting career at the Biloxi Herald. Traces of that brash Southern boy remained in Nelson, even when he became a trusted confidante of presidents and esteemed Washington insider frequently seen on shows like "Washington Week in Review" and "Meet the Press."

After launching his career at the Mississippi gulf coast town where he spent most of his childhood, Nelson served in the Army, stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga. Nelson amusingly tells how he nearly escaped basic training by working as a public information officer. 

He'd attracted the attention of the Constitution with stories sent from Biloxi, and the Atlanta newspaper hired him when he left the army in 1952, at a weekly salary of $85, barely enough to support his family. Nelson colorfully recalls his grueling career at a newspaper notorious for its stinginess.

Atlanta during his years at Ralph McGill's Constitution was transforming from a mid-sized insular Southern city to a major metropolis. Many of Nelson's scoops exposed Georgia's transition from a corrupt rural-dominated state whose government sought to preserve white power.

While Nelson venerated McGill, he clashed with the famed editor. In one shocking case, McGill sought to protect one of his cronies who was the target of a Nelson expose.

Nelson praises the Constitution for fully supporting his investigative pieces. The Constitution's parsimonious and flinty Executive Editor Bill Fields comes off in the balance as a staunch journalist.

In a surprising revelation for those who know Athens as a progressive city today, Nelson recalls a time when the home of the University of Georgia was plagued with gambling and prostitution. Nelson exposed the corruption, receiving the enmity of city boosters and, he says, the UGA student newspaper the Red and Black.

Nelson also castigates Athens as a hotbed of Southern racism, revisiting the shocking killing of Lemuel Penn, a black Washington, D.C. educator and decorated World War II veteran who was killed while passing through the city. Two Klansmen were acquitted of the slaying in a trial in Athens. Nelson doesn't disclose whether the case is one of those civil rights slayings that should be reopened.

Outside of the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnists McGill and Eugene Patterson, the Journal and Constitution shamefully did little to cover the civil rights movement outside of running wire stories, as Nelson acknowledges. He faults himself for ignoring the movement.

Nelson made up for that neglect at the Los Angles Times, traveling across the South with a courageous band of national reporters to cover key moments in Martin Luther King's campaign for civil rights.

In a memorable vignette, Nelson recalls the poignance of a lesser known moment in King's career, when he visited the rural community of Gee's Bend, Ala. and promised the poverty-stricken descendants of slaves that they would receive voting rights and recognition of their human dignity. 

Nelson in an amusing chapter discusses his fraught relationship with Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who singled out Nelson for abuse during press conferences. After Wallace was paralyzed from wounds in an assassination attempt, he turned away from his harsh racism. Nelson was among those with whom Wallace made amends.

While reporting on breaking stories, Nelson also used his investigative skills, notably uncovering police abuses and a coverup in the killing of three black students at South Carolina State University at Orangeburg, S.C., in a protest on Feb. 8, 1968. He also exposed FBI involvement in a complicated entrapment scheme in Meridian, Miss., drawing the hatred of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover carried out an acrimonious campaign to discredit Nelson, even after he joined the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau. Hoover made false claims and accusations against Nelson, which continued until Hoover's death.

"Scoop," published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2013, deserves recognition as one of the best journalistic memoirs of the South's transformation after World War II.

Nelson loved White House dinners and fine Washington restaurants. But he always remained a reporter.

 

 

 

 

"Something in the Water" painstakingly details Macon's musical history

Seminal rock and rhythm and blues legends Little Richard, Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers all called Macon home.

Dynamic rhythm and blues performer James Brown, born in Augusta, also launched his career in Macon, whose flourishing nightclub scene and musical promotion network rivaled that of Memphis, New Orleans and Nashville.

The midsized Georgia city's musical legacy extends beyond those supernova perforrmers, as University of North Georgia history professor Ben Wynne painstakingly documents in Mercer University Press's "Something in the Water: A History of Music in Macon, Georgia, 1823-1980."

The first part of the book is hampered by Macon's rather ordinary musical history from antebellum years through the middle 20th century. Wynne gives a plodding rendition of local performers, music teachers and promoters. Macon's small-town cultural life is not distinguished from that of other small Southern cities, although the desire for cultural improvement is admirable.

A few moments catch fire in his stodgy narrative, such as his rediscovery of Macon's Pickens sisters. The trio produced hit records and performed on national radio shows and in the movies in the 1930s.

Jane Pickens Hoving, the trio's musical director, went on to an enduring career in New York City music and theater from the 1940s through the 1960s. She starred in films and Broadway musicals, and hosted her own radio and TV shows on national networks.

The book's momentum rises in the postwar era with Wynne's look at the careers of Little Richard, Redding, Brown and the Allman Brothers and lesser known Macon musical figures. A strength is Wynne's detailed summary of the rise and fall of Phil Walden and Capricorn Records, which launched the Allman Brothers' superstar career.

While Wynne's in-depth history of Macon's musical heritage in the 19th and early 20th centuries bogs down in details, he gives a solid account of the city's international fame in the rock era.

 

Whitman, Lincoln seem present at Washington's historic 10th Street corridor

Walt Whitman Way runs off 10th Street in downtown Washington, D.C., a few blocks toward the National Mall from Ford's Theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.

Whitman often walked through the theater's neighborhood, and revered the slain president. Whitman's "Speciman Days" gives one of the best portraits of the rough U.S. capital during the Civil War, and he wrote the impassioned elegies to Lincoln, "Captain, Oh My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed."

The past, present and future come together in the corridor, filled with museums, historic buildings, monuments, government offices and modern commercial developments.

Whitman visited wounded soldiers who lay in cots crowded into the U.S. Patent Office, now the National Portrait Gallery. He sought to raise the young men's spirits, telling them jokes and stories and bringing them pencils, paper and candy.

At Ford's Theatre, the future is represented by school groups that line up to tour the downstairs museum, with extensive exhibits on Lincoln's presidency and the Civil War.

A gallery gives an in-depth rendering of John Wilkes Booth's chilling plot to kill the president and members of his cabinet. Booth's co-conspirators are represented by ghostly statues.  The single-shot derringer with which Booth killed the president gives stark witness to history.

The presidential booth, decorated with bunting as on the night of the assassination, rises above the stage where plays are still performed.

On that pleasant spring night several days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, attended the theater for a performance of  the comedy "Our American Cousin." Booth, a famous actor, gained entrance to the booth and shot Lincoln in the back of the head, leaping to the stage below and breaking his left leg. 

Lincoln was carried to the Peterson House across 10th street, and laid diagonally in a bed because of his height. He died at 7:22 the next morning. The house where the president died remains, but has been closed to the public because of the pandemic.

On nearby H Street, Booth co-conspirator Mary Surratt, executed by hanging, ran a boarding house. The street, leading to Chinatown and the Capital One Arena, pulses with bars, hotels and restaurants.

Lincoln, a Shakespeare admirer, would be happy that plays are still performed at Ford's Theatre. Along with books on the slain president, the site's gift shop honors the theater. I was pleased to find a copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Damon Runyon's "Guys and Dolls and Other Writings."

At the Ford Museum,  young students appeared enthralled by Lincoln's presidency and Civil War leadership. A salute to their teachers for bringing them to a place where history’s real.

 

 

Farewell, Arnold Hano, chronicler of Willie Mays' catch

Arnold Hano wrote many books and articles in a long, distinguished career.

He's remembered for chronicling one moment on a sun-splashed September afternoon in upper Manhattan, close to where Hano spent his early childhood.

Sitting in the Polo Grounds' center field bleachers, Hano witnessed New York Giants outfielder Willie Mays' over-the-back catch of a smash by the Cleveland Indians' Vic Wertz in the eigth inning of the opening game of the 1954 World Series. Mays' catch, and subsequent spinning throw to the infield, is one of the most famous plays in baseball history.

Wertz's blast traveled 450 feet in the Polo Grounds' expansive center field. Mays turned and raced toward the ball, catching it over his back, then turned and hurled the ball to the infield.

The throw kept the Indians' Larry Doby from scoring from second base, preserving a 2-2 tie. The Giants went on to win the game 5-2 on Dusty Rhodes' 10th inning home run, and swept the series over the Indians, the overwhelming favorite after winning 111 games during the regular season.

Hano gave a memorable account of Mays' feat in his 1955 book "A Day in the Bleachers," now seen as a pioneering work of "New Journalism." While he want on to a prolific career as a magazine writer and popular novelist, Hano gained fame for his description of that play, giving a picture as clear and vivid as black-and-white film clips available on YouTube.

A native of New York City, Hano died Sunday at age 99 at his home in Laguna Beach, Calif., according to a New York Times obituary. Along with novels, Hano wrote several biographies of sports heroes, including Mays. He was a veteran of World War II, and won the 1964 Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for his article "The Burned Out Americans," uncovering abuses of migrant workers in California's Central Valley.

Along with brilliantly depicting Mays' catch, "A Day in the Bleachers" records Hano's reactions to working-class fans, the smell of hot dogs, and each team's players. His novelistic first-person voice anticipates later works by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer.

He came to the game planning to write an article about the experience of attending the opening game of a World Series. He completed an impressionistic piece, rejected by the New Yorker, and went on to finish the book. "A Day in the Bleachers" set a standard for later sports classics by Roger Kahn, Dick Schapp, Roy Blount Jr., Roger Angell and others.

In his long, productive life, Hano also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica and fought to protect Laguna Beach's shoreline from developers' schemes.

The films on YouTube show Willie Mays going back, his number 24 turned toward the infield, and somehow capturing the ball in flight. In Hano's words, the moment lives forever.

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Bate examines literary connection of John Keats, F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald just before his death made a recording in Hollywood of John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," which he knew by heart.

Fitzgerald venerated Keats, sharing his romantic sensibility. Both writers saw beauty as truth, as Keats said in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Arizona State and former Oxford professor Jonathan Bate's "Bright Star, Green Light, The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald" examines how Keats influenced Fitzgerald's work. 

Following the model of Plutarch's "The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Compared," Bate offers dual biographies of the two writers, separated by 100 years, the same amount of time that Keats was removed from his literary hero, Shakespeare.

Bate at times appears more engaged with Fitzgerald's life than Keats'. He castigates both men for their objectification of women. Analyzing in depth Fitzgerald's novels, especially "The Great Gatsby," Bate takes a cursory look at Keats' great odes and other poems.

Alleviating that lack, Bate gives a complete synopsis of the composition and meaning of "To Autumn," Keats' most accomplished poem. Keats wrote the poem while on a sojourn in the ancient Roman cathedral town of Winchester. Bate gives a novelistic portrait of Keats' walks through the city, and the town's agricultural setting that inspired the poem.

While Keats undoubtedly was a major influence on Fitzgerald's work, Bates too often overreaches in contriving connections between the poet's life and scenes in "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night."

Bates revisits familiar details of Keats' life, from his apprenticeship as a apothecary to his struggling apprenticeship as a poet, before his astounding breakthrough in the spring of 1819.  While he treats Fitzgerald's relationship with Zelda Fitzgerald more completely than Keats' with Fanny Brawne, he gives a more detailed picture of Keats' fragile financial situation than other biographies.

Keats' aesthetic concepts, generally tossed off in passing in his letters to his brother George, who immigrated to America, are inadequately explored.

Most glaringly, Bate gives short shrift to Keats' most famous idea, "negative capability." While Keats saw Shakespeare as possessing the magical ability in abundance, he cited Coleridge as lacking  it. Bate disappointingly doesn't examine the reason for Keats' criticism of Coleridge, who displayed Shakespearean creativity in his poems.

While Keats' artistic ideas inspired Fitzgerald, especially in "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night,"  a title taken from a passage in "Ode to a Nightingale,"  the writers' had far different careers.

Fitzgerald enjoyed instant fame with the publication of "The Other Side of Paradise." The then-young author was acclaimed as the voice of his generation and the sage of the Jazz Age. In contrast, Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at age 25 without achieving the fame he desperately wanted.

In the tradition of a long succession of Keats biographies, Bate shows the poet as an exemplary, tragic figure, beloved by his circle of friends. While Bate neglects Fanny Brawne's side of the relationship, he quotes extensively from Keats' yearning love letters to her.

In contrast to Keats, Fitzgerald is portrayed as reprehensible, especially when drunk. Fitzgerald's chronic alcoholism led to shameful behavior; Gerald Murphy, the model for Dick Diver in "Tender Is the Night," banished Fitzgerald from his parties on the Riviera. While drunk, Fitzgerald was also physically abusive to women, including Zelda and Sheilah Graham, his lover during his final years in Hollywood.

Bate also finds that Fitzgerald held virulent racist views similar to those expressed by his boorish villain Tom Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby."

The book ends with a flourish. Bate achieves Keats' and Fitzgerald's standards of beauty in his heart-searing narratives of each writer's final days.

Before his death of a heart attack, while at Sheilah Graham's West Hollywood apartment, Fitzgerald's career had come to resemble that of Keats. His novels out of print, Fitzberald was a forgotten writer, although still writing for Esquire magazine. Despite his failure as a screenwriter, Fitzgerald was engaged in writing "The Last Tycoon," which he left unfinished.

Fitzgerald was prematurely aged from alcoholism, tuberulosis and heart disease. Increasingly happy in his relationship to Graham, while remaining connected to Zelda, committed to a mental institution in Asheville, N.C., he had begun a new optimistic chapter. His old Jazz Age friend Dorothy Parker was one of the few visitors to the funeral home after his death.

Both men died believing themselves failures. After his death, Keats received recognition as one of the greatest English poets. In a similar way, Fitzgerald gained posthumous critical acclaim as a major American writer.

Bate in the end shows them as mystically connected in their fragile lives, their sensitivity to beauty, and their desperate love of language.

 

New York Times Book Review marks 125th year

The New York Times Book Review on Sunday marked 125 years of publication with a special issue of reviews and author interviews from the past.

No reviews of current books appeared, or the weekly best-seller lists. The entire publication was devoted to the book review's proud history, now in decline.

The New York Times began publishing the stand-alone book review in October 1896, surprisingly predating the Times Literary Supplement by six years. Publisher Adolph Ochs began the book review, another of his ideas that changed American journalism.

Sunday's anthology shows that the Book Review in its history has shown an awareness and understanding of Southern literature, echoing Ochs' origins as the publisher of the Chattanooga Times.

I was intrigued by the inclusion of a lengthy interview with Gore Vidal, who always claimed the Times had a vendetta against him and his books. Novelist Diane Johnson interviewed Vidal, who made his characteristic acerbic comments about the low standards of American literary criticism. He refrained from his usual barbs against the Times.

The reprinted reviews, most of them cut from their original length, covered a range of books, from James Joyce's "Ulysses" and Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," to Dale Carnegie's "The Power of Positive Thinking,"  Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" and Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray Love."

Well-known authors wrote many of the reviews, such as James Baldwin praising Arthur Hailey's "Roots" and Nora Ephron chortling about Rex Reed's "Do You Sleep in the Nude?," a collection of Reed's candid interviews with celebrities that appeared in the Sunday New York Times.

Another highlight is Alfred Kazin's review of Flannery O'Connor's "Collected Stories," in which he mentions visiting O'Connor and her "famous peacocks" at her home in Milledgeville, Ga.

In his discerning appraisal of the collection, published in 1971, seven years after O'Connor's death, Kazin finds that O'Connor displays her genius in her intense concentration on her memorable characters

The famed literary critic's Jewish immigrant experience in New York City gives him special insight into O'Connor's understanding of the South.

"O’Connor, as I must call her, was in story after story all there, occupying the mind and the whole life of a character who was as solidly on the page as if impaled on it," Kazin wrote.

"Her people were wholly what they were, which wasn’t much in “humane” terms. But they were all intact of themselves, in their stupidity, their meanness, their puzzlement, their Southern “ruralness.” The South was her great metaphor, not for place but for the Fall of Man. Life for O’Connor was made up of absolutes; people were absolute, sharp, knives without handles."

The anthology, which generally avoids William Faulkner, also offers a wonderful interview with another esteemed Southern writer, Eudora Welty, who actually was a staff writer for the Sunday Book Review for several years during World War II before returning to her Mississippi home.

Walter Clemons' 1970 interview with Welty, geared to the publication of "Losing Battles," her last novel, gives striking details of his visit to Welty's home in Jackson, Miss.

Clemons and Welty discuss her 1963 short story "Where Is the Voice Coming From," based on the murder of Medgar Evers at his home in Jackson. Welty says that after the story's publication in the New Yorker, a Northern reporter called to ask if anyone had burned a cross on her lawn. She expresses her incredulity at the question. "The people who burn crosses on lawns don't read me in the New Yorker. Really, don't people know the first thing about the South?"

That reminded me of Faulkner's character Quentin Compson telling his Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon at the end of "Absalom, Absalom" that he didn't hate the South. Welty didn't hate it either, as Clemons' interview makes clear. She loved it, with all its faults.

Southern literature, and Faulkner, is viewed from a black perspective in Harvey Breit's revealing 1952 interview with Ralph Ellison, conducted before Ellison gained fame after the publication of "Invisible Man."

“It is felt that there is something in the Negro experience that makes it not quite right for the novel," Ellison says. "That’s not true. It becomes important to the novelist because it is in this problem, as Faulkner makes us aware, that the American human conflict is at its most intense and dramatic."

Such insights are rare in today's Book Review. The reviews and interviews from the past struck me as more substantial, well-written and entertaining than what appears in today's Book Review.

Compared with the Wall Street Journal's Saturday Review section, the TLS , the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review has sunk to self-indulgent writing, pandering to popular tastes and gimmicky features.

The publication that once set the standard for American literary criticism has lost its way.

 

 

Catching up with Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman"

On a beautiful autumn Sunday afternoon, I decided at last to watch "The Irishman," Martin Scorsese's take on Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance and other famous mob murders.

The film featured a murderers' row of famed mob-noir actors: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Al Pacino, Jesse Plemons, even Steven Van Zandt in a cameo role. And Ray Romano shows up as a mob lawyer. Michael Imperioli and Ray Liotta must have been busy.

While Pesci was mesmerizing as the crime boss Russell Bufalino, DeNiro as the hit man Frank Sheeran and Pacino as Hoffa burn up the screen in their dual appearances. The two acting legends keep pushing each other to more flamboyant mugging and vocal histrionics.

Taken from Sheeran's memoir, "I Hear You Paint Houses," the exhausting three and half-hour film written by Steve Zaillian and directed by Scorsese for Netflix hinted at Mafia involvement in the John F. Kennedy assassination, as well as Hoffa's death. Like a homicidal Forrest Gump, DeNiro's every-man hitman Sheeran keeps showing up, even killing "Crazy Joey" Gallo at a restaurant in Manhattan.

Scorsese and Zaillain give tantalizing tidbits of mob culture: "I Hear You Paint Houses" is code for "I hear you kill people." There's a long mystifying dialogue about a fish left in the back of a car, connected to Hoffa’s killing. Right: "He sleeps with the fishes."

Conspiracy buffs will levitate at references to old Joe Kennedy's mob ties, JFK's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and other hints of mob anger at what they saw as the Kennedys' betrayals. The CIA is not mentioned. There is a muffled mention of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.

The epic makes references to other mob films, directed by Scorsese and others. The depiction of Gallo's murder echoes the famous scene in Francis Ford Coppolla's "Godfather" in which Pacino's Michael Corleone kills the mob boss and crooked cop at an Italian restaurant. This time, the killer doesn't go to the bathroom to find the murder weapon.

A huge banquet honoring Sheeran, where Van Zandt appears as singer Jerry Vale, recalls the wedding scene in Coppolla's movie. Bits from "The Sopranos," "Goodfellas,"  "Casino," "Scarface" and "Mean Streets" fly by.

Pacino and De Niro appeared in "Godfather Part II," but in separate tracks. "The Irishman" was the first film in which they faced off against each other.

I was gratified that the movie made a passing reference to Ed Grady Partin, the Baton Rouge Teamster boss whose testimony sent union president Hoffa to prison. In my youth, Partin's strikes often shut down Louisiana's capital city for months. Partin met his downfall trying to organize workers at publisher and TV station owner Douglas Manship's Morning Advocate.

"The Irishman" is like a greatest hits album featuring stars of yesteryear. The movie is a feast for history, conspiracy, Mafia and film buffs. The soundtrack of old '50s and '60s songs, compiled by the Band's Robbie Robertson - also touch the nostalgia synapses.

God, the film is long. Scorsese might have cut closing scenes of De Niro in his nursing home, reminiscing about the old days of carrying out mob hits and confessing his sins to a young priest.

But, hey, it was De Niro, filling the screen.

 

 

 

 

 

New Yorker shines with Paul McCartney interview, Thomas McGuane short story

The New Yorker's current issue proves again that we boomers refuse to go gently into that good night.

Longtime Editor David Remnick unshelves his writing skills in a long profile of Paul McCartney, who at 79 seeks to reframe the Beatles legacy and his subsequent career.

The issue also offers a vintage short story by 82-year-old Thomas McGuane. "Not Here You Don't" examines the environmental deterioration and declining ethos of freedom in Montana, McGuane's longtime home.

Those who experienced 1960s pop culture first-hand can also relish film critic Anthony Lane's typically insightful review of Daniel Craig's last James Bond film, "No Time to Die." Recent film-goers will mourn Craig's farewell as earlier Bond fans did the exit of Sean Connery.

Remnick's revealing piece on McCartney arrives at a big moment for the pop superstar. A remix of his latest album, "McCartney" III," is topping the charts, and he's publishing a collection of his lyrics dating back to his teen years. Poet Paul Muldoon wrote essays for "The Lyrics: 1956 Through the Present."

The biggest event is the long-delayed arrival of a re-edited version of the 1969 film "Get Back," which takes a lighter view of the Beatles' breakup than the original movie. Peter Jackson's film, taken from 56 hours of material, will be streamed on Disney Plus at Thanksgiving.

I saw the original Beatles film years ago, transported by the band giving an impromptu concert on a London rooftop as office workers and passers-by on the street watched in wonder.

In pushing the film, McCartney looks back on his tortured relationship with John Lennon. McCartney says Lennon caused the Beatles breakup, for which McCartney was blamed at the time. He also says he remained friends with Lennon despite Lennon's harsh public insults, and admired Yoko Ono, whose marriage to Lennon was seen as breaking the band apart.

McCartney in an amusing aside punctures the Rolling Stones, calling the Beatles' major rivals a blues cover band.

Younger generations will  likely wonder what all the fuss was about. Yet watching the Beatles perform their songs will make them understand why their moms and dads, and grand-moms and grand-dads, loved the band's music so intensely.

I'm always happy to see in the New Yorker stories by McGuane and a few other remaining writers of his generation. Contemporary short stories often don't engage me, as was the case in the current special issue of Oxford American showcasing new Southern writing.

The emerging generation of writers formed in college creative writing programs display a similarity of techniques and banality of characters and situations.

In contrast, McGuane makes the reader wonder how he achieves such power from his deceptively simple language. He ties his stories to broader social and environmental changes. As he discusses in a separate interview, McGuane uses the short story to illuminate the West's environmental and political crises.

Like McCartney, McGuane is a master storyteller who remains relevant for younger generations as well as we aging boomers.