Southern Bookman

High Museum's "A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845" examines region's tragic past, dynamic future

The High Museum's "A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845" gives a familiar pictorial history of the region's poverty, racism and environmental abuses.

While comprehensive in documenting the South's tragic past, the exhibition avoids the region's celebratory rituals of sports, music and story-telling. Missing are the Masters, the Kentucky Derby, NASCAR races, college football, major league baseball and hunting and fishing.

Rather than famous Southern politicians, writers, musicians and actors, the photos concentrate on average people. The South's traditional agricultural economy takes precedence over more recent industries.

The exhibit ends with a striking selection from a new generation of photographers, celebrating immigrant culture and changing lifestyles.

The 175 photos range from golden hits by famous names like Walker Evans, Auguste Belloc, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, William Eggleston, William Henry Jackson, Gordon Parks, Richard Avedon, Sally Mann, William Christenberry and Ernest C. Withers to portraits, landscapes and daily life by unheralded photographers.

Opening with portraits of freed slaves and Civil War pictures, the exhibit documents the poverty and racial conflicts of the Jim Crow era and the Depression, culminating with the Civil Rights area and demographic shifts at the close of the 20th century.

Curated by Gregory Harris, the High's curator of photography, and Sarah Kennel, director of the Raysor Center at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibit is a triumph for the High, drawing upon its extensive photography collection.

A high point is a sequence of photos from the civil rights area, from one of the famous images of police dogs attacking a young protester in Birmingham, Ala., to Martin Luther King's life.

King's arrest in the Montgomery, Ala., courthouse on Sept. 4, 1958, is shockingly captured by photographer Charles Moore. Elegantly dressed in a beige suit and fedora, King was arrested for "loitering" after arriving for a trial involving his associate, Ralph David Abernathy.

Moore's photo shows the officers bending King's right arm behind his back, twisting his body as he grabs a counter with his other hand. Moore surprisingly took the picture for the Montgomery Advertiser, one of the local newspapers disparaged for weak coverage of the civil rights movement and supporting white supremacy.

Life magazine picked up the photograph, giving it national attention. Moore later moved to Life, where he took many photos of the struggle for civil rights, including shots of Birmingham police blasting protesters with water from fire hoses.

A series of photos detail King's assassination, from Withers' shot of marching Memphis sanitation workers days before his death to the horse-drawn wagon that carried King's body after his funeral.

One of the exhibit's surprises is Diane Arbus' dramatic portrait of Coretta Scott King, illuminating the indomitable fortitude and resilience of King's widow.

Another Arbus photo of young rural white men on a porch in South Carolina, taken for Esquire magazine, more resembles the photos of grotesque subjects for which Arbus is best known.

Atlanta's rise as a gleaming Sunbelt metropolis receives limited attention. A photo of 14th Street before the 1996 Olympics gives an impression of urban desolation rather than bustling commerce.

The historic racial inequalities of Atlanta come forth in Joel Sternfeld's haunting "Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta, 1983," documenting the persistent theme of blacks from the city's impoverished Southside working in the homes of the affluent northern suburbs.

Part of Sternfeld's "American Prospects" collection, the photo shows the three domestic workers standing in isolation in an otherwise deserted Sandy Springs neighborhood of well-kept lawns and extended driveways leading to suburban mansions.

A new generation receives recognition including work by Memphis Chinese-American Tommy Kha and Atlantan Jose Ibarra Rizo's portraits of fellow Latino immigrants in Gainesville.

Atlanta artists Sheila Pree Bright, Angela West and Jill Frank are also featured, along with Athens residents Irina Rozofksy and Mark Steinmetz.

The exhibit ends with Rozovsky's shot of a young girl standing by a flooded Athens street, mesmerized by the rushing brown water. Rozovsky told the Atlantic that she sees the photo as more of a fairy-tale image rather than a statement of environmental threat.

Rozovsky's striking creation affirms that photography will give witness to the South's future.

 

 

Saltwater "wedge" threatens New Orleans water

In the latest dystopian news, a saltwater "wedge" creeping up the Mississippi River threatens to contaminate New Orleans' water supply.

The salt intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico is scheduled to arrive in a few weeks, rendering the water unsafe for drinking, showering, and sprinkling on lawns.

After hurricanes, floods, government corruption, crime and extreme heat, New Orleans now must overcome the saltwater invasion, the result of a persistent drought that has lowered Mississippi water levels.

To counter the threat, the U.S. Corps of Engineers plans to send 36 million gallons of freshwater a day to city utilities. The corps will use barges to transport the treated water from the upper Mississippi.

While the corps action sounds effective, it could further deplete the river's water if the drought worsens.

The corps is also finishing a "sill," or underwater levee, that will partially block the salt attack. The sill has an opening for river ships, which will allow some salt to pass through.

Southern Louisiana for years has been losing vast amounts of land to the Gulf of Mexico. Salt heading up the river is something new.

Gumbo cooks might no longer need so much seasoning.

 

Times reporter Adam Nagourney looks at newspaper's digital shift, while Marty Baron revists Washington Post reign

Two new books trace the transition of The New York Times and Washington Post into the digital age.

Veteran Times reporter Adam Nagourney's "The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism," out Tuesday, details the Times' shift from the nation's dominant print newspaper into a multimedia Internet giant. 

The Post's similar transformation receives a front-row airing from former Washington Post editor Marty Baron in "Collision: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post,"  published Oct. 3. Baron, who retired in 2021, looks at the Post's rise in digital readership as it clashed with the Trump administration.

Nagourney takes a longer view, picking up The Times' story from where it ended with Gay Talese's classic history "The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times, the Institution That Influences the World."

When Talese's book came out in 1969, print newspapers held tremendous power, from The Times to strong dailies like the Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the St. Petersburg Times and The Los Angeles Times.

With the rise of the Internet, newspaper advertising revenue and circulation sank. To survive, the Times, the Post and other companies switched to online subscriptions rather than traditional advertising.

Nagourney's book ranges from the last days of domineering editor Abe Rosenthal's reign, into its handling of the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals. A main focus is the shift into the digital age under publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who took over from his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. in 2018.

A.G. Sulzberger engineered the Times' makeover, pushing out former editor Jill Abramson, a battle that Nagourney covers. The author also focuses on the volatile era of Howell Raines, embattled by the discovery of Blair's concocted stories and Miller's tainted reporting that led to the Iraq War.

The Times has built a dominant digital circulation by offering recipes, games and lifestyle features that critics say have weakened its traditional commitment to national and international news.

Local reporting, after a resurgence under Raines and Abramson, has declined, and the Times recently subleased its sports page to the Athletic, the online sports site it purchased in 2022. Those who subscribe to the Athletic and the Times receive the same content.

The Post and other newspaper companies have not kept pace with the Times. During the Biden administration, the Post's digital subscriptions have fallen off, and the company has undergone layoffs.

Nagourney updates Talese and Baron updates Ben Bradley and Katharine Graham. A welcome feast for lovers of traditional books, and newspapers, even in their new formats.

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Lethem's "Brooklyn Crime Novel" marks return to roots

Jonathan Lethem's new novel/memoir "Brooklyn Crime Novel" revisits the Brooklyn neighborhood he made famous with novels based on his childhood there.

"Brooklyn Crime Novel" blends fiction, memoir and history to chronicle the 50-year transformation of his native Boreum Hill neighborhood, the setting of his acclaimed novels "Motherless in Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude."

White urban pioneer writers and artists in the 1960s began moving into the area, triggering years of intensive gentrification.

Lethem, the child of artistic parents, grew up on Dean Street, the shifting neighborhood's main thoroughfare. Attending the local New York public elementary school, he was attacked by young blacks whose lives were disrupted by the arrival of the more affluent newcomers. .

In a recent New Yorker article, Lethem details the transformation of the gritty Brooklyn neighborhood, originally known as North Gowanus, named for the polluted canal that runs through the area. He discusses how an early pioneer renamed the neighborhood Boreum Hill to give it a more appealing image.

Lethem's New Yorker essay looks back at the New Yorker writer Jervis Anderson, who in a 1977 article for the magazine examined the neighborhood's transition.

In the New Yorker piece, Lethem comprehensively chronicles the urban pioneers who led the neighborhood's makeover, undermining the lower-class black, Latino and working class whites who had lived there.

Lethem grew up near noted black playwright Lynn Nottage, with whom he rode the subway each day to the LaGuardia High School for the arts in Manhattan's Lincoln Center.

Nottage in an interview in the Paris Review's fall issue recalls growing up in the neighborhood, and its influence on her plays.

"Brooklyn Crime Novel" is the latest notable book in a bountiful fall season.

As AI encroaches upon human life, extreme weather worsens and political rancor rises, an abundance of new books brings hope. 

 

Gay Talese's friends gather to honor new book, "Bartleby & Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener"

Gay Talese at age 91 keeps the literary flame burning.

The elegantly dressed Talese recently attracted a crowd of old friends and colleagues to an old-fashioned book party marking the publication of his latest book, "Bartleby & Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener."

Graydon Carter, former Vanity Fair editor and publisher of the Air Mail online magazine, hosted the party at his Waverly Inn restaurant in New York City's Greenwich Village.

Washington Post features writer Ashely Fetters Maloy, covering the story that somehow eluded The New York Times, hailed the event as keeping alive a fading tradition.

Well-wishers included actors Tony Danza and Joel Grey, singer Judy Collins, Talese's longtime agent Lynn Nesbitt, New Yorker Editor David Remnick and Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Talese, wearing a stylish blue suit, fedora and distinctive pocket square, basked in the praise along with his 89-year-old wife, the acclaimed publisher Nan A. Talese, who wore pearls and a fetching hat.

The book looks back on Talese's career and how he composed landmark New Journalism pieces like "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and classic books like "The Kingdom and the Power," his acclaimed examination of newsroom politics at The New York Times, where he began his journalism career before gaining fame as a magazine writer and author.

In "Bartleby," Talese reflects upon his writing life, including the controversy over his 2016 book, "The Voyeur's Hotel." Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi pointed out factual inconsistencies in the work, and the Post's Erik Wemple raised ethical questions.

Post book critic Michael Dirda in a positive review of "Bartleby" says Talese admits to mistakes in challenging the Post's reporting and over-reacting to the negative press coverage.

Talese might identify with the independent spirit of Melville's Bartleby, yet he hasn't "preferred not to." Instead, Talese has fearlessly chronicled American life, from the hothouse existence of the famous to the every-day triumphs and failures of common people.

 

 

 

 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution returning to the city

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is heading into a new, expansive era.

After years exiled in the suburbs, the AJC will move to Midtown next year, the news operation's Publisher Andrew Morse announced to the Rotary Club of Atlanta on Sept. 18, according to Maria Saporta's Saporta Report.

The AJC will do business in an office building with AJC signage, Morse said. The company plans to offer newsmaker events at the new site.

It also appears that the endangered print newspaper will have a reprieve. Morse told the Rotary Club that the print operation will continue into the near future, while the company builds up its digital operation.

The Cox media company aims for a rapid rise to 500,000 digital subscriptions in the next few years, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.

In meeting that ambitious goal to outpace The New York Times' digital buildup in recent years, the AJC will go on a hiring binge, a dizzying shift in direction from the company's frequent buyouts this century as the print newspaper's circulation and ad revenue plummeted.

After years of retrenching its news coverage, the AJC is  planning to establish bureaus across Georgia, with reporters in Athens, Augusta, Columbus and Macon, the WSJ said.

Recently hired Savannah correspondent Adam Van Bremmer is already boosting coastal coverage with in-depth features and breaking news stories.

The AJC in recent weeks has shown robust news coverage not seen in years, such as sending a reporter to Jacksonville after the Dollar Store slayings.

With ace state reporter Greg Bluestein and columnist Patricia Murphy, the AJC gives blanket coverage of the state's emergence as a national political barometer. Young reporters like City Hall beat writer Riley Bunch have given the newspaper new energy.

The AJC's move to Midtown acknowledges the neighborhood's rise as the city's media and technology center, seeded by Georgia Tech's dazzling  business development projects.

As an AJC alum of 26 years, I'm proud to see that the Cox family's old media company will keep playing a major role in Atlanta's future.

Remembering the anniversary of Keats' writing "To Autumn"

John Keats wrote "To Autumn" on this date in 1819, ending his poetic career with a last flowering of genius.

Keats in the spring of the year wrote his famous odes in a remarkable burst of creativity. In late summer, he left London to stay in the old cathedral city of Winchester, 60 miles away, hoping to finish several projects he hoped would prove lucrative.

On a walk along the River Itchen on Sept. 19, he basked in the late summer weather, finding a strange beauty in the stubble fields after the harvest. In a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, he commented "how beautiful the season is now - How fine the air," and noted that he'd composed the poem.

Sadly, he abandoned the epic "Hyperion" and other work he'd wanted to finish in Westminster. Outside of the fragmentary "The Living Hand," Keats had written his final poem with "To Autumn." Suffering from tuberculosis, he died in Rome two years later. 

Keats in "To Autumn" asks "Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?"

The young poet didn't know that he'd written his last songs of spring.

 

To Autumn

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

 

 

 

 

Noted biographer Terry Daugherty examines life of Texas writer Larry McMurtry

I've discovered another book to add to my overflowing autumn reading list: Terry Daughterty's new biography of Larry McMurtry.

Daugherty's book, which received favorable reviews from Greg Curis in the Wall Street Journal, Dwight Garner in The New York Times and Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker, is the first comprehensive biography of McMurtry, the chronicler of Texas history and society who died in 2021 at age 84.

McMurtry gained widespread fame and won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic novel "Lonesome Dove," which tells the story of a late 19th century cattle drive from Texas to Montana. A TV series based on the novel generated an intense national following.

Before "Lonesome Dove," McMurtry built a devoted audience for his Texas-based novels and essays, especially "The Last Picture Show," the basis of the 1971 film that received eight Academy Award nominations.

Later in his life, McMurtry wrote memoirs about his separate careers as a book enthusiast, best-selling author and Hollywood celebrity.

Daughterty, who has written acclaimed biographies of Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and the Texas novelist Billy Lee Brammer and several novels and nonfiction books, is a Texas native praised by reviewers for his comprehensive look at McMurtry's rise from a childhood on a desolate west Texas ranch to international fame.

Here is the link to the Southern Bookman interview with Daughtery following the publication of his 2011 biography of Barheleme, known for his surrealistic novels and short stories.

Daugerty's biographies of Didion and Barthelme found riveting drama in their lives as writers, and I'm looking forward to enjoying the same excitement from his biography  of McMurtry, one of my all-time favorite authors.

 

 

Tim O'Brien's "America Fantastica," his first novel in 20 years, a late-career gift for longtime fans

Drinking beers and playing golf with Tim O'Brien are my warmest memories of the Sewanee Writers Conference, the summer camp for adults that I attended in 1991 and 1992.

O'Brien, who always wore his signature baseball cap, had none of the pretensions of a famous author. Friendly and cheerful, he treated the aspiring writers at the conference as fellow seekers of literary excellence.

Offering encouragement and humor, Tim enlivened the gathering at the University of the South, nestled in the east Tennessee mountains.

Acclaimed for his Vietnam novels "Going After Cacciato" and "The Things They Carried," O'Brien drew upon his war experiences for a mesmerizing craft lecture in which he illustrated how fiction writers achieve higher truths through making up characters and stories.

At 76, O'Brien has recovered his commitment to literature after many years of not writing. In October, he's publishing his first novel in 20 years, "America Fantastica," a saga about a former journalist who robs a bank and is then pursued cross country.

O'Brien in 2019 published the memoir "Dad's Maybe Book," about becoming the father of two sons late in life. He was also the subject of a documentary based on the book.

Like fellow writers of his generation Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Ann Beattie and Lorrie Moore, O'Brien is giving longtime readers a late-career gift.

Reading his new book, I'll remember Tim's smile on those summer afternoons in Sewanee.

Emily Wilson's translation of "The Iliad" a major literary event

Emily Wilson's anticipated translation of Homer's"The Iliad" arrives Sept. 26, accelerating an already exciting season of new books.

Wilson's "The Odyssey" in 2017 attracted a multitude of new readers to the ancient epic, freshening Homer's language with traditional iambic pentameter lines, an effective English parallel to Homer's dactylic hexameters.

Homer traditionalists griped that Wilson took too many liberties with choices such as calling Odysseus a "complicated man" in the poem's first line, yet Wilson's words were actually closer to Homer's original language than earlier, more grandiose translations.

Wilson told the New Yorker's Judith Thurman and the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins that she struggled with Homer's descriptions of war, death and conquest, which make "The Iliad" darker and more concentrated on violence than "The Odyssey." 

In a profile in the New Yorker's current issue, Thurman describes traveling with Wilson to purported site of Odysseus' palace in Greece. Wilson visits several places from the end of "The Odyssey," in which Odysseus returns home after years wandering from the war with Troy described in "The Iliad." Thurman also witnesses Wilson giving a reading at the University of Pennsylvania, where she's a classics professor.

Higgins in an interview with Wilson also reports on her struggles with translating "The Iliad" and its more difficult poetic conventions. Higgins sees parallels with the current war between Ukraine and Russia.

Working on the difficult translation during the Covid shutdown, Wilson at last decided to return to the five-beat line used by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, although the meter didn't match as well with Homer's tropes in "The Iliad."

Wilson, the daughter of British biographer and critic A.N. Wilson and the late Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan Jones, who died in October of Alzheimer's disease, came to the United States to receive a doctorate at Yale after completing undergraduate and master's degrees at Oxford. She's the sister of noted food writer Bee Wilson.

As with her translation of "The Odyssey," Wilson said she sought in "The Iliad" to recover Homer's democratic language that first made his poems popular centuries ago when traveling bards read them orally to audiences.

Wilson in her translations seeks to give Homer's language the same immediacy for today's readers.