Southern Bookman

Farewell, Kathleen Blanco

Former Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco was blasted for the state's inadequate preparation for Hurricane Katrina.

In the 14 years since Katrina's flooding devastated New Orleans, Blanco's performance has received higher marks. Blanco, who died from cancer over the weekend at the age of 76, had to fight George W. Bush's dysfunctional administration over aid delays, according to the New York Times obituary Monday. She also had to deal with the incompetent and corrupt administration of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who ended up in prison.

A month after Katrina struck, Blanco led the state's response to Hurricane Rita, which struck the southwestern part of the state. She rose to political prominence in the Cajun parishes around Lafayette that received the brunt of Rita's fury. Her response to the hurricane drew praise.

But Blanco decided to step down after one term, leading to the election of Republican Bobby Jindal, whom she'd defeated to become the first female governor of the state. Following the path blazed by Huey Long, she raised her state profile as a member of the powerful state Public Service Commission. She was also the first woman elected to the PSC.

Jindal's budget cutting following the 2008 recession was more disastrous for the state than Katrina. His two terms marked the Republican Party's total control of the state, bringing deep tax cuts and spending reductions for social programs and higher education.

But John Bel Edwards, like Blanco a conservative, anti-abortion Democrat, took over for Jindal, and has slowly restored the state's financial health. Edwards, running for re-election against a slate of Republicans, announced Blanco's death.

Blanco, unlike Louisiana's many flamboyant and corrupt male governors, ran a solid, professional administration that could have made significant gains for the state. Unfortunately, her success was hampered by Katrina.

J.D. Salinger's books enter the digital age

J.D. Salinger's books will be published digitally for the first time, according to a front page article in Monday's New York Times.

Salinger's works are the last major literary estate to enter the digital world, according to the Times. Although the reclusive Salinger hated technology, the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust decided that his work is being forgotten by a new generation geared to reading on smartphones and computer screens.

"The Catcher in the Rye," "Nine Stories," "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction," will be converted into e-books, but not audio recordings, Salinger's son, Matt, announced. The estate also will continue its ban on movie versions of the books.

Matt Salinger also told the Times that more of Salinger's writing will be published in the next few years. As rumored, Salinger, who died at age 91, kept writing until the end of his life and produced a voluminous amount of new material.

A lot of the unpublished work concerns Salinger's mystical Glass family, his son said. Unable to find reliable software to convert Salinger's handwritten work into print, Matt Salinger is painstakingly typing the manuscripts.

Long a favorite of middle-school and high school classes, "The Catcher in the Rye" is seen as outdated by young readers today. Girls especially find the book unrelated to their concerns. Black readers also don't find the book relevant.

Yet, Salinger's Holden Caulfield and his memorable portrait of New York City surely will draw younger fans attuned to the beauty of language and Holden's quest for meaning.

I'll be happy to have an e-book copy of "Nine Stories" available for convenient reading. "For Esme in Love and Squalor" is one of those stories I must reread, along with "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" and "Just Before the War With The Eskimos."

Along with many other male Salinger fans, I fell in love with Franny Glass, imagining myself also dating her on a crisp Ivy League football weekend. But when I reread the novella a few years ago, it seemed overwrought and treacly.

I consumed "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters," and "Seymour: An Introduction," but they show a decline in Salinger's writing, with too much exposition at the expense of artistry. Still, narrator Buddy Glass, Salinger's alter-ego, is a good companion.

While I welcome the e-book publication of Salinger's classics, I can't wait to see what he was working on all of those years hiding away in New Hampshire. Perhaps brilliant new masterpieces will arrive, or disappointing, unrealized work. Either way, Salinger fans will greet them in a frenzy.

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Treasures found at new Sandy Springs library: Joy Williams stories, and a study of George Orwell's "1984"

The new Sandy Spring library feels like stepping into the Starship Enterprise.

With shiny metallic shelves, new carpet, digital screens and high-tech gear, the Atlanta-Fulton County library branch is like Oz to the old building's Kansas, if I may mix my cultural metaphors.

Teens have a special room for studying, or searching the Internet. An ample computer bank and a row of meeting rooms with televisions rival the amenities at one of those incubators for business startups A huge new public meeting room has been added, and let us not forget the renovated bathrooms. Not unisex, as yet.

Perhaps the library could raise funds with a sideline as a meat locker. The air conditioning was frigid. And, I assume solar power wasn't considered in the big makeover?

The children's section appears larger, with a magnitude of books for our new generations of readers. The Friends of the Library also has a separate room for book sales. The shelves are empty for now.

As suspected, the librarians no longer check out books. Patrons must go to high-tech self-serve stations, where electronic beams and bar codes come into play. A full library staff remains, for now mainly occupied with showing people how to use the new book checkout machines.

Staffers stand behind a couple of small desks, equipped with laptop computers, to issue library cards, or give answers to homework questions.Siri-styled robots probably will be arriving in the not too distant future.

Nor do the librarians accept returned books. To return books, a person presses a square on a digital screen, and doors of an electronic passageway slide open. Placed on a platform, the books are whisked away, as in an old Buck Rogers movie when the hero finds himself transported into the evil ruler's sanctum.

The good news is that the emphasis remains on books. On the other hand, the periodical sections appears to have diminished, and, sadly, I didn't see the presence of a newspaper anywhere.

But let's be glad for the books. The renovated space contains rows of shiny bookshelves, of much lower height than before. It appears that there's a larger selection of novels, non-fiction, history and biography, especially new arrivals.

And the books are attractively displayed. Many of the previous library's, older, less checked out books apparently have been removed and replaced with new stock. But I still noticed some of my favorite old tomes from the past. But the poetry section seemed smaller.

I was thrilled to see outside of the teen lounge a large Young Adult section. The surging popularity of young adult novels in recent years gives hope that books might survive after all.

Searching the enticing fiction section, I was thrilled to find a book I've been wanting to read for a while: Joy Williams' "The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories." Williams was praised as a master of the short story when the book came out, and I'm looking forward to delving into her work.

I also found another Williams collection, "99 Stories of God," a small volume published by Tin House Press. The stories of no longer than a page and a half, some only a few paragraphs, are like mystical riddles, or metaphysical parables. God is a frequent character in the stories, showing up unobtrusively at everyday places.

Exploring further, I came upon another treasure, the recently published "The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984." Written by the British author Dorian Lynskey, known primarily as a music journalist, the book examines the biographical and cultural background of Orwell's famous dystopian novel, which seems all too relevant in Donald Trump's alternative fact era.

Shooing away a hovering librarian, I learned how to check out my book treasures all by myself. But that laser beam seemed a bit Big Brotherish.

 

 

 

Welcome back, Sandy Springs Library

North Atlanta's summer without a public library will end Tuesday morning.

The Sandy Springs Regional Library reopens at 10 a.m. with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, refreshments and tours of the renovated library, according to the Atlanta-Fulton County Library System.

An oasis among the suburban clutter along Mount Vernon Highway, the library has long been one of the cultural jewels of Sandy Springs, which in recent years has developed into one of Atlanta's most sophisticated and cosmopolitan centers.

Known for opening on Sunday afternoons, allowing teens to complete homework projects after dissolute weekends and giving those bored with NFL games a place to browse books and magazines, the library has been closed for nearly a year.

Last month, the Northside and Buckhead library branches shut down for their months of renovations, leaving North Atlanta with no libraries.

I felt sympathy for stay-at-home Moms deprived of their weekly storytimes and other offerings. Nor could readers hope to check out the latest beach book, although the library is notorious for not acquiring hot summer novels until autumn's first chill has already arrived.

The Sandy Springs library renovation will add a teen room and a bookstore for the Friends of the Library, according to reports, along with freshened shelves and I suppose book collections. The Sandy Springs library always had one of the system's most extensive children's book sections, which I trust will be even better.

I can't wait to explore the new library, hoping that some of my favorite sections haven't been tossed out. The CD collection likely has been winnowed, with vinyl making a comeback, and new digital technology will no doubt gain prominence. A 3-D printer? I hope the library staff hasn't been reduced in favor of self-service checkout kiosks and so forth.

It'll be good to have the library back. I always enjoyed driving down Roswell Road to the library on Sunday afternoons, listening to the Braves on the radio.

 

Nathaniel Philbrick tells how George Washington orchestrated Yorktown victory, American independence

I spent Memorial Day morning completing Nathaniel Philbrick's "In The Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown."

Along with Washington's patience and leadership in keeping peace among different factions, I was struck by how big a role the French played in the U.S. gaining independence.

The French navy's control of the Chesapeake Bay after a victory over the British fleet ensured the American victory at Yorktown, where  the French army's siege tactics led to British Gen. Cornwallis' surrender.

Philbrick, who also wrote a readable account of the early days of the Revolution in Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill, shows that Washington often was dependent on French leaders such as  Admiral de Grasse. Washington marshaled the highest diplomatic skills to persuade French leaders to support American aims.

Sometimes, they resisted, as when DeGrasse refused to send French ships up the York River, which might have allowed Cornwallis' forces to escape. A sudden storm dashed Cornwallis' plans.

Washington initially resisted moving his army to Virginia to bottle up Cornwallis. At first, he planned to attack British-held New York, a strategy that Philbrick struggles to justify.

Philbrick exposes Washington's repellent actions in regard to slavery. Several of Washington's slaves escaped, and apparently joined Cornwallis's army along with hundreds of other slaves. During the Yorktown siege, with food running low, Cornwallis expelled the slaves, many of whom starved or fell victim to disease.

After the battle, Washington attempted to recapture his slaves, hiring a professional slave hunter, according to Philbrick. After a peace agreement with the British had been signed,  ending the war,Washington sought to prevent thousands of former slaves from leaving New York with British forces. The British insisted on the slaves retaining their freedom and traveling to Britain.

Washington in his later years did criticize slavery, and in his will freed his slaves, upon the death of his wife, Martha. But during his lifetime, he sought to uphold slavery at his home of Mount Vernon. Washington also resisted a venture by Lafayette to establish a farming venture that would operate without slavery.

The American commander agreed to aide John Laurens' proposal to establish black regiments in the Continental Army. I was astonished that Washington commanded the most integrated American army until Vietnam.

Yet, Philbrick notes that Washington's efforts to recapture slaves after Yorktown sowed the seeds of the Civil War.

Philbrick's book is part of a renewed interest in the Revolutionary War in recent years, fueled by the success of the musical "Hamilton" and popular biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and other Founding Fathers.

While the Revolutionary War receives new attention, interest in the Civil War was waned, according to an article Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal's Cameron McWhirter. Visitation to Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg and Chickamauga has declined, McWhirter reported.

One reason is the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, and the violence at Charlottesville over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, McWhirter found.

Another cause is a declining knowledge of American history among young people. When I was growing up, Civil War interest was high among Southern males. Now, aging Civil War re-enactors are not being replaced by younger participants, McWhirter found.

Books on the Revolutionary War reveal that it was a nasty conflict,  a civil war between the rebels and American British loyalists. Philbrick relates brutal British tactics such as throwing small-pox-stricken slaves into wells to poison drinking water. As another recent book details, the fighting continued for two years after Yorktown in a bitter civil war in the Carolinas.

Now, noted World War II historian Rick Atkinson has turned to the Revolutionary War. Atkinson's recently released "The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777:" is the first of a three-volume history of the war, following his trilogy about the allied victory over Germany in World War II.

The most striking scene in Philbrick's book is Washington bidding farewell to his officers in New York City. As Philbrick relates, Washington stood for a strong central government while refusing efforts to make him an American king.  Our current president tramples Washington's legacy.

 

Las Vegas recevies renown as literary town

Not only is Las Vegas booming from the Supreme Court legalizing sports betting in our land of the free. Along with landing an NHL hockey team and the Oakland Raiders, the glitzy desert mecca is now a hot spot for literature.

The gambling and entertainment town associated with Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, Howard Hughes and the Mafia now hosts a high-toned literary festival and supports a bookstore known as the Writers' Block, according to an article in The New York Times Monday by John Williams, who also writes some of the newspaper's best book reviews.

Why shouldn't Vegas be a literary town? The glitzy desert mecca is more than the strip. It's the home of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, no longer a national basketball power, but possessing a fine writing program.

Art critic Dave Hickey, author of the well-praised collection "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy," once taught at UNLV.

Las Vegas has been the site of a number of memorable movies, most prominently "The Godfather: Part II." Unless you prefer "Viva Las Vegas," and who doesn't like Elvis and Ann-Margret?

The city also received literary and cinema notoriety from Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

As far as art goes, some even like Las Vegas' iconic sign.

Believer magazine, the literary and pop-culture journal that for some reason I've never warmed to, now publishes from Las Vegas, according to Williams. The publication was losing money until a Vegas-based foundation gave it a money infusion.

Good to know that reading is a bigger pastime in Vegas than slot machines. I wouldn't place money on it though.

 

 

Farewell, Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly, who died April 11 at age 79 of multiple myeloma, enriched my literary life. One of America's foremost poets and a noted Keats biographer, Plumly was a distinguished creative writing professor at the University of Maryland.

Early in his career, Plumly was my favorite professor at LSU,  transforming his English literature class into great performance. I believe that was the then rising young poet's first academic job.

A native of rural Ohio like James Wright, Plumly also turned a brutal childhood into enduring poetry. With his full beard, frequent laughter and deep voice, Plumly loved playing the role of the two-fisted poet with surprising wells of sensitivity. As he aged, his beard turned from the black I remember to snowy white.

Plumly's interpretation of James Joyce's "The Dubliners" left me with a lifelong love for the short stories, especially "The Dead," which I reread every January. After all of these years, I still remember Plumly's comments about Joyce's art.

As he advanced his career, I eagerly read Plumly's work in literary magazines and whenever he published a new collection. 

Then Plumly enjoyed late success as a Keats biographer. Following brilliant poems on Keats' life, Plumly wrote "Posthumous Keats," a collection of linked biographical essays. As a longtime lover of Keats, I was enthralled by Plumly's examination of the Romantic poet's career and posthumous fame after his death at age 25, believing that he would be forgotten.

"Posthumous Keats," along with Jackson Bates' definitive biography, are my favorite books on Keats. My passion for Keats was also awakened at LSU, thanks to an older professor, an immaculately dressed Englishwoman in whose class I was the only student.

Plumly's account in "Posthumous Keats" of the doomed young poet's horrendous carriage ride from Naples to Rome under the care of his loyal friend Joseph Severn is a literary masterpiece. Keats also made the brutal journey with a young woman suffering from an even worse case of tuberculosis than his. Severn's calm and the suffering and physical humiliations suffered by Keats and the young woman are rendered with black humor, pathos and compassion.

A subsequent book on Keats' attending a dinner in 1817 at the home of the artist Robert Benjamin Haydon along with William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb was not as compelling. But Plumly still captured the lifestyle and artistic culture of early 19th century London.

Plumly's death is the latest of an author whose work I constantly followed, joining John Updike, Philip Roth and others. Plumly leaves his wonderful poems, his brilliant books on Keats and the memory of a young poet awakening a callow college student to the riches of literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good Friday, 2019, Heading Westward

On a stormy good Friday morning in Atlanta, I read John Donne's "Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward," as has been my custom for many years.

Wonderful to reopen the Norton Anthology of English Literature and rediscover Britain's literary treasures.

We're headed westward ourselves for a mini-family reunion and history-steeped weekend in Montgomery, Ala.

Other family members are on their way to Fort Worth to cheer the LSU gymnastics team on as they seek a national championship.

As we depart, here is an Easter message from George Hebert's "Easter Wings."

O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

Elizabeth Kolbert investigates disappearance of Louisiana's coast

Louisiana loses a staggering amount of land to the Gulf of Mexico each hour. The disappearance of the state's coast is one of the world's most alarming environmental disasters.

Elizabeth Kolbert in a pessimistic article in the current New Yorker finds that control of the Mississippi River is the main cause of the state's rapid land loss.

Flood control and the need to keep the Mississippi from abandoning New Orleans and Baton Rouge mean that the river no longer spreads sediment to build up the state's delta, as it did for thousands of years. The oil industry's cutting of canals through swamps and marshland worsened the crisis.

Kolbert reports on likely futile attempts to counter the land loss through engineering efforts to artificially boost sediment in places like Plaquemines Parish, where seawater now covers large areas where homes and businesses once stood.

Along with Kolbert's reporting, two maps shock with the realization that much of southern Louisiana is gone forever, and that New Orleans, already sinking, will be threatened by the gulf in not too many years. One map shows the old familiar boot-shaped Louisiana. The other shows the state today, with shredded slivers of land remaining in places like Plaquemines and Terrebonne Parish.

Kolbert's Louisiana reporting updates that done by legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, who in a 1987 article examined control of the Mississippi. In homage to McPhee, Kolbert visits a central focus of his writing, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Old River Control Structure 80 miles north of Baton Rouge.

The corps keeps 70 percent of the Mississippi's water flowing toward New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As Kolbert details, following McPhee, the Mississippi, seeking a shorter distance to the gulf, wants to shift west into the Atchafalya River's channel. If the Mississippi made its break, Louisiana's two major ports would be left dry.

While two engineering projects are under way to restore land in Plaquemines, the states' relentless loss of land won't stop unless river control is ended. New Orleans' economy would be devastated, but the city already seems doomed to sink into the sea.

Kolbert stands among the most pessimistic environmental writers, seeing human's alteration of nature as irreversible. She takes a broad view, citing the term "global change," rather than just changes in the climate.

With overpopulation, humans now outstrip the body weight of other vertebrates combined, she says. Along with rising species extinctions, she cites threats from humans' dominance of the globe: atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication (the spread of chemicals to waterways, causing algae blooms, etc.). "These are just some of the byproducts of our species' success," she says.

So much for the joys of baseball's opening day.

While GOP loons like Sen. Mike Lee mock the Green New Deal with claims such as that it would remove airplanes, that's the kind of decisive action needed if humans are to escape the worst of "global change." We might not be able to afford air transportation any longer.

Alas, Kolbert takes a dark view of humanity's prospects.

"At this point, it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us - nearly eight billion - and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable."

Impracticable or nor, it's time for massive action.

 

 

Christian Lorentzen takes temperature of book reviewing in "age of algorithm"

Literary critic Christian Lorentzen in a long article in Harper's magazine diagnoses the decline of book reviewing in the United States.

Lorentzen's "The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm" cites a dismaying personal example: He's lost his contract to write book reviews for New York magazine.

That's sad news for admirers of the magazine, whose longtime editor Adam Moss recently left. While New York is expanding book coverage, Lorentzen claims that he was told that book reviews no longer serve the magazine's editorial purpose.

Instead, the magazine has moved to author-friendly profiles and Q and A features, such as an interview with Irish author Sally Rooney on the magazine's web site in which she gushes about her favorite books. With Lorentzen gone, the magazine apparently will avoid a serious review of Rooney's new novel, "Normal People."

"The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm" indicts a similar philosophy at The New York Times, whose Sunday Book Review is a weekly debacle. Lorentzen slams the Times Book Review as anti-intellectual, citing its feel-good features such as "By the Book," in which celebrities and authors chatter about their favorite books and answer such trivial questions as which famous writers they would invite to a dinner party. As Lorentzen points out, the feature often serves as a publicity vehicle for a new book by the subject.

The Times' brief book reviews also lack intellectual depth, mostly handing out fulsome praise and lacking sustained analysis. While the newspaper's daily reviewers give books more in-depth consideration, with analysis of weaknesses, they too write with an overall rosy tone. I never thought I'd miss Michiko Kakutani's critic-speak, but at least she was unafraid of skewering an author's work.

Lorentzen's piece is a 21st century echo of Elizabeth Hardwick's 1950s diatribe in Harper's that found the same shortcomings in book reviews of the time. Harper's reprints Hardwick's fusilade, which served as the manifesto for the New York Review of Books, which she co-founded in the early 1960s.

While the Times book review is now mainly a publicity vehicle for publishers, serious reviews remain in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic and the London Review of Books, where I first encountered Lorentzen's work. I expect his reviews to continue in the LRB and elsewhere.

Unmentioned by Lorentzen is one of the best book review sections to have appeared in recent years, The Wall Street Journal's Saturday Review section. While WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch is often blasted for journalistic horrors such as Fox News, he has broadened the WSJ's cultural landsape. The Saturday WSJ gives the thoughtful, analytical and balanced reviews that the Times Sunday Review lacks. Under Murdoch, the Times Literary Supplement has sustained its quality.

On a hopeful local note, I have noticed a small resurgence in Sunday book reviews at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC no longer employs a staff book critic as in the past, but the newspaper's freelance and wire reviews give attention to books often neglected by the national media. Unlike the Times, the AJC's reviewers plumb deeply into a book's strengths and weaknesses.

Lorentzen ties the decline of book reviewing, if it really exists, to the rise of television as a serious cultural force. Book lovers will enjoy his puncturing of the overinflated reputation of "The Sopranos" and other so-called "peak TV" shows.

The book review demise is also linked to the frequently pronounced death of the novel. Such panic-laced post mortems are often given by novelists themselves, such as the late Philip Roth, who seemed to connect the novel's critical condition to his retirement.

While studies show a decline in reading, sure to burgeon as video streaming eats up more and more leisure times, books keep appearing, and finding readers.