Southern Bookman

All of those books in a lifetime of reading

Whenever I finish a book, I wish I knew how many I've completed in a lifetime of reading.

A few books stand out: Kerry the Firedog, another early picture book about a truck delivering coal, Alice and Jerry's adventures revealing the wonders of language in my first grade class taught by Miss Coates, whom I still remember. The Golden Books, with their distinctive gold-leaf binding, opened a world of enchantment.

My youth was filled with the Hardy Boys, Chip Hilton and the Western novels of Zane Gray. Our mother took us for summertime visits to the air-conditioned bookmobile, where I checked out stacks of baseball, football, golf and boxing histories.

I also loved a series of biographies about famous Americans in their youths, such as "Ernie Pyle, Young Reporter." My favorites were lives of Lou Gehrig, Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin.

Carlos Baker's early biography of Ernest Hemingway stands out as one of the first "serious" books I finished. From there, I discovered Hemingway's novels and short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night," Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" and James Joyce's "The Dead." I also fell under the spell of J.D. Salinger's short stories and Glass Family saga and James Joyce's "The Dead."

William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and short stories were a major touchstone of my reading life.

From my college years, I treasure the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes 1 and 2, to which I often return. For years, I consulted my college Webster's dictionary, although it lacked a few contemporary words. In recent years, I've gone to the Internet for definitions.

In college, I began a lifetime passion for the poems of Keats, Eliot and Donne and the poems and plays of Shakespeare.

Sometimes the titles on my bookshelves look like tombstones. I wonder why I'd ever acquired some of my more esoteric titles. Reading often seems futile these days. But it's as essential to me as breathing.

I'll keep reading until I finish my final book.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Chattahoochee Review

The Chattahoochee Review began the careers of many acclaimed authors.

Founded by Lamar York in 1989 at what was then Chattahoochee Community College, now Georgia Perimeter College, the small but vital journal published early work by an impressive list of writers. The journal's short stories, poems, author interviews, book reviews and art set a high standard.

AJC book columnist Suzanne Van Atten reported Tuesday that the review has stopped publication, a victim of the covid pandemic and financial setbacks.

Countering that sad news, Van Atten announced that the Townsend Prize for the best fiction book published in Georgia will again be awarded after a two-year hiatus. The Atlanta Writers Club, which took over the prize from the Chattahoochee Review, will announce the winner in April.

On a personal note, I published two pieces in the Chattahoochee Review a number of years ago, a book review and a critical essay on the work of the late Atlanta poet Turner Cassity, who served for many years as Emory University's chief librarian.

The Chattahoochee Review was a literary beacon. Its demise is a loss for Atlanta as a literary center.

Poetry flowers during National Poetry Month

Another National Poetry Month is almost gone.

In April, publishers release new poetry books and publications heighten their attention to the genre all but ignored the rest of the year.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review recently devoted an entire issue to "poesy." The New York Times Sunday magazine now publishes a poem each week.

Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda Thursday proclaimed his love of poetry in lavishly praising new critical studies of the art by Guggenheim Foundation President and noted poet/critic Edward Hirsch and Johns Hopkins professor and formalist poet Brad Leithauser.

Both have been longtime leaders of the nation's poetry establishment. Hirsch in several books and a term as the nation's poet laureate has striven to raise poetry's popularity. Leithauser has spearheaded efforts to restore the use of traditional meter and form after years of "free verse" dominance.

Hirsch's "The Heart of American Poetry" is the latest entry in an increasingly prevalent format he pioneered: offering a selection of poems accompanied by brief explanations of each of them.

Leithauser's "Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry" joins a teeming collection of books on poetic technique. The title and subject echo the late John Hollander's small classic "Rhyme's Reasons."

Dirda cites Hirsch's inclusion of outsider works like Robert Johnson's song "Crossroads Blues (Take 2)" along with a variety of poems from across the American canon.

He commends Leithauser for unlocking poetic techniques for the general reader.

While I'm skeptical of the triumphalism of National Poetry Month, I'm marking the occasion with the long-awaited arrival of British writer Lucasta Miller's "Keats a Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph." 

Has I yearned to read the book when it was first published in Great Britain, and waited long months for its American appearance. At last, April brought the book's arrival, and I'm happily reading it each night.

After years of receding from mainstream literary culture, poetry returned to prominence after Sept. 11, 2001. Grieving Americans after the attack on the World Trade Center found solace in poems like W.H. Auden's "Sept. 1, 1939."  Readers are also turning to poetry after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially to work by Ukrainian writers.

Poetry lives whenever deeper human emotions must receive expression.

 

 

Farewell, Richard Howard, renowned poet, scholar and translator of Friench literature

I loved reading books on MARTA trains in my years working downtown at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In those 15-minute trips between Buckhead's Lenox Station and Five Points downtown, I finished many novels, histories, biographies and nonfiction works I might not have ever opened at home.

The train's soothing rhythm focused my concentration, enabling me to reach the end of blockbusters like Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919," her encyclopedic account of the Woodrow Wilson-led peace talks after World War I.

My favorite MARTA book, a daily reading joy for weeks, was Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma," translated by Richard Howard. Howard renewed Stendhal's language while maintaining his classic rigor and brought alive the scenes and characters.

Howard, a renowned poet, essayist, editor and teacher as well as the translator of an array of French books, died Thursday at age 92 in his beloved Manhattan. He was another of those great minds who suffered the cruelty of dementia late in life.

The winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection "Untitled Subjects," Howard taught at Columbia, where as a student he was part of the postwar generation mentored by Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Howard's classmates included John Hollander, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Gottilieb.

Howard was one of the last members of that era of predominantly Jewish New York intellectuals, accomplished in all of the literary vineyards. His death also marks the passing of a renowned generation of American poets, led by James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Hollander, James Wright, W.S. Merwin and Anne Sexton.

Showing Howard's longevity, he was born three years before Sylvia Plath.

When I met Hollander at the Sewanee Writers Conference, he mentioned Howard as a literary model. Years ago at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, fellow workshop members who knew Howard fondly remembered his learning and kindness.

Like Wilbur, the foremost translator of Moliere, Howard's translations illuminated French literature for countless readers like me.

I found Howard's poetry too academic and mannered. But his "Charterhouse of Parma" was one of my most memorable reading experiences.

 

 

 

 

Sonny Perdue a disgraceful choice to lead Georgia's premier universities

All Georgians, not just UGA alums, should be outraged over Sonny Perdue controlling the state's premier universities.

The 75-year-old former governor and Trump henchman is known for partisan politics and opposing academic freedom. As Trump's agriculture secretary, he devastated the federal department's scientific research.

The university system’s board chose Perdue Tuesday, marking April Fools Day a month early. Embattled Gov. Brian Kemp’s hastily drummed up appointees gave Perdue the nod.

Over the years, the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State and Kennesaw State have soared in academic prestige and research achievements.

Along with economic gains, the universities have enriched the state's artistic and literary culture, enhancing the state's quality of life.

The University of Georgia almost lost its academic accreditation because of political interference from rabid segregationist Gov. Gene Talmadge. The appointment of Perdue boosts Gene Talmadge tactics over gene research.

Faculty members, already angry over the Board of Supervisors' crippling of tenure protections, vehemently opposed Perdue taking over Georgia's higher education jewels. Renowned professors and innovative researchers will no longer come to Georgia.

Perdue said he wants to support "conservative values." Will he get rid of Plato's books because he and Socrates were gay? Remove Toni Morrison's novels because they portray the horrors of slavery? Perhaps "Hamlet" will be banned as too disturbing, and "The Great Gatsby" jettisoned for maligning American capitalism. The works of Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly will fill the curricula.

As governor, Perdue idiotically sought to boost bass fishing. Now he's in charge of the state's premier universities.

 

 

Anahid Nersessian casts cold lover's eye on Keats' odes

Anahid Nersessian's "Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse" reads more like a lover's quarrel.

The UCLA professor haphazardly mixes literary analysis, personal memoir and poetic evocations of a lost love affair in the 130-page book published by the University of Chicago Press.

Each of the "Great Odes" that Keats wrote in a creative burst over the spring, summer and fall of 1819 receives its own chapter. While Nersessian's unconventional analysis of the poems will outrage Keats traditionalists, the book benefits readers by reprinting each poem at the beginning of its chapter.

Nersessian effectively demonstrates the submerged political themes of "Ode to a Nightingale” and the mesmerizing power of Keats' dreamy language. 

In her analysis, she also casts a critical eye on artist Joseph Severn's care for the tuberculosis-ravaged Keats in his final days as not quite as noble as traditionally viewed.

In her strongest chapter, Nersessian convincingly views "Ode on a Grecian Urn" as describing a scene of rape. In a fresh interpretation, she views the poem's narrator as a creation of Keats.  Presenting a devastating critique of the famous formulation "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," she accuses the speaker of condoning rape and justifying art's exploitation of crimes against women.

Following T.S. Eliot and others, Nersessian skewers the "Beauty Is Truth" statement as facile. In a twist, she sees Keats himself as disavowing the speaker's closing affirmation, "That Is All/Ye Know on Earth and All Ye Need to Know." One of Nersessian's strengths is displaying how Keats veers from stunning brilliance to clumsy language.

Nersessian in the "Grecian Urn" chapter most successfully uses personal anecdote to bolster her literary analysis. She strikingly conveys her horror and outrage when she was sexually harassed by a trusted teacher.

But she misfires throughout the book with her ethereal evocation of a love affair, seeking to echo Keats' doomed passion for Fanny Brawne. The surrealistic passages, at times poignant, fail to mesh with the literary criticism. The unformed recollections might cohere in a separate book, but here distract from the narrative.

In her final chapter, on "To Autumn," Nersessian makes her most objectionable assertions.

Calling the poem "perfect and unforgivable," she upbraids Keats for not reacting to the Peterloo Massacre, which occurred a month before Keats wrote the poem.

In the Peterloo tragedy at Manchester, a local security force attacked a crowd of working-class protesters, wounding hundreds and killing 15. Nersessian dubiously claims that Keats had an obligation when writing the poem on Sept. 19, 1819, to decry the massacre.

Referring to the horrible event would have ruined the poem's perfection that she cites. Citing the massacre would have turned literature toward propaganda.

She also questionably cites Diane Di Prima's "Revolutionary Letter #7" as a counterpoint to Keats' "To Autumn." Di Prima's work has its virtues, but is hardly comparable to one of the greatest poems in the English language.

A lover's discourse? A rash and discordant one, but full of passion.

 

 

Remembering Valerie Boyd, biographer of Zora Neale Hurston and standout arts editor at AJC

Valerie Boyd's majestic biography of Zora Neale Hurston led to the rediscovery of a major American writer's work.

Boyd wrote the internationally acclaimed "Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston," one of America's great literary biographies, while working as a daily journalist.

Even after the success of "Wrapped in Rainbows," Boyd continued working as The Atlana Journal-Constitution's arts editor, leading an outstanding staff of writers and critics with the same dedication and grace that she had brought to honoring Hurston's life.

I was enjoying one of Atlanta's sunny February mornings that prefigure spring when I heard that Valerie had died of cancer at the much too early age of 58.

As the AJC's arts editor, she was never too busy to give full attention to a copy editor raising an issue about a story. Her smile was like a ray of sunshine.

After her journalism career, she nurtured a generation of writers as an associate professor and writer in residence at the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia. While battling cancer, she continued working with Alice Walker on the author's journals, which Random House will publish in April.

I remember Valerie's graciousness when I asked her to sign a copy of "Wrapped in Rainbows" as a gift to a North Atlanta High School English teacher who inspired my son's love of reading.

Valerie made a difference in small and large ways. She was one of God's angels.

 

Farewell, Shirley McBay, distinguished champion of black achievement in math, sceince

Shirley McBay heroically fought for black students' excelling in math, science and technology.

The first black to receive a doctorate from the University of Georgia, the esteemed educator died Nov. 27 at age 86 at her home in Los Angeles.

During her academic career, Dr. McBay developed a stellar science program at Atlanta's Spelman College, developed and led a minority education project at the National Science Foundation and raised opportunities for black students as dean of student affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as leader of the university's Quality Education for Minorities Network.

A native of Bainbridge, Ga., where she showed a proficiency for math at an early age, Dr. McBay entered the University of Georgia's PhD program in mathematics in 1964, three years after the university's desegregation, according to The New York Times. She received her doctorate in 1966, the university's first awarded to a black student. She was also the first woman to receive a mathematics doctorate from the school.

She'd already received master's degrees in chemistry and mathematics from Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University, when she entered UGA. Turning down an offer from UGA, she taught for nine years at Spelman, the noted historically black women's college. She created Spelman's Division of Natural Sciences, which dispelled myths that blacks, and women, can't achieve in science and math. More black women with science and engineering doctorates have undergraduate degrees from Spelman than any other institution, according to the Times.

As dean at MIT, she sought to bring more minority students into science, technology, engineering and math, not only at MIT but throughout higher education.

After a study into why black students weren't better represented in science studies, she concluded that "educational opportunities for most minority youth, and hence their educational attainments, lag behind the chances, choices and performance of the nonminority," the Times reported. "The present system of education learning in a mass education for mass production model is inadequate to the demands the 21st century will place on the nation."

As black and Latino students fall further behind in math and science education, Dr. McBay's achievements are a model for the nation to follow. 

 

A bounty of new books at Buckhead's Northside Library

I missed the old Northside Library.

The small branch just off Buckhead's prosperous West Paces Ferry Road closed for several years for renovation. Then covid struck.

When the Northside Branch reopened, I was happy to make the drive from Habersham to West Paces Perry, passing once again the Georgia Governor's Mansion, Anne-Cox Chambers' former estate across the street, Pace Academy and the landmark Pink House.

After the stately Buckhead homes, the landscape shifts to shopping centers, gas stations and restaurants, growing increasingly commercial around the turn to Northside Parkway at the OK Cafe. The library sits in a tangled area of highway intersections, shops and businesses, schools and a Covid testing site.

Unlike my appreciation of the renovated Sandy Springs library, I was disappointed by the Northside Library work. A once bustling place was now antiseptic, like a forbidding museum. The shiny new shelves, pristine meeting rooms and high-tech self-checkout machines had come with a loss of soul.

Through the years, I loved  to wander through the old library's shelves, browsing through the different sections. I knew most of the books and where they sat. I also liked to sit at one of the nice wooden tables to read new magazines, as students doing homework huddled with their tutors and fellow aging readers nodded off. The library was a vibrant community gathering spot.

Several other visits added to my belief that the library renovation was a mistake. While the old library was always crowded, the new institutional layout received few visitors. One day, when a librarian told a mother to leave with her crying toddler, I decided not to go back. 

But weary of driving through the construction-snarled Roswell Road to the well-renovated Sandy Springs Library, I decided to return to the Northside Branch. It was a splendid afternoon; climate change has brought beautiful weather to Atlanta's once dreary late autumns.

A cheerful greeting from a young librarian warmed my spirits. And, much to my surprise, I found a bounty of new books.

Tempted by Jill Lepore's "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future" and George Packer's "The Last Best Hope," I was thrilled to discover on the bottom shelves John Feinstein's "Raise a Fist, Take a Knee: Race and the Illusion of Progress in Modern Sports,"  Claire Tomalin's "The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World," and "Woke Up This Morning, the Definitive Oral History of 'The Sopranos,'" by Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, with Philip Lerman.

After a series of disappointing books, I was set for joyous holiday reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.