:Bill's Book Blog:

Like me, do you ever marvel at the things your brain brings up from the most surprising places? The subject today is poetry, dabs and dribbles of which never seem to go away even when I think — and hope — they have finally disappeared for good.

And what brings up this particular subject is a brain tsunami that rolled over me yesterday, recalling vividly — in spite of no wish for it to do so — a poem my mother dearly loved, read to me often, and which, like a bad piece of pizza, never goes away. I will quote only the opening lines so that you will not find yourself too burdened: “By the shores of Gitche Gumee,/By the shining Big-Sea Water,/Stood the wigwam of Nokomis…” etc. Yes, those immortal lines by Longfellow which begin his lengthy and once-popular narrative “The Song of Hiawatha” return to haunt me periodically. I don’t have to close my eyes to see my mother eagerly and dramatically reading it to me, time after time. I can still recite large slices of it but assure you, kind reader, I will not do so in this space.

Looking back,I suppose there was an upside to hearing the poem, enjoying it and committing a lot of it to memory at a young age. I learned, I think, that poetry was not an alien word form, that readers derived pleasure from not merely its sound but its structure, and sometimes both the mystery and the magic lay in words and phrases that didn’t always seem clear on first glance.

Miss Baker deserves the credit for moving me farther along that path. She was the 11th grade English teacher at my high school in Charlotte who believed that her students should be fully immersed in great literature, from the Greek classics to Shakespeare to the finest poets. It made for a memorable year, one that stretched most of us intellectually and emotionally. I remember her announcement that we would next be reading Emily Dickinson was greeted by groans, probably from me, too. And yet, I loved her poems, I loved reading and learning them, and lines like this are welcomed on the occasions when they pop up in my brain these days: “The pedigree of honey/does not concern the bee;/A clover any time to him/is aristocracy.”

And so it goes. On and on. When Yeats makes a return appearance in my head, the welcome mat is always out. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” never fails to evoke a deep sense of melancholy. The scattered lines from Shakespeare, or maybe John Keats, or Grays’s “Elegy” (another of my mother’s favorites, and now mine as well), or Wadsworth, or … well, you know, don’t you?

Why some re-visit more often than others remains a puzzle. And certainly why Longfellow is invariably in their midst is a source of annoyance. At least until I get to thinking about Nokomis’ wigwam, and Hiawatha and Minehaha, and I begin to reminisce in spite of myself. And to be honest about it, that reminiscence is pretty sweet. Pretty darned sweet. I hope you’ve got your own Big-Sea Water somewhere, too.

This month we celebrate the 221st anniversary of a major literary event: the publication of James Boswell’s biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Feel free to start your partying now. And consider this while you’re raising a toast: since it first appeared in 1791, Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” has NEVER been out of print. As in never. That’s remarkable enough; how many other books from the 18th century can you quickly recall? (Actually there are a lot of great books from that century, but don’t let that obscure my point.)

Boswell is regarded by many scholars as having written not merely the definitive biography of Dr. Johnson but the finest biography ever written in the English language.  At the least, he may be viewed as the inventor of the modern confessional biography. And that wasn’t all he wrote, either. His pioneering travel account of a trip to Corsica is still quite readable, and his book recounting the delightful trip he and Johnson made to Scotland in 1773 is a classic and second only to the biography. In addition, Boswell’s journals — lively, insightful and sometimes outrageous — are quite entertaining and perceptive for more committed readers.

But it is the biography that still draws most attention, of course. Boswell was a remarkable writer, a genius, really. He had a fantastic memory — he could conjure up details in conversations and situations both recent and long-ago that are scarcely less than amazing by any measure. But his genius lay not in that photographic memory but in the way he composed the material he gathered into print. Boswell was a literary artist. Yet not everyone reading the biography might be aware of that, for it can often seem that Boswell was little more than a recorder of words and events. Those who have studied his careful, thoughtful preparation know otherwise.

But then, isn’t that one of the measures of a true artist? Someone who makes the difficult seem easy, seem something anyone could accomplish? In another field, consider a major league batter who hits balls thrown by fast-throwing pitchers. The good ones make it seem possible. The great ones make it seem easy (I’m thinking of someone like Ted Williams, the last player to hit .400 over a full season).

So, Boswell and Ted Williams? I may have drawn the analogy a bit too far, but in their own very individual artistic ways, maybe so. You really should read the “Life of Johnson.” You’ll easily find copies at your library, your bookstore and ebook versions, some of which are free. And yes, it’s long (print editions will run over 1,000 pages), and it will require some time to get accustomed to the 18th century way of speaking. But you’ll get it quickly, I promise, and you won’t regret the experience.

And finally, in the interests of full disclosure — and to keep my publisher happy — I should mention that I am not altogether unfamiliar with the various guises of Boswell, having written a book recently which tracked the Boswell/Johnson trip to Scotland with a  modern-day sensibility. It’s titled “Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster.” After you finish the biography, perhaps you’ll find this a pleasing coda.

The judges for this year’s Townsend Prize for Fiction couldn’t have made a better choice when they selected Thomas Mullen’s outrageously inventive novel “The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers” as the 2012 winner on April 26. It is the second book for Mullen — though he’s written another one since then — and is one of those novels that seems to me to firmly establish the young author among the finest of his generation.

Adding to the pleasure of that award is the fact that the contenders for it were so good. Tom Mullen didn’t win out over a dead field; his rivals (a term used only in award terminology) included some terrific authors and books, whose presence among the finalists affirms that the state of fiction writing in this state is very good indeed. Congratulations go to all, but special recognition, of course, must be directed to the winner.

Tom Mullen is not from around these parts, but he’s been living in Decatur for the last five years, and has established himself as a most welcome addition to a thriving community that increasingly values its literary individuals. Decatur, after all, is not merely the home of a number of good writers but the home of the Georgia Center for the Book, which over the last decade has reset the heart of this region’s literary life squarely in the middle of town. Not only does it run one of the most ambitious and successful literary programs in the country but without it there would be no Decatur Book Festival today.

But back to Tom Mullen for a moment. “Firefly Brothers” is a quirky book, as you might assume from its title. The brothers are bank robbers in the 1930s who wake up only to find themselves in a morgue, presumed dead. Following some of America’s great myths, the brothers reinvent themselves in larger, more charismatic roles and flourish throughout a novel that sears with wonderful storytelling and sizzles with memorable characterizations. It’s just a dandy novel, one that’s easy to recommend, although now that it’s won the Townsend Prize — given every other year for the best work of fiction by a Georgia author — it would seem self-recommending.

Tom’s first novel, “The Last Town on Earth,” and his most recent, “The Revisionist,” are as splendid in their own ways, each different, and each pointing to a writer of diverse skills and interests. I should confess that Tom is a friend, and while I had no final voice in his selection, I couldn’t be happier for him.

And the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is ….. no one. That’s right. The judges this year decided there wasn’t a work of fiction strong enough to merit a mighty Pulitzer. They did announce the three finalists, but declined to select a winner, meaning that all three writers probably can claim some sort of distinction.

I’m of a couple of minds on this. First, I wonder why the judges who award the Oscars in Hollywood haven’t done this before? There have been many years when there wasn’t a film that deserved to be chosen over others and other years when at the very absolute least the honor could have been shared (Think 1952, “The Greatest Show on Earth” winning over “High Noon” and “Singin’ in the Rain”).

In 1941, the Pulitzer judges declined to given an award in fiction to Ernest Hemingway because his work offended the prize-givers at Columbia University. That wasn’t the case this year; the judges named the three finalists but then admitted not one mustered a majority of votes to be a winner. That’s the way democracy is supposed to work; you don’t get the votes, you don’t win. The finalists, “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, and “The Pale King” by the late David Foster Wallace, will have to settle for that.

On the other hand, the judges’ job is to pick a winner, and if they didn’t agree on those three, there were certainly other examples of good American literature produced last year (maybe “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach as an unconventional choice? Or maybe “The Tiger’s Wife” or “11/22/63″?). For heaven’s sake, make up your mind. Any one of the three finalists — or others — was deserving and follows in a distinguished tradition. To pass altogether on judgment is to suspend judgment, and do we really need judges for that?

In the end, of course, it all coms down to pretty much, “what do you think?” And to that I would add only that your thoughts are welcome here, agree or not.

I knew Harry Crews about as slightly as you could get away with claiming to know someone. I did two interviews with him, the last one on the phone, pretty cursory in hindsight. The in-person talk went on for a few hours and involved some alcohol — the disabling drink of choice for Crews for much of his life — along with occasional posturing and some alternately frightening and revealing glimpses of Harry Crews. It was, to say the least, a memorable conversation. For me. It’s doubtful Crews remembered it thirty minutes after I left, and I wouldn’t blame him.

My memory about the occasion is pretty good even though it was a king time ago. He was in what turned out to be a good mood (in the way that “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” passes for family entertainment). It wasn’t too long after his finest book, the autobiographical memoir “A Childhood” had been published, a searing look back at growing up in tough, poor, rural South Georgia. It was a place where everyone young Harry knew was maimed either emotionally or physically, missing eyes, fingers or limbs or good sense, and where the models in the Sears catalog offered the only picture of human perfection.

Crews sat and drank while I ran some things by him to get a reaction. Did he once walk from Georgia to New England to get to a writers conference in spite of bad legs, showing up  smelling and behaving about as you might guess? Yep, that’s sort of right. Once when he leaned in to respond to a question, he seemed to sneer at me, almost as if he wanted to chew my nose off, and I recoiled, honestly just a bit scared. Then he backed off, laughed, took a drink, and our conversation continued.

I wasn’t the only one who could get scared by him. AS lot of students, even friends, reported the same from time to time. But they — and I, in the lesser way of a mere acquaintance — knew that whatever he was, he was real. And what he wrote about in his books, his characters, were real. They were the people he knew who had been broken by life, a lot of them freaks, a lot of them losers. He could empathize with them and mean it. His books weren’t pretty. He wrote a lot of pieces including 15 novels, most of them dammed good ones. He was always a careful, thoughtful and precise writer. And if critics liked to call him an over-the-top Southern gothic writer, I suspect he didn’t mind. Or care. Remember Flannery O’Connor? She and Crews had a heck of a lot more in common than some people were comfortable accepting.

So, did I get some gems of insight from my small interview? No, I’m afraid not much. I didn’t know him well enough then, I had too little time with him, and I wasn’t fully up to the occasion. I wish I’d had the opportunity more recently, but life interferes with our best plans. He taught writing at the University of Florida until he retired in 1998 — not long after our phone chat — and suffered worsening health for the rest of his life. He died just a few days ago. His papers are at the University of Georgia, and here’s a biography of him in the works. I’ll be eager to read it. He’s not for everyone, to be sure. But I doubt you can read one of his books — and try “A Childhood” before the novels — and come away without a sense of the transformative power and hurt and compassion in his work.

In case you missed it, some of the nation’s most important — and idiosyncratic — literary awards were just announced. The National Book Critics Circle has given annual awards for over three decades now, and having once been a member of that notable organization, I’m always pleased to be able to report their latest choices (for which I had no vote, I hasten to add).

The 2011 fiction winner was Edith Pearlman’s collection “Secular Vision,” a very fine book to be sure, but a bit of a curious choice since it contains a number of stories that appeared in her previously published books. The general nonfiction category winner was Maya Jasanoff for “Liberty Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World,” a riveting, revealing history that tracks the lives of some 60,000 Americans loyal to the British crown who fled this country after the Revolutionary War.

The poetry winner was Laura Kaischke for “Space, in Chains;” the autobiography category award went to Mira Bartok for “The Memory Palace;” and the choice for biography was the highly acclaimed “George F. Kennan: A Life” by historian John Lewis Gaddis. Those would seem very good, solid awards, although I’ll refrain from comment since I haven’t read them.

The NBCC is the premier group of book reviewers in this country, a genre that has been dwindling as major newspapers have trimmed or eliminated arts writers and editors. Of course, anyone with a blog now becomes a de facto reviewer — hmmm, that seems a tad self-referencing, doesn’t it? — but I don’t find that, in general, standards have gotten any higher with the shift. Nonetheless, these awards reflect a serious comment on serious writing, and it;s good to still have them as a measuring stick for all of us.

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On a completely unrelated topic, I finally got around to seeing the Academy Award-winning Best Film of 2011, “The Artist.” It was a favorite of critics and a non-starter with audiences; it’s been out nearly four months, and its box office has just barely scrapped past $40 million. In other words, in spite of the Oscar, hardly anyone is going to see it. I wondered how it could possibly be better than “The Descendants” (my favorite) or “Hugo.” The answer turns out be be simple: it isn’t, by almost any way you have of defining “better.”

“The Artist” is a one-trick pony, albeit a well-done one. No doubting the skill and artistry involved, but it’s essentially a novelty film. There’s nothing bad to say about it, but when it comes to the highest levels of writing, direction, acting and impact, either of the two films I mentioned above far surpass “The Artist.” And having seen it once, my viewing needs are completely satisfied. With “The Descendants,” there’s so much more to be learned and understood about relationships in additional screenings.

So how did “The Artist” win all those honors? Well, most of the critics liked it, that’s why. That doesn’t make them wrong or me right, but it surely doesn’t foreclose second thoughts about the award, either. I think a lot of people got it wrong. Maybe you agree. Or not. And maybe you don’t care for the NBCC choices either. Feel free to share your thoughts here. After all, it’s just a blog.

I love reading biographies. They have become over the years my favorite genre, and my reading now seems concentrated primarily in the areas of literary history and American history. A list of the biographies I have most enjoyed and learned from would run for pages and pages and test anyone’s stamina and interest.

But because you asked — you did, didn’t you? — these are among the favorites that leap to mind immediately (in no particular order): David MCullough’s bio of Harry Truman; Samuel Eliot Morrison’s bio of John Paul Jones; Jean Strouse’s bio of J.P. Morgan; David Donald’s  two biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Wolfe; Ron Chernow’s two bios of John D. Rockefeller and George Washington; Robert Morgan’s bio of Daniel Boone; Willilam Manchester’s bio of Douglas MacArthur; R.W.B. Lewis’ bio of Edith Wharton; Frank Freidel’s bio of Franklin D. Roosevelt; David Garrow’s bio of Martin Luther King Jr.; Virginia Carr’s bio of Carson Mccullers; Robert Creamer’s bio of Babe Ruth; Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James; Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson; and Blake Bailey’s bio of John Cheever.

That’s a lot of good if sometimes hefty reading. And it’s a very incomplete list. It does not, for instance, include probably the best biography ever written: James Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, an 18th century classic that remains fresh, vital, engrossing and entertaining into our 21st century. 

This little blog was prompted by finishing up Willard Sterne Randall’s new biography of our little-remembered frontier Founding Father, Ethan Allen. Many of us recall him as the leader of the Green Mountain boys and the hero of Ticonderoga in the American Revolution. That he was, but he was much more, as Randall’s book reminds us. He was an outspoken advocate for personal and national  independence, a skilled military leader (who captured the British-held Fort Ticonderoga without any loss of life in what was the first offensive for patriots in the Revolution), a writer of serious thought, and the man who paved the way for Vermont’s statehood. He was a most complex figure, as Randall’s biography makes abundantly clear, who suffered (nearly 1,000 days as a maltreated British prisoner of war) and survived.

His story is fascinating, and I only wish Randall’s full life and times book was completely up to the task of making him so. Unfortunately, Randall’s writing is  turgid at points — dependent clauses loaded one upon another — and too often disgressive to distraction. And there are a few rather sloppy errors of geography and copyediting that mar the final result.

In other words, as much as I discovered about Ethan Allen from this biography — and Randall’s book would seem the best comprehensive study of Allen available  — it is lacking too much to grab a slot on my list of memorable biographies. But if you’re casting about for a biography, I’d highly recommend any of the ones mentioned above. And I’d be pleased to hear about your favorites, too.

This isn’t going to be very serious. After all, it involves Dave Barry, one of my all-time favorite comic writers, so there’s nothing to provoke a frown in the paragraphs ahead. Nor is there anywhere through Barry’s new novel, “Lunatics,” written with yet another comedy writer, Alan Zweibel. I have no idea how two people go about writing one novel, but given the loose-limbed, anything-goes, over-the-top form of this one, I’m willing to guess that alcohol had something to do with it.

 Barry, of course, is the long-time Miami newspaper columnist whose humor has always resonated with me. That is, he writes lines so funny I have found myself spitting out the Coke I was drinking. Zweibel was one of the original Saturday Night Live writers and has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. A funny guy, too.

“Lunatics,” which I read over a weekend — it is not a challenging read — is an outrageous spoof of contemporary politics and diplomacy cleverly disguised as a picaresque adventure of two bumbling men. Philip Horkman is the genteel, happy owner of a pet store called “The Wine Shop,” and you may immediately sense some of the lunacy at work in these pages. Jeffrey Peckerman is a pompous jerk, a forensic plumber no less, whose path is fated to cross that of Horkman on a ten-year-old girls’ soccer field. 

From such an innocent beginning, we are treated to a round-the-world odyssey of alleged terrorism that keeps getting more and more unbelievable — and unbelievably funny (if sometimes a tad vulgar and sophomoric). Everyone and everything gets parodied, from nuns and Jews to Arab terrorists, Fidel Castro, the continent of Africa and everyone in the People’s Republic of China. I’m not giving away anything to tell you that the books’s finale includes surprise appearances by Horkman and Peckerman at the nominating conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties. And yes, Donald Trump figures in it as well. 

Any rational person would of course be asking at this point, “How can that possibly be?” And the answer is that no rational person would ever get that far into this novel. Only the slightly wiggy, I suspect, will follow Horkman and Peckerman to the end. But they — like me, I hope — will have found the journey a much-needed break from the partisan, demeaning, half-true conversations that pass for political party discourse in the real world these days.

I’ve been meaning for a long time to look more closely into the early films directed by one of my favorites, Alfred Hitchcock. Most of us are familiar with his later classics: “North by Northwest,” ‘The Birds,” “Psycho,” and “Vertigo” surely among them. But Hitchcock didn’t get to America until 1940, when he directed “Rebecca;” he had learned his craft directing more than 20 films in Great Britain before that time, going all the way back to the era of the silent cinema.

Most of those early films are in general circulation and can be fairly easily (and cheaply) viewed. They are fascinating, especially the silent movies, showing Hitchcock as a very young man — he was born in England in 1899 — who already possesses a singular vision behind the camera. His earliest films have been lost, but his third film and first thriller, “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog,” made in 1926 survives. As one critic writes, in spite of certain conventions, it is visually clever and “is virtually a textbook for Hitchcock’s later work” with its theme focused on an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime.

“The Ring” from 1927, another silent film, also sparkles with inventive direction including the director’s good use of close-ups of his actors. His last complete silent film, “The Manxman” (1929), apparently has met with little critical praise, but its admittedly melodramatic tale of love and guilt — magnificently photographed on the Isle of Man — nonetheless is sustained by some compelling moments from Hitchcock.

Moving into the early talkies, Hitchcock oversaw several notable films with his growing craft and confidence, digging into a theme of deception, particularly among those of law and order who prove false in “Blackmail” (1929) and later in the unusual “Rich and Strange” (1932) exploring the extremes of life and death. For those accustomed only thinking of Hitchcock only in a master of suspense, some of these films will come as quite a surprise. Several are light comedies, and as mentioned earlier, a melodrama, and yet few are boring or unviewable for most modern audiences.

Several collections of these early films may be found in circulation, and libraries will be a good source to find many. Online are several multi-CD sets, reasonably priced and rewarding for those who would like to sample a part of the Hichcock canon they don’t know. It’s fun to see the director’s recurring techniques, from the swooping overhead camera shots to the blurring of sound between a woman’s scream and a train’s whistle to the presence of birds (always a sign of chaos). And you can also spot Hitchcock himself in many of the films with the cameo appearances that many viewers came to expect in each later movie.

There are several books about Hitchcock’s films and several biographies which provide good overviews of his life and work. Among them are Donald Spoto’s “The Dark Side of Genius,” “Hitchcock Piece By Piece” by Laurent Bouzereau and Patricia Hitchcock, “Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light” by Patrick McGilligan and “Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews.”

The Townsend Award for Fiction is a major Georgia literary prize that has followed a bit of a winding path since its inception. They began back in 1981, named to honor Jim Townsend, the founder of Atlanta magazine and a fine writer who served as an inspiration to a number of young authors. Over the years since his passing, however, the Townsend family apparently lost interwest and is no longer involved in the award though it continues to carry his name. Instead, it is administered by Georgia Perimeter College and the Georgia Center for the Book, with assistance from several other organizations.

This background, of course, matters not nearly as much as the award itself and the writers who have been chosen to receive it over the years. They include a pretty fair group of whom you may have heard: Alice Walker, Terry Kay, Philip Lee Williams, Mary Hood, Ha Jin, Ferrol Sams and others. It’s a significant award by any name, however, and the ten nominees foror this year have just been named. They are, in alphabetical order:

Daniel Black forPerfect Peace

Lynn Cullen for Reign of Madness

Ann Hite for Ghost on Black Mountain

Joshilyn Jackson for Backseat Saints

Collin Kelley for Remain in Light

Thomas Mullen for The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

Andrew Plattner for A Marriage of Convenience

Josh Russell for My Bright Midnight

Joseph Skibell for A Curable Romantic

Amanda Kyle Williams for The Stranger You Seek 

If you’re looking for a good fiction reading list, go no further. This is a great one. They are all Georgia writers, or writers with strong connections to this state, and they represent a great diversity in showcasing literary talent around these parts.

The winner of the Townsend Award — given every other year, by the way — will be announced at a gala reception on the evening of April 26 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden (not exactly known as a literary salon, but it’s lovely nonetheless). We’ll have details about tickets posted shortly. In the meantime, the Center for the Book and the Southern Academy of Literary arts at GPC have chosen a panel of three out-of-state judges who will make a decision among the ten nominees, but we’ll all have to wait until April 26 to find out who’s the winner. We hope you’ll want to join us there for the festivities, and to hear from keynote speaker, the prize-winning  novelist Anne Beattie.