Off the Books

J. Peder Zane

Description

Head Off the Books in this collection of newspaper columns, where J. Peder Zane uses classic and contemporary literature to explore American culture and politics. The book review editor for the Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer from 1996 to 2009, Zane demonstrates that good books are essential for understanding ourselves and the world around us. The one hundred and thirty columns gathered in Off the Books find that sweet spot where literature's eternal values meet the day's current events. Together they offer a literary overview of the ideas, issues, and events shaping our culture—from 9/11 and the struggle for gay rights to the decline of high culture and the rise of sensationalism and solipsism. As they plumb and draw from the work of leading writers—from William Faulkner, Knut Hamsun, and Eudora Welty to Don DeLillo, Lydia Millet, and Philip Roth—these columns make an argument not just about the pleasure of books, but about their very necessity in our lives and culture.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Essays
• América
• Obscenity
• Dirty Pictures
• Anti-intellectualism in American Life
• Ask the Dust
• Disparagement
• Unfit for Command
• Forbidden knowledge
• Imperial Hubris
• Dumbing down
• Relationship breakup
• Demagogy
• Ridicule (film)
• Outsider art
• General officer
• Miscegenation
• Counterculture
• Suspension of disbelief
• General
• American
• Ridicule

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 06 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611175097
• Langue: English

Extrait

OFF THE BOOKS
OFF THE BOOKS
ON LITERATURE AND CULTURE
J. Peder Zane

The University of South Carolina Press
2015 University of South Carolina
All the columns in this book originally appeared in the News Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, which retains copyright to this material.
They are reprinted by permission of the newspaper.
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-508-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-509-7 (ebook)
Front cover photograph by Keith McGraw
To my mother- that s all.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Between the Covers: Classic Fiction
Eudora Welty: The Writers Writer
John Fante: What the Boys Read
Knut Hamsun: Risking a Literary Friendship
Georges Simenon: Rediscovering a Literary Phenomenon
Walter Brooks: The World According to Freddy the Pig
Robert Penn Warren-A King Restored: Round Two for an American Classic
Thomas/Tom Wolfe: The Man Who Cried Wolfe
Ralph Ellison: Popeye vs. The Invisible Man
Nadezhda Mandelstam: Spanish Wine and Oranges
Beyond the Covers: Contemporary Fiction
E. L. Doctorow: The Civil War in All Its Raging Glory
Richard Slotkin: 11 Openings to Abe Lincoln
Dan Brown: I ve Cracked the Code of Da Vinci Code Hypomania
Haruki Murakami: A Writer Who Takes on the World
Lydia Millet: A Daring Tale of a Lonely Heart
Nicholson Baker: Bomb-Throwing Book Against Bush Fizzles
Don DeLillo s Sound And Fury
Tom Wolfe: Far from Empty, Not Quite Full
Thomas Pynchon: Another Monument in Pynchonland
Norman Mailer Celebrates Himself, Again
Philip Roth for MVP
Southern Writing Lives
David Sedaris: Him Write Pretty
Jonathan Miles: Author Keeps the Tales Pouring
Jonathan Williams: Nosing Out Talent
Reynolds Price: Rooted in His Native Soil
Eudora Welty s Passing: A Death in the Family
William Faulkner s Literary Legacy
Fellowship of Southern Writers Seeks Future As Bright As Its Past
Just the Facts? Nonfiction Reviews
They Had Their Troubles; We Have Ours
Quick, Fast, in a Hurry
Our Machines, Our Selves
How to Idle in the Fast Lane
Our Children, Ourselves
Adventures in Literature s Gray Area
Self-Service Happiness
A Feminist in Bold Relief
A Poor Excuse for Compassion
Thinking Outside the Penalty Box
The Heartbreak Behind the Buzz
Ink-Stained History
Crunching Numbers, Finding Us
Paradox and Poetry of Chernobyl
Only an Empty Memory?
Taking Cover: The Assault on the Book Business
A Room with a Low Ceiling
America the Literate
If You re Hip Say Golly Gee Whillikers
Ban the Book! Really!
The Words That Sell the Words
Oprah s Little Golden Books
High Art, High Dudgeon
Bound by Time
Nothing to Be Ashamed Of
Binding Devotion: Book Culture
The Book on Wilt Chamberlain
The Book on the 20th Century
The Real Power of Books
Where Books Lead We Follow
A Simple Plan
The Best Gift Reveals Yourself
Cure for the Blues Is a Click Away
Novels Found in Translation
Know-How for the New Millennium: Fire and the Art of Library Maintenance
Critics Need More Than a Thumb
The New American Dream
Having a Baby by the Book
Anything Goes: New Standards, Shifting Boundaries
Lack of Curiosity Is Curious
Reading Loses in This War
So Long Moby, Hello Aquaman
We re Servants of the Overload
Daily Nuggets of Wisdom
Idiot s Delight: The Age of the Moron
Really?: Truth and Truthiness
Truth, Facts, and CBS
New Media: Too Much of a Good Thing?
No Lie, We Live in An Age of Truth
We Know It, but We Can t Prove It
Psst, I ve Got a Secret
Sensationalism: Nothing More Than Feelings
News As Spectacle (March 13, 2005)
Media Sell the Sizzle of Small-Minded Stories
Littleton: Madness Magnified
Secondhand Emotions: When TV Filters Our Feelings, They Become Pale Imitations of Life
In Search of Amazement
Letting It All Hang Out: The Rise of Raunch
Though Our Goodness Grows, a Culture of Cruelty Thrives
Paranoids Return! But Exhibitionists Seize the Day
No More Plain Brown Wrappers
When Culture Goes Raunchy
Taking Aim at Graphic Concerns
Identity: Race, Gay Rights, and 9/11
The History We Choose to Forget
A White Man s View of Blacks
A Black Woman s View of Whites
Imus s Sin Stains Many
A Hard Look at the Slaveholding Fathers of Our Country
Still the Same Old Same Old
For Men, Straight Label Is Inflexible
Marriage of Our Hearts and Minds
The Beginning of Dialogue
The Age of the Fear of Terror
What s Up with the Muslims?
Assimilation and Its Discontents
No-Brainers Meet the Brainwashed
New Directions in a Changing Landscape
The Perils of the Luckiest Generation
Friendly, from Afar
Feeling All Righteous
Hiding from the Silence of the Mind
Parents Give Traditional Names Creative Twists
An Old-Fashioned Icon in a Fragmented Culture
If Mother Superior Speaks, Listen
You Are at Your Service
Nowadays, It s Easy to Hear Women Roar
Men Peek Out from the Cave
My Children s Bookshelf Is a Battleground
Peter Pan Literature Takes Flight
Happy Days in a Grumble-Free Land
When Our Lives Become iMovies
Acknowledgments
First thanks belong to my editor at the University of South Carolina Press, Jonathan Haupt, whose sharp eye helped me shape this collection. More important is his vision that the work of newspaper book critics is worth preserving. I am honored to be part of his project.
All of these pieces originally appeared in the News Observer of Raleigh. I want to thank the newspaper s publisher, Orage Quarles III, who has graciously supported this project. My two main editors at the paper, Suzanne Brown and Felicia Gressette, improved these columns. Copy editors including Eileen Heyes, Nell Medlin and Pam Nelson saved my bacon more times than I like to remember. Book-loving colleagues such as Geoff Edgers, Todd Lothery, Bill Morrison, John Murawski and Dwane Powell made the best job in the world even better.
As the book review editor, I was privileged to work with many talented writers who inspired me through their knowledge-I spent half my day speaking with these brilliant folks-and challenged me to raise my game through the quality of their own work. I especially want to thank Bruce Allen, Ellyn Bache, Sven Birkerts, H. W. Brands, Frederick Busch, Fred Chappell, Michael Chitwood, Peter Coclanis, Rod Cockshutt, Clyde Edgerton, Quinn Eli, Clyde Frazier, John Freeman, Peter Gay, Philip Gerard, Denise Gess, Marianne Gingher, Marvin Hunt, Robert Lalasz, Janet Lembke, Peter Makuck, Phillip Manning, Erin McGraw, Dennis McNally, Herbert Mitgang, Ruth Moose, Louis D. Rubin Jr., Michael Skube, John David Smith, Gil Troy, Damon Tweedy, Timothy B. Tyson, Anthony Walton, Steve Weinberg, Roger Wilkins and Tom Wolfe.
Finally, thanks is too weak a word to express my gratitude to my wife, Janine, whose love and support are only matched by her editing chops.
Introduction
Reading the return address on my package, the Raleigh postal clerk asked, Are you the man from the News Observer? I was thrilled. My photo ran with my Sunday books column, but I was hardly even a local celebrity. I am, I said. Fishing for a compliment, I added, You like our pages? She was nonplussed. After an awkward pause, she explained, You re the one who gets all those boxes.
Guilty as charged. Every day was like Christmas during my 13 years as the book review editor and books columnist. Around mid-morning I d hear the gray cart s rattling wheels, then I d see Gus s straining face as he delivered four or five white postal containers stuffed with cardboard envelopes. For the next half hour, I d valiantly tear them open-paper cuts be damned-organizing my bounty into piles as I once did stocking stuffers. Novels here, biographies there, histories in this stack, memoirs in that.
A few went back in the mail, to the critics from around the country who filled our section. Most wound up in the discount bin, where my colleagues could buy hardbacks for $2 and paperbacks for $1 (the proceeds went to charity). The rest ended up in the four-foot-tall stacks lining the walls of my office; anything higher angered the laws of physics.
I didn t see these books as a fire hazard but as windows on the world. From the confines of my Raleigh office, they told me what was going on in America and abroad, in big cities and tiny hamlets, in the minds of the mighty and the many. They were a mirror, reading me as I read them.
I did not come to the Book Review column through the traditional route-I majored in history, not English, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. After that, I reported on hard news and cultural issues for various publications in my hometown, including the New York Times.
A confession: I read, but didn t devour, books before moving to Raleigh. Mostly I consumed material that seemed directly relevant to my job of understanding the world around me, especially newspaper and magazine articles. After a few months at the Book Review, I had an awakening. I r