Author Archive
I picked up “Kreature Comforts Low-Life Guide to Memphis” at the counter at Shangri-La Records, and started to walk out the door. Um, that’ll be $5, please…. It’s on newsprint, stapled, pages about a fourth the size of a standard newspaper page. I assumed it was free. But there it was on the cover: “Still only! 5.00 Cheap!”
If your time is worth money, and you’ve got visitors who want the behind-the-scenes goods on Memphis music, this is cash well spent, although you may still need to invest in a Handymap, because there are some obscure streets in this guide. There’s Aretha Franklin’s birthplace at 406 Lucy, for instance, and 4908 Eastshore, where 
Jerry Lee Lewis lived with his 13-year-old cousin Myra and her parents, before he married the girl and they moved down the street to 5042 Eastshore. There’s Alex Chilton’s parents’ one-time house at 145 Montgomery. There’s an empty spot at 811 Mosby where Furry Lewis once lived; the house burned down. Someone’s done the research for you, here; you’ve just got to locate the streets.
This is a guide with opinions. On Beale Street: “If good times for you means ‘Mustang Sally’ covers ad nauseam and drinking til 5 a.m. at theme bars (legally), this is your place.” The Low-Life Guide recommends the Blue Worm and the Executive Inn, both on Airways, and Wild Bill’s on Vollintine for fun accompanied by live music. And here’s a traveler’s advisory you won’t get just anywhere: “If you’re an aspiring musician, please don’t ’sit-in’ at Wild Bill’s or anywhere else for that matter. While you may think it fun, it is so only for you. Playing at certain juke joints, blues clubs or wherever may be your holy grail, but with the exception of very few musicians out there (yourself not included) the kindness of the locals should not be taken advantage of.”
There’s also a section on dining out (”Memphis is a great grub town!”), with some interesting suggestions like the Gay Hawk on Danny Thomas, Uncle Lou’s Fried Chicken on Millbranch, Melanie’s on North Watkins.
To find copies, go to Shangri-La Records is at 1916 Madison. Or order online from Shangrilaprojects.com
Richard Price’s “Lush Life,” which was lodged at No. 7 on the New York Times’ best-sellers list for fiction this week, is an immersion course on the Lower East Side of New York City, the mechanics of a homicide investigation, the street patter of cops and perps.
Don’t care about the Lower East Side, police procedures, the patois of city life? Richard Price can make you care. The place, the people and the talk in “Lush Life” are vivid and vital; the sense that human systems are indifferent to human beings is profound. (Click on our podcasts of the author reading from the novel when he appeared recently at Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss. Something about the Bronx accent makes this seem like the complete “Lush Life” experience. )
The prologue introduces the Quality of Life Squad, an undercover operation, in the world-weary voice of the author at his booksigning, consisting of “900 pounds of white meat with guns, sitting in a cab that fools no one.” They are the personification of the ongoing reality play that sets cops up against the rest of the world, what Price calls the police-as-occupying-army dynamic of urban life.
An innocent victim is murdered, a survivor of the crime is wrongly abused in the investigation, another survivor capitalizes on the media attention to his friend’s death. 
It reads like life, which, of course, is unfair. This isn’t a spoiler: As Price pointed out at his Square Books reading, this is no mystery. You know how the killing goes down and who does it from the start.
”Lush Life” has no clear heroes; the homicide detectives are intriguing and charming characters, who operate with the ethical delicacy of savannah predators. One of the aforementioned survivors, a character Price describes as a close stand-in for himself (his name is Eric “Cash”) is a complex of compromises and self-preservation instincts.
The thrill of this book is in Price’s dialogue, which reads like found nonfiction, as if he’s transcribing tapes of real conversations. Dennis Lehane, another master of sound-and-place reconstruction, defers to his colleague in the “Lush Life” jacket notes: “Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced.” Price himself describes his gift as a mere genetic or biological trait. He says he doesn’t want to “go all Margaret Mead on it.”: “I just have a good ear, but it’s not like I worked on it. You know, some people run fast, some people are good mimics. I’m not writing down authentic; there is no authentic.
Richard Price: Intro [4:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (24) The Quality of Life Squad [20:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (38) Back at the Precinct [4:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (29) Some old junkie [5:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (30)It’s nice to know Tennessee Williams’ power to shock survives him. When the latest 
Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” previewed in February, audiences were distressed that that four-letter word had been imposed on the dialogue of the 1950s-vintage drama. This version, with an all-black-cast, has James Earl Jones waxing obscene as Big Daddy, but a little research by theater writers turned up the news that the words were in fact Williams’ own, added during his 1973 revision of the play. Or possibly the word ‘restored’ should be used instead of ‘added,’ since the playwright’s first ‘Cat’ used sham words like ‘rutting’ and ‘ducking’ where now that four-letter word prevails. And surely sounds more natural and Big Daddy-esque.
Folks in Memphis who need a Tennessee Williams fix can find “Night of the Iguana” on stage at Theatre Memphis until March 30. It brings back some veterans of TM’s 2004 “Streetcar Named Desire,” including director Jerry Chipman, and actors Christina Wellford Scott and Greg Boller. (We’ll quote our theater critic Jon W. Sparks’ review of the earlier show on the playwright’s Memphis connection: ”His first play was produced at a residence here in the mid-1930s, and while ‘Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!’ didn’t set the theatrical world afire, it did give Tom Williams the urge to keep at it and to start using the ‘Tennessee’ moniker.”)
Meantime, if your longing for Williams’ way with words can’t be satisfied by one local play production, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival starts March 26. This year it’s called “A Weekend Named Desire,” sort of an awkward title for a collection of literary panels, random master classes on the art of writing, and performances such as “Camino Real” and ”Ignatius on Stage” (essentially just readings from “A Confederacy of Dunces”). And there’s a panel called “Sweet Word of Youth,” for young writers to read from their work in creative writing programs.
Go to tennesseewilliams.net for more information.
I took a fiction-writing course from Barry Hannah (Airships, Geronimo Rex) years ago, and wrote a short story called “Work” that he dismissed out of hand. (well, he did like one sentence in it.) It was about fear and loathing and paranoia resulting from some petty changes in titles at a corporate office. Hannah said, “Nobody cares about work. They read fiction to escape from it.” 
I have to say, when I read about Joshua Ferris’s book Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown, $24), and learned that it was mostly, almost only, about work, it didn’t make me want to snatch it up. But the reviews were so good, and it was on The New York Times’ list of five best fiction works of 2007. So I got it, and no regrets. Opposite. In fact, when I finished I went back and read it again because it was so funny. (I’m laughing right now about a description in this Ferris book of a guy whose creaky crutches made him sound like a 19th century whaler.)
This is the Office Space of novels. It’s been compared to Catch-22 and that seems fair. What Joseph Heller did to the military in Catch-22 he tried to do to work in Something Happened, but that book just made me grimace.
Then We Came to the End is life contained in three floors, 60 stories up, in a Chicago office building. The narrator is the corporate “we,” vindictive, selfish, irrational and hilarious. It’s an addictive voice that nails the petty collective life of the cubicle. “How we hated our coffee mugs! our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned into cloying reminders of time served.” And the insane way modern life separates work from reality: “What sort of person showed up on Monday and had no interest in sharing what transpired during the two days of the week when one’s real life took place?” There are included in the “we” a lot of fully realized, recognizable characters — Marcia, whose hair and music are stuck in the ’80s; Lynn Mason, the elegant and inscrutable boss; Tom Mota, who should have been a landscaper; Benny, whose office is gossip central.
And there’s a nice revelation about “us” at the very end.
Zora Neale Hurston devotees should seek out a wonderful tribute book that came out in 2004, by her niece, Lucy Anne Hurston. 
“Speak, So You Can Speak Again,” (Doubleday, $30) is 36 pages, and includes a CD with 25 tracks, the first half a series of segments from a 1943 radio interview, on which Zora tells tales with a melodic Southern accent about her childhood — “I thought the moon followed me around like a puppy dog” — and about her early poverty while she was trying to get her first novel published, about her visions and topics such as Haitian zombies and Bahamian jumping dances.
The highly stylized pages include pockets with removable copies of manuscripts in Zora’s hand, or typewritten by her with notes. It’s a readable and entertaining glance at a singular life, touching down in the writer’s hometown of Eatonville, Fla., and in Harlem — one of the pockets is a copy of her “Harlem Slanguage,” defining words like “Diddy-wah-diddy, a far place, measure of distance. (2) Another suburb of Hell, built on since way before Hell wasn’t no bigger than Baltimore.”
It’s an excellent complement to Robert Hemenway’s “Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography,” and Hurston’s own “Dust Tracks on a Road.”
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, author of “Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” (reviewed under New volumes for Black History Month) raves about an extension of the New York Public Library, called the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, near the Apollo Theater. Besides what Gerzina, head of the English department at Dartmouth, calls “the world’s finest collections of books, manuscripts … photographs and art of Africa and the African diaspora,” the building, which was recently renovated, contains such artifacts as Richard Wright’s original manuscript for “Native Son,” and sound recordings of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey. The ashes of Langston Hughes are buried under a mosaic on the main floor. Check it out at http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html
“Atonement” was one of my favorite books of the last five years, so I was annoyed that there was going to be a movie. But of course I went to see it. Glumly. I don’t feel that need to see everything I like in print compressed for the screen.
Sometimes the transition is brilliant; “Lolita” the book and “Lolita” the movie are like two freestanding works of art. James Mason is a better Humbert Humbert than I imagined on my own when I read the book, and Shelley Winters just IS Charlotte Haze. The movie wasn’t a road trip like the book was, but since Nabokov wrote the screenplay, it had its own credibility.
“Atonement” is a good movie. The first half is beautiful, the casting is pretty perfect. But here’s why I suffer when I watch movies made from books that I like. One of the great sentences in the first chapter of the book was about the villainous little girl’s room: “a shrine to her controlling demon.” And, “the model farm consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way, toward their owner, as if about to burst into song.” In the movie’s opening scene, the camera surveys animal figures on a rug on its way to finding the little girl typing. Does that really tell someone who hasn’t read the book that this little girl is self-absorbed and egotistical?
The movie won best drama at the Golden Globe awards and has seven Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. And the author is a fan. AP last week quoted Ian McEwan saying the actress Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal of Briony Tallis gave you “the sense of her mind just turning.” He did also say that he thinks film is inferior to books at portraying human consciousness.
I didn’t read “No Country for Old Men.” Any Cormac McCarthy fans have thoughts on that movie?
The historian of slavery has to be obsessive. Records about people who were considered goods — there’s plenty of shock and horror still to be had in this topic — are hidden and haphazard at best, nonexistent at worst. Here are several authors who have pried some obscure and fascinating details out of the past with heroic effort.
Saidaya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14 paperback) is a hybrid, a history/memoir/eulogy, informed as much by Hartman’s anger as by her research and grace with language. The backbone of her narrative is a trip to Ghana’s Elmina Castle, a dungeon from which uncounted numbers of souls were launched into the hell of slavery in the Americas.
Hartman has disdain for Alex Haley’s return to Africa to embrace his lost-son status: I had not come to … admire the great states that harvested captives and sold them as slaves. An academic herself, she is scornful of the academy’s efforts to comprehend the horrors of the trade, by parsing How many slaves packed per ton constituted ‘tight packing’, mortality reduced to Deck Area = Constant x (Tonnage) 2/3. While piling on excruciating details about how slavery worked over the centuries, Hartman meditates on her status as a stranger, an obruni, in Ghana, and on the realities of modern Ghana, once a lighthouse for contemporary idealists. And she exposes her own family’s struggle to figure out who African Americans are with disarming candor. A house full of Hartmans yelling at the top of our lungs about slavery in my parents’ modest lower-middle-class dwelling populated by more television sets than persons and outfitted with Ethan Allen furniture, she writes, would have made Ghanians laugh. Or, suck their teeth in resentment.
Angry, soul-bearing memoirs can be hard reading, no matter how righteous the indignation, but Hartman’s bitterness is poetic. She toggles between centuries and countries gracefully, with a fearsome command of English prose and an effective grasp on her material.
Like Hartman, who teaches English at Columbia, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, author of Mr. and Mrs. Prince (Amistad, $25) is an academic on a mission that is both personal and historic. Gerzina is chair of the English department at Dartmouth. Both women add personal revelation and reminiscence to their meticulous research.
Abijah Prince was a slave in 18th-century New England who fought in the French and Indian Wars, negotiated his freedom and purchased land for his family in Massachusetts and Vermont. His wife Lucy Prince was the first known African-American poet, famed in her lifetime for her brilliant conversation and public oratory in defense of her family’s safety and holdings. Gerzina, whose mother is white and father African-American, was startled to discover by chance early in her research on the couple that she was related to the white family that owned Abijah Prince. Her direct ancestors, she realizes, gave him orders.
In fact, the way Gerzina internalizes black and white points of view is part of what infuses this mildly dramatic tale, which the publisher describes as the most detailed history of a pre-Civil War black family known to exist, with life. People used to reading of the many and horrible perversions of slavery in the U.S. might at first be lulled by the Princes’ story into a sense that, hey, it wasn’t so bad in New England. Yes, Gerzina says, slaves in the North could travel, marry and learn to read. They shared quarters with their owners, usually sleeping with the children. But parents and children in the North were casually sold away from each other, too, and some committed suicide in desolate colonial villages. Gerzina includes the story of a woman named Jenny in Deerfield, Mass.: To the end of her long life she prepared for a return to her original home across the ocean. She neither forgot nor forgave her abuction and always recalled, as though it had just occurred, the white men who seized her and a group of other children playing near a well, not far from the home of her royal father, when she was twelve.
Lucy was much younger when she was abducted, which may explain her possession of what psychologists call resilience. Only one example of her poetry survived, a singsong ballad called Bars Fight, written when she was 21 about a French raid on Deerfield, Mass.
While Gerzina is telling the Princes’ story — from Abijah’s first appearance as a slave in the early 1700s in Massachusetts to Lucy’s oral plea before the Governor and Council of Vermont for protection from the assaults her family had suffered from neighbors — she also tells the story of her seven years of research, with the help of her husband and dedicated New England librarians. The detective story is, fortunately, intriguing, not intrusive.
If you wanted to reduce evil to a name, that name would be Simon Legree, right? Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was set on a sugar plantation on the Red River in Louisiana, and she had real-life prototypes for her villain, one of whom, apparently, was Meredith Calhoun, a figure in The Colfax Massacre (Oxford University Press, $25).
The subtitle promises The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, & the Death of Reconstruction. LeeAnna Keith, a teacher at Collegiate School in New York, begins her book by pointing out the distinction between a massacre and a riot. Here’s what the historic marker in Colfax says about the event: On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873 marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South. (For orientation, note that Colfax is in central Louisiana, about 40 miles from Jena.) Given the numbers, the description would be laughable if it wasn’t clearly an unmediated white-supremacist poster on public land.
Keith starts the story by following the Calhoun family from Alabama to Louisiana when they settled the Red River valley with more than 1,000 slaves. Fredrick Law Olmsted, a 30-year-old reporter for the New York Daily Times, visited the Calhouns in 1853 on the trail of Stowe’s sources, and witnessed the brutal beating of a woman, a slave found hiding in a creek bed, that haunted him for years. At the time, Olmsted hid his feelings about the event because the plantation owner’s son Willie, who was beside him, betrayed not the slightest flush of shame. But that same Willie later inherits the running of his father’s four plantations, becomes a scalawag, marries a woman of color and if he isn’t exactly a champion of the freed men on his land, he at least acts on their behalf.
All Keith’s reporting leads up to the massacre itself. You’ll wonder why you never heard of this tragedy. Keith’s story explains that, too.
