Month: July 2008

“Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjo Music”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in James Dickey, Mark Twain

The latest edition of the Oxford American, as usual, is full of great reading: Among the riches are an essay on food writer Charles H. Baker Jr., a visit to Joseph Mitchell‘s hometown of Fairmont, N.C., and a guide to epitaphs of ten Southern writers. (Mark Twain: “Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.”) What I keyed in on, though, was “The Last Wild River,” an essay by Bronwen Dickey about the legacy of the Chattooga River, immortalized in her father James Dickey‘s novel Deliverance. The piece details some of the consternation among residents of northern Georgia about controls over access to the river; some of it involves concerns about the feds taking control of the land, and some of it involves complains about what Deliverance, especially the film version, did to the area’s rep. Dickey writes:

The sadistic mountain men in Deliverance were, of course, fictional, as were the town of Aintry and the Cahulawassee River, but the residents of Rabun County were left to contend with the peculiar legacy of the film long after the cameras stopped rolling. The theme music from the movie, “Dueling Banjos,” is used in commercials to sell everything from dish detergent to SUVs. “Paddle Faster, I hear Banjo Music” is printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers all over the South. The character actor Bill McKinney, who uttered teh improvised line “squeal like a pig” (the line does not appear in either the novel or original screenplay), now maintains his official website at www.squeallikeapig.com. It’s hard to get away from.

The overwhelming majority of the pieces in the OA, including Dickey’s piece, aren’t online, but it’s well worth picking up.

It’s a Dystopian Novel, People

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Michael Chabon, Philip Roth

I don’t entirely disagree with James Lewis‘ review of Michael Chabon‘s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in the American Thinker. “Plotwise the novel is shapeless, as if the writer could not restrain himself and trim the excess,” he writes, and it’s a fair complaint. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay managed to be sleek and epic simultaneously, while The Yiddish Policemen’s Union clangs about, its deeply imagined world not quite connecting to its dry, overextended plotting. The remainder of Lewis’ review, though, is an interestingly rageoholic misreading:

There is no love unspoiled by hate in this book, there is no joy or pleasure, no innocence and playfulness, no music and dancing, there are no High Holidays, there are no happy children in Chabon’s imaginative world.

This is a bit like complaining that Robocop didn’t have enough love scenes. The American Thinker is a repository of right-wing vitriol, and its book reviews are clearly no different. (Lewis introduces Chabon to the reader by calling him “an American Leftwing atheistic Yiddishist, living, significantly, in Berkeley, California.”) Yet what struck me about this post is that I haven’t stumbled over much like it—I thought that there would be more of this nuttiness, both among critics and commenters, when the novel came out. Same goes for Philip Roth‘s The Plot Against America, another successful novel about a Jewish dystopia that didn’t seem to ruffle many feathers. Maybe the novel doesn’t have the power to provoke that it once did?

Annals of Assimilation

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Leo Rosten

Jennifer Weisberg has a lovely essay on Leo Rosten, who in the ’30s received acclaim for his short stories about Hyman Kaplan, an immigrant eager to shrug off his Yiddish and pick up English. Those stories originally appeared in the New Yorker, were later collected in a bestselling book, and inspired a 1968 musical. Weisberg argues that the appeal of Rosten’s stories was simple:

When Kaplan made his first appearance on the printed page, the American Jewish community was on the cusp of change. By the 1930s, Jews of Eastern European origin were increasingly confident, working assiduously to leave behind not just the shtetl, but the tenements and crowded streets of the Lower East Side, and to join in American life more fully. Perhaps no one could sum up their growing Americanization as well as Kaplan himself, explaining to Mr. Parkhill one day that he declined to attend his friend Jake Popper’s funeral, opting instead to “tink like Americans tink! So I tought, an’ I didn’t go. Becawss I tought of dat dip American idea, ‘Business before pleasure!’”

Yates’ Fighting Words

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Yates

In the New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal revisits Richard Yates‘ Revolutionary Road—a fairly unprovocative work about suburbia today, now that Little Children can be a bestseller (a movie version will come out at the end of the year), but tough to wrestle with in 1961:

Yates isn’t interested in expressing tenderness. His characters are doomed, and he leaves it at that. One of his many rejection letters from the New Yorker complained of his “mean-spirited view of things.” Yates was never published there, while “Precious John,” as Yates called Updike, found ample space.

Hoop Dreams

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Rus Bradburd

The Ball State Daily News covers the online literary journal Freight Stories, which has just published its second issue. (I’d recommend “Scene & Dialogue,” a story about a college basketball prospect that’s full of potent ironies; the story’s author, Rus Bradburd, jumped from coaching basketball at UTEP to getting an MFA.) The journal’s founders, husband-and-wife Ball State English profs Victoria Barrett and Andrew Scott, figure they’ve found a way to avoid printing costs without delegitimizing their efforts. Citing Narrative Magazine as a model, they explain:

“Online publishing has become both easier and less iconoclastic,” Barrett said. “Web journals began to emerge as a viable outlet for the highest quality work, the work of writers who, a few short years before, wouldn’t have considered publishing online. And so, Freight Stories was born.”