The Farm Report

As we ruminate further on the decline of newspaper journalism (Holy Smoke! The Detroit papers will be available only online five days of the week!), let’s celebrate something that makes newspapers so important to us – great columnists.

Florida is blessed with several of the best in the nation, and luckily the University Press of Florida has begun a program of preserving great newspaper columns as part of a series on Florida culture, edited by University of South Florida professors Gary Mormino and Raymond Arsenault. Mormino and Arsenault offer a master’s degree in Florida Studies. Woo hoo!

Jeff Klinkenberg (that’s him, above, wrestling with an alligator) of the St. Petersburg Times is one of Florida’s greatest blessings and his latest collection, Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators (University Press of Florida, $24.95), is another entry in his “Real Florida” crusade against anything false and manufactured with the stench of a theme park.

Klinkenberg hits the road to find off-the-beaten trail people and places, examples of the old, weird and wonderful Florida.

Imagine this scene: You pull up at a gas pump in Desolate Bumfuck in the Florida Panhandle to feed the guzzler. There’s a picture of that bad-ass cop on the pump, warning you that if you drive off without paying you are dogmeat. Then the real-life cop pictured on the gas pump pulls up next to you. What happens next, of course, is a great story.

Great, serendipitious things like that happen to Klinkenberg.

There’s a lot of humor in the book, as anyone who reads his Real Florida column expects. But the real lump-in-the-throat piece comes at the end, when Klinkenberg lovingly and unflinchingly looks back at his mother’s life from her deathbed.

Keep the tissues handy.

Full disclosure time: I was asked to write the introduction to Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators and proudly did so. But I’d ballyhoo this book even if I hadn’t done that.

Another full disclosure: I was also a pre-publication reader of Mark Lane’s Sandspurs (University Press of Florida, $24.95). Again, I don’t think that should tarnish the rave I’m about to lay on you.

I don’t know Mark Lane and he hasn’t bought me so much as a beer, but this is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Lane is a longtime columnist for the Daytona Beach News Journal and Sandspurs collects some of his favorite columns. 

This book ought to interest ayone who lives in Florida, visits Florida or has heard of Florida. Beyond that, anyone who enjoys humor will probably consider this book a hoot.

Sandspurs is made of short bites. Things can be read and digested incrementally.

Lane has an appealing sense of humor – dry to the point of being arid. He’s in touch with his inner lunkhead, painting himself as a sloth with his “Darwinian Gardener” columns about his monumental laziness. His engaging self-deprecation works well throughout the book.

As a Florida newspaper columnist, Lane is wise enough to know that facts are perfect fodder for flights of fancy. Truly, you couldn’t make up this stuff.

Whether you’re a Florida native, a long-ago transplant or a new arrival, there’s something here to make you laugh at the ridiculous spectacle of life in Florida.

We all love to find good writing and so Lane’s work is kind of revelation; it’s been here all along. As a metro columnist in Daytona, Lane hasn’t reached much beyond his newspaper’s circulation area, so I think this work will be a surprise to readers elsewhere.

There are a couple of earlier entries in this series – still in print – that should also flip your skirt.

The genre was jumpstarted nearly a decade ago by Carl Hiaasen’s Kick Ass (University Press of Florida, $24.95), the first in his collection of Miami Herald columns. Nothing – and no one – is sacred in Hiaasen’s world and he expertly blends the absurd with the obscene. (That’s the pretty boy, at left.)

He’s such a success as a novelist, many people wonder why he keeps his day job at the newspaper. Read the column about the beachgoers who ignored the posted warnings and still took a dip into toxic waste and you’ll understand: the day job keeps him mired in the weirdness of Florida.

He followed his collection with Paradise Screwed (Putnam, $24.95), sort of a Kick Ass II. 

I remember that when he was on his promotional tour forKick Ass, he stopped by the good old College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. We promoted his visit heavily, but one faculty member refused to acknowledge it in class because she did want to use the Ass Word. Silly rabbit. She should have read the explanation of the book’s title. Hiaasen says a good newspaper columnist’s job is to kick ass. It’s in the job description.

That’s something Hiaasen has turned into high art.

And, bringing us back to the St. Petersburg Times, Maximum Insight (University Press of Florida, $24.95) collects several of Bill Maxwell’s best columns for that newspaper. Often unpredictable, consistently insightful, always readable, Maxwell’s collected work is a must-have for any thinking Floridian (a diminishing
population?).

Maxwell (above, talking to students) took a harrowing sabbatical to teach at a university out of state a couple years back and his return to the Times is one of the many things that makes newspapers such a vital part of daily life.

(This has been yet another posting borrowed from Bill McKeen’s Book Blog at Tampa’s Creative Loafing.)

Sheri Lynch is co-host of the best morning talk show on radio, “The Bob and Sheri Show.” Last year, this syndicated show was switched from one station to another in my market, causing me tremendous pain, for reasons that will be revealed below. While bored in an airport the other night, I sent the profoundly unsolicited message to Sheri that follows. Because people complain that I haven’t been blogging enough, I’m going to post it here so that it can do double-duty. She has not responded yet. Can’t say that I blame her.

It’s important to know that Bob and Sheri are in always-the-bridesmaids / never-the-bride mode with regard to the Marconi Awards, the radio industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. I begin my missive by rubbing salt in that particular wound. Let me go on record as saying how much the show deserves the award. It’s the most intelligent thing on radio and I’ll stand in my cowboy boots on Scott Simon’s coffee table and say the same thing. (That last passage borrowed without asking from Steve Earle.)

Dear Sheri:

Any chance you can use your clout as a Marconi winn . . . – I mean nominee – to get your show switched back to the classic rock station in Gainesville? You were moved over to the “sister station” and it’s the smooth jazz format. I can’t take it anymore. As I’ve said before, smooth jazz is defined as music by dead people for dead people. Buddy Holly once said, “Jazz is for stay-at-homes.” I guess that means that smooth jazz is for corpses.

I don’t dislike good jazz – Monk, Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Miles before he went nuts. But every time your show goes on break, they start pumping out some jejune bullshit that is an insult to the Divine Gift that is music. “Music,” Brian Wilson once said, “is God’s voice on Earth.” It’s not supposed to be God’s wallpaper on Earth.

At least the classic rock station had news on the breaks. Anything is better than this Juicy-Fruit commercial soundtrack they play. Luckily, your breaks match up perfectly with NPR news.

I’ve listened to your show for eight years. It’s part of the family experience. I drive my four youngest children to school (Catholic school, uniforms, guilt, the whole deal) every morning. They love listening to Bob and Sheri. My son Jack thinks you have gorgeous eyes. (I showed him your Web page.) Thank you for being so subtle and clever when your conversation turns to matters sexual. Nothing beats a good innuendo except for the occasional royalty check or a frigid draft beer. Maybe a few other things too. Chicken wings, for example. The only thing I miss about my bachelor years inbetween marriages is chicken wings, one of the single guy’s seven basic food groups. Then I married a woman who is half Italian and half Cuban. The food and the temper are magnificent. She rarely lets me in the kitchen except when it’s my turn to do the dishes, which is three times a day, seven days a week.

I’ve always thought Bob was a little too uptight and something of a prig. But after eight years, I realize he is me. The other day, when he said that he didn’t like to see reading material in the bathroom when he was visiting someone’s home, that was dead-on me. Because, like Bob, I am then forced to conjure the image of that person reading that material, complete with posture. 

Take care. I can’t listen tomorrow. I’m traveling now – passing through Charlotte airport as a matter of fact – on my way to Milwaukee. It is 11 degrees in Milwaukee. I am insane. But we’ll be listening next week and think about me with my 12-year-old daughter and my boys (6,5 and 3) and remember to keep it clean.

Airports are really boring. Didn’t mean to ramble.

Sincerely ….

There’s an old story about James Stewart, the late, great American actor. A fellow walked up to him once on a movie set and said, “You were in a picture once. You were in a room. You said a poem about fireflies.” The man paused. “That was good.”

And that little incident gave Stewart the opportunity to tell us why people love the movies: “What you’re doing is … you’re giving people little, tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

We all have those pieces of time in our heads. And though we can keep everything preserved at home now on DVD and BluRay, it’s never really enough, is it? It’s nice to have something tangible – a book perhaps – to help us hold onto and appreciate those fleeting images on the screen.

There’s a new biography of Marlon Brando and a compendium of commentaries on a thousand films – with Brando as Don Vito Corleone on the cover – and both these fine books are feasts for film fans.

Somebody (Knopf, $26.95) is a splendid and highly readable biography by Stefan Kanfer. Thorough without the curse of being academic, Somebody (as in “I couldda been . . . “),gives us insight and anecdotes that will enrich your next trip through On the Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris orApocalypse Now. Brando was a hugely talented actor whose style is still controversial, nearly 60 years after his film debut. We might start a fist-fight arguing if he was the best screen actor ever.

But he’s always been portrayed as enormously lazy, because he refused to memorize scripts. Kanfer gives a different interpretation. Because he wanted to be natural, to be really thinking instead of parroting dialogue, he placed cue cards all over the film set, so he would appear to be doing what he was, in fact, doing: searching for the words.

Brando made classic films but he hit a bad patch in the 1960s. There was the vapid Bedtime Story, a comic misfire. The Appaloosa followed, a Western in which the star appeared to be asleep the whole running time. Then came the disastrous Countess from Hong Kong, which brought Brando together with Charles Chaplin. What should have been cinema history was instead a huge snorefest, prettied up by the presence of Sophia Loren.

He nearly had to beg to get the lead in The Godfather. Cheeks stuffed with Kleenex, he aged himself suitably for the producers’ approval. Director Francis Ford Coppola never doubted he’d found the right man to play the head of the Mafia family. After that film and Last Tango, Brando worked only when the money or the cause moved him.

Brando was a puzzling man. Little “Bud” from Omaha grew up, went east and took over Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, then redefined the concept of screen acting in the 1950s. Along the way he accumulated three wives, several dysfunctional children, an island in the South Pacific and the burden of immense sadness. Perhaps the most telling and heartbreaking part of Kanfer’s book is the story of Brando the loving and tormented father.

It being a movie-star biography, there’s a requisite amount of gossip. Even this is well handled, including the rumor that Brando had a fling with Laurence Olivier while Lady Olivier — Vivien Leigh — was playing Blanche DuBois to Brando’s Kowalski. Brando and Olivier swimming naked in a pool while Viv gets a snootful of sherry … now, that’s an image we’ll not soon forget.

Somebody brings back to life this greatest of actors who shrugged off his work as insignificant. Kanfer urges us to disagree with Brando’s self assessment.

It’s fitting that of the 1,000 films profiled in David Thomson’s “Have You Seen…?” (Knopf, $39.95), it’s the opening scene of The Godfather that makes the cover. Rarely has there been a better of example of the difference between literature and film. Mario Puzo’s novel was pulp fiction. Coppola turned it into cinematic art.

“No other American classic so repays repeated viewings,” Thomson writes of The Godfather. Indeed, in our house there’s one week a year set aside for the whole trilogy, parsed out in two-hour installments each evening. This is why we love the movies.

Thomson’s approach is simple: Each film gets a page. Rather than list cast and crew – we do have Internet Movie Database, after all – he gives us background, odd facts and critical assessments. No pictures, but then we don’t really need those if we love the movies. (Little, tiny pieces of time in the head, after all.) Obviously, even with the room to talk about a thousand movies, there are a lot of films that will be left out. What amazes me are some of the films he managed to squeeze in.

I saw it once – a half-hour French film made by Chris Marker in 1962 called La Jetee. It was in a film class in college 30 years ago and I’ve never forgotten it. Over the years, I’ve never found anyone who’d seen it. I began to think I had imagined it. But the piece-of-time thing struck again, and I could never forget it. Thomson’s short essay makes me realize I did not hallucinate the film’s short and subtle brilliance.

“Have You Seen,,,?” (Good Lord, could they have found a shittier title?) is valuable not just because it takes us back through a thousand of the most important films ever made, but because Thomson’s spot-on, insightful essays say so much in such a short space. It’s superb economical writing.

(This is another posting “borrowed” from my book blog for Tampa’s Creative Loafing.) 

Rick Bragg (at right) is a great storyteller and I’ve always had faith that people will continue to want stories. Ever since we sat around campfires in the days of the hairy and unhygienic cavemen, we’ve always wanted stories.

I’ve always been a sucker for them (stories, not cavemen) – whether in newspapers, magazines or books. Bragg made his mark in newspapers, writes frequently for magazines and has published several best-selling books.

Still — these are scary times for storytellers and people who love to read.

Alarms started going off in the newspaper industry, but still I had faith. I told myself: The nature of the publication might change, but people will still want stories … won’t they? They will still care about other people … people unlike themselves … won’t they?

Even though the delivery system has changed for the young folks, I still hold on to my newspaper. I guess that makes me a weirdo.  I look at my friends leaving the Tribune and the Times and ponder a world crushed by information and the incredible shrinking product from which I prefer to get the news. I don’t think a laptop can compete with a newspaper for pure portability and information storage. What a great invention.

It’s pretty clear that we’ll be getting our information online or through some form other than newsprint. Will this generation be the one that kills off the newspaper as we know it?

Ah, but The Book … despite the Kindle and digital downloads  … The Book is still sacred, right? Is there anything more perfect than a book?

But now I wonder: Is The Book … gulp … dying?

Book publishers are having their moments of doubt and faith. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has decided it is no longer interested in finding new writers. Sorry. We’re all full up here. (Apparently in disgust, one of the company’s senior vice presidents resigned.)

Publishers figure this will be the worst holiday book-buying season since they’ve been keeping track of these things.

It seems that there’s more going on that just a downturn in the economy. People’s attitudes toward news and information – and reading in general – are changing. What does that mean those logomaniacs among us? Will we run out of words on paper to read?

At the Miami Book Fair last month, a number of celebrated writers were asked about the future of the written word. This is what Rick Bragg had to say: “Books in their traditional form will endure. I hope I’m dead before I have to read a good mystery by tapping keys or on a touch screen.”

Events such as the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading or the Miami Book Fair (sort of like a Festival of Reading on steroids) give you hope. In Miami, the city closes off a few blocks for a weekend and thousands celebrate books (and funnel cakes and frosty beers, too). Assloads of authors show up. This year’s cast included Peter Matthiessen, Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Belzer(Munch! My man! Love the wingtips, Babe!) Dave Barry, Dennis Lehane, George Hamilton (Nice tan, Dude!) and a cast of thousands. I was on the program too, flogging Outlaw Journalist, my Hunter S. Thompson biography.

The huge turnout for these book festivals gives us hope. Maybe if people like Bragg keep writing great books, there will be a future for publishing.

I can tell you this: Bragg is a great friend to any teacher of writing. I used to let students choose a book to write about in my introductory journalism course at the University of Florida. The papers sucked. Hell – they worse than sucked. But I noticed that people who wrote about one of Bragg’s books generally wrote good papers. I developed a theory: If they read great writing, they will try to emulate it. (For me, this is a theory on par with Einstein’s best work.)

So I started requiring Somebody Told Me (Vintage, $13.95), a collection of Bragg’s journalism. Fadoop! The quality of the students’ writing went through the roof.

Bragg’s latest, The Prince of Frogtown (Knopf, $24) completes a family trilogy that began with his magnificent book about his mother, All Over But the Shoutin’ (Vintage,  $14.95) and continued with his paean to the grandfather he never met, Ava’s Man (Vintage, $13.95).

In The Prince of Frogtown, Bragg delves into the character he danced around in those earlier books: his father.  The wounds uncovered and explored in the book are heart-breaking – but then, heartbreaking has always been Bragg’s specialty, back to when he reported for the St. Petersburg Times before winning a Pulitzer for that paper in New York City.

These books aren’t merely memoirs. They form part of what I hope will become a large body of literature from Bragg. 

His books break your heart but they also give you hope – for writers, readers and publishers.

(This post is “borrowed” from Bill McKeen’s Book Blog, which appears in the Tampa edition of Creative Loafing. I post to the blog weekly and once a month write a column for the print edition. It’s called Palm Reader and is devoted to Florida writers. Check out the blog archive.)