The Farm Report

(From Tampa Calling at Creative Loafing.)

This may be the first time that the words “funk” and “accordion” have been used in the same sentence.

Despite leaning heavily on the signature instrument for the bratwurst-and-polka crowd, Bob Dylan’s new album, Together Through Life manages to wring rhythm and soul from an overgrown squeeze box.

David Hidalgo of Los Lobos does the honors on each of the album’s 10 tracks and much of the backing band’s beat reminds is of the best work by Hidalgo’s group. Hidalgo adds great Flaco Jiminez touches to Dylan’s new songs, and at times Together Through Life sounds as if we’ve wandered into a Ry Cooder album.            

But it’s Bob Dylan, of course. That broken-speaker growl of his is unmistakable and although this is an album of purported love songs – what else would the title Together Through Life suggest? – nothing is ever so simple or straight-forward in Dylan’s world.  And when was the last time he wrote a conventional love song?

Case in point: “My Wife’s Home Town.” OK, we figure, this is going to be some rhapsodic reverie about visiting the place where his beloved grew up. A stock-in-trade tuneslinger from Tin Pan Alley might come up with something like that. But the refrain on this tune is “Hell is my wife’s home town.” And then . . . and then . . . a couple of times during the song, Bob . . .  cackles.  In his 47-year recording career, has he ever cackled before.

In short, Bob’s having fun here.

“My Wife’s Home Town” offers clues to the Rosetta stone for this album: Chess Studios, 1954. But for the accordion, “My Wife’s Hometown” sounds identical  to the instrumental track of Muddy Waters’ “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Chess seems to be the blueprint for many of the songs – Chess, mixed with some Doug Sahm / Augie Meyer Tex-Mex bordertown blues.

By my count, Dylan has made 15 masterpieces, the most recent being Love and Theft in 2001. Modern Times (2006) was a great, jumping record but a bit shy of his highest standard. It contains some excellent songs – “When the Deal Goes Down,” “Nettie Moore,” “Ain’t Talkin’,”  among them – but did not quite achieve the epic and apocalyptic stature of Love and Theft.

Together Through Life is much like Modern Times: superbly performed (by Bob’s usual band, plus Hidalgo) , with songwriter Dylan in great form (much in collaboration with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter), and with the sort of drive and funk that can even get a rhythmically challenged Midwesterner dancing.

It all started with a request from director Olivier Dahan (“La Vie En Rose”), who asked Dylan for a song for his new movie, “My Only Love Song.” Dylan came up with “Life is Hard,” by my account the weakest song on the album. But that inspired him to write nine other meditations on love. Despite the presence of the instrument on which Frankie Yankovic’s career is based, there is much dance funk on Together Through Life. 

Angry Young Bob will always exist as an icon of popular culture. But Dylan’s most interesting and satisfying artistic period may be the last 10-12 years, when he has shown how a great artist can age majestically. This album again reminds us Dylan is an amalgamation of all of his influences. Together Through Life, like all of his recent albums, is both a paean to and a tour of his the spectacle of American music.

(From Bill McKeen’s Book Blog at Creative Loafing.)

This state inspires so much great prose, it’s amazing we can keep up.

Here’s a half dozen great new Florida books you need to get your mitts on.

THEY PUT UP A PARKING LOT: From some of the same folks who brought you a Pulitzer Prize comes Paving Paradise (University Press of Florida, $27).  Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite tell a complex and on-its-face unsexy story about water in Florida.  But it works, drawing readers into its difficult subject by resorting to the dirtiest trick in the journalist’s bag of tricks: great storytelling.

Pittman and Waite use several people – some heroic, some shady – to examine the political shell game that makes white equal black and no equal yes. They tell the story through the eyes of politicians, developers, bait-shop owners and a league of people who mourn what’s happened to this state.

Based on their award-winning series for the St. Petersburg Times,Paving Paradise is the perfect way to give a longer shelf life to a vital work of journalism. Pittman and Waite are a couple of the best journalists practicing the craft in the country today. 

It makes us wonder if there will be a place for journalism like this in a few years. If newspapers still exist, will they give over this much space to an in-depth report. Will book publishers then give reporters the space to expand on their work?

This isn’t a story that works well on Twitter.

  
MATT WAITE (left) and CRAIG PITTMAN (right) with WAYNE GARCIA

Pittman worked for the newspapers in Pensacola and Sarasota before joining the Times two decades ago. Waite, part of the PolitiFact team that helped win one of the Times’ two Pulitzers last week, comes from Nebraska. When it comes to outrage over the vanishing wetlands, they are twin sons of different mothers.

Pittman and Waite also sit down with Creative Loafing’s Political Whore Wayne Garcia for a swellpodcast.

I WANT TO SAY ONE WORD TO YOU – PLASTICS: Years ago, New Yorker writer John McPhee wroteOranges and you had to marvel that someone could write such a fascinating book on a species of citrus.

   

BOB KEALING

This year’s John McPhee Award goes to Bob Kealing, author ofTupperware Unsealed (University Press of Florida, $28).  Of course, this is much more than a book about plastic containers.

Balzac once said that behind every fortune there was a crime.

There’s no real crime behind  Tupperware, but there sure as hell is a good story.

Earl Tupper invented the stuff and came up with the idea. It was his business partner, Brownie Wise,  who not only came up with the look         of the product, but also its in-home approach to marketing.

But the fall-out between Tupper and Wise is the great part of the story. As one of the first phenomenally successful businesswomen, Wise was heralded by the press. She was the first woman ever to grace the cover of Business Week.

Tupper’s jealousy over Wise’s success led to a falling out and at once time, Tupper ordered Wise written out of the company history and had a company hand bulldoze hundreds of copies of Wise’s memoir into oblivion.

Kealing, a reporter for WESH-TV in Orlando, is a man with wide interests. He’s the keeper of theKerouac House in Orlando and author of Kerouac in Florida (Arbiter Press, $13.95).

Now that the Tupperware book is out, he’s turned his attention to his next book – the story of singer Gram Parsons’childhood in the South, including his years in Winter Haven.

Can’t wait for that one.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO FISH TO LOVE FISHING: Writer / photographer Tommy L. Thompson is also a charter boat captain and his new book, The Salt Water Angler’s Guide to Florida’s Big Bend and Emerald Coast (University Press of Florida, $22.50) looks at one of this state’s most magnificent and – so far – relatively undeveloped areas.

   

TOMMY L. THOMPSON

Let’s hope it stays that way.

The waters and the villages along that coast are as close as we can come to stepping into a time machine: Horseshoe Beach . . . Panacea . . . Carabelle . . .  these are some of the loveliest small towns along this still-wild coast. Each trip that way on US 98 brings new sightings of condos, but compared to the concrete jungles to the south, the Big Bend still offers the pleasure of isolation.

Thompson’s book is aimed at fisherman, of course, and as a longtime guide on the coast, the author knows his stuff. But this book should also be marketed to those folks who never set foot on a boat. Rarely has there been a more intelligent and helpful guide to navigating the waters of restaurants and inns.

If you follow his fishing advice, you’ll probably have a good haul. Follow the other advice, and you’re also guaranteed a good time and great meals at fine restaurants where someone else provides the catch.

TUBING THE ITCH: One of the great pleasures of North Florida living is flopping in an innertube for a nice float down an icy spring-fed river.

Too bad we can’t tune out the noisy redneck masses floating alongside us, surreptitiously sipping Natty Light tallboys and flipping their ashes into the pristine water. It’s just the price we pay, right?

Steven Earl’s shimmering photo essay, Itchetucknee: Sacred Waters(University Press of Florida, $34.95) shows us the natural beauty of the river, without the pasty-bellied multitudes and the beer cans floating in the water.

This might as well be the river at the dawn of time. Earl’s photographs preserve that indescribable shade of blue known to every Floridian north of Orlando. His photographs of reflections in the water look like the work of Claude Monet.

This is the world Steven Earl sees every day. In addition to being a great photographer, he’s a park ranger.

This stunning book belongs on the coffee table of every Floridian who loves this place.

DOWN THE ROAD WE GO: Of course, one of the great Florida-art stories of recent years has been the rediscovery of the “Highwaymen” – a league of African American artists who painted Florida landscapes and sold them along the U.S. highways in the 1960s to tourists grasping for souvenirs of their visit to the Sunshine State.

Fine arts professor Gary Monroe told their story in The Highwaymen (University Press of Florida, $34.95) in 2001. Now he’s back with another volume in this series, The Highwaymen Murals: Al Black’s Concrete Dreams (University Press of Florida, $39.95).

Black had been one of the Highwaymen, but by the late 1990s was sentenced to prison for drug possession. Behind bars, his talent found new appreciation and he began painting a series of murals – landscapes, of course – that changed concrete blocks into vistas that both comforted and tormented the prisoners.

Monroe’s thoughtful essay sets the tone for photographs of Black’s murals. Such prison artwork is unlikely in any other state in the nation.

But this is Florida, after all.

(From Bill McKeen’s Book Blog at Creative Loafing.)

Here’s the book-review equivalent of the lightning round. Short takes on a lot of great new books.

Any Led Zeppelin fan who’s ever seen The Song Remains the Same remembers the story of the band’s $203,000 stash cash from their hotel. In Black Dogs (Three Rivers Press, $13.95), author Jason Buhrmester imagines what might have happened. In this case, he sees the main culprit as a semi-deranged Black Sabbath fan working as a backstage caterer at Madison Square.  Lots of great, sharp dialogue – kind of like an updated His Girl Friday script – and insider rock geek stuff make this book indispensible.

Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (Speigel & Grau, $24.95) has been getting a lot of buzz and justifiably so. Much of the buzz comes in the form of this-is-a-serious-LITERARY novel, but don’t let that scare you off.

 

 

In terms of technique and theme, American Rust  is indeed a big book. But Meyer (at left) also knows storytelling and this saga of Midwestern life in this new Great Depression resonates with book lovers. It’s a Cinemascope book with Big Themes, but we’re entranced with the lead character, Isaac, a young man wounded by his mother’s suicide, itching to set off on an epic journey.

Most of us are pretty ignorant of the history of our neighbors. Not sure there’s a lot to say about Canada. (“It was cold … then it was colder … then it remained cold.”), but for many Americans “Mexican history” begins and ends with the Alamo. Auburn professor Timothy Henderson’sThe Mexican Wars for Independence (Hill and Wang, $27.50) follows that pre-Alamo period of the early 19th Century when Miguel Hidalgo launched the move for independence. I’ve always dug Hidalgo, because Mexican Independence Day – Hidalgo Day – is my birthday. Read this crisply written book. It’ll give you something intelligent to say over your margaritas on Cinco de Mayo.

Last week in this space I lamented the thinning ranks of short stories in our lives and magazines.

 

 

Caitlin Macy’s Spoiled (Random House, $24) collects the work of a young writer whose work appears in John Cheever’s old venue, the New Yorker. While I’ve been mourning the loss of stories from Cheever and Flannery O’Connor, Macy (at right) has been carried on this rich American tradition of the short story. It’s easy to be self-indulgent and blathering in the space of a novel. But to create a whole world within the relatively tight word count of a short story – now that, my friend, is artistry.

The old Sigmund Freud question (What do they want, O Lord, what do they want?) might draw male readers to The Means of Reproductionby Michelle Goldberg (Penguin, $25.95), but they will soon discover there is no definitive answer. Goldberg’s reader-friendly style (she’s a skilled journalist) keeps this examination of women’s rights from being a dry anthropological study and instead making it a valuable part of our discourse. A couple decades back Deborah Tannen brought down the barriers between men and women by helping them understand each other’s communication styles. Goldberg’s book is another book with great insight to share.

Just out in paperback this week, Mary Roach’s Bonk (W.W. Norton, $14.95) is the third in her series of monosyllabic books.Stiff was about cadavers and Spook was about the afterlife. Bonk, as the title implies, is about sex. I wish we could all have jobs like Mary Roach (at left). But then, few have her imagination or talent. Bonk is a book about the serious art of sex research, but it’s a book that doesn’t take itself so seriously that the author can’t have fun. In the line of duty, she and her husband have sex under strict scientific supervision. It’s funny, but it’s also a learning experience. Roach continues to be one of the best science writers of our time and this book is fascinating and funny.

There’s no doubt that The DaVinci Code awakened the amateur archealogist-sleuth in millions of readers. Will Adams, author of The Alexander Cipher (Grand Central, $24.99) might cringe at the comparison, but there’s no doubt that this new “ancient” thriller taps into some of those some obsessions and conspiracies. Centuries after the near-god Alexander’s death, the discovery of his tomb sets off a chain of events to make readers in compulsive page-turners. This is Adams’ first book and it’s an exciting start of a career.

The rule of writing is to seek experience and write about what you know. Antonio Lobo Antunes took that advice to heart. He didn’t pursue his writing career until he’d worked for years as a psychologist and physician. The Fat Man and Infinity(W.W. Norton, $26.95) collects sketches, stories and vignettes in a hypnotic examination of the secret life of this Portugese writer. It’s prose with the passion of poetry boy Jorge Luis Borges. It is a thoroughly beautiful book.

Imagine all of the lines used in the art of seduction. Now, imagine this one:  “The world is being destroyed by climate change, but you can save millions of lives by fucking me.” OK, that does Lowboy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25) injustice, because John Wray has written a deeply serious novel. But it might draw you into the mind of Wray’s main character, a teen-age paranoid schizophrenic. Like American Rust, Lowboy is a “serious book” that is accessible to readers who simply love strong, passionate storytelling.

(From Bill’s Book Blog in Tampa’s Creative Loafing.)

Of all the great lost arts of America, perhaps it’s time to praise the short story.

People still write them and magazines and literary journals still publish them.  But we must have hit some sort of a peak – a harmonic convergence, perhaps – in the middle of the last century. In a long tradition that included Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ring Lardner and Ernest Hemingway, came two great mid-20th Century masters whose private lives have just been put on display.

Flannery O’Connor is the subject of Brad Gooch’s Flannery (Little, Brown, $30) and John Cheever gets the epic treatment in Cheever by Blake Bailey (Knopf, $35).

O’Connor (above) and Cheever are among the greatest storytellers in our history. Happens that they are both favorites of mine. When I was a young swain, working on a magazine, my managing editor introduced me to O’Connor’s work. My mentor was no slouch himself – a gifted author of short stories, winner of the prestigious O. Henry Award – and so I gorged on his advice, swallowing whole O’Connor’s Complete Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $17).

Her stories, often called Southern Grotesque, formed whole worlds. Lesser writers might try to fashion a novel from the material O’Connor used for mere paragraphs. Each story offered new, dark insight to the soul of a Southern eccentric. Odd and twisted, her stories are unforgettable. 

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” was about a family car trip derailed by an escaped killer. “Good Country People” featured a charlatan who steals an introverted woman’s wooden leg. “The Lame Shall Enter First” used a familiar O’Connor them,  the well-intentioned helping the less-fortunate, and struck a resounding chord in a symphony of human nature.

Her stories were deeply affecting, a reflection of both her Southern upbringing and hard-core Catholicism. She was born in Savannah, raised by only her mother most of her life, and sprang fully formed as a writer from the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in the late 1940s. She lit up literary reviews and some mainstream magazines (Harpers Bazaar, Mademoiselle) for 15 years and died young — not yet 40 — from complications from Lupus. In her last years, she limped around her mother’s house on crutches, her body racked by the disease, her mind tortured by the doubts that so well illuminated her stories.

She’s always been pretty much a mystery, so Gooch’s biography is priceless insight to the life of this great writer.

She often used her mother as a character — usually unflattering —  and we learn that she was safe from maternal abuse because her mother couldn’t abide Flannery’s writing. She didn’t read her daughter’s work. We also learn about the writer’s stubbornness, her devout Catholicism, and her physical and emotional pain.

She left behind two brilliant story collections – A Good Man is Hard to Find (Harcourt, $30) and the posthumously published Everything that Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15). She published two novels — the twisted Wise Blood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14) and The Violent Bear it Away (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14). After her death, her literary executor published a book of letters, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23), and a collection of essays and speeches, Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15). 

That’s not an insignificant legacy for someone who died so young. But Gooch’s book fills in a lot of blanks and gives O’Connor’s life the sort of narrative scope that her tightly focused stories rarely offered. 

Even ardent admirers knew little about O’Connor until the publication of the letters and certainly we did not get the fill-in-the-gaps details until Gooch’s biography came along. John Cheever’s life is another story. Perhaps you can know too much.

Cheever was a master short story writer, sometimes called the Chekhov of suburbia. Most of his stories appeared in the New Yorker and he was the poet laureate of quiet desperation.

In his collections of stories or in his four novels, he told elegant and detailed stories that chronicled the subdued suffering of 20th Century America. Occasionally, in such stories as “The Enormous Radio” or “The Swimmer,” he touched on the supernatural to present his themes of emptiness and longing. A story such as “Artemis, the Honest Well-Digger” was too frankly erotic for Cheever’s usual outlet, so it appeared in Playboy.

After Cheever’s death, his family allowed publication of The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage, $16.95) andThe Letters of John Cheever (Touchstone, $10.95). Perhaps we learned too much about Cheever. The revelations, particularly about his indiscriminate and ravenous sexuality and his dogged pursuit of both men and women, told us more than we probably wanted to know about this elegant man who wrote those beautiful stories. In death, he became a “Seinfeld” punch line.

But we can’t unlearn that now. Blake Bailey has done a masterful job writing the story of this disorderly life. Cheever, we learn, spent most of his life overshadowed and underloved. Rejected by his cold and aloof wife, disdained by his children, he was often drunk often by 10 in the morning, and seems to have spent much of his life wrapped in a gauze of gin.

Flannery O’Connor died chaste, but John Cheever was not so discriminating. He would copulate with a wallet, if he could get his rocks off. 

Reading Bailey’s immensely detailed book, Cheever almost appears as one of his characters, heading for a sad and dissolute end. We want to throw up our arms and tell him to stop, or grab him and hold him, hoping to prevent catastrophe. But we can’t stop what is inevitable.

Both of these writers told us much about themselves through their stories. In the end, though, the curious reader, admiring the stories, wants to know more about the lives of the creators. Both O’Connor and Cheever are well served by their biographers who illuminate these masters of fiction by showing the great truths.

If you can, got to a used bookstore and hunt down Cheever’s great story collections, such as The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (Harper and Row, out of print) or The World of Apples (Knopf, out of print). His crowing achievement, The Stories of John Cheever (Vintage, $17.95), earned him the Pulitzer Prize two years before his death.

Thanks to the Library of America, both O’Connor and Cheever have all of their major works back in print, in handsome new editions. Bailey edited Cheever’sCollected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, $35) and Complete Novels (Library of America, $35). O’Connor is also part of the same series, with all of her books available in one volume as Collected Works (Library of America, $35).

O’Connor has been dead since 1964 and Cheever since 1982. It’s time for new generations to discover these great artists.