My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

How do you consume the news?

Are you a Net-Newser? An Integrator? A Traditionalist? Or are you among the Disengaged?

Find your niche in the Pew Research Survey on Audience Segments in a Changing News Environment.

Heartening finding:

Most Americans say they prefer to get political news with no point of view rather than news that shares their political views. Two-thirds (66%) wants news with no political point of view, which is consistent with measures from recent news consumption surveys.

Majorities in all major demographic and political groups say they prefer news with no political point of view. However, less educated people are more likely than those with more education to say they prefer news from their point of view. A third of conservative Republicans, and about the same proportion of liberal Democrats (31%), say they prefer news with their point of view. That compares with 27% of conservative and moderate Democrats, 21% of moderate and liberal Republicans and just 15% of political independents.

Disheartening finding:

Only 18 percent of the public could identify the party in control of the House of Representatives and supply the name of the United States' secretary of state and Britian's prime minister. A third could not answer a single question correctly.

Southern Reading Challenge: Hee Haw!

I read four books for Maggie's Southern Reading Challenge, which ended last week:

Truman Capote's The Grass Harp

Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge

Gin Phillips' The Well and the Mine (that cover photo is one taken by Eudora Welty)

and Hillary Jordan's Mudbound

and they were all enjoyable and well worth reading, particularly the O'Connor.

I'd just finished the Capote when Maggie announced the State of the Mule contest based in part on the dead mule alert I'd issued about Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms during last summer's challenge . As you might imagine, I was internally braying with happiness--I mean, who in their right mind wouldn't want to hone in on the physical condition of all fictional mules they might encounter? (Oh, bite your tongue if you're going to be that way.)

Trouble was, mules were nonexistent in The Grass Harp and scarce in the O'Connor and the Phillips. O'Connor mentions a mule a couple of times: in "Greenleaf," Mrs. May reflects that she's put up with with "having shiftless people's hogs root up her oats, their mules wallow on her lawn, their scrub bulls breed her cows" and in "Judgement Day" Tanner dreams of going back home by train in a coffin and having his friends meet him there with a "borrowed mule and cart." State of the mule: pretty good.


Mules were just scarce in the Phillips as well, but their well being took a dramatic decline. Albert, a miner in Depression-era Alabama, says, "Started as a boy sorting the coal from the slate for the tipple. I knew my way around the pit mules by the time I quit grammar school for good--poor blind creatures that must've thought they were born and raised in hell. We didn't use them no more once the electric cars came around, with the chains hauling the cars up to the top." Earlier, Albert says that a black co-worker who'd served time in prison for vagrancy had been "treated worse than a pit mule" during those six years. State of the mule: hellish while alive, now presumed dead.

Then I read Mudbound. And let me tell you, Hillary Jordan has read her Faulkner. There are quite a few times that As I Lay Dying was brought to mind, but mule death is what we're dealing with here: Jordan knows dead mules are a steadfast requirement.

Oh, she teases us at first, gives us a dead horse, live plow mules. But when she decides it's time to kill one off, she makes that mule's death be an act of God:

Hap, you better humble down now, you been taking the blessings I've given you for granted. You been walking around thinking you better than some folks cause you ain't working on halves like they is. You been forgetting Who's in charge and who ain't. So here's what I'm gone do: I'm gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of. Then I'm gone send hail big as walnuts down on that mule, making that mule crazy, making it break its leg trying to bust out of there. Then, just so you know for sure it's Me you dealing with, the next morning after you put that mule down and buried it and you up on the ladder trying to nail the roof back onto the shed I'm gone let that weak top rung, the one you ain't got around to fixing yet, I'm gone let it rot all the way through so you fall off and break your own leg, and I'm gone send Florence and Lilly May to a birthing and the twins out to the far end of the field so you laying here half the day. That'll give you time to think real hard on what I been trying to tell you.

State of the mule: Collateral damage.

And speaking of collateral damage, the worst mule carnage encountered this summer didn't take place in Southern literature, but in the harbor on the quai at Smyrna:

The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business.

Nice image, Ernest Hemingway.

Further mule alerts as warranted. You don't have to thank me.

"It's like a slur in music, leading you to the next thought without making you stop to rest."

Be sure to note the Marilyn Monroe illustration that accompanies the "Sex and the Semicolon" article.

It seems like a lifetime ago. . .

my daughter went to school--first one, and then another--and my son stayed home with me. Or went to preschool, where he majored in Power Rangers, the original crew. And outside the Power Rangers obsession, which got on my nerves, there were plenty of books and dinosaurs, so life, basically, was good.

And then my son started kindergarten, and for one glorious year both attended the same school (my daughter's third).



And then my son switched schools and my daughter stayed put for another year, and time sped up and now my daughter's gone and graduated from college--"with distinction," as it says on the diploma mailed here earlier in the month--and the straight A torch has been passed on to her brother, who's the only one in the family starting a new semester today, when, clearly, both ought to be in back in class.



Someone needs to go to grad school before things start getting a bit too weird around here.

Latest batch of books

These are the books that have taken up residency on my shelves over the last couple of months. It's sort of magic how these things find their way here considering I've had exactly two trips to the bookstore this summer and brought home only four books total. If you're out of storage space, they will come, I suppose.

David McCullough. John Adams. Finished watching the HBO series earlier in the week. I'll probably wait to start this one until after I've read a Jefferson bio.

Anne Enright. Yesterday's Weather. Short stories. I'm very excited to own this.

Beth Gutcheon. Good-bye and Amen. Already finished with a review pending.

Robert Boswell. The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction. I love reading craft books and I'm quite fond of Boswell anyway.

John Dufresne. Requiem, Mass. Read during the readathon in June.

Helen Garner. The Spare Room. It didn't make the Booker longlist, but I bought it anyway.

Amitav Ghosh .Sea of Poppies. This one did make it onto the Booker longlist.

Haven Kimmel. Iodine. I'm anxious to start.

R.W.B. Lewis. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. I've eyed library copies of this one for years, but knew it would be impossible to read it before its due date. Now I can read it at my leisure.

Joan Wickersham. The Suicide Index. One of the best books I've read this year.

Richard Hughes. A High Wind in Jamaica, The Fox in the Attic, In Hazard, and The Wooden Shepherdess. If they're all as wonderful as High Wind, I'm in for a treat.

Stefan Zweig. The Post-Office Girl. Lots of discussion of this one in the forums at Readerville and Book Balloon.

Darcy O'Brien. A Way of Life, Like Any Other. If it's reissued by NYRB it's got to be good, right?

Kitty Aldridge. Cryers Hill. Another Readerville recommendation.

John McPhee. The Control of Nature. Purchasing this one led to a big discussion on Alaska and Utah with the owner of my favorite used bookstore: he was previously a miner in Utah.

John Welter. Night of the Avenging Blowfish. I've read this one before. Welter is hilarious. Why has he stopped publishing?

Nicolai Gogol. Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil. The only thing I've read by Gogol is Dead Souls. I'm sure that's not enough.

Michael Greenberg. Hurry Down Sunshine. ARC

Sana Krasikov. One More Year. Review copy

Perri Klass. The Mercy Rule. Review copy

Porter Shreve. When the White House was Ours. Review copy

And (unpictured) for the Kindle:

Lin Enger. Undiscovered Country. Based on Hamlet.

David Rabe. Dinosaurs on the Roof. I'm not quite halfway through and I doubt I ever finish it.

Works of Anton Chekhov. The complete works. For $4.79.

Gold Medal Reading

You, um, may have noticed that the Olympics are going on right now, so that’s the genesis of this week’s question, in two parts:

First:

• Do you or have you ever read books about the Olympics? About sports in general?
• Fictional ones? Or non-fiction? Or both?

And, Second:

• Do you consider yourself a sports fan?
• Because, of course, if you’re a rabid fan and read about sports constantly, there’s a logic there; if you hate sports and never read anything sports-related, that, too … but you don’t have to love sports to enjoy a good sports story.
• (Or a good sports movie, for that matter. Feel free to expand this into a discussion about “Friday Night Lights” or “The Natural” or whatever…)

~~~~~~

I watched part of the opening ceremonies last Friday, and I've watched more than that in past years, but for the most part I simply can't muster the interest in sitting in front of the TV screen. In other words, no one would ever mistake me for a sports fan.

I've read about the original games in my history reading, but never a book about the Olympics. I feel that I ought to read Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby, or at least the part about Wilkes County and Junior Johnson (one of L.'s cousins was a race car driver--killed when a tire blew up-- and another relative's family owned the track there), but so far I haven't made an effort to secure a copy. NASCAR, eh. I try to ignore it but it's always there in the background.

My lack of interest does not apply to sports that involve horses. From the Black Stallion and National Velvet and Ralph Moody's Come On, Seabiscuit when I was a child to Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit, I've read a lot of books about horse racing.

Outside that area of interest, I've managed to read either Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough or Peter Gent's North Dallas Forty (I honestly cannot remember which) for a novel about football, and, for baseball, David James Duncan's The Brothers K and Russell Rowland's In Open Spaces. And I did actually read nonfiction about basketball back in high school: I'd been hired by the local newspaper to be the sports stringer (can you imagine?!?!) for my high school and I figured I ought to learn something about the game.

Anything beyond these will require a bit more caffeine flowing through the system.

Booking Through Thursday