Eudora Welty, photographer: "because I was part of it"

"Sunday Morning"

The photography of Eudora Welty is on view in a new exhibit, "Exposures and Reflections," at the Atlanta History Center now through May 8. Welty was a photographer before she was a writer; in 1936, after she learned that a magazine was going to publish two of her short stories, she was overjoyed. "I wanted acceptance and publication," she said later. "If they had paid me a million dollars it wouldn't have made any difference."

Many of her photographs of 1930s Mississippi feature African-Americans, who up to then were "socially invisible" in American society. Welty shows them on the street, window shopping, working, in family groups. T.A. Frail in The Smithsonian magazine of April 2009 notes that although Welty grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin and studied business at Columbia University in New York, which helped "move her beyond the confines of her family environment."

She returned to Jackson after her father was diagnosed with leukemia, and began taking photography more seriously in a succession of writing jobs. In a 1989 interview excerpted here, Welty claims no larger agenda for her photographs other than her own, personal one. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said.

"Fairgrounds"

"While I was very well positioned for taking these pictures, I was rather oddly equipped for doing it," she would later write. "I came from a stable, sheltered, relatively happy home that by the time of the Depression and the early death of my father (which happened to us in the same year) had become comfortably enough off by small-town Southern standards." ...

It hardly mattered. Through the early '30s, Welty gathered a body of work remarkable for the photographer's choice of subjects and her ability to put them — or keep them — at ease. That is especially noteworthy given that many of her subjects were African-Americans. "While white people in a Deep South state like Mississippi were surrounded by blacks at the time ... they were socially invisible," the television journalist and author Robert MacNeil, a longtime friend of Welty's, said in an interview during a recent symposium on her work at the Museum of the City of New York. "In a way, these two decades before the civil rights movement began, these photographs of black people give us insight into a personality who saw the humanity of these people before we began officially to recognize them."

"Window Shopping"

Welty, for her part, would acknowledge that she moved "through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was part of it, born into it, taken for granted," but laid claim only to a personal agenda. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said in a 1989 interview. "I was the recorder of it. I wasn't trying to exhort the public"—in contrast, she noted, to Walker Evans and other American documentary photographers of the '30s. (When a collection of her pictures was published as One Time, One Place in 1971, she wrote: "This book is offered, I should explain, not as a social document but as a family album—which is something both less and more, but unadorned.") ...

In addition to "Exposures and Reflections" which opens today at the History Center, the Atlanta area is host to several other notable photography exhbits. The High Museum is displaying works by Henri Cartier-Bresson from Feb 19 to May 29th, and the Booth Museum in Cartersville has announced it has extended its Ansel Adams exhibit through March 13.

Neal Cassady (February 8, 1926-February 4, 1968)

Neal Cassady

(Charles Plymell)

An ego pressed onward

Like a tight skirt in the night

Popeye and Olive Oyl

Swaggering down the street

Jumping parking meters

doing exercise gyrations

Expectations surrounded him

in crowds and beach boy cronies

Tarot card sharks and wood shooters

The Fastest Gun in the West.

I showed him pictures

Of Butch and the wild bunch

"Neal, Was he your father?"

That worried orphaned-look

I'll not forget.

He lived fast, his beds, death rows

to blow genius away, like The Doors,

A race over rails from time's windowpane

sun hot on the Mexican landscape--the

Railroad tracks chromed with cocaine.

(from Six by Charles Plymell. Photo of Neal Cassady from Influx.)

"The great equalizer": A few words about libraries

Yesterday was the birthday of James Joyce. Today is the birthday of Gertrude Stein, Paul Auster, and James Michener. And we're lucky that public libraries still carry the works of all these writers available for no charge -- right there on the shelf, waiting to be picked up and discovered.

Public libraries, once considered such an important community asset that Andrew Carneigie financed their building in towns both large and small, continue their struggle to survive. Many are now in danger of becoming print's obsolete repository as more offer online services to stay open. Computer access is becoming more important to library services to such an extent that one Georgia library is considering removing the books all together and becoming, in essence, a Starbucks without the coffee.

The internet, in all its wonders, may not replace the thrill of discovery quite like finding the unexpected on library shelves. Of course the electronic wizard can always point the way for the curious reader. But most of us use the internet like a dowsing rod. Looking for something specific in the vast sea of knowledge and finding the gold coin glittering there is unlike browsing shelves in a library; the gold can sometimes be found in the search itself.

The student seeking "three facts about Rome" who helpfully adds the clarifier in a question, "It's a city in Italy?" may only need the internet for a 500-word paper. The student who discovers a book with reproductions of the art in the Sistine Chapel will make his own life-changing discovery in the stacks.

Even that old sage Keith Richards in his 2010 memoir confessed to a lifelong interest in libraries: "The Church belongs to God, but the library belongs to you," he writes about his own self-discovery reading in 1950s English libraries. In a system so tradition-bound, the young guitar-player with a passion for the blues found the library "a great equalizer" about ideas of class and station in everyday life.

A recent post by a writer on The Dabbler blog illuminates how this stumbling about in a public library can have unexpected results, and create an interest that continues to expand forty years on -- not just the in the search for information, but in the pleasure of reading itself.

... It was through public libraries that I found my way into reading -- real reading -- and as often as not it was a book picked off the shelf on little more than a whim that changed everything, opening up a new path that would enlarge my mind and soul and become part of my life. When I was still at school, I was mooching around in my small local public library, idly scanning the shelves, when I spotted a title I thought might be worth a look. I knew the author only as a playwright who had caused a bit of a stir in the Fifties, but this appeared to be a novel.

It might be interesting, I thought, picking it up. It was bound, I remember, in a muddy blue 'library binding', unpleasing to the eye and the hand alike, and on its spine was stamped in ugly black letters 'Molloy. S. Beckett'. I opened it and read: 'I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there...' I was hooked. I read Molloy with amazed delight and moved on to devour every Beckett I could get my hands on. And now, more than 40 years on, when most of my youthful literary enthusiasms have long since died the death, I am still reading (or rather rereading) Beckett.

I have just finished rereading Malone Dies, and it seems to me every bit as wonderful - no doubt in different ways - as it was to me then, more than 40 years ago. And this lifelong, ever-deepening love affair I owe to a chance find on the Fiction shelves of a suburban branch library. Could such things happen in the librariless or library-lite future that seems to be on its way?

(The four-volume complete Grove Press edition of Samuel Beckett's work was published in 2006, with series notes by Paul Auster. From his introduction: "Open anywhere and begin reading. It is an experience unequaled anywhere in the universe of words." Photo of Beckett from the website A Piece of Monologue.)

Andrew Zawacki tonight at Word of Mouth, Athens GA

Book-reading has its charms, but eventually everyone has to get out of the house and see real, live writers in their natural habitat. Upstairs tonight at The Globe in Athens, GA, the monthly Word of Mouth meeting is a good place to see local writers away from their desks and spotted with cocktail in hand, reading their latest news bulletins from the front lines. Here's a sample, by tonight's featured poet Andrew Zawacki.

Any Other Eviction, Than the Frequent

If it be warfare, let it be mistress

and midnight up that slope,

not reticent in a weather

of withdrawal, its salmon-roe tint,

the shabby grass it grazes

but varnished to richterline

under a prismatic glare:

delinquent churn of cloudswath

and gust, calving a foreshore filth

from its respiratory lunge:

inlaid verges blear kaleidoscopic,

larkspur and loosestrife splinter

and render afire, as frontiers to scour

or confiscate, and laving dark

these latent, these restive affronts:

I was in love with a river

and its recoil - water and whither

it went is a doctrine of veil,

applique to what angle of incident

little, what lightless, unhinge.

"Winter's Bone" and other films about the South, from D.W. Griffith to the Coen brothers

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has included Winter's Bone In its list of ten nominated films for best picture this year -- a real dark horse by contemporary Oscar standards. The plot is utterly unlike The King's Speech or the Coen brothers' sincere retelling of True Grit; either of those films is likely to receive the Oscar for best picture of the year. Here's the plot of Winter's Bone as described on the movie website imdb.com: an unflinching Ozark Mountain girl hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her drug-dealing father while trying to keep her family intact.

'"Dangerous social terrain": suddenly, Geoffrey Rush's affront in calling the future King of England "Bertie" seems a bit ... pale in comparison to a determined girl hacking her way through the culture of the Ozarks.

What is it about "the South" -- quotation marks included -- that continues to appeal to script writers, directors and audiences this late in movie history? No other area of the country seems to conjure up such a strange mix of honor and family, humor, money -- or the lack of it -- and the pure romanticism of some long-gone past, with an ever-present threat of mayhem or violence.

A southern setting (even in a work of fiction or film as broad in its setting as a John Grisham adaptation) is more likely to turn on a long-buried family secret as it is to feature an afternoon of iron-willed ladies drinking sweet tea served on a sheltering porch; make no mistake about a southern drama, there's always a gun somewhere in the house. Hollywood has always believed that alcohol, tobacco and firearms make a perfect Saturday night south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Hillbillyland explores Hollywood's never-ending fascination with moonshine, country bumpkins, and what goes on up there in the hills beyond Beverly. In the early 1920s as more people moved to the cities, Hollywood found it could make money telling audiences about the places they'd left behind. The South has long been a source of conflicting impulses in Hollywood; the region was mined for its "colorful" characters, mostly humorous, as well as its darker impulses. The sex and violence in 1950's Tobacco Road undercut the good-hearted goofiness of the Ma and Pa Kettle series of the 1940s, and this seesaw play of opposites and cultural attitudes has been a movie convention long unmatched by any other region in the country.

Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main as Ma & Pa Kettle

Williamson shows how Hollywood has gotten a lot of mileage out of these stereotypes. The Coen brothers' Raising Arizona was a hit on the strength of Nicolas Cage's ironic portrayal of a hillbilly fool trying to achieve "the basic family unit" by stealing a baby, and then continuously compounding his mistakes. (An updated edition of this book would have to include the recent TV show My Name Is Earl, proving this funny and well-meaning-yokel archetype isn't dead by a long shot.) There was also Martin Scorsese's 1991 violent remake of Cape Fear, in which Robert DeNiro is a convicted rapist who terrorizes the family of the attorney who put him in jail, which takes place in a desolate Florida backwater town. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter challenges FBI agent Jodie Foster's cool by noting her "cheap shoes": "You're not more than one generation removed from poor white trash, are you? And that accent you've so desperately tried to hide -- pure West Virginia. What does your father do? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the land?" It's an unnerving moment.

The early motion picture industry enticed audiences into movie palaces with spectacle, sex, and increasingly lurid tales of sin and seduction. Many of these movies used Southern settings, featuring taboo subjects. This combination proved so successful that, by the early 1930s, a conservative religious movement emerged with an aim to "clean up" Hollywood's excesses, led by the Catholic Church but supported by preachers, ministers, and spiritual spokesmen nationwide. The Catholic Church's League of Decency became the first cultural crusade against what was perceived as a threat to the national character. Wielding an authority of equal parts religion and politics, the League saw to it that movies were banned outright, content was snipped and clipped, and production scripts were combed over for hints of immorality. Classic novels were re-written for the screen to pass the scrutiny of the hastily-created, reactionary Hays Office.

There was a backlash among Hollywood writers as stories set in the South became a target. William Faulkner himself created the story of Sanctuary in three weeks ("the most horrific tale" Faukner could imagine, "a morbid tale of rape, murder, sexual impotence and perversion" -- he was broke, and decided to go for broke in his paid-for Hollywood bungalow) which certainly seems like an outright challenge to the Paramount studio censors. The studio made the film anyway. The rewritten, completed film (The Story of Temple Drake, 1933) abandons Faulkner's story for a much less-scandalous ending -- and a moral that the author never intended. Pre-code films (made before 1934) are being released on DVD, but Temple Drake is still unavailable. As World War II brought more sophisticated audiences to the movies censorship taboos began to fall, but Southern locales were still used to dramatize "taboo" subjects like miscegenation and incest.

Williamson covers a lot of ground here, from D.W. Griffith's Tol'able David to John Boorman's Deliverance, The Dukes of Hazzard to The Andy Griffith Show, and his conclusions are necessarily broad ones. His best writing narrows focus on a specific film or theme: the on-location making of the log-cabin potboiler Stark Love (1926), by the director Karl Brown, is wildly detailed, with newspaper reporting and interviews with local extras who made appearances in the film as members of an "authentic" mountain family.

Film still from Stark Love (1926), with Forrest James and Helen Mundy

To find hillbillies, he incongruously went first to New Orleans, the most interior southern city he could think of, and there he asked a journalist friend if he knew where there were any benighted mountain people. His friend had vaguely heard of a Berea College in Kentucky that was supposedly civilizing such types ... So Brown took the hint and got himself by train to Berea, where he got the none-too-surprising official cold shoulder from college people eager not to be associated by such "truth." Next Brown bounced to Nashville where he asked hotel desk clerks if they knew where any real isolated mountaineers lived. They didn't, but they pointed him in the direction of Knoxville, Tennessee, where someone else told him that those kinds of hillbillies were all over the line -- in North Carolina ...

It was December 1925 when Brown staked his location. He went back to Robbinsville in the summer of 1926 with $50,000 and went to work on his movie, the first task being to acquire a "native" cast. But Brown had a major problem. He wanted to hire local people for parts in a movie that was guaranteed to insult them. He got around much of the problem by keeping the storyline to himself and by shooting out of sequence ... He hired many people to pantomime disconnected actions that told no narrative they could rightly follow. ... For the two fathers, Brown eventually cast two perfect country men, Reb Grogan and Silas Miracle, who were placated into acting as mountain monsters by being told they were impersonating North Carolina monsters, not Kentuckians.

Williamson writes with an eye for history and, as someone who is upfront about his own "hillbilly bona-fides," a good deal of humor. He has also seen a lot of truly awful films and two-reelers, some archived in the Library of Congress -- more than 800 movies. Lots of movie stills, contemporary cartoons, and detailed captions accompany the text. At times the book reads like a college course -- Williamson is a professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and acknowledges the input of several students -- but Hillbillyland is a good look at how the film industry exploits this facet of American culture.


"A dimwitted hillbilly gets involved in an armored-car robbery."
--TV Guide description of an episode of "Sheriff Lobo", Dec. 19 1983, page A54

The road to censorship, paved with good intentions

The recent publication of an edited edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a reminder that good intentions and censorship are often one and the same. Here's a selection (from a much longer list) of banned books and the reasons why, from The American Library Association.

Classics all, old and new, have come under attack. In the case of a bookstore in Orem UT, the sale of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess resulted in the owner's closing up the store and relocating to another city. The Awakening, Kate Chopin's 1899 novel about a woman who challenges orthodox views of motherhood, was still being questioned in 2006.

Books are censored and edited for many reasons. Twain's Autobiography was revised by editors who thought his views on politics too controversial for his Gilded Age readers. (One hundred years later the outrage of his religious views is still running high.) A letter from the always-pertinent author regarding the banning of Huckleberry Finn by the public library in Omaha, Nebraska (in 1902!) indicates the author very much enjoyed the notoriety: "It has started a number of hitherto spotless people to reading Huck Finn, out of a natural human curiosity to learn what this is all about -- people who had not heard of him before; people whose morals will go to wreck and ruin now."

Huck remains in good company these days along with Jem and Scout, Harry Potter, Deenie, and Holden Caulfield; here's a short excerpt from the ALA website, and reasons why the books have been banned over the years.

The Awakening, Kate Chopin: Retained on the Northwester Suburban High School District 214 reading list in Arlington Heights, IL along with eight other challenged titles in 2006. A board member, elected amid promises to bring her Christian beliefs into all board decision-making, raised the controversy based on excerpts from the books she'd found on the Internet. First published in 1899, this novel so distrubed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee: Challenged in Eden Valley, MN (1977) and temporarily banned due to words "damn" and "whore lady" used in the novel. Challenged in the Vernon Verona Sherill, NY School District (1980) as a "filthy, trashy novel." Challenged at the Warren, IN Township schools (1981) because the book does "psychological damage to the positive integration process" and "represents institutionalized racism under the guise of good literature."... Banned from the Lindale, TX advanced placement English reading list (1996) because the book "conflicted with the values of the community." Challenged by a Glynn County, GA (2001) School Board member because of profanity. The novel was retained; returned to the freshman reading list at Muskogee, OK High School (2001) despite complaints over the years from black students and parents about racial slurs in the text. Challenged in the Normal, IL Community High School's sophomore literature class (2003) as being degrading to African Americans. ....

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck: Burned by the East St. Louis, IL Public Library (1939) and barred from the Buffalo, NY Public Library (1939) on the grounds that "vulgar words" were used. Banned in Kansas City, MO (1939); Banned in Kern County CA the scene of Steinbeck's novel (1939); Banned in Ireland (1953); .... Banned in Kanawha, IA High School classes (1980); Challenged in Vernon Verona Sherill, NY School District (1980); Challenged as required reading for Richford, VT (1981) High School English students due to the book's language and portrayal of a former minister who recounts how he took advantage of a young woman ... Challenged in the Greenville, SC schools (1991) because the book uses the name of God and Jesus in a "vain and profane manner along with inappropriate sexual references." Challenged in the Union City, TN High School classes (1993).

Catch-22, Joseph Heller: Banned in Strongsville, OH (1972), but the school board's action was overturned in 1976 by a U.S. District Court in Minarcini v. Strongsville City School District. Challenged at the Dallas, TX Independent School District high school libraries (1974); in Snoqualmie, WA (1979) because of its several references to women as "whores."

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut: Challenged in many communities, but burned in Drake, ND (1973). Banned in Rochester, MI because the novel "contains and makes references to religious matters" and thus fell within the ban of the establishment clause.... Challenged at the Owensboro, KY High School library (1985) because of "foul language, a section depicting a picture of an act of bestiality, a reference to 'Magic Fingers' attached to the protagonist's bed to help him sleep, and the sentence: 'The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of God Almighty."' ...

The Call of the Wild, Jack London: Banned in Italy (1929), Yugoslavia (1929), and burned in Nazi bonfires (1933).

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess: In 1973 a book seller in Orem, UT was arrested to selling the novel. Charges were later dropped, but the book seller was forced to close the store and relocate to another city. Removed from Aurora, CO high school (1976) due to "objectionable" language and from high school classrooms in Westport, MA (1977) because of "objectionable" language. Removed from two Anniston, AL High school libraries (1982), but later reinstated on a restricted basis.

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck: Banned in Ireland (1953); Syracuse, IN (1974); Oil City, PA (I977); Grand Blanc, MI (1979); Continental, OH (1980) and other communities. Challenged in Greenville, SC (1977) by the Fourth Province of the Knights of the Ku Klux KIan; Vernon Verona Sherill, NY School District (1980); St. David, AZ (1981) and Tell City, IN (1982) due to "profanity and using God's name in vain." ... Challenged as a summer youth program reading assignment in Chattanooga, TN (1989) because "Steinbeck is known to have had an anti business attitude:" In addition, "he was very questionable as to his patriotism:' ... Retained in the Olathe, KS Ninth grade curriculum (2007) despite a parent calling the novel a “worthless, profanity-riddled book” which is “derogatory towards African Americans, women, and the developmentally disabled.”

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote: Banned, but later reinstated after community protests at the Windsor Forest High School in Savannah, GA (2000). The controversy began in early 1999 when a parent complained about sex, violence, and profanity in the book that was part of an Advanced Placement English Class.

A Separate Peace, John Knowles Challenged in Vernon-Verona-Sherill, NY School District (1980) as a "filthy, trashy sex novel." Challenged at the Fannett-Metal High School in Shippensburg, PA (1985) because of its allegedly offensive language. ... Challenged at the McDowell County, NC schools (1996) because of "graphic language."

An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser Banned in Boston, MA (1927) and burned by the Nazis in Germany (1933) because it "deals with low love affairs."

What do writers listen to when they write?

What do writers listen to when they write? In these media-saturated days that doesn't seem like such a far-fetched question for an interview any longer, but it remains unasked most of the time. Even more rare is the chance for an author to write about the music that inspired an idea or enhanced the form of a story.

Perhaps it seems more appropriate to ask a writer simply if he turns the music off or on when he sits down to write. To many, music is only a distraction. But it turns out that many contemporary authors find music forms a soundtrack to their writing. And for some authors, music can help find a way into a story.

The Largehearted boy site has a regular feature, Book Notes, which asks writers to comment on music they listened to while they worked on their books. Thaisa Frank writes about her first novel Heidegger's Glasses, a story of World War II, that the music of Beethoven was her first choice while conceiving the story. But there were other inspirations as well: California rain on skylights, and an iPod shuffle that included Cat Power, Bob Marley, and The Cranberries.

Frank decided early in framing her characters that the camp Commandant would be listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the "Pastoral." But she changed her mind: "after listening to the Pastoral, I decided the dissonance was heavy-handed and remembered Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, which my boyfriend gave me in college. It joined my iPod shuffle. The Commandant played it, too."

...Since I studied piano perhaps it's not surprising that I chose the Concerto or made the one of the characters a pianist, although at the time I didn't give it much thought. Nor did I give it much thought at first when she played Scarlatti sonatas. Then I listened to Scarlatti and remembered how much I loved playing his sonatas and the sense of a clean, well-ordered world. I found as many Scarlatti piano sonatas as I could and they also joined the iPod shuffle.

At some point -- perhaps toward the middle of the novel -- I began to watch documentaries about WWII, documentaries in which Germany's national anthem at the time was played again and again. I heard this anthem in a curious way -- distancing myself, trying not to hear it. Perhaps I listened the way people who were threatened by, or unsympathetic to the Nazi Party listened.

In one documentary, however, I found a song that became emblematic -- a song I then listened to again and again. This was from Lotte Leyna's German recording of The Three Penny Opera. It is called "Solomon" in English, "Saloman" in German. I first heard it on a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl. While Riefenstahl insisted that she didn't know about the concentration camps it was played over and over, like a dirge. The song sounded less ironic in German than it does in English. It sounded mournful. The rhythm is insistent and relentless. It washes over Riefenstahl's denials like waves.

Thaisa Frank

I also listened to Cat Power, blues piano by Jimmy Yancey, and The Cranberries. Each piece of music felt close to the novel or the act of writing it. The Cranberries and Cat Power are close to the feelings of love and betrayal that persisted in Germany during WWII. And Jimmy Yancey's piano seemed closest to the way I seemed to disappear when the writing went well. His blues are deceptively simple--as though the piano is a guitar and he is picking out tunes. I always see him at an old upright late at night in a smoky Chicago bar. There's a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and he's playing as if no one is listening. ...

The music of the blues and the reality of German concentration camps in World War II make an unlikely pairing, but that was Frank's way of "disappearing" into the story and letting the story tell itself. Most writers, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining where their inspiration comes from. It seems that an author's music playlist is one small facet that can make the mystery of creativity a little clearer, even as the connection between source and inspiration remains as inexplicable as ever.