Michael Korda: "technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it"

The dire predictions that doom the future of the printed word seem to mount daily. Not to worry: book publishing will adapt in ways undreamed of, and with a quickness that will be astonishing.

That's the hopeful forecast in this interview with Michael Korda, author and former editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, who's well aware that the book business will respond to the commercial expectations of readers as it always has, even as the idea of "the book" itself changes. He thinks that the role of small-press publishers, always precarious, will benefit from technology in the next five years with "a media that's open to everybody ... how they'll make money, I don't know. But then, how do they make money now?'

Korda offers a future business model based on the recent history of the music industry: "Nobody would have guessed that people would be downloading individual songs onto their computers and that record stores would disappear. So, you know, a very similar thing is going to happen to reading." The complete online interview by Rob Couteau, excerpted here, is in Raintaxi.

RC: You were saying the form itself is not so important; it’s the book that’s important, and we can’t compare the book in its present form to an electronic book, like the Kindle, but we have to apply our imagination to it much further, in that it might become something that’s just beyond anything we can imagine today.

MK: Well, I think that that’s true. You know, you’re looking at the Model T Ford and trying to predict what road transportation will be like in 2010 . . . ultimately, it’ll still have four wheels, and some form of propulsion, and a steering wheel, but beyond that, you’re trying to imagine something which is beyond imagination, if you see what I mean.

Now, there are two important differences. One is that the speed of progress is now so rapid, and transition is so quick, that the next step in reading-technology will come very rapidly, rather than very slowly. So that there’s not going to be a long lag between its inception and its development, and any changes that take place. Already, the iPad is a huge step ahead of the Kindle. Although whether it’s a useful step ahead for readers remains to be seen. ... it’s a rather large and cumbersome device, which needs to be replaced with something altogether different. But that is going to happen with such incredible rapidity that we really can’t forecast what it will look like. ...my guess is that, in ten years time, it will be in place and that nobody will have a problem with it. It’s just amazing the degree to which things are changing rapidly.

RC: There are a lot of people who say, “Well, I would miss the feel of the book.” But if you really unleash your imagination, it’s actually quite easy to imagine how digital book producers could appeal to the tactile sense; it doesn’t have to be just a visual innovation.

MK: Yeah, no doubt. But you know, I don’t have a clue. The person to talk to about that is Steve Jobs. [Laughs] Because unless he dies first, he’ll probably be the one who will invent it. But it’ll be something quite different. But I don’t think that that’s in any case something that one should be afraid of. People react the same way about a whole variety of things, ranging from smoking cigarettes to using typewriters or fountain pens. But nevertheless, the technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it. ...

RC: But other things, other businesses, will be created.

MK: Right. ... The book will continue to be a major factor for as, certainly as long as I live, and maybe as long as you live. But eventually it’s going, in the form of something else.

RC: What about the future of publishing?

MK: It will have to be reinvented with that in mind. Already, I think it’s evident that the major publishers are looking to find a partner in Apple, (and it) will become, in effect, a kind of publishing house. How that will work remains to be seen. There isn’t anyone in the book publishing business who can tell you, because nobody knows at this point in time. But that’s what everybody is clearly attempting to move towards. ...

Missing the beat: "Poetry" magazine and the spoken word

Patricia Smith

Poetry Magazine is such a puzzle. The magazine (and now the Poetry Foundation) serves as a well-funded venue for contemporary poets, an honored and recognized voice for poets since Harriet Monroe began publishing in 1912. Yet I'm mystified these days by most of what the current editor, Christian Wiman, selects: many of the poems seem academic, and word usage almost seems archaic. I won't name names here -- but the room needs some air. I've subscribed infrequently but never submitted a thing to Poetry, although I've thought about it from time to time.

I'm just not on the magazine's track, apparently, but that's the immediate thing about poetry itself: it either moves you or it doesn't. And, as the young Elvis once slurred into the microphone after one false start at a rocking little tune, "that don't move me, fellas. Let's get real gone for a change."

What's missing in Poetry Magazine for me is the spoken energy of poems. They are meant to be read, and not spoken, most of them. Jonathan Williams, the erstwhile wordsmith of Scaly Mountain, NC, had it right when he commented that to be appreciated poetry should be read out loud, and (more importantly) written to be read that way as well. Chaucer's Tales read by a roaring fire with wine-cups at the ready, the Six Gallery reading in 1955 with Kerouac urging readers to "go! go! GO!": the spoken poem has to have an engine that drives it, and that's what often lacks in the pages ofPoetry.

Not that the magazine doesn't have its interests for me. A recent issue has a nice interview article by Jeremy Richards titled "A Shifting Sense of Place." Patricia Smith, Todd Boss, C.D. Wright, and Frances McCue are asked what place their poetry has in the world, where it belongs. Todd Boss comes right out of the gate with perhaps the most itchy, American reply: here’s the sad truth: I’ve resented every place I’ve ever been. It isn’t “me,” or I don’t “fit in,” or it’s “too close to home,” or my wife isn’t happy there, or it’s not where I’d have chosen to live, or whatever.

Boss's first book was called Yellowrocket, and his cinematic video (for motionpoems.com) is posted on YouTube. It's no surprise that his poem "The Sticks" is filled with stuttering, stumbling, don't-wanna-hang-out-here-long energy:

my mother still mutters whenever

she remembers where we lived,

reciting then her one life sentence

of overlush underbrush, neighbor trash,

shoddy farms and fallen fences

and filthy Herefords knee-deep in

barnyard shit. ...

Now, that moves me like a twitchy needle in the groove of a 45 rpm record. Why doesn't Poetry publish more poems like that? Patricia Smith -- her 2008 book is Blood Dazzler -- doesn't write nature poetry ("concrete and glass were the order of the day ... why should I strain towards something that's so alien to me?") and sounds more at home around the jukebox rhymes of rhythm and blues: here's part of her poem, "Hip Hop Ghazzal":

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat,

swinging blue hips,

decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie,

bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas

throat the heartbreak,

inhaling bassline, cracking backbone

and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent,

seeping ’tween floorboards,

wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee,

clinging like glue hips. ...

That is poetry that jumps and wiggles itself off the page, and it's full of an energy that reads just as well as it can be spoken. "As a poet, you search for whatever gives a place its muscle and bone," Smith writes, and she could just as well be talking about its animation.

It's an energy Poetry Magazine could use more of, more of Eliot's elegant, intelligent Shakespherian rag: 'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?' The editors of Poetry ought not to be alarmed. There's still plenty of space in the room for the women who come and go speaking of Michelangelo.

"Blowing Minds": A happening for the East Village Other

Initiated by poets, painters, artists, seers, perverts and prophets, it shared its pages with the likes of Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Robert Crumb, Ishmael Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Baba Ram Das, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman – the conspiracy of the 1960s.

Like all culture receding quickly into the hazy and obscured past, the East Village Other is having a quick look in the rear-view mirror. From the press release:

The panel on Feb. 28, to be livecast on this site, is poised to feature some of the EVO’s greatest living treasures: Ed Sanders, Steven Heller, Claudia Dreifus, Dan Rattiner and two who still live in the neighborhood –- EVO editor Peter Leggieri and writer and activist Alex Gross.

Other neighborhood residents, illustrator and cartoonist Yossarian and writer Steve Kraus, have helped us locate and gather the far-flung EVO tribe. John McMillian, author of Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, will moderate.

More about McMillan's book, from a previous BellemeadeBooks post, is here.

If you'd like to contribute, the website adds: EastVillageOther.org will also feature newly commissioned and republished pieces about the period from legendary EVO writers, artists (we’ve solicited a piece from R. Crumb), and thoughtful fans. If you’d like to contribute, please e-mail the editor of The Local. We’re seeking posts of 600 to 1,000 words.

International Grafik (1969-1980): Graphic art behind the Iron Curtain, unafraid

“If you have talent and a need to express yourself, you live unafraid.”

(a Czech citizen who lived in Prague during the Communist Era.)

This is one of those holiday season weekends where I let the shoppers rush home with their treasures -- and without me in their crush. It was a brilliant 70-degree afternoon, and summer-like.

I spent a lazy day with doors and windows open, talking to family and friends, writing Christmas cards (seasonal duty shall not be overlooked), listening to Cistercian monks chanting "music for contemplation" on the hi-fi, and following my muse's nose into some internet links previously unknown to me. These are (admittedly) legion, but then free time and a liberal arts education has its benefits.

Here, for example, is a 2010 offering from Bohemian Ink, a site that offers a look at eastern European art and graphics. Its tagline, Budapest, Burbank and beyond, indicates the blog's broad look at the original Bohemian culture as curated by Jessica Taylor Tudzin, an American writer now living in Budapest, Hungary.

In the Bohemian Ink entry Tudzin writes: "Neil Philip, a British-based writer who also runs the online original print gallery Idbury Prints ... has graciously given Bohemian Ink permission to reprint his fascinating post on Czech graphics of the 1970s. I can only just imagine the times these featured artists endured as they bravely created their art."

Included in the post is a selection of reproductions from International Grafik magazine and its thirty issues dating from 1969; the final press run was in 1980, and was devoted entirely to works by Miraslav Matous. Read the entire post here. An excerpt:

In the 1970s I remember a great deal of interest in the West in writers behind the Iron Curtain, but almost none in artists. It was just assumed that all artists in the Eastern Bloc were producing soulless socialist realism or figurative kitsch. So it has been fascinating for me to acquire work by what seems a representative sample of Czech printmakers from that decade, all published in the Danish art revue International Grafik, edited between 1969 and 1980 by Helmer Fogedgaard and Klaus Rödel. International Grafik was an altruistic labour of love.

It published almost exclusively woodcuts, wood engravings, and linocuts, printed from the original blocks or plates, in a numbered edition of 1000 copies. No doubt many important artists are unrepresented in its pages, especially those who specialized in etching and engraving, but there are enough artists here to at least get a flavour of the currents of Czech art at this time. All of the Czech artists contributing to International Grafik were doing so from inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

The first surprise is that in the decade after the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Czech artists were not retreating into safe figurative images on socialist themes, but were instead diving headfirst into experiment and abstraction. These are not cowed voices, but confident and progressive ones.

Maybe in the period of “normalization” that followed the overthrow of Alexander Dubček’s reformist government there were too many other people to police, and the graphic artists somehow operated under the radar of government surveillance. I’d be very interested to hear from anyone with memories of the cultural atmosphere of this time.

(Jaroslav Vodrázka, 1973)

Graphic artist Jaroslav Vodrázka was born in Prague in 1894. He studied at the School of Applied Art, and then at the Academy of Visual Arts under Max Svabinsky. Jaroslav Vodrázka himself became a professor of graphics. He produced wood engravings, linocuts, etchings, engravings, and lithographs, and was always interested in exploring new printmaking techniques, using materials such as plastic and plexiglass. Although he lived until 1984, Vodrázka remained rooted in figurative art, creating images of peasants, landscapes, and religious scenes.

(Joseph Weiser, 1971)

... The graphic artist, art teacher, and art theorist Josef Weiser was born in Switzerland in 1914, but moved with his parents to Moravia during WWI. In 1933 he became a teacher, and from 1950-1958 was a professor of art education in the teacher training college in Olomouc. Subsequently he became head of art teaching at the institute of advanced education for teachers in Olomouc. Besides his original graphics, Josef Weiser is also known for his bookplates. Weiser, too, remained a figurative artist; in the linocuts published by International Grafik, the predominant motif is that of a rather idealised young woman. He died in 1994.

(Miroslav Matous, 1980)

... Lastly, Miroslav Matous was born in Zdárky in eastern Bohemia in 1920. Known as painter, printmaker, tapestry designer and architect, Miroslav Matous attended the Mánes School for painting, studying under Vladimír Sychra. As a printmaker, Miroslav Matous is known for lithographs, drypoints, etchings, linocuts, and woodcuts. From the evidence of these prints, the 1960s had definitely arrived in Czechoslovakia by 1980!

Tudzin adds this note: Among Neil Philip’s books are Mythology (with Philip Wilkinson), English Folktales, The Cinderella Story, Victorian Village Life, and The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. He has also published two collections of original poetry, Holding the World Together and The Cardinal Directions. All text and photographs on this post are copyright © Neil Philip. Copyright in the artworks remains with the artists or their estates. Read more from Neil Philip on his blog, Adventures in the Print Trade.

The Mike Davis interview: talking of Tesla, the Unarians, and Navy dolphins

What I enjoy about BOMB magazine is its focus on ideas rather than style, content more than technique, art over celebrity. The current issue introduces me to at least four artists I'm not familiar with. The hook here is that the interviews are more like late-night boozy chats between friends (artists talking to artists, mostly) or on long drives into the California desert. There's at least one artist in each issue whose ideas intrigue me enough to learn more about their work.

It can be heavy going at times. Yes, the big ideas get tossed about, sometimes laid on with a trowel, but most of BOMB's pages are filled with artists having a chance to air their opinions about where it is their art comes from. Increasingly relegated to the fringes of American life and mostly ignored by pop culture, the grandchildren of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are scrambling for grant money and gallery wall space. BOMB gives its readers a chance to meet them on their own terms -- artists and writers, architects and sculptors, photographers.

Sometimes the ideas of art and politics combine to add another dimension to the interview. In the summer issue, Lucy Raven takes a road trip to El Cajon, California to interview writer Mike Davis, whose books include City of Quartz (2006) and his upcoming Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. Davis and Raven spin through the desert around El Cajon, where Davis grew up.

Live here for a while (I grew up in the San Diego backcountry in the 50s and 60s) and you will inevitably have eerie, unexpected encounters with the brave new world that a trillion dollars of recent military expenditures is bringing into being ... frequently, in the mornings, there are dolphins doing Sea World-like stunts in the water; after an encore, they hop aboard the back of a Navy fast-boat which roars back to the marine-mammal weapons facility -- or whatever it's actually called -- at Ballast Point. ... they are now part of the naval arsenal and were used to penetrate Saddam's harbor defenses during both Iraq wars.

One interviewer has described Davis as " a walking encyclopedia of whatever is strange and riveting about Southern California." His theories are sometimes startlingly unique: a book originally intended to focus on the Rodney King riots morphed into 1998's Ecology of Fear. Davis describes that book's larger theme as "a study of the fetishism of disaster in Southern California, where the natural gets seen in social terms (coyotes and mountain lions compared to street gangs), while social problems are seen as natural events (street gangs are 'feral and wilding youth.')."

Voice of Venus, Unarian HQ

Then, of course, there are the sights of El Cajon for which Davis has a wonderful affinity. Here is the conversation between Raven, Davis, and members of the Unarian religious community at the location of the self-described "celestial world of Unarius":

Mike Davis: The Unarians came just after I graduated from high school in the mid-60s, and they're really quite wonderful. Their message is the loving convergence of the 32 inhabited worlds, celebrity-quality reincarnated genealogies for everyone, and the building of Nikola Tesla's City of Light.

Lucy Raven: Tesla? Fantastic. The man who battled Edison over AC/DC, and in his twilight years battled over the invention of a "death ray" particle-beam weapon (it's also been called a "peace ray," as a weapon to end all wars) must be smiling all around us.

MD: Seriously, these folks are latter-day Fourierians with their homegrown version of communal socialism, galactic peace, and life in crystal phalansteries. The group was founded by an aging couple in the '50s who decided they wanted to become god and goddess. This is the model of one of their future cities, albeit already existing on more advanced planets. The radial design is uncannily like the plan of Llano del Rio, the briefly lived socialist utopia in the Mohave Desert during World War I. But this one, of course --

LR: -- is bejeweled.

Unarian HQ

MD: And that would be a 100-foot high alabaster wall.

LR: Wow, the "power tower." Great that they have it in Spanish also.

MD: "Peace, prosperity, internationalism." In Duncan Hunter's own congressional district. And here are the founders over here. Ruth Norman. Doesn't she look adorable?

LR: She looks amazing. Is it a painting or a photograph?

MD: I think they added a little William Blake to Tesla here.

Unarian: Do you want me to light up the star map?
LR: Why not?

Starmap, Unarian HQ, El Cajon, CA

LR: Is this space the physical center of of Unarius?

Unarian 2: It's the physical manifestation of the celestial world of Unarius.

Unarian 1: There are seven spiritual planets, teaching centers where scientists, artists, philosophers, and everyone else goes through time periods as they start to progress into a higher awareness of themselves. Nikola Tesla is the head of the scientific plane of Eros. It's where all the scientists who have left their mark in the world come from.

Unarian 2: Like many of the famous people of the past. Maybe they don't consciously remember, but in their sleep or out-of-body experiences, they gain knowledge. ...

Wow. The interviews in BOMB are a valiant effort to answer the old and eternal question: where does art come from? The process of turning life into art can be a truly mystifying one. War-trained dolphins and Unarians, the Rodney King riots, coyotes and street gangs ... It's a good thing BOMB arrives every few months to help the reader sort it all out.

"Smoking Typewriters": the '60s underground press emerges from the shadows

"We're turning into a generation whose thing is to be an Audience, whose life-style is the mass get-together for good vibes." (The Berkeley Tribe, December 12-19, 1969)

That quote seems a surprisingly contemporary view of our media-driven culture, in its way, even as it describes the audience who showed up for the Rolling Stones wreck of a free concert at Altamont in 1969 expecting a good time. In its pages the Tribe newspaper reported the sudden end of the 1960s, as first witnessed in the underground press. In contrast the major Bay-area daily paper, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, first reported on a successful and happy festival with no deaths and no problems at Altamont. It was a kind of wishful thinking, brought on by the expectations of another Woodstock. Where were thoseExaminer reporters grooving?

More than forty years later everyone is still part of a tribal audience, of course. We are all connected in cyberspace, but rather than joining in a group with shared expectations and ideas we are the internet audience of individuals bent over our keyboards. The difference is that we are now accustomed to news and information expressly tailored to our own expectations and ideas, with advertising based on data-mining of our own internet searches, and the insular "news services" of all political and cultural stripes.

The history of the underground press in the 1960s and 1970s presented in Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, is more than a memory-trip of counter-culture rags, political rants, and Indian ragas. John McMillian's study makes plain that the New Left politics of the underground press could only move further left of the Kennedy and Johnson Democratic administrations of the 1960s. The rest of the country was not as sure what was going on in college campuses, and later in the streets, as the decade ended in equal parts tragedy and war.

The only direction, for many on the New Left, was to move beyond even the goals of the politicians and union leaders of in the 1930s and 1940s. Hubert Humphrey's long career fighting for liberal causes was overshadowed by his vice presidency under Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy had been assassinated in June; and the Democratic Party found itself split, again, when first-time 18-year-old voters were attracted to Senator Gene McCarthy's promise of a "peace plank" in the Democratic platform to end the Vietnam War.

This idealism, created and nurtured primarily on college campuses, was bound to seem extreme in a year of assassination and riots, and it eventually met an extreme backlash in the form of Nixon's "silent majority" and the rise of Dixiecrats represented by George Wallace, who won five states in 1968.

It was plain, however, that the anti-establishment position of the underground press was initially helped along and then maintained by increasingly cheap technology available to anyone with an opinion: "our founder, the mimeograph machine," read a posted sign in the office of one paper.

With the luxury of a long view, Smoking Typewriters takes pains to draw lines between the cultural and the political. In the hothouse reality of the times, however, the lines were swiftly blurred between the polemic and the people. By the late 1960s there were an estimated 400 underground magazines in the country; in many, it would have been difficult to separate the ads for record companies from the anti-establishment editorials they helped finance.

Soon the politics became wrapped in the idea of a "counterculture" that spread into the marketplace, and though Paul Krassner's Realist magazine was funny, smart and pointed in its politics, it was Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone, with lengthy musician interviews, full-color photography, and hip, literate record reviews that was found beside most readers' LP collections and plastic baggies.

The Great Speckled Bird (1969)

As the counterculture emerged aboveground in commercial ways, it was the distribution and availability of the more radical underground press, as much as the content in its pages, that was at issue. In Atlanta, The Great Speckled Bird was subject to a succession of obscenity and harassment trials, and its offices were eventually firebombed after an expose of the Mayor's office in 1972. Challenges to first amendment rights became a frequent battleground in what could and could not be printed and sold. Here was a familiar war ranged around freedom of the press, and some familiar voices spoke up for the underground papers.

Even then, however, there were differences of opinion in an era when the very words "drug culture" meant different things to different people. Allen Ginsberg took note of these subtle shadings when he chided PEN American Center director Thomas Fleming's defense of free speech in one 1970 case, for characterizing the underground press as "inflammatory":

I would have taken exception were it my place, to (the) adjective "inflammatory" applied wholesale to the New Left literature outside the context of equally-inflammatory ideology displayed in, say, Reader's Digest with its historically inflammatory cold war fury or odd language about "dope fiends;" or NY Daily News which in editorials has proposed atombombing China counting 200 million persons at their own estimate as reasonable; or for that matter the New York Times whose business-as-usual reportage in this era of planetary ecological crisis occasionally inflames my own heart to fantasies of arson. ... Merely to say that I find "aboveground" language as often inflammatory as I find "New Left" underground thetoric, (as would) W.C. Fields.

Today the idea of a left-dominated, underground press as a dynamic force for change seems an increasingly distant memory. Smoking Typewriters is a good reminder that America, though challenged to do so, was able to encompass both the "radical" and "political" in its concept of a free press. Yet there are surprising echoes in the history of recent political campaigns as partisans on both the left and the right learn to use the internet to "frame the debate" with persuasive words and images, and with even more powerful personalities.

The 2008 election will always be historic, McMillian writes, not just because it made Barack Obama president, but "as a watershed election in which the Beltway media was frequently outmaneuvered or humbled by the liberal blogosphere." The power of the '60s underground press is duplicated now in the internet's viral videos and meetups, and with more far-reaching effect. As the most recent events in Egypt and elsewhere indicate, the potential of the internet as it develops will far outstrip the wildest expectations of any nation's underground press.

Barry Hannah remembered: Oxford American's new issue

Barry Hannah left a South that is a big tent of intellect and emotion, a writer's paradise made half of bright-light sideshow and half shadow. Looking away from the spotlight that Hannah put on his characters a reader would miss the intent of Hannah's writing. His fiction, like McCullers', O'Connor's, and Faukner's, was not about external action as much as personal observation. Family, neighborhood, and society provide the setting; the force of individual need is the source of tension in many of his stories.

The Oxford American has devoted much of its current issue to Barry Hannah's work and legacy. There is a video of Hannah riding around his old neighborhood in Tuscaloosa discussing a writer's love, work, and life that will disabuse any potential author's romantic ideas of writing. Fittingly there is also a wonderful cross-section of reactions, memories of Hannah's own history, ranging in tone from contributions by his university students to professional compatriots.

Here are just three representative samples. For more there is the Oxford American website, worth a browse if only to see what happens in America's literary "fly-over country" far from the influence of the New Yorker and its offspring.

There was a puncturing quality to Barry’s zingers, darts that pop the overblown balloon and send it, whining and deflated, on its pitiable trajectory. I saw this at Oxford restaurants, on panels at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and, most appreciated where most needed, in the English Department faculty meetings at the University of Mississippi, where we were colleagues. I remember several young hot-shot critics were attempting to amp up the introductory class for new grad students.

“We need more investiture in critical theory which assumes apprenticeship more than it does doctrinal or methodological instruction,” said one.

“Yes,” agreed another, “but choosing texts and films”—

(Here a snort from Barry, who read books, watched movies)

—“that are not comparatist but destabilize the traditional concept of literature as an isolatable aesthetic object.”

“Agreed,” added a third, “privileging the historicity of such discourses and the cultural phenomena they set out to investigate. Of course, this reenvisioned course deserves a new name.”

The critics paused, thinking of a course designation worthy.

Barry broke the silence. “How about calling it, ‘The Death of Joy as We Know It’?”

Whooosh. I miss having someone around who could do that. (Beth Ann Fennelly)

Barry Hannah, smiling (University of Louisiana, Monroe)

The Friday before Barry passed away, he came into Square Books. He got off his motorcycle wearing his oxygen tank and smoking a cigarette. Someone asked him about the upcoming book conference that was dedicated to him. He smiled and said, “Don’t go to that. It’ll be boring.” Then, without missing a beat said, “Did y’all hear about that woman trainer who was drowned by the killer whale? Who are these people? They’re called killer whales.” That weekend he bought Snuggies for him and Susan (he called them “snugglies”) and he went to play Xbox somewhere because he was thinking about getting one. My favorite line of Barry’s from his class was “Samuel Beckett was never really the same after he got stabbed by that pimp.” (Michael Bible)

One day in the late ’90s, I hear Barry Hannah is going to give a reading at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and as a gift to myself, I traded bar shifts with a pal, and pulled out a suit I had bought for a wedding a year back. I hate a suit more than about anything and probably won’t wear another until I’m in a casket, but the occasion was special enough. When I got to the museum, I was surprised at the number of people there.

Knowing a little of the history, the times in Tuscaloosa when he was fond of drunkenness and firearms, the layer of tension and quick violence in his stories, I was unprepared for the small, kind, almost Asian-looking gentleman behind the podium, reading one of his works in a far too genial tone for my liking, and too “Southern,” as well, which is a fucked up thing for me to say, because I loved that inherent Southernness in his stories, but I fully expected him to hide his accent while still being a proud Southerner, like me at the time. I wasn’t deflated, he was still a hero. And the story shone through.

After the reading, Hannah shuffled over to a little table and sat down as nearly everyone there formed a line to meet him and have a book or two signed. I brought Bats Out of Hell, and stood near the back, watching as this man graciously had conversation after conversation, earnest in his interest in every person that came before him, gregarious, talkative, funny as all hell, as per usual. I waited, in my suit, feeling kind of awkward at the whole thing, and trying to come up with something clever and deep to say, such as how had it not been for him and Maker’s Mark whiskey, I’d most likely have committed some great hurt upon myself or other such nonsense.

And then my turn in line came. And I approached, and Hannah went ghostly pale. He stuttered and looked visibly shaken. I thought to my self, “What piss is this? I have a suit on for God’s sake!” I must have seemed some past demon or hateful person to him, as all his geniality disappeared and he mumbled something about who to sign to. I never expected this, from witnessing everyone in front of me, and I lost my nerve and jabbered back at him, “Just to Scott, just to Scott.” And I walked away feeling stupid and almost scorned. I’d give anything to know what my face brought up that night for him. Nonetheless, I got to meet my favorite author. In a goddamned suit. (

Scott Howdeshell)