One might believe, with the current popularity of Marley and Me, that man-and-dog memoir is a new genre.  However, there is a great deal of wonderful writing that preceded Marley about canine companionship.  One such was My Dog Skip, the moving tribute by Willie Morris, which went on to achieve even greater fame once it was adapted into a movie.  Willie Morris himself,  gave his book that title in homage to a book published in the mid-1960s called My Dog Tulip.  In it, the distinguished British author and editor J.R. Ackerley recounts his relationship with Tulip, an Alsatian (what I believe  we would call a German Shepherd).  Mr. Ackerley, already a middle-aged bachelor when he came into possession of Tulip,  lovingly and humorously recalls his sixteen years with her in what remains, more than forty years later, one of the finest examples of  canine-man literature. 

So I was delighted to learn today that a feature-length animated film based on My Dog Tulip is being released this fall in a limited number of theatres.  It features the voices of Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini.  As with all adaptations, it is wise to check out the book before seeing the movie.  Thankfully the New York Review of Books has kept it in print.  Read more about the film here. CFR

  From news reports around the world today it is now known that Random House and literary agent Andrew Wylie have reached an agreement over the control of digital publishing rights of authors represented by the Wylie agency and published in the U. S. by Random House.  Apparently Random House controls those rights.

But whether this agreement occurred as a result of legal authority or through Random House's threat not to do business with Wylie's clients we do not know.  Wylie's overnight enterprise, Odyssey Editions, still apparently has digital rights to the works of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and Oliver Sacks.

The day we heard at Square Books that Wylie had created an exlusive arrangement with Amazon to publish e-book editions, we immediately created a window display of Wylie authors' books, all tagged with a "This book NOT for sale" bookmark, as a way of demonstrating the harmful potential that such a monopoly held for readers.

We also do not know whether Wylie's move came out of frustration over the transition to the digital market that he or his clients may have thought was too slow or because it was simply a play for more dough -- for the owners of intellectual property and, naturally, the Jackal himself.  One thing is clear -- this sort of balls-out internecine skirmishing in what was once known as the book world is a frightening indication of things to come.  For now, as ABA's Oren Teicher said today, "It sounds like good news.  We've always felt that exclusivity is never good and if this means that Wylie authors' e-books will now be available to all retailers, the reading public will benefit."   RH

    Dwight Garner has an interesting article in today's New York Times--a piece written about James Dickey on the occasion of  the 40th anniversary of Deliverance.  It reminded us of the visits that this writer, who had a sort of deliberately constructed larger-than-life personna, literary and otherwise, made to Oxford and to Square Books.  Lisa and I first met Dickey in 1977 when we were booksellers in Washington, D. C., and attended a public reading by all the then-former poetry consultants to the Library of Congress.   

The reading was in a beautiful and fairly intimate auditorium in the Library, and prior to the reading there was an open reception in the Library's astonishing lobby, where, remarkably, we met and actually spoke with Elizabeth Bishop, Howard Nemerov, Stephen Spender and ten other poets who had held this position, now known as poet laureate.  When we encountered Dickey, who clearly had been drinking, he took a shine to us because we were Southerners, and from Oxford.  He shared a Faulkner tale, which I will one day tell, and introduced us to his wife, Deborah.  During the reading, he was the last of the thirteen poets to read, weaving about the stage as he did -- I feared that he would fall into the orchestra pit -- but gave a grand reading of his poem, "The Sheep Child."

We invited him to sign books at the Savile Bookshop, where we worked, when his book God's Images was published.  On the appointed date he showed up and, again, had drunk so much that he simply could not sign his name in the books.  Deborah assured us that she would see that he came by some other time and sign some books -- and he did.

Willie Morris knew Dickey -- "Jimbo" -- well, and invited him to Oxford to speak on campus and sign books at Square Books on two occasions during the 1980s -- once in the original store location, when we enjoyed a large and fairly wild dinner at Taylor Grocery (pre-rehab, before Bill Dunlap's crop duster mural and the signatures of some famous writers and U.S. Senators were completely covered up by besotted frat-graffiti), and again in the upstairs of the existing Square Books, where he read a number of poems standing beside the cafe counter.   He returned to Square Books for a final time in 1993 when his novel, To The White Sea, was published, and gave a memorable reading and visit otherwise -- too much to go into here.   

The Coen brothers adapted To The White Sea as a screenplay, but the film has never been made.  Like Deliverance, To The White Sea is a haunting story of man's possibly innate capacity for inhumanity.  Its locale and events are quite different: the firebombing of Tokyo and an American soldier's violent perambulation through Japan in an effort to escape to a wilderness island -- man against man and nature.  Both books are American classics and insufficiently recognized as such, as Garner makes clear in the case of Deliverance.  I would give just about anything to see a Coen brothers version of To The White Sea on the screen.   RH

Read Garner's entire article in the New York Times here. 

Longtime Square Books friend and a-long-time-ago bookseller James E. Pitts died on Thursday, August 19, 2010, after a long illness. Originally from Corinth, where he was born in 1967, he lived in Oxford since moving here circa 1990, after finishing Northeast Community College. Following a short stint in the flower shop on Van Buren where Bottletree Bakery now is, he got on at Square Books after being coached by his friend, Marc Smirnoff, who worked at Square Books at the time and included among his tips for employment, "don't tell them you know me." Jimmy worked in shipping and receiving, where he became known mostly for being himself.

He was an artist with an artist's quirky traits; he tended to regard you out of one eye with caution, the other with affection; he might be chipper one day, all gloomy the next. Jimmy was a poet, and began to get a few poems published when he worked here, including a couple in Gordon Lish's then hot new litmag, The Quarterly. Additional publications appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Arkansas Review, Shenandoah, Poetry, and, naturally, The Oxford American. Many of the poems appeared in his book, The Weather of Dreams. He was thorough in his work and cared as deeply for this bookstore as anyone who ever worked here. For Christmas in 1993 he made a gift of a wooden block in which he painstakingly had carved the store logo and colored it with crayons. It was a sort of crude-looking thing and I asked, "What is this, where did you get this?" "A woodcarving," he said. "I did it myself over the last couple of nights." I noticed his knuckles were skinned and bloodied. Over time the carving became more beautiful and precious, and long has been on the wall behind the front counter.

After four or five years at Square Books Jimmy then worked at the University Law Library. He dedicated his free time to, and was prolific with, his poetry, his art, and his music. Friday night at the Powerhouse a large group of friends gathered for food, drink, and to pay respects by viewing some of Jimmy's art that folks had brought and by listening to live music, a reading of his poems, and a few personal and extemporaneous remembrances. Many observed that the crowd was impressive in its number and diversity, as it dawned on us that Jimmy made friends the same way he made art -- deliberately, one at a time, because each mattered specifically. Lesser are the legacies of many.

Memorials may be made to the National Kidney Foundation. Jimmy's facebook page can be found here.

RH

This fall the SFA will be releasing a new cookbook simply titled The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook (University of Georgia Press, 24.95). Editors Sara Roahen and John T. Edge picked over 170 recipes for the collection with a foreword by "Good Eats" host Alton Brown. The recipes span over 12 chapters and cover a wide range of the best of southern cooking. Sections like Gravy, Garden Goods, Roots, Greens, Rice, Grist, Yardbird, Pig, The Hook, The Hunt are all here. You’ll find recipes for chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, chess pie, and many more.

For a limited time Square Books will donate 10% of the profits from the sale of the cookbook to the Southern Foodways Alliance. Call 1-800-648-4001 or click here to order your copy.

Here's more on the cookbook from the SFA website: 

A small group of SFA writers and cooks has set about putting together a community cookbook of recipes culled from our esteemed membership and oral history subjects.

We aim to celebrate grandmothers and artisans, farmers and bartenders, authors and chefs. We are still in the gathering-and-writing stages, but for a glimpse of the book’s bright future, consider these pointed words, penned by our committee at the book’s conception.

“Think of an old spiral-bound cookbook of the sort that was popular before the Junior League thought it would make a mint on coffee table style books. That’s what we’re aiming for.”

The worker bees include Sara Roahen and John T. Edge as wranglers and editors; Sheri Castle as recipe tester; and Tim Davis, April McGreger and Angie Mosier as recipe gatherers and writers – with help from Fred Sauceman. The University of Georgia Press is our publisher. And our working title is “The Spiral Bound Bible of Southern Cooking: A Community Cookbook from the Southern Foodways Alliance,” though don’t hold us to it. Publication date is fall of 2010.

 

Hurricane Katrina forever changed the lives of everyone who lived in New Orleans, both by the effects of its destruction and by the way that people immediately were required to rethink the way that they would live there.   For Kristina Ford, who had been New Orleans' City Planner from 1992 to 2000, it caused her to deeply reconsider the manner in which New Orleans was built, how "prior municipal decisions are the normal working context for all planners," and how the city might be rebuilt.  In The Trouble with City Planning (Yale University Press, hd 30.00), readers are given an agreeable discourse on city planning in three large parts -- an overview of American city planning, determining the trouble with planning, and formulating and activating a good city plan.  Ford is a professional planner who also has served as a citizen representative on a small-town planning commission, and her voice is sound on the nuances of the many trials New Orleans experienced in rebuilding -- the familiar flaws of a failure to get public input, the clutter of professional jargon in planning, dealing with government bureaucracy and inattentive elected officials -- and her vision is clear in how to go about avoiding common pitfalls in order to establish a meaninful plan, a vision rooted in the better tenets of democracy and the idea that city plans are "a path to a better life" for citizens.  This is a book that should find appreciation among all city planners and ctizens, as was found here.  RH

To order a copy of The Trouble With City Planning click here.