Guest Post – Page 2 – Lemuria Books

Category: Guest Post (Page 2 of 3)

A Jim Ewing Review: Go Set a Watchman

On July 21, 2015

In Fiction, Guest Post, Southern Culture, Southern Fiction, Southern History

Special to the Clarion Ledger By Jim Ewing

For the Lord said to me, “Go, set a watchman. Let him declare what he sees.”

— Isaiah 21:6

Legions of readers have eagerly awaited the release of “Go Set a Watchman (Harper Collins),” the previously unpublished precursor of Harper Lee’s iconic “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and now that it’s out, the reaction is as explosive as first publication in 1960.

“Watchman” is likely to offend devotees of “Mockingbird” and add to the current debate about race relations in America. But, if “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a morality tale about the woeful state of racial justice in a small Southern town of the 1930s, “Watchman” is a reality tale about race relations in the 1950s — still relevant to today.

In “Watchman,” Scout is now called Jean Louise, 26, a college graduate living in New York City, coming home to visit her aging father. She is horrified by his racial views and those of her hometown.

In “Mockingbird,” the tragedy of a black man convicted of a crime he didn’t commit against a white woman elevated his defender, Scout’s lawyer father Atticus Finch, to saintly status. But in “Watchman,” Finch is revealed as — to modern eyes — a bigot.

But it’s more nuanced than simply that. The point of “Watchman” is the point in time it depicts.

In “Mockingbird,” the younger Atticus is, honestly, a white patrician who is, perhaps idealistically, passionately acting out the role of society of being a legal advocate for the oppressed. But in “Watchman,” the “revolution” in race relations, as Lee terms it, has begun.

Racial lines have hardened. People no longer see the people they grew up with as people (black or white) but as “tribes” or factions — divided by race.

Remember, this was more than half a century ago. When Lee wrote “Watchman” in 1957, the ink was barely dry on Brown vs. Board of Education that ordered school desegregation. That fall, the Little Rock Nine were escorted by federal troops to the schoolhouse. Racial segregation was a fact of culture and shifting laws.

The reality of that time, which still lingers in the memories of Southerners who lived in the 1950s, ’60s and beyond during the civil rights struggle, is more complex than we now view it. The South and the nation still wrestle with those conflicts and points of view: the good vs. evil narrative of slavery and Jim Crow — and Confederate battle flag.

Jean Louise is cast cold turkey into the maelstrom of the historical ambiguity and cognitive dissonance of loving a heroic father (forebears and region) vs. the harsh, unremitting hardships and brutality that stem from that racial intolerance.

Atticus is the same Atticus, but older, and drawn into the reality of the times. He is racist — as is the white society in which he lives. He could not have been elected to the Legislature (when blacks lacked the right to vote) and not cooperatively exist in that world. In the 1930s, whites had unquestioned power; in the 1950s, it is crumbling before his very eyes. He was reared in a world of manners but he, still, is dedicated to the law.

Atticus’s bigotry is cultural and defines him less than his motivations. Why was he a board member of the Maycomb white Citizens Council? Why did he attend a Ku Klux Klan rally? These are uncomfortable truths about a time in this nation that the South would just as well pretend never existed or claim was blown out of proportion; but Atticus is still following a moral compass, the only one he knows: the law.

In “Watchman,” Lee gives an apologia through the lens of her uncle, Dr. Jack Finch, who sits Jean Louise down and tells why white Southerners fought the Civil War. It wasn’t for slavery, he explains, noting that only about 5 percent of the population owned slaves (rich man’s war, poor man’s fight), but because of their regional character as white, Anglo Saxons who essentially were serfs in Europe and took up arms as part of their inherent inclination to fight any change. It’s a strain of irrational rebelliousness that exists today.

The crux of the narrative is less about Atticus and more about the shift from 6-year-old Scout to twentysomething Jean Louise. If Scout saw the 1930s-era racial injustice as filled with heroes and villains from the eyes of an adoring, motherless child, Jean Louise sees the reality of race relations circa late 1950s with adult eyes — and the idealism of a young career woman living in New York City.

In this vein, “Watchman” is as much a coming of age story as “Mockingbird,” only a shift in the timeline. And her moral compass is tested — and readjusted.

The elder Atticus is wrapped up in the fears and prejudices of the time — envisioning his and his peers’ grip on the levers of racial power slipping away and fearful of the outcome. Both views are of the same piece, but different facets; two sides of the paternalistic elite’s same obdurate coin. And that currency remains. “Watchman” may be as much a timely novel in 2015 as “Mockingbird” was in 1960.

Reading “Watchman” reaffirms how extraordinary it was for “Mockingbird” to have been published 55 years ago in the first place. When “Mockingbird” was published in 1960, Freedom Summer had not occurred. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech had not been uttered, nor the prospect of racial equality been brought to the forefront of America’s consciousness. Both books are time capsules that are transformative.

Through “Mockingbird’s” tale told through the simple eyes of a child, all the absurdities and horrifying realities of racial oppression were revealed —with the worst qualities of human beings as well as the courage and lonely moral convictions of the few who took on the task of righting overwhelming wrongs.

Now, “Watchman” comes in the wake of the killing of young black men like Trayvon Martin, the ghastly gun rampage by a white man in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and resurrection of the Confederate battle flag’s heritage vs. hate debate. It reprises lingering views on racial equality and the role of government in enforcing societal norms that leave more black men in jail or killed through violence than in universities.

As a novel, “Watchman” is a good book, with interesting characters, wandering narrative, thin plot, but compelling subject matter (showing the value of a good editor to make a good book great). Its power lies in its comparison with “Mockingbird,” showing even the best intentioned with feet of clay. Its message is that bigotry comes in many guises, including those who take an opposing view to an apparent and real wrong.

The “watchman” reference is interpreted to mean that only individual conscience can guide us in turbulent times. That biblical clarion still rings for all us to speak truth, raise awareness and come to a meeting of minds among all races with prayers of understanding.

In “Watchman,” we are again given an opportunity to see with new eyes racial wrongs still sadly current today.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including “Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them,” now in bookstores.

Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” sees busy release day

By Guest Author

On July 16, 2015

In Fiction, Gift Books, Guest Post, History, Newsworthy, Southern Culture, Southern Fiction, Southern History

Original article posted on July 15, 2015 in The Clarion-Ledger by Jana Hoops

Tuesday’s long-awaited release of Harper Lee’s first novel since “To Kill A Mockingbird” 55 years ago was met with smiles, curiosity and mixed opinions as literary enthusiasts kept local book stores busy all day.

Despite Monday’s media leaks that “Mockingbird’s” beloved character Atticus Finch was portrayed in “Go Set A Watchman” as a “bigot” or “racist” — a far cry from his role as a defender of African American rights in Lee’s first book —readers seemed to shake off that possibility with a grain of salt, preferring to hold off judgment at least until they’ve digested it for themselves.

More than 125 people crowded into Lemuria Books’ nearby events venue, known as the “dot.com building,” as author and Belhaven creative writing professor Howard Bahr read the first chapter of “Go Set a Watchman” to the expectant audience.

“I don’t care about all that (controversy),” Bahr said. “To be chosen to do this tonight is an extraordinary privilege. I am deeply honored to be able to read this on its first release day.”

John Evans, owner of Lemuria Books in Jackson, said he has no worries that the pre-release hype touting a potentially racist character will discourage book sales.

If anything, Evans thinks it will fuel interest in the book. “Controversial labels arouse curiosity,” he said. “People should form their own opinions.

“ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was a story set in the ’30s, written in the ’50s by a middle-aged woman. Scout (the main character) was able to look at her father (Atticus) through the eyes of a child. A child at that age thinks of her father as God’s gift. ‘Watchman’ is about a woman coming of age, and a grown woman’s perspective of her father is different.

“Also, you have to look at the cultural differences,” Evans said. “At that time in the South, people were only third generation away from the Civil War. I haven’t finished reading the book yet, but I’m not sure those people may have thought of (some of the things in ‘Watchman’) as being racist, as we probably would today.”

Maggie Stevenson, special projects coordinator for the Eudora Welty House, attended the event to get her copy and read it for herself before making any evaluations.

“This book is not a sequel to ‘Mockingbird,’ ” because it was actually written earlier, she said. “I’m reading it as a separate book,” she said.

“I have a theory. I think this book is really more autobiographical than ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’ She (Lee) left her hometown and came back and found out she had different views from most people there, including her father, who she loved very much — and that’s why she wrote ‘Watchman.’ You write what you know.”

Local author and former Clarion-Ledger writer Jim Ewing — probably the only person at the event to have read the whole book (in one day) — called ‘Watchman’ “excellent.”

Ewing said there was “no question” that Atticus was racist “by today’s standards, but this was written half a century ago. By those standards in the South, he would be considered moderate or even liberal. The strength of ‘Watchman’ is that it’s a time capsule and openly displays characteristics we find ugly today, but it becomes a measurement for us for both good and evil.”

‘Into the Savage Country’ mesmerizing tale of America’s youth

By Guest Author

On July 3, 2015

In Fiction, Guest Post, Southern Fiction

By Jim Ewing Special to the Clarion Ledger
Shannon Burke’s Into the Savage Country takes place in the western territories of the late 1820s with the clash of cultures of Britain, France, Spain, Russia and American Indian tribes, providing a gripping series of adventures.

William Wyeth, the protagonist, finds himself Out West having been disinherited by his father in Pennsylvania, and fighting the seeming curse laid upon him that he would never amount to anything for his inability to settle down into the civilized, farming life of his brothers. In this new world where he has found himself, he is at once confronted with prairies so wide, mountains so tall, vistas so broad, the silence so deafening it makes even the brashest of men seem small.

“I had come west to satisfy some restless craving, to sound the depths inside myself,” he reminisces. He finds that, and much more. Written in the form of a memoir, with accurate renditions of the clothing, speech and mannerisms of the mountain men, the citified dandies of St. Louis and various native tribes, Savage rings of authenticity as a historical novel should.

It skips across the more mundane aspects of frontier life, but zeroes in on key moments to make the tale hard to put down. The result is a portrait of life in all its hardship and monotony interspersed with mortal terror — not only at the hands of men, but by animals and the elements — along with brief moments of pure joy and abject awe.

Along the way, the reader matures as does Wyeth, coming to a greater understanding of the life of a trapper, seeing firsthand the rapidly changing landscape wrought by the influx of American settlers and the loss of the wildness of the continent.

The whole scope of the journey is shifted with this understanding, as the good and bad elements of “civilization” take their toll. Our pilgrim becomes transformed through the alchemy of the camaraderie of men, and how they change through hardship and association, their achievements, bonding and treachery.

And, of course, there is a woman. The Canadian half-breed Alene Chevalier is at once wild and wise, the daughter of a French trapper father and native mother, who knows more about life on the frontier than Wyeth can guess. He longs achingly and incessantly for her but risks the achievement of her love for this “restless craving” for adventure outside of the charms of her arms. Which allure proves stronger is a question that challenges and defines him.

Overall, Savage Country is a remarkable journey into the wild, untrammeled wilderness of a young man’s soul.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

Key’s Southern ‘secrets’ too funny, painful, true to share in ‘World’s Largest Man’

By Guest Author

On June 19, 2015

In Culture, Guest Post

By Jim Ewing

Special to The Clarion-Ledger
Before saying anything about The World’s Largest Man by Mississippian Harrison Scott Key, let’s get down to brass tacks. First, we probably need to keep this book a secret just between us Southerners.

Key, the scurvy lout, reveals all of our secrets. Such as: Most Southerners, despite literary assumptions elsewhere, don’t know how to tell a story. Their dinner conversation is not a Faulkneresque regaling of the gothic intrigues of their kin, but in fact is mostly grunts, or code. Such as:

“You ever speak to old Lamar Bibbs?”

“Not since him and Gola Mae went down yonder after the thing up at the place.”

Silence.

The story ends then, as grandpa studies his dentures that he has placed in his hand to remove particles of corn.

Storytelling itself evolved, reveals Key, because in Mississippi when he was young “there was very little to do but shoot things or get them pregnant.”

So, as you can see, with such truths as this leaking out of Key’s pen, we don’t need to be spreading it around.

Key does reveal that he’s still a Mississippian, sort of, though maybe a bit around the bend living in Savannah, Ga.

“I do believe in the power of Jesus and rifles,” the Belhaven University graduate confides. “But to keep things interesting, I also believe in the power of NPR and the scientific method” — which means he’s probably out of sync with most of the people who write letters to the editor of The Clarion-Ledger — and vote.

Key came about his odd mix of weltanschauung by spending his early years in Memphis, then moving to his parents’ native Mississippi in fourth grade — where, he tells, his classmates had sideburns, body odor, and large male parts.

He had moved, you see, to Puckett in Rankin County.

He chronicles such things as:

– Rites of Passage, such as the dove hunt, where the drunken leader of the gun-toting mayhem says: “Only rules is don’t be shooting nobody in the face.”

– Vital Knowledge, such as the Rankin County News, he relates: “a publication I would later value chiefly for its photographs of local virgins.”

– Football: “It had everything required to make a boy into a man: brutality, blood, a concession stand.”

Living as he did walking between the worlds of Mississippiana and what some people mistakenly call civilization, he learned to observe the ways of people in the Magnolia State the way anthropologists study ancient civilizations.

Largest Man is a laugh riot that will shake the skeletons of any Mississippians with the slightest sliver of a funny bone. But that’s only half the story. It’s leavened by insights about his father, moments of fear and sadness, inadequacy, and anger. For, at heart, Largest Man is a coming of age story about the difficult life his tough-as-nails asphalt salesman father laid out for Key, with its attendant disappointments. Throughout, his mother, a schoolteacher at McLaurin Attendence Center in Star, shines like a gentle beacon of hope and love, albeit with her own quirks.

As a memoir, Largest Man weaves poignant growing up tales that are profound. He reveals very real and somber truths about growing into adulthood, fearing — and knowing — that he never measured up to his father’s expectations, and lays bare his own failings, as a husband, as a father.

Some parts of the book are so filled with sorrow only laughter can heal the pain. We laugh with him, knowing we share his pain, as individuals, as a region.

That agony, too, is our secret we sometimes try too hard to conceal.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

“Fateful Lightning” illuminates Civil War Gen. Sherman’s march

By Guest Author

On June 18, 2015

In Fiction, Guest Post, History, Southern History

By Jim Ewing

Special to The Clarion-Ledger
Sometimes, fiction can be more revealing of the truth than nonfiction, and in Jeff Shaara’s The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War, the bones of nonfiction shine through his artful narrative.

This 614-page saga focuses on a less studied segment of the war, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea and thence into the Carolinas, which is usually overshadowed by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Lightning is the fourth and final volume of Shaara’s Civil War series that previously included the battles of Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga (though it’s not necessary to have read any of the previous books to enjoy this one). It covers the campaigns from November 1864 through the end of the war in North Carolina in April 1865. For the South, Lee’s surrender was the symbolic end of the war, while Sherman’s march continued the war’s misery for generations. It set a heinous standard of “total war,” waged intentionally against civilians.

Shaara adds the insights, motivations and behavior often overlooked: breakdown of civil authority in the South; the assistance of Confederate forces in the destruction, in advance of Sherman in order to starve his army; the hatred of the civilian population of both sides of the conflict for that destruction; as well as the need for constant foraging for food by both armies, including for the freed slaves numbering 50,000 following Sherman’s 60,000-man army.

We may think of Sherman’s march as a lightning strike, as the name suggests, but it might more accurately be seen as a big, hungry hurricane consisting of four broad columns of men about 75 miles wide moving about 15 miles per day through 2,000 miles of the South.

Shaara takes pains to say that Sherman only ordered facilities of use to the enemy to be destroyed, that the actual burning of entire cities — including his worst conflagration, Atlanta — was the result of being unable to control his men.

Shaara lays bare the outlines of this segment of the war, keeping up the suspense, even as the outcome is known, by detailing Union Gen. Ulysses Grant’s concerns in the East; Sherman’s burning the heart out of the Deep South; both men fighting constant rearguard actions against politicians, the press, the duplicitous greed of those whose allegiance is to profit, no matter whose flag flies over it; and the jealous, second-guessing of subordinate generals.

Shaara’s brilliance is credibly crafting the thoughts, motivations, strategies and personalities of the leaders on both sides of the conflict. He also weaves the narrative of a slave named only Franklin, who gives the unique perspective as one of the emancipated, giving voice to those who latched on to the hope of freedom and Sherman as savior, a faith at least somewhat betrayed at Ebenezer Creek in Georgia.

There will be some grousing, for sure, from those who see Lightning as a whitewash of Sherman. It’s a point Shaara notes, saying that perhaps no more polarizing figure exists from the conflict, regarded alternately as its finest battlefield commander and ranking among the nation’s finest with George Patton and Douglas MacArthur versus a “savage,” his very name “a profanity.”

While Lightning may not be a history book, but historical fiction, students of the Civil War will find much to debate, and readers just looking for an absorbing novel will be well rewarded.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

Guest Post: Beyond the Dollar and the Dead Tiger

By Guest Author

On May 4, 2015

In Guest Post

Written by Kirby Arinder

Preamble

The assignment is to write “a couple of paragraphs” on why Lemuria is important to me. A fish, evidently, told me to do it, so I have to, obviously.

But I don’t think it’s enough, or it’s too much, depending on how you look at it; the content is too much for the space. So I’m going to try to allude and elide my way toward something that points vaguely in the direction of my goal and hope that satisfies our piscine overlords, while admitting that it’s going to both regrettably exceed the space requirements and still not actually adequately cover the points required. The worst of both worlds, but we don’t really get to choose our world, do we?

So in a spirit of deconstruction or self-criticism or just perverseness, let me start by talking about some pitfalls I think this sort of essay should avoid, things I can’t or shouldn’t do that I might find myself trying to do anyway. (And then there would be some sort of blog disaster; performative self-contradiction on the Internet leads, I’m told, to explosion.)

What love has to do with it (spoiler: Something, but not enough)

So, first, I don’t really think this should be a piece about why I love Lemuria. It’s tempting to try to say something about that. I mean, it really is my favorite place in town, and I go there when I’m sad to cheer myself up and I go there when I’m happy to reward myself. (When I say it that way, in hard public print, I just sound to myself like an addict more than anything else. But I digress.)

So why not an essay about loving Lemuria? Well, because love is idiosyncratic and ineffable and particular. Which is to say, your love may have causes but it doesn’t really have reasons; and in the absence of reasons, it can’t really GIVE reasons to anybody else; and I think this essay should have at least a tinge of normative character to it, because I’m not just setting out to say that Lemuria is good TO ME, but that Lemuria is good simpliciter, that you yourself, nameless and unknown reader of these words, probably ought to find it valuable too.

(Let me digress again, just enough for an example for clarification. When you love a person, obviously enough, even though that person may have a number of good qualities — and surely does, because he or she caught your eye and engaged your mind in some fashion — eventually, once you really LOVE that person, it’s not because of those qualities.

Imagine that a brimstone-smelling, suspiciously fork-bearded character offers to replace your beloved with an exact duplicate. Maybe he adds a little worldly wealth, just to sweeten the deal. I suspect I’d refuse, and I suspect you would too; the fact that this new person shares many good traits with your beloved doesn’t mean he or she IS your beloved, and it’s just not the same.

You love the haecceity, your beloved as him- or her-self, not as a collection of properties. (Not to get medieval on your ass, which suddenly occurs to me as a much more charming interpretation of Marsellus Wallace’s threat in Pulp Fiction. Maybe he took his assailants away and had his hirelings discuss scholastic philosophy with them. But now this is a digression from a digression, and a much more sharply angled one. Back to the point.)

Furthermore, and along the same lines, the fact that your beloved has a lot of good traits, and even that I can perfectly well see many if not all of those good traits, doesn’t actually give ME reason to love that same person. I can agree with you that someone is lovable without actually loving that person.

(Subdigression: The above points apply to things and places as well as people. If the cloven-hoofed gentleman above offered to replace your favorite shirt, the one you wore on that one perfect night that stands out in your memory as a time when the world felt in balance and hope seemed not merely permissible but rationally mandatory, with an exact duplicate, you’d probably refuse that deal too, though obviously the stakes aren’t as high. The new shirt wouldn’t be THAT shirt; it wouldn’t have the history, the essence. And if YOU were offered a choice between my favorite shirt and an exact duplicate, in the absence of my standing there saying, “hey, don’t take my shirt,” it ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you which is which.)

Oh, and this sentence is just to end the big digression without using two parentheses in a row.)

(Okay, one more digression: I suddenly realize I just spent eight paragraphs saying, “I love a thing, and don’t want to talk about it.” From a detached perspective, this probably doesn’t indicate maximal emotional health. Not that it’s relevant, but it’s interesting.)

III. Beauty and Truth: Not all ye need to know

Anyway. This shouldn’t be an essay about why I love Lemuria, even though that’s one of the first places my mind went when I saw the fishy communique.

But then, it also shouldn’t really be an essay about all the good things Lemuria represents to me, though it does represent many good things. I said earlier that I wanted to have a little normative character to this essay, to give you the reader reason to approve of Lemuria. So it’s tempting to move all the way from the particular — my love of the place — to the universal — why Truth and Beauty and Books are important things. But I’m not sure that’s quite right either.

I mean, look, Truth and Beauty are important. (I’ll talk about Books in a bit.) We live in a world in which they’re undervalued, and I don’t just mean Deplorable Postmodernity and This Darn Internet Age; let’s face it, Socrates lamented that new-fangled technology (i.e., literacy) was ruining kids’ minds and that the popular intellectuals valued winning arguments and gaining political power more than they valued finding the truth, and that was two and a half millennia ago. Plus ca change and all that.

In the ordinary course of things I think we all tend to undervalue Truth and Beauty, and maybe it’s because we just have to spend so much effort staying alive — avoiding sabertoothed tigers and the bubonic plague, passing on our genes, contributing to the global economy, et cetera — that out of sheer exhausted necessity we tend to narrow our focus to the goals that are important in the now, for immediate survival and putting bread on the table.

But it’s more broadly important for a wide variety of reasons — which I’m going to stay away from, because good gracious, this essay burst right past “a couple of paragraphs” some time ago, and the fish-lords are already probably unhappy — to reconnect with those things. To remind ourselves that some meaning and value are out there to be found, that survival, whether it means hitting the tiger with the rock or rationally maximizing expected life utility measured in U. S. dollars, isn’t the only or even the most important aspect of sapient existence.

And one of the best ways, I think, to connect with these things is to read (pace Socrates, above). And Lemuria is a great starting point for this sort of thing, pretty clearly. I mean, duh. Bookstore.

But as important as these things are — and I think if you’re reading this you probably agree that they are, and even if you don’t I think I could make an argument that you should, given world enough and time — I don’t think talking about them really captures what this essay should be about either.

Grand universal claims may well have a hold on us the way that somebody else’s love doesn’t. But if the previous section of this essay undershot, not giving the reader enough reason to care, maybe this section overshoots.

Because Lemuria may be a place where you can (and I do) go to connect with the eternal verities, to remind myself that human beings can be humane and that the world contains beautiful elements even if I haven’t seen them that day and that there are always more complexities to discover and that practically anything, anything whatsoever, is really interesting if you look at it hard enough.

But if Lemuria takes me to those verities, it isn’t the SAME as those verities, and describing the destination is really not the same as describing the means of arriving there. I mean, look, terrifying as the prospect might be, you can buy great books on the Internet; you might even avoid buying books at all, and just read on a screen or something, though I deeply distrust such an idea and am privately convinced it leads to moral turpitude and probably scrofula or something.

So I don’t want to talk about Truth and Beauty either. He says, nine more paragraphs later.

The Middle Way

So, then, let’s get to the point. What’s so good about Lemuria, in particular, such that I think it’s genuinely valuable for itself and not merely as a fungible ladder to Great Books bearing Universal Truths, such that I think not only that it’s lovable but also that if you got to know it you’d love it too, assuming, Dear Reader, that you haven’t and don’t already?

Well… maybe it’s this. Lemuria strikes me as a place that’s built around a recognition of the intrinsic value of what it does. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons that you could get into selling books. Some online businesses we won’t mention here started out selling books just because of their physical properties, because they’re easy to ship and store and hard to damage. To a business like this, in other words, books represent not so much things in themselves as abstract widgets that happen to have desirable characteristics when incorporated into a particular business model.

But that’s just treating books as another mechanism for survival, for bashing the tiger and maximizing the dollars. It’s taking a class of objects that can be a gateway to all the great things I mentioned in the previous section and treating them, if I may be permitted to misuse Kant shortly after having complained about such a thing, below their intrinsic dignity, or at least below the dignity of their contents. It’s deliberately commodifying, in a strong sense and not in the trivial way all stores “commodify” the things they sell, some of the greatest achievements of the human species.

But Lemuria isn’t like that. It’s a place built around the idea that a bookstore sells books, and not coffee and toys. It’s a place built around the acquisition of books that are interesting and worthwhile, not to the exclusion of popularity, but in addition to it, a place that recognizes that a facsimile edition of Jung’s Red Book is important to have even if it doesn’t fly off the shelves.

It’s a place where the employees are readers before they are retail specialists, where they can be relied upon to have genuine opinions and tastes not formed by demographic trends. It’s a place where the — for me — increasingly rare and utterly irreplaceable experience of bookstore serendipity is reliable enough that I don’t have to go there with a particular acquisition in mind; I can search a section of the shelf that I generally like and find a book that’s interesting and new to me, because the shelves aren’t filled with a thousand copies of some book selected by a poorly-designed sales-optimization algorithm. (Which I say with the greatest respect for statistical algorithms, believe me, but they’re also easy to screw up, and the ones designed to predict book tastes for purposes of shelf-stocking screw up practically ALL THE TIME.)

I guess if I have to summarize, to present a thesis, as it were, before my aquatic masters, it’s this: Lemuria is a particular place that recognizes the transcendent values available through books. As such, it’s particularly valuable, separate from and in addition to the books it sells. If we just think to ourselves, “Plato will always be there on the Internet,” we’re just about guaranteeing that we relegate him to that virtual place’s dusty corners. And if we do that, we are making the world a worse place, one in which it’s ever harder to even imagine doing something more than hitting tigers and making dollars.

But if we value those places and people that themselves value things beyond the dollar and the dead tiger, then we are helping to make the world a place where, just maybe, more people have a chance to think more often about the things that genuinely matter.

And surely — I speculate, Dear Reader, because I can’t really know you in this respect — the kind of place that values those things and furthers those values in the world is the kind of place with which you could fall in love.

Guest Post: Anything Can Happen at an Independent Bookstore

By Guest Author

On May 1, 2015

In Guest Post

Written by Steve Yates

Saturday, May 2 is Independent Bookstore Day all across America.

Independent bookstores, including Jackson’s Lemuria Books, are inviting rank amateurs, such as me, onto the sales floor to work part of Saturday as Guest Booksellers in violation of almost every accepted business principle I know.

Imagine being greeted at your local law firm by a Guest Attorney. After all, President Dwight David Eisenhower did declare May 1 Law Day, so why not? “Hi, I’m Steve Yates, your Guest Attorney. You look like you’re really into estate planning? Great! Let’s light in here with Charles Dickens and Bleak House.”

Or imagine sitting down Saturday in confessional, and instead of Father Jerry, you are welcomed to the Solemn Rite of Reconciliation with, “Hey! I’m Steve Yates, your Guest Priest. Why so contrite? Look here, let’s read us some Gerard Manley Hopkins and get some perspective. Or check out the new Collected Frank Stanford—now that guy knew what was coming for all of us!”

With so many guests running around, I’m pretty sure the authors of The New Rules of Retail: Competing in the World’s Toughest Marketplace would say, “You have lost all control of your value chain.”

But, you see, anything can happen at an independent bookstore. The value in an independent bookstore isn’t just the shelves and all those whispering spines and enticing covers. The reading community that gathers there, that’s the preemptive, experiential, demand driven “thing” about Lemuria. That reading community is the reason you should come on in Saturday.

Where else could you meet Matthew Guinn and get to participate in his incredible story. And at any good book signing, you are going to see Marshall Ramsey, Rick Cleveland, Billy Watkins, Gerard Helferich, Teresa Nicholas, Carolyn Brown, Patti Carr Black, Alan Huffman, Diane Williams, Ed King, and so many other authors from our community with wonderful books. You can meet more authors in one good night at Lemuria than you will in a whole year at an MFA creative writing program.

But I’m not being entirely fair to Lemuria and its calculated business decision to allow me and other authors to join you in commerce. Lemuria has supported me through two novels—Morkan’s Quarry and now its sequel The Teeth of the Souls—and the Juniper Prize-winning short story collection, Some Kinds of Love. And in fact, The Teeth of the Souls would have perished in the dustbin had it not been for the close reading and tough love of Matthew Guinn and Paul Rankin, both of whom I met at readings by other authors at Lemuria. And Lemuria welcomes me all the time as the assistant director/marketing director of University Press of Mississippi. I may not be able to help you with estate planning or with your immortal soul, but I will know where some of the good books are shelved. And heck, I bet you can introduce me to several as well—I welcome that experience.

Maybe we should revise the headline here, and remember the extraordinary miracle of a great independent bookstore, remember why we would celebrate and invite in rank amateurs as Guest Booksellers.

THIS CAN ONLY HAPPEN AT AN INDEPENDENT BOOK STORE

What’s in that vague pronoun, this?

Real books

Real experience

Real reading community

What does it take to activate these three really wondrous elements, to create the spark so THIS can happen?

You. Come on in this Saturday.

Steve Yates is the author of The Teeth of the Souls: A Novel, and the Juniper Prize-winning Some Kinds of Love: Stories. Follow him at Fiction and History

Guest Post: Reasons why the Book City of Lemuria is important to me, grouped into two general sections

By Guest Author

On April 30, 2015

In Guest Post

Written by David McCarty

Preternatural Knowledge: When I am shopping for my teenaged niece, I can tilt into Oz and say “she loves science, she is interested in
robotics, nothing with a pink cover, female protagonist” and not even a second passes before someone says “this is what you MUST get.” They are always right.

The Spirit of God Moved upon the Face of the Waters: in one of the
Secret Vaults of Lemuria (not unlike Uncle Scrooge’s money bin), there is a small bound volume of a talk given by two people at Millsaps College a few years ago. One was the artist Eudora Alice Welty, the other a person named Walker Percy. They spoke about post-apocalyptic perceptions of the New South. It is signed by both; she in her spidery cursive, he with a bolder sloping smear. For people of a certain faith, touching this little book is like taking communion.

Preternatural Knowledge, Part II: That when I walk to the counter
with an armload of books, sometimes Maggie hesitates—then says “who is this one for?” I’ll tell, and then she’ll gently say “why don’t you consider . . . .?” And point me to a different novel or collection.

She is always right.

The Spirit of God Moved upon the Face of the Waters, part II: Often musicians at a certain stage in life put pen to paper or keys to
screen to memorialize their travels, although it is sometimes
difficult to capture the grunts and screams of their instruments and
their fans from over the many decades. Lemuria has a soft spot for
these artists (indeed, if Lemuria were working itself through college,
music would be its night gig after a daytime of moving print). The
opportunity to hear from people who created the fabric of time + space (or those who chronicled their creation) can be transcendent.

Over the years, I have heard Robert Gordon reveal details about Muddy Waters, like a craftsman scraping faded paint from a mansion; Steve Earle mumble about life in the dark parts of Nashville; and towering over them all, because of Lemuria, shake the hand of Bobby Keys, who played saxophone on “Brown Sugar,” by the recording artists the Rolling Stones. Bobby Keys, who may or may not have played on “Return to Sender,” by Elvis Aron Presley; who for sure played on two different records with John Winston Ono Lennon. He signed a Carly Simon record for me.

Preternatural Knowledge, Part III: when a 33 1/3 book came in once about a Black Sabbath album, written by John Darnielle, my friend Simon (working at L at the time) tweeted at me that he was reserving me a copy, and that I needed to get up there and pick it up. He was right.

The Spirit of God Moved upon the Face of the Waters, part III: there is a guitarist from Tennessee named Winfield Scott Moore, III. In the 1950s, he played with a group called the Blue Moon Boys. Their lead singer and rhythm guitarist was billed sometimes as the Hillbilly Cat, or the Memphis Flash, or in a few cases, the King of Western Bop. The guitarist wrote a book, and Lemuria had him come speak about it.

I didn’t come to the event, on purpose, because I worried that if I
met Scotty Moore, who recorded “That’s All Right” with Elvis in 1954, that I would become overwhelmed, and start to cry.

Guest post: For those of us displaced Mississippians

By Guest Author

On April 29, 2015

In Guest Post

Written by William Kirkpatrick

I first experienced Lemuria while in early elementary school in the old Highland Village location. I recall my babysitter at the time worked there as a part time job while she was in high school. Writing this narrative caused me to pause and consider just how far the reach of Lemuria extends beyond the boundaries of Jackson and Mississippi. I’ve lived in Leesburg, VA in the suburbs of Washington DC for almost 10 years while my previously mentioned babysitter was residing in Singapore the last time I had an update on her whereabouts. I suspect there are countless other stories of displaced Mississippians who have had their lives touched in some form or fashion by their experiences at Lemuria.

I grew up in Jackson and have lived all over the South since finishing at MSU in 1993 – Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, back to Atlanta, before being asked by my employer to move to the Washington DC area in 2006. As a Mississippian and proud Southerner by heart, moving to DC seemed no different than being asked to move to New York, Detroit, or Toronto – it might as well have been the North Pole. To say we were apprehensive would be a huge understatement. It certainly wasn’t the South – even though all my new neighbors from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey seemed to think it was. Fast forward to present time and I have to share that Leesburg, VA has been a wonderful place to live, but it’s still not the South.

Our boys were 3 and 5 when we arrived in Leesburg. It dawned on me shortly after arrival that if we didn’t make an effort to do so, they would grow up without understanding their Southern roots of a Dad from Jackson and their Mom and my wife Sylvia from New Orleans. I also noticed I was missing The South – other than catfish, sweat tea, and BBQ, I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that I was missing, but I found a big part of it in Southern Literature. Lemuria played a large role in making that happen. I joined their First Editions Club several years ago and eagerly anticipate the monthly delivery, often working with Adie to add several additional signed first editions to my shipment. For those who say the internet killed the independent bookstore, I can share that without it I would have never known about, let alone joined the First Editions Club.

If you need a reminder of just what being a Southerner is all about – both the good and the bad , grab a copy of William Alexander Percy’s “Lanterns on the Levee”, Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”, John Barry’s “Rising Tide”, or countless other wonderful books by historically well-known authors like Willie Morris, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner or Shelby Foote. If you prefer a more recent time in South, Lemuria has you covered there as well with Ace Atkins, Greg Iles, and of course John Grisham along with countless others. I had never cried when reading a book until earlier this year when I reached the end of The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton in his debut novel. It was the best book I have read in many years. If you haven’t read it, you need to get to Lemuria and pick up a copy.

I’ll close by saying that I have had many reasons to come back to Jackson over the years to visit family. In February 2014 that changed when I spent a month with my Mom in Jackson when she had to be placed in hospice care at the end of her battle with cancer. Her 2nd husband and I took turns staying with her on 24 hour shifts at the hospice facility in Ridgeland. The first week I was there helping Mom was interrupted by my Grandma passing away at St. Catherine’s Village in Madison. To say it was a tough month would be an understatement as it left me with a much smaller family and no remaining relatives in Mississippi. The one place that I gravitated to almost every day after my time taking care of Mom ended was Lemuria. I would estimate that I visited Lemuria 15-20 times that month. I never told anyone why I was there and was treated with the same Southern hospitality I had always enjoyed. For those hours, I was able to be at peace in a different world from the one I had just left.

Our boys are now 11 and 14 and are well on their way to understanding their Southern roots. They have been to Lemuria many times and for several years it has been their idea to go there instead of mine. We don’t get to Jackson as much as we used to and it will probably remain that way for a while, but one of the ways we stay connected is through Lemuria and getting book recommendations from Adie and Clara. The other parts of their Southern Education center around Mississippi State football games and family vacations in Orange Beach. We just smile when people act like we are crazy for vacationing on the Gulf Coast rather than the wonderful nearby beaches in Delaware and Maryland. If only they knew, yet we are happy that they don’t.

Guest Post: Ex Libris Lemuria

By Guest Author

On April 28, 2015

In Guest Post

Written by Matthew Guinn. Matthew will be joining us on on Saturday, May 2 as a Guest Bookseller to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day!

Let me tell you what an independent bookstore can do: it can change everything.

I came to Mississippi in 1992, an aspiring writer though not yet ready to admit it, and encountered Lemuria that fall. I say encounter because Lemuria was not like all the other bookstores I had known, but something bigger and better, sui generis. You do not shop in Lemuria; rather, you discover and consume. Between the bold yellow walls and bright green carpet, the signed photos of every significant American author of the last fifty years on the walls not covered with bookshelves, in the nooks and crannies of arcane subject matter, under the blues or jazz pouring out of the speakers in the store, one is reminded of the joyful truth that the world will never run out of books. Or curators of them, which is what Johnny Evans is, of the foremost rank.

I have seen Barry Moser’s King James Bible at Lemuria. I have met Jim Harrison at Lemuria. And of the southern legends, every one. Hanging around Lemuria over the years has been like getting another degree in literature. Without the lectures. Just all plot, all action. The only test is whether you are paying close enough attention.

And I have a novel on the shelves of Lemuria, and on the shelves of other stores, elsewhere, because of my friendships there.

The conventional route to getting published did not work for me. I had a manuscript, The Resurrectionist, with a literary agent in New York. She pitched it to the major publishing houses—19 of them—and got rejection after rejection. Then she pitched me.

Rejection led to dejection. Then one afternoon, just after he walked into the house from school, my eleven-year-old son asked about the manuscript. I told him it was in my desk drawer, most likely permanently. I did not tell Braiden that there were desk drawers like mine all over the country, the world. Where most likely the majority of novels end up, musty as the languishing dreams of the men and women who wrote them. But you can’t speak that harsh truth to a child. And I’m glad I didn’t, because Braiden then said (and I swear this is verbatim, better than anything I’m capable of imagining): “Dad, nobody writes a book just to put it in a drawer.”

Call it the Tao of Kid, the little Buddha of elementary school. The cafeteria Confucius. Regardless, it felt like scales dropped from my eyes. I heard him. This was one of the times I was paying attention.

So I gave it another shot, the best one I could think of. My friend Joe Hickman, the manager of Lemuria, had expressed an interest in reading my manuscript. I took it to him.

He called me one Sunday evening—February 13, 2011—after spending the weekend reading the book. “It’s really good,” he said. “We gotta get it published.”

Now is not the time to point out the obvious, I thought. Instead, I tried to focus on the enthusiasm in his voice. But the reality of us “getting it published” from little Jackson, Mississippi, when an agent working full-time in New York couldn’t get the job done, was hard to deny.

I should have remembered the parable of the mustard seed. Or maybe the mustard-yellow walls of Lemuria.

Because the first opportunity Joe had to pitch my manuscript to a visiting author turned out to be the only time he had to do it. As my quasi-agent, Joe batted a thousand from his first time up at the plate.

“Come down and meet Andre Dubus,” Joe said. “He’ll be here next month for Townie. He was a friend of Larry Brown’s, too. Maybe he can help you out.”

It’s a rare day that I don’t want to be at Lemuria, or meet a real writer, but I was uncomfortable about meeting Andre because I hadn’t read any of his work. I’d been taught by one of my best professors at UGA that it was the apotheosis of rudeness for a scholar to approach an author without having read something of his or hers. How much worse, I thought, for a creative writer to do the same thing—and hoping for a favor, to boot.

“Can’t do it,” I said. “I haven’t read a thing of Andre’s.”

“He’s a cool guy,” Joe said. “He won’t mind.”

“I doubt it. And anyway, I teach Wednesday nights.”

“Your loss,” Joe said.

As the date of Andre’s reading approached, I realized that the particular Wednesday night in March that Andre was to be at Lemuria was Tulane’s spring break. No class. When Joe learned that, I was on the hook.

Andre gave a fantastic and moving reading from Townie, signed books as long as people remained in line. The crowd dwindled down to some cousins who’d ridden over from Louisiana to have dinner with their famous kinsman. Otherwise it was just Andre, Joe, and myself. While Joe handed Andre books to sign from a stack of stock, he waved me over to the table and introduced me.

“I haven’t read any of your work,” I blurted. I figured I’d go ahead and get the unpleasantness over with and head home.

“That’s all right,” Andre said. “I gave a signed copy of House of Sand and Fog to my best friend back home. First edition. Next time I was over at his place it was propping up one leg of his couch and his dog had chewed on it. I said, ‘Please tell me you read it before you stuck it under there.’ ‘Andre,’ he said, ‘I stay busy.’”

“Matt was a friend of Larry’s,” Joe said. “He’s written a novel. I’ve read it. It’s good.”

“Oh yeah?” Andre said, still signing away as quickly as Joe could pass him the books. “What’s it called?”

“The Resurrectionist.”

“The Resurrectionist?” He asked. I nodded.

He put down his pen and said, “Holy shit! With a title like that, it’s got to be good.” Then he stood up and hugged me. “Will you send it to me? If I like it, I’ll give it to my editor at Norton.”

Just like that. Years of writing nights and weekends, hoping this one would be good enough. (My first, Murk, a novel of catfish grabbling, had long since gone to sleep with the fishes, where, sadly, it belongs.) A New York agent, then nineteen rejections. Then no agent at all. And here in quiet Jackson, Mississippi, on a rainy spring night in the cinderblock bunker annex that Lemuria calls its dot-com building, everything changed.

A year and a half later, W.W. Norton published The Resurrectionist and I had a reading of my own in the dot-com building. I’ve tried to figure it out, the sceptic in me running one scenario after another—the cumulative effects of spending time around good people; networks; chaos theory, etc. That maybe Andre sensed in me a particularly acute case of The Desperation of the Unpublished and took pity. But my better self, the one that now and then cuts through the white noise and reminds me to witness the mystery that surrounds us in the world every day, knows better.

The only thing I’ve concluded definitely is that my break couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Or any other way. Call it A Lemuria Event.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a damned-near-perfect love story of a reader and a bookstore, a shared history, a friendship. I certainly could not have written it any better.

That is why, if my family someday decides to scatter my ashes, they need to save a pinch or two for Lemuria. To sprinkle over the green carpet in the southern writers section. Under a shelf where maybe, maybe still, there will rest a book with my name on its spine.

Matthew Guinn’s next novel, The Scribe, will be published by W.W. Norton in September 2015.

Category: Guest Post (Page 2 of 3)

A Jim Ewing Review: Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” sees busy release day

‘Into the Savage Country’ mesmerizing tale of America’s youth

Key’s Southern ‘secrets’ too funny, painful, true to share in ‘World’s Largest Man’

“Fateful Lightning” illuminates Civil War Gen. Sherman’s march

Guest Post: Beyond the Dollar and the Dead Tiger

Guest Post: Anything Can Happen at an Independent Bookstore

Guest Post: Reasons why the Book City of Lemuria is important to me, grouped into two general sections

Guest post: For those of us displaced Mississippians

Guest Post: Ex Libris Lemuria

Authors

Categories

Tags