A billionaire's ode to charity: $100 million to poetry journal
By James Warren
Tribune staff reporter

November 17, 2002

In the early 1970s, an unsolicited poem arrived in the Chicago office of Poetry, a small, influential but typically financially strapped literary magazine. It was from a Mrs. Guernsey Van Riper Jr. of Indianapolis.

Joe Parisi, the editor, thought it good but not up to the standards of a monthly known for running the works of titans of 20th Century poetry, including William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.

Perhaps it was Parisi's handwritten rejection note. Or similar rejection notes he'd send over the years to the same woman, whom he has to this day never met or even spoken with. But, along the way, Mrs. Van Riper grew to have affection for the publication, the kind that may change the state of poetry in America.

Van Riper, who later divorced and switched back to her maiden name of Ruth Lilly, is the last surviving great-grandchild of Col. Eli Lilly, founder of Eli Lilly and Co., the pharmaceutical giant. At 87, she is a very low-profile, ailing billionaire-philanthropist who will now alter the 700-square-foot world of the four-person magazine housed in the basement of Chicago's Newberry Library.

Lilly will stratospherically increase her own previous donations to Poetry by giving it well in excess of $100 million over the next 30 years, with no strings attached. The stunning development, the result of a new estate plan approved by an Indianapolis court and confirmed by lawyers, was outlined, though not fully detailed, by Parisi Friday at a dinner that the magazine held at the Arts Club of Chicago.

"Yes, it does seem to have a couple of extra zeroes at the end of the number," said Billy Collins, the U.S. poet laureate, who attended the dinner. "It is probably an unprecedented gift to a literary publication. It's a wonderful and good thing, unambiguously good, that Mrs. Lilly has done."

And, in a grand understatement inspired by the turn of events, Parisi said last week, "Ruth Lilly has ensured our existence into perpetuity."

The monthly, whose paid circulation is a modest 10,000, was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, a former art critic for the Chicago Tribune, and its storied past includes running the first major works of Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, as well as important efforts by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. It has flirted with poverty, frequently having less than $100 in its till, but it has never missed an issue, and thus is believed to be the oldest continuously published literary publication.

Lilly, who is childless, began writing poetry in the mid-1930s, said her attorney, Thomas Ewbank. She "did not take personally" the rejections from Poetry and proved to be a fan and loyal contributor, establishing in 1986 its annual Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which was initially $25,000 and has grown to $100,000. She also has sponsored two $15,000 annual fellowships via the magazine, as well as a professorship in poetry at Indiana University.

Lilly has been no less an enigmatic presence in Indianapolis, donating significant sums to academic and arts institutions, but in very understated ways.

The most notice she's received, besides the various donations, came amid some controversy several years ago over millions of dollars spent on European and Hawaiian travel for her and entourages of more than 30, including 26 personal staff members. The money came from the conservatorship into which her estate was placed in 1981.

But even knowledge that her estate exceeded $1 billion did not prepare the Chicago magazine for what was in the offing.

Message from a lawyer

Ewbank contacted Parisi last year, indicating that he had been instructed to devise a new estate plan for Lilly. Ewbank "suggested we obtain counsel, since the plan was so complicated," Parisi recalled. At that point, Parisi had no clear sense of the money involved, but he enlisted the services of estate specialist Richard Campbell.

As the Chicago attorney explained, there are essentially six different pots of funds created by what are known as charitable lead and remainder trusts. For example, out of three trusts, there will be one annual payment to the Modern Poetry Association, which oversees the magazine as its publisher, for as long as Lilly lives; a second annual payment over the next 15 years; and a third annual payment over the next 30 years.

With much of her wealth turning on Eli Lilly stock, which has had a topsy-turvy year (dropping from the mid-$80s to the mid-$40s, closing Friday at $61.30), one can make only broad estimates of values. Ewbank, citing his client's personal preference, did not engage in estimates, leaving them to the magazine.

But, by conservative assessments, the first payment, in January, will be about $10 million. And, over the course of the 30 years, a conservative estimate is $100 million, but it could well be closer to $150 million, Campbell said.

Ewbank would only say, "There are people who can snatch defeat from the jaw of victory. But assuming they have a good investment committee and controls, all they need be is prudent and conservative and this will provide them the base they need."

Such a sum would vault the association into the forefront of vaguely similar, arts-related non-profits. By comparison, the total assets of New York's John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are $219 million.

For sure, change will come swiftly once word breaks out about such good fortune. Old donors may well be reluctant to maintain their level of giving, while fledgling poets and others may inundate the magazine with requests for money.

With so much funding from one source, tax laws will require the Modern Poetry Association to become a private operating foundation rather than a so-called 501c3, its current tax-exempt status conferred to qualifying political and cultural institutions and interest groups. It is applying to change its name to the Poetry Foundation, but it will still be able to receive tax-deductible contributions.

High hopes for big bucks

Deborah Cummins, president of the association's board of trustees, said the group will seek to increase its various educational programs; devise seminars for teachers nationwide to teach poetry (aimed at middle and high school teachers); expand grants and fellowships; and increase the publication of books via its Poetry Press.

And, no surprise, it wants to use the money to buy its own, far larger and separate headquarters in Chicago. Along the way, it also hopes to find public space for thousands of books of poetry, which surpass those of most colleges and universities but are virtually all in storage.

"The magazine, as our crown jewel, will obviously remain. Perhaps we can pay our authors more [whether you're a Pulitzer Prize winner or unknown undergraduate, it pays $2 a line]. We aim to keep it the premier journal devoted to poetry in the country," she said.

As for long-term impact, Collins said, "The only thing I am sure of is that when the news breaks, it will draw a lot of good attention to the magazine and poetry itself.

"It reminds me of my father, a New York businessman, not being too impressed by my poetry writing. Then I got a $25,000 grant from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), and he started taking poetry seriously."


Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune

Just got home from the Miami Book Fair. Had the pleasure of meeting some wonderful people, and listened to some incredible authors. The street fair has been downsized yet again, but lots and lots of authors. There are so many authors speaking that it forces visitors to make some very hard decisions, and throwing chaos into the mix surely doesn't help. Coming soon to the home page, my full report of a day at the fair...

Point. Click. Think?
As Students Rely on the Internet for Research, Teachers Try to Warn of the Web's Snares

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 16, 2002; Page C01


It is 2 a.m. and Daniel Davis, a University of Maryland freshman, has not even started his English paper on biological warfare, due that day.

No problem. He'll just do what he has done before a dozen times or more. He sits down at his computer in his dorm room, signs on to Yahoo's search engine and begins his quest. Six hours and several bags of chips later, the paper pops out of his printer, complete.

He doesn't consider visiting the campus library or opening a book. Why should he? "You can find whole pages of stuff you need to know on the Web, fast," he says.

So Davis is a procrastinator. So what? Professors are used to that. But six hours? That's a whole new kind of extreme.

Welcome to the world of Net thinking, a form of reasoning that characterizes many students who are growing up with the Internet as their primary, and in some cases, sole source of research. Ask teachers and they'll tell you: Among all the influences that shape young thinking skills, computer technology is the biggest one.

"Students' first recourse for any kind of information is the Web. It's absolutely automatic," says Kenneth Kotovsky, a psychology professor at Carnegie-Mellon University who has examined the study habits of young people.

Good? Bad? Who knows? The first popular Internet browser, Netscape, came out only about a decade ago. What we do know after millennia of training minds in scholarly disciplines is that something has changed and it's not apt to change back.

On the good side, Net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connections easily. "They are more in control of facts than we were 40 years ago," says Bernard Cooperman, a history professor at the University of Maryland.

But they also value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth, and other people's arguments over their own.

This has educators worried.

"Seven years ago, I was writing about the promise of digital resources," says Jamie McKenzie, a former school superintendent and library director who now publishes an e-zine on educational technology. "I have to say I've been disappointed. The quality of information [on the Internet] is below what you find in print, and the Internet has fostered a thinner, less substantial thinking."

The problem is no longer plagiarism of huge downloaded blocks of text -- software can detect that now, when a teacher enters a few lines of a paper. The concern is the Internet itself.

Marylaine Block, a librarian and Internet trainer in Iowa, is blunt: "The Internet makes it ungodly easy now for people who wish to be lazy."

In the Shallows


Jeffrey Meikle, chairman of the American studies department at the University of Texas, sees the new world every time he walks into the main library on the Austin campus. There, where the card catalogue used to be, sit banks of computer terminals.

"My students are as intelligent and hardworking as ever," he says, "but they wouldn't go to the library if there weren't all those terminals."

All Web resources are not equal, of course.

What aficionados call "the deep Web," including subscription services such as Nexis and JSTOR, enables students to find information that is accurate, thorough and wide-ranging.

"I think the Internet encourages intellectual thinking," says Nora Flynn, a junior at Maryland. "You can go to so many sources, find things you never heard of. It forces me to think globally."

But many students don't have access to these costly, sophisticated resources or don't know how to use them. This leaves them relying on the free Web, a dangerous place to be without a guide.

Anyone can post anything on the free Web, and anyone frequently does. A student who typed "Thomas Jefferson" into the Google search engine would get 1.29 million hits; rap star Eminem would bring up 1.37 million. Narrowing one's search to certain words may not help. The gamelike quality of screen and mouse encourages students to sample these sources rather than select an appropriate text and read deeply into it or follow an argument to its conclusion. The result is what Cooperman, who teaches both Davis and Flynn at Maryland, calls "cocktail-party knowledge."

He's the model of a man of books: short-sleeve shirts, glasses, slight stoop, a pensive air. "The Web is designed for the masses," he says. "It never presents students with classically constructed arguments, just facts and pictures." Many students today will advance an argument, he continues, then find themselves unable to make it convincingly. "Is that a function of the Web, or being inundated with information, or the way we're educating them in general?"

Entering the Web


If students cannot come up with their own ideas, cut-and-paste technology allows them to lift someone else's sentences or phrases with ease.

Jeana Davis, a ninth-grade teacher in Arlington, says students frequently don't see anything wrong with this. "They'll say, 'I changed the words around.' And I'll say, 'But it's not your original thought.' "

Superficial searching habits can have tragic consequences, illustrated last year at Johns Hopkins University. A physician-researcher performed a test of lung function on a healthy 24-year-old woman, administering a large dose of a particular chemical. The woman then died of lung and kidney failure. The doctor had searched online for information about the drug but had failed to turn up any literature warning of its dangers -- information that medical librarians later did find online after the woman died.

Students can avoid such mistakes by asking for help from those trained to give it, but some young inquirers say they've done that and are merely waved over to the digital section of a library. Librarian Marylaine Block concedes that can happen, particularly since staff positions at many libraries have been cut.

Bonnie Kunzel, teen specialist at the Princeton Public Library, says students "will walk into our library and spend 30 minutes on the Internet trying to find out how a cobbler worked in Colonial America. I'll walk over and ask, 'Want to try a book now?' "

When students do come across something of interest, they may not be able to detect the author's bias because Web prose, unlike the writing in serious books and journals, often appears with only the slimmest of attribution, if any. This can introduce a certain naivete into their writing.

The Net has a kind of magical quality that leads younger students to say to librarians such as Block, "It has to be true. If it weren't true, they wouldn't let it be there." Says Block, "I have to tell them there is no 'they.' "

History teacher Davis, at Washington-Lee High School, recalls sitting down at the computer with a student who was researching Christopher Columbus's effect on the Americas. The student had found a convincing essay by an author taking Columbus to task for his treatment of Native Americans.

"Then we found another essay contradicting that," Davis says. "I asked the student, 'Who is right?' He couldn't tell, and neither could I."

Teachers like Davis spend class time teaching their Net thinkers how to read and think more critically. "I tell them, 'Don't take any Web site for granted. Who was the author? What authority does he or she have? Does the author have an agenda?' "

Maryland's Cooperman engaged a group of summer school students in a similar discussion earlier this month. The course was titled "History of the Jews I" and covered the period from the Bible through the Middle Ages.

Find a scholarly article on an issue in Jewish history, he told the students, suggesting that the best way to do that would be to visit the campus library and "touch books."

After receiving teacher approval of their articles, Cooperman's students summarized and evaluated the articles' arguments and then used the Web to find further sources. Cooperman told them to evaluate the usefulness of the Web sources compared with the scholarly material.

Their Web work turned up contradictions, errors and extraneous material. Nora Flynn, exploring the female Talmudic scholar Beruriah, noted in class that the scholarly article talked about Beruriah as a late invention, a composite of several women scholars. Web sources that she found through the popular search engine Google referred to Beruriah as one woman, she said.

Student Lauren Steely said the Internet sites he looked at presented lots of facts but got the dates wrong. Amy Newman, researching anti-Semitism in Europe at the time of the Black Death, brought up more than 2,000 sites on Google, "but the first 30 were useless. Just poems and songs. Then there was one story that looked like a kindergartner had written it."

"Or maybe it was a basketball player from Duke," Cooperman quipped, drawing a laugh from everybody who roots against Maryland's arch-rival.

Daniel Davis noted that several popular search engines place at the top of their lists the sources that have paid them the most money. This would be like a library prominently displaying only those books whose publishers paid for the privilege, and Davis knows it. But it doesn't stop him from using those search engines.

It only makes him, and young people like him, skeptical about information sources wherever they're found, including books.

"College students are quite aware that they can't trust what they read," says Meikle at Texas. "They're drawn to sites that are ironic or sarcastic, poking fun at perceived truths."

Not that long ago, Meikle continues, a person who wrote a book was assumed to be an authority. "Now, when anybody can have a Web site on any topic, then everybody is an expert, which means nobody is."

Cooperman says this is not necessarily a good thing for students. They "assume everyone is a liar." Shallow thinking is one result, he says. Another is the unwillingness among some students to take a strong position themselves lest they be battered by classmates for their ideas.

Students who are not urged to "touch books" often don't realize how much information is not on the Internet. According to Block, only about 15 percent of all information -- books, periodicals, government documents -- is found there. The full texts of articles from most academic journals, for example, are not online nor are most current books. Because of copyright laws, a lot of information may never make it to the Net, Block says, which is why she and other librarians worry about lawmakers who slash library budgets or propose eliminating libraries altogether, saying, "Why do we need them? Everything's on the Internet."

And so the problem feeds on itself, encouraged by legislators.

Net Gains


Even the most vocal Net critics say it has aided learning in some ways. Students no longer have to wrestle with microfilm machines or wait at the circulation desk for books placed on reserve. Instead, they wander through the information landscape. Jamie McKenzie calls them "free-range students." Philosopher John Dewey, the proponent of student-driven education, would be proud.

Allison Druin, an education professor who runs the human-computer interaction lab at Maryland, says even younger children can create something new on their own Web sites. In her laboratory, children ages 7 to 11 work with professors designing software that kids their age can use when querying the Internet.

"The Internet is a tool, but it's also something they can make an addition to," says Druin. "That's pretty powerful stuff for a kid."

"I see kids much more able to construct on their own," she continues. "They used to look at us and ask, 'What's our next step?' Now we say, 'Here's the goal, here are our resources, here's our timeline,' and they take off.'"

Meikle, at the University of Texas, observes the same phenomenon. His best undergraduates come up with new takes on old subjects as quickly as graduate students did years ago, he says. "I don't think you can come up with something original unless you have an array of things to look at, and the Internet certainly gives you that," he says. "It isn't collaging, it's building something new."

Book Learnin'


One would like to think that this self-confidence and creativity will produce adult citizens eager to participate in society and tackle its problems.

When Jeana Davis at Washington-Lee makes an assignment, she directs students to Web sites they might not know about but that she has already approved. If students want to use another site, they must win Davis's approval.

She requires students to use at least three books on any assignment, not including encyclopedias. She checks their work during each project, looking for originality and depth.

Cooperman at Maryland suggests books, first, to any student who asks him for help. He also offers extra credit to students who do research in the library, according to Daniel Davis, who likes getting bonus points for doing what students took for granted only a decade ago.

"Sitting in the library is a lot better than sitting on the Internet," he says, even though he's not exactly a frequent visitor to the main campus library. "If you go into the library, you have to take apart a topic and you become sort of an expert. Sitting on the Internet you don't actually learn anything."

The place he does visit, as a music major, is the performing arts library. "I can sit for hours there looking at books and things, with no particular goal in mind."

That's post-Net thinking, says McKenzie, a realization that digital is not enough, that grazing is good, but great ideas require deep reading, incubation and contemplation. He believes today's students are headed in that direction if grown-ups take seriously their assigning, as well as advising, role.

"For decades we've been doing topical research," he complains. "Schools say, 'Go find out all about Molly Pitcher.' That's an invitation to scoop it up, to write stuff they already know. We should be encouraging kids to research the difficult truth. Let's tell them a woman has been diagnosed with breast cancer and has five doctors recommending different treatments. What would they do?"

But do school systems really want students using the same tools to question current proprieties and conventional wisdom? Teach kids to be critical thinkers and they'll be sending it right back at the teacher in the classroom.

There is much to worry about.

Up to a point. Libraries have a longstanding appeal that goes beyond the antique, baby's-breath smell of books and the sense of exploration, spelunking through the stacks. Few students can get through college untouched by this experience, whether they know it or not.

"There's something in a library that makes you feel like an intellectual," said Amy Newman. "You can wear glasses, look like Dr. Cooperman. When you read, the books have such nice writing."


© 2002 The Washington Post Company

National Book Award Winners Announced

The winners of the 2002 National Book Awards were announced November 20, at a ceremony at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. The annual awards are given by the National Book Foundation to recognize achievements in four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature. The night's ceremonies included the presentation of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Philip Roth.

This year's winners by category were:

FICTION:
Julia Glass, Three Junes (Pantheon Books)

NONFICTION:
Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf)

POETRY
Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press)

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion (A Richard Jackson Book/Atheneum Books for Young Readers) -- my daughter loved this book!

Very interesting piece from the Washington Post on Southern Writers...

Gone With the Wind
Has the Once-Towering Genre of Southern Literature Lost Its Compass?

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 11, 2002; Page C01


HILLSBOROUGH, N.C.

The vinegar-based sauce at Allen & Son Barbeque near here is tangy, but it's no tastier than the tomato-based baste you can get at Washington area pulled-pork parlors, such as Red, Hot & Blue.

Barbecue used to be a regional delicacy, a Southern thang. Now it belongs to all of America and you can find really good 'cue just about anywhere. Even Gaithersburg.

Same's true with what used to be called Southern literature.

It's good and it's nationwide.

Take Lee Smith's new novel, "The Last Girls," published by Chapel Hill-based Algonquin Books in September. It has all the trappings -- a clutch of alumnae of a fictitious Blue Ridge Mountain women's college, a trip on a riverboat down the Mississippi, a dead woman named Baby.

There was a time when everyone would have hailed the book as a fine Southern yarn.

That time is gone.

The New York Times, the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe all reviewed Smith's work -- favorably -- without once calling it a Southern novel.

Sure enough, as you read it you realize that these women -- with their lost opportunities and retrofitted dreams -- could have come from anywhere, and you begin to wonder if there even is such a thing as Southern literature anymore.

The question comes up at lunchtime as Smith meets a few of her friends -- Louis D. Rubin Jr., Shannon Ravenel, Fred Hobson and Lucinda MacKethan -- at Allen & Son.

Rubin is the founding editor of Algonquin and spiritual godfather to many writers.

Hobson is a humanities professor at the University of North Carolina and MacKethan teaches English at North Carolina State. They, like Smith, were students of Rubin when he taught at what is now Hollins University in Virginia. This group knows the South, and literature.

Ravenel, who helped Rubin launch Algonquin, asks him if he has seen a certain new book of Southern photographs. He says he has. "I almost threw up," he says.

The problem, he says, is that it's a trumped-up book written for tourists. He makes it sound like the literary equivalent of tourist traps, such as Gatorland or snake farms.

Rubin, 79, who edited the 1985 landmark work "The History of Southern Literature," wears a short-sleeve plaid shirt. For lunch he has a slice of peanut butter pie and a cup of coffee. He has hearing aids in both ears.

When it comes to talking literature, he's as sharp as ever.

Hobson points out the ever-increasingly multicultural complexion of the South. "There's been an influx of Caribbean and Mexican and Asian voices," he says. "It's not just a black and white thing anymore."

Rubin says the region has changed so dramatically in recent years, it has lost its sense of a shared history. That past was treated as myth. "I don't know that the myth is still important," he says.

"The past is not as important," MacKethan says.

Smith adds, "The past is not as agreed upon."

Maybe the past is, at last, past.

Folks used to agree on a lot. That there was such a thing as Southern literature, for instance.

William Faulkner. Eudora Welty. Richard Wright. Tennessee Williams. Thomas Wolfe. Truman Capote. Carson McCullers. Reynolds Price. Zora Neale Hurston. Katherine Anne Porter. Robert Penn Warren. James Dickey. Flannery O'Connor. Willie Morris.

Those dogs could hunt.

Granted, they wrote in different styles and with varying degrees of success. But there was still something there. Something solid and familiar and identifiable.

Something Southern.

For one thing, there was a common theme playing through most of the stories: the Defeated South.

Around the time Walker Percy accepted the National Book Award for his 1962 novel "The Moviegoer," he was asked what made the South different from the rest of the country.

We lost, he said.

Percy was perhaps the transitional Southern writer -- with one foot in the traditional South and another in the post-traditional South. "The Moviegoer" was as indebted to the European existentialist literature as it was to Faulkner.

For another, there was a graceful prose style -- in the fiction and the nonfiction -- a gentility reflected in the culture.

As the South has been swallowed up by America, all that has changed. The region has lost some of its manners and moorings. Irate drivers honk at each other in Jackson. You can buy the New York Times in Mobile. There's sushi everywhere. Faux moonshine, Mason jar and all, is sold -- and taxed -- in liquor stores.

John Shelton Reed, former director of UNC's Center for the Study of the American South in Chapel Hill, says, "You're right about there not being a central theme anymore."

How did this come to be?

In the beginning, American and Southern literature were one. J.A. Leo Lemay wrote that "American, and Southern, literature began when Sir Walter Raleigh sent four major expeditions to Virginia." The first was in 1584, led by Arthur Barlow. As the exploring party neared land, Barlow wrote, the air was alive with a sweet fragrance, "so strong a smell, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden, abounding with all kinds of odoriferous flower."

From the get-go, Southern literature was flowery.

Others believe that Capt. John Smith, who wrote his "True Relation of Occurrences and Accidents in Virginia" in 1608, got the ball rolling.

But a definably Southern literature did not emerge until after the Civil War, a mythmaking confrontation in the minds of many Americans.

The first Southern literature was, in the words of critics, local color.

Characterized by quirky characters and rampant vernacular, works of local colorists were extremely popular throughout the South between 1865 and 1910.

Writers such as George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page groped about for a regional voice. Using already-weary cultural cliches and lots of down-home di'lec, these men and other three-name wonders including Ruth McEnery Stuart, John Esten Cooke and Joel Chandler Harris spewed out stories about Southerners' peculiar ways of living and thinking and speaking.

The tales were lapped up like collard greens by readers across America, and implanted many Southern stereotypes in the popular mind. With the exception of Harris and his tales of Uncle Remus, these local colorists and their works are largely forgotten.

Then along came Faulkner and others, and between 1925 and 1985 the South produced some of the greatest literature in history.

By Faulkner: "The Sound and the Fury" in 1929, "Light in August" and novellas including "The Bear" in 1932, "Absalom, Absalom" in 1936, "Collected Stories" in 1950 and "The Reivers" in 1962, a body of work that won him the Nobel Prize.

By Eudora Welty: "A Curtain of Green" in 1941, "Delta Wedding" in 1946, "Losing Battles" in 1970 and her autobiographical "One Writer's Beginnings" in 1984.

By Richard Wright: "Native Son" in 1940 and the memoir "Black Boy" in 1945.

By Tennessee Williams: "The Glass Menagerie," first produced in 1944, "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1947 and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in 1955.

Literary movements -- such as the Fugitives and the Agrarians -- flourished in the South. It all happened in such a short span of time.

Thomas Wolfe died in 1938. ("You Can't Go Home Again" was published in 1940.) Zora Neale Hurston published "Dust Tracks on a Road" in 1942, and died in 1960. James Dickey's "Deliverance" was published in 1970. He produced little prose of much significance after that.

By the mid-'70s, the great run of Southern literature was coming to an end.

In 1974, John Egerton wrote "The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America." His thesis: Because of mass media and rapid transit and the immense changes brought about by the civil rights movement, the once segregated and separated South was being thrown into the blender with the rest of the nation. Southern literature was part of the new cultural margarita.

Impatient with being asked the same old questions, Walker Percy interviewed himself in Esquire in 1977:

Q. You're not interested in the South?

A. I'm sick and tired of talking about the South and hearing about the South.

Q. Do you regard yourself as a southern writer?

A. That is a strange question, even a little mad. Sometimes I think that the South brings out the latent madness in people. It even makes me feel nutty to hear such a question.

Q. What's mad about such a question?

A. Would you ask John Cheever if he regarded himself as a northeastern writer?

Q. What do you think of southern writers?

A. I'm fed up with the subject of southern writing. Northern writing, too, for that matter.

Apparently Percy was not just speaking for himself. Since 1985, most books written by Southerners and/or set in the South can be boiled down to: American stories with a Southern accent, such as Smith's, and the local-color variety, such as Anne Rivers Siddons and anything by Fannie Flagg.

Here's an excerpt from a chapter called "Uncle Floyd Has a Fit" in Flagg's new novel, "Standing in the Rainbow": "Two days after Christmas," she writes, "the phone rang. Betty Raye, walking by, picked up and to her surprise it was her mother. Minnie Oatman was on the other end, calling long-distance from the office of the Talladega, Alabama, Primitive Baptist Church and she was hysterical.

" 'Oh, Betty Raye, honey, something terrible has happened, brace yourself for bad news.'

" 'Momma, what is it?'

" 'Honey,' Minnie sobbed, 'we lost Chester last night. Chester's gone and your Uncle Floyd is locked hisself in the men's room, blaspheming the Lord, and he won't come out.'

" 'What men's room?' said Betty Raye.

" 'Over at the seafood place. One minute we was happy without a care in the world eating fried shrimp and the next thing we knowed Floyd was running around the parking lot, screaming like a banshee. In the time it took to eat twelve fried shrimp Chester had been snatched right out of his little suitcase in broad daylight and was gonded . . . kidnapped just like the Lindberger baby.' "

Chester, as it happens, is a Scripture-quoting ventriloquist's dummy.

There is really no such thing as contemporary Southern literature.

"It's like we're back to local-color writing," says Bryan Bremen of the University of Texas. He says some contemporary Southern fiction is "rooted in almost a kind of cartoon version of what we think of as New Orleans, or what we think of as Georgia."

Bremen says that this is the case because "geographic boundaries have certainly become more fluid."

Hal Crowther, Lee Smith's husband and a columnist for a Chapel Hill newspaper, has given a lot of thought to Southern literature.

It is often defined, he says, by "the morons in New York who think that everybody has an outhouse. You cannot exaggerate the ignorance of some New York editors."

He admits, "There are people down here writing who play right into the hands of editors."

But the traditional idea of a work being distinctly Southern is no more.

"We have to radically change our idea of what is Southern," Crowther says.

Every year Shannon Ravenel edits a collection called "New Stories From the South." To make her selections, she pores over more than 100 different magazines and some 200-300 stories with Southern settings.

This year's anthology contains tales by writers living in Italy, New York City, Denver, Iowa City, Madison, Wis., and other far-flung places.

"I no longer say 'Southern writers,' " Ravenel says.

We've come full circle.

As it was in the beginning, Southern literature nowadays is American literature. And, on occasion, vice versa. Something is gained by the passing of a "Southern literature": Most books by and about Southerners are no longer treated as curiosities. They are judged as American works.

And something is lost: For a while there, books by and about Southerners explored -- and expressed -- the deepest extremes of the human heart and soul. Like other canons of great literature -- Irish, Russian -- Southern literature changed the way we look at the world.

There are older writers -- Smith, Ernest J. Gaines, Pat Conroy -- who continue to write powerful American novels that happen to be Southern.

Mississippian Donna Tartt, riding a tidal wave of publicity around her second novel, "The Little Friend," doesn't want to be called a Southern writer. "It's not pleasant to be lumped into a group of black writers or women writers or gay writers," she told USA Today. "Why be part of a group simply because of the circumstances of your birth?"

And there are younger voices, such as Silas House, Tony Earley and Tayari Jones, who at one time might have been called Southern but now are not so easily pigeonholed.

Walking her dog around Hillsborough, Lee Smith is not quite ready to give up on the idea of Southern lit. "It's more oral," she says, "more speakerly than writerly."

Southern prose "comes from the conversational" and "avoids abstraction," she says.

"In the South, people just talk all the damn time," she says. "Every kind of information is presented as narrative."

But, she adds, it just might be "more a difference between urban and rural."

She stands in the crisp daylight and speaks of the swift-changing South. Even her little town is going through a metamorphosis.

She points to a line of stores. "There's a new espresso shop," she says, "right next to a live-bait store."


© 2002 The Washington Post Company

Crime writer tries to identify Jack the Ripper
Mon Oct 28, 5:05 PM ET

LONDON - Using new evidence, best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has come up with her own theory about the identity of Jack the Ripper, the pseudonymous murderer who killed at least seven women in London's East End in 1888, all of them prostitutes.

Relying on forensic science such as DNA testing and an image-enhancement computer, Cornwell will argue in a new book that Jack the Ripper could have been Walter Sickert, a painter and printmaker who was the most important of Britain's impressionists.

Vanity Fair, which plans to publish an excerpt from Cornwell's book, "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper — Case Closed," in its December issue, issued a statement Monday about what they will contain.

An examination of DNA samples from letters, envelopes and stamps reportedly sent by Jack the Ripper, Sickert, his first wife and others helped Cornwell produce a "cautious indicator" that Sickert may have been the vicious killer, Vanity Fair said in a statement.

The real proof may never be available because Sickert was cremated, leaving no evidence of his DNA behind.

The author also worked with Paul Ferrara, director of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, who used a forensic image-enhancement computer to compare watermarks on stationary that Jack the Ripper and Sickert apparently had used, Vanity Fair said.

In addition, Cornwell studied the life of Sickert and his art work, searching for signs of the kind of morbidity, violence and hatred of women that someone like Jack the Ripper would have possessed.

Last weekend was Bouchercon, a mystery convention for writers & readers. Lots of awards were presented -

ANTHONY AWARD WINNERS
--------------------------------------------------

Chosen by voted by members of Bouchercon 2002.

* Best Novel: MYSTIC RIVER, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)

Also Nominated: THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN, by Rick Riordan (Bantam); FLIGHT, by Jan Burke (Simon & Schuster); REFLECTING THE SKY, by S. J. Rozan (St. Martin's Minotaur); and TELL NO ONE, by Harlan Coben (Delacorte)

* Best First Novel: OPEN SEASON, by C. J. Box (Putnam)

Also Nominated: AUSTIN CITY BLUE, by Jan Grape (Five Star); THE JASMINE TRADE, by Denise Hamilton (Scribner); THIRD PERSON SINGULAR, by K. J. Erickson (St. Martin's); and A WITNESS ABOVE, by Andy Straka (Signet)

* Best Paperback Original: DEAD UNTIL DARK, by Charlaine Harris (Ace)

Also Nominated: DEAD OF WINTER, by P. J. Parrish (Pinnacle); DIM SUM DEAD, by Jerrilyn Farmer (Avon); THE HOUDINI SPECTER, by Daniel Stashower (Avon); and A KISS GONE BAD, by Jeff Abbott (Onyx)

* Best Short Fiction: "Chocolate Moose," by Bill & Judy Crider (in DEATH DINES AT 8:30, edited by Claudia Bishop and Nick DiChario; Berkley Prime Crime)

Also Nominated: "Bitter Waters," by Rochelle Krich (in CRIMINAL KABBALAH, edited by Lawrence W. Raphael; Jewish Lights Publishing); "Double-Crossing Delancy," by S.J. Rozan (in MYSTERY STREET, edited by Robert J. Randisi; Signet); "My Bonnie Lies," by Ted Hertel Jr. (in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF LEGAL THRILLERS, edited by Michael Hemmingson; Carroll & Graf); "Virgo in
Sapphires," by Margaret Maron (in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 2001)

* Best Nonfiction/Critical Work: SELDOM DISAPPOINTED: A MEMOIR, by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins)

Also Nominated: DASHIELL HAMMETT: A DAUGHTER REMEMBERS, by Jo Hammett (Carroll & Graf); THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY, by Max Allan Collins (Collector's Press); WHO WAS THAT LADY? CRAIG RICE: THE QUEEN OF THE SCREWBALL
MYSTERY, by Jeffrey Marks (Delphi Books); and WRITING THE MYSTERY: A START TO FINISH GUIDE FOR BOTH NOVICE AND PROFESSIONAL, by G. Miki Hayden (Intrigue)

* Best Young Adult Mystery: THE MYSTERY OF THE HAUNTED CAVES, by Penny Warner (Meadowbrook)

Also Nominated: DEATH ON A SACRED GROUND, by Harriet R. Feder (Lerner); GHOST SITTER, by Peni Griffin (Dutton); TTHEW'S WEB, by Jeri Fink and Donna Paltrowitz (Bookweb); and THE VIKING CLAW, by Michael Dahl (Simon & Schuster)

* Best Cover Art: REFLECTING THE SKY, by S. J. Rozan, cover design by Michael Storrings from a photograph by Josef Beck/FPG (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Also Nominated: CHAPEL NOIR, by Carole Nelson Douglas, cover art by Glenn Harrington (Forge); GRAPE NOIR, by Kit Sloane, cover art by Annie Sperling (Deadly Alibi); THE TAINTED SNUFF BOX, by Rosemary Stevens, cover art by Teresa Fasolino (Berkley Prime Crime); and UNDER THE COLOR OF LAW, by Michael McGarrity, cover design by Anthony Ramondo from a photograph by
Index Stock Imagery/John Warden (Dutton)


SHAMUS AWARD WINNERS
--------------------------------------------------

Presented by the Private Eye Writers of America.

* Best P.I. Novel: REFLECTING THE SKY, by S.J. Rozan (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Also Nominated: ANGEL IN BLACK, by Max Allan Collins (NAL); ASHES OF ARIES, by Martha C. Lawrence (St. Martin's Minotaur); THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN, by Rick Riordan (Bantam); and COLD WATER BURNING, by John Straley (Bantam)

* Best First P.I. Novel: CHASING THE DEVIL'S TAIL, by David Fulmer (Poisoned Pen Press)

Also Nominated: EPITAPH, by James Siegel (Mysterious Press); RAT CITY, by Curt Colbert (UglyTown); A WITNESS ABOVE, by Andy Straka (Signet); and PILIKIA IS MY BUSINESS, by Mark Troy (LTD Books)

* Best Paperback P.I. Novel: ARCHANGEL PROTOCOL, by Lyda Morehouse (Roc)

Also Nominated: ANCIENT ENEMY, by Robert Westbrook (NAL); and KEEPERS, by Janet LaPierre (Perseverance Press)

* Best P.I. Short Story: "Rough Justice," by Ceri Jordan (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)

Also Nominated: "The Jungle," by John Lantigua (in AND THE DYING IS EASY, edited by Joseph Pittman and Annette Riffle; ignet); "Last Kiss," by Tom Sweeney (in MYSTERY STREEt, edited by Robert J. Randisi; Signet); "The Cobalt Blues," by Clark Howard (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2001); and "Golden Retriever," by Barbara Paul (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 2001)

* Friend of PWA: Jan Grape

* The Eye (lifetime achievement): Lawrence Block

* St. Martin's/ PWA contest for new writers: Michael Siverling


BARRY AWARD WINNERS
--------------------------------------------------

Chosen by subscribers to Deadly Pleasures magazine and visitors to its Web site.

* Best Novel: MYSTIC RIVER, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)

Also Nominated: TELL NO ONE, by Harlan Coben (Delacorte); A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown); PURGATORY RIDGE, by William Kent Krueger (Pocket); SILENT JOE, by T. Jefferson Parker (Hyperion); and
BAD NEWS, by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press)

* Best First Novel: OPEN SEASON, by C. J. Box (Putnam)

Also Nominated: THIRD PERSON SINGULAR, by K.J. Erickson (St. Martin's Minotaur); CHASING THE DEVIL'S TAIL, by David Fulmer (Poisoned Pen Press); PERHAPS SHE'LL DIE, by M.K. Preston (Intrigue); BLINDSIGHTED, by Karen Slaughter (Morrow); and BUBBLES UNBOUND, by Sarah Strohmeyer (Dutton)

* Best British Crime Novel: DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS, by Stephen Booth (HarperCollins)

Also Nominated: BLOOD JUNCTION, by Caroline Carver (Orion); THE KILLING KIND, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton); DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD, by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins); DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS, by P.D. James (Knopf); and KILLING THE SHADOWS, by Val McDermid (HarperCollins)

* Best Paperback Original: KILLING GIFTS, by Deborah Woodworth (Avon)

Also Nominated: RODE HARD, PUT AWAY DEAD, by Sinclair Browning (Bantam); DEATH IS A CABARET, by Deborah Morgan (Berkley Prime Crime); THE FOURTH WALL, by Beth Saulnier (Warner); and STRAW MEN, by Martin J. Smith (Jove)

* Don Sandstrom Memorial Award: Gary Warren Niebuhr


HERODOTUS AWARD WINNERS
--------------------------------------------------

Presented by the Historical Mystery Appreciation Society.

* Best Historical Mystery Novel: BROTHERS OF CAIN, by Miriam Grace Monfredo (Berkley Prime Crime)

Also Nominated: THE LAST KASHMIRI ROSE, by Barbara Cleverly (Carroll & Graf); THE GOOD GERMAN, by Joseph Kanon (Henry Holt); CALL EACH RIVER JORDAN, by Owen Parry (Morrow); and ISLAND OF TEARS, by Troy Soos (Kensington)

* Best First Historical Mystery Novel: MURPHY'S LAW, by Rhys Bowen (St. Martin's)

Also Nominated: CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL, by Glen David Gold (Hyperion); MUTE WITNESS, by Charles O'Brien (Poisoned Pen Press); THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP, by John Wray (Knopf); and THE BIRTH OF BLUE SATAN, by Patricia Wynn (Pemberley Press)

* Best Historical Mystery Short Story: "Kiss of Death," by Max Allan Collins (in KISS OF DEATH; Crippen & Landru)

Also Nominated: "The Invisible Spy," by Brendan DuBois (in THE BLUE AND THE GRAY UNDERGROUND, edited by Ed Gorman; Forge); "Hobson's Choice," by John Lutz (in THE BLUE AND THE GRAY UNDERGROUND, edited by Ed Gorman;
Forge); "Beyond the Lost Man Mountains," by Anne Weston (in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2001); and "A Perfect Crime," by Derek Wilson (in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF MORE HISTORICAL WHODUNNITS, edited by Mike
Ashley; Robinson)

* Lifetime Achievement: Max Allan Collins


MACAVITY AWARD WINNERS
--------------------------------------------------

Chosen by members of the reader/fan organization Mystery Readers International.

* Best Mystery Novel: FOLLY, by Laurie R. King (Bantam)

Also Nominated: MYSTIC RIVER, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow); THE DEADHOUSE, by Linda Fairstein (Scribner); TELL NO ONE, by Harlan Coben (Delacorte); and SILENT JOE, by T. Jefferson Parker (Hyperion)

* Best First Mystery Novel: OPEN SEASON, by C. J. Box (Putnam)

Also Nominated: THE JASMINE TRADE, by Denise Hamilton (Scribner); BLINDSIGHTED, by Karin Slaughter (Morrow); and PERHAPS SHE'LL DIE, by M.K. Preston (Intrigue)

* Best Biographical/Critical Mystery Work: WRITING THE MYSTERY: A START TO FINISH GUIDE FOR BOTH NOVICE AND PROFESSIONAL, by G. Miki Hayden (Intrigue)

Also Nominated: SELDOM DISAPPOINTED: A MEMOIR, by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins); THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY, by Max Allan Collins (Collectors Press); MY NAME'S FRIDAY: THE UNAUTHORIZED BUT TRUE STORY OF DRAGNET
AND THE FILMS OF JACK WEBB, by Michael J. Hayde (Cumberland House); and WHO WAS THAT LADY? CRAIG RICE: THE QUEEN OF SCREWBALL MYSTERY, by Jeffrey Marks (Delphi Books)

* Best Mystery Short Story: "The Abbey Ghosts," by Jan Burke (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January 2001)

Also Nominated: "My Bonnie Lies," by Ted Hertel (from THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF LEGAL THRILLERS, edited by Michael Hemmingson; Carroll & Graf); "Bitter Waters," by Rochelle Krich (from CRIMINAL KABBALAH, edited by Lawrence W. Raphael; Jewish Lights); and "The Would-Be Widower," by Katherine Hall Page (from MALICE DOMESTIC 10, edited by Nevada Barr; Avon)

Life of Pi Wins 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

On October 22, 2002, Canadian author Yann Martel's second novel, Life of Pi (Harcourt), was named the winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Martel's fable is about a boy stranded at sea with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a Bengal tiger.

The Man Booker Prize is awarded to the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland. The winner was announced at an awards dinner in the Great Court of the British Museum, London, and was televised live on BBC Two and BBC Four.

New historical thriller

From PW Daily for Booksellers
October 17, 2002

The Baltimore Sun calls Philip Kerr "one of our most gifted novelists, yet his name has not achieved the widespread recognition it deserves. His new novel may change that." The new novel is Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton (Crown, $24), which the Sun describes as "a fast-paced historical thriller that makes both science and history seem anything by dry and abstract."

It's 1696, and Newton has assumed the position of warden of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. Christopher Ellis has been hired as his assistant, and together, the two are directed by the king to find and prosecute counterfeiters. While investigating several murders at the Tower, they uncover a diabolical conspiracy involving the murder of thousands of Catholics, the passing of counterfeit guineas and reigniting the war with France.

The murders are accompanied by esoteric clues, encrypted documents and references to the pseudoscience of alchemy.

In addition to this rich tapestry of interesting characters and page-turning intrigue, Kerr has woven an illuminating look at life at the end of the 17th century: London is beset by whores and ruffians, opium dens, pestilence, grisly executions and a sparkling array of historical figures.--Judi Baxter

From the NY Times, October 17, 2002

Books for the Asking
By ERIC A. TAUB


AFTER spending a year trying to sell her book to publishers and receiving 70 rejection letters as a reward, Laurie Notaro, a newspaper columnist in Phoenix, decided to do it herself. Working with iUniverse, one of many companies that offer "print on demand" services, Ms. Notaro paid $99 to have her book designed, laid out, stored as a digital file and printed and bound only as copies were ordered. Several months later she sold the rights to her book, plus the concept for a new one, to a major publisher for a six-figure sum.

Joe Vitale, on the other hand, had already published several business books with traditional publishers. But for a new book, Mr. Vitale, a marketing consultant in Austin, Tex., decided to try a print-on-demand company, 1stBooks Library. For two days in June, Mr. Vitale's book was the best-selling title on Amazon.com.

Read the entire article

WHERE ARE THE LOVELY BONES???

2002 National Book Award Nominees
Winners to be announced November 20 in NYC

Fiction

Big If by Mark Costello (Norton)
Three Junes by Julia Glass (Pantheon)
You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett (Doubleday)
Gorgeous Lies by Martha McPhee (Harcourt)
The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson (Norton)


Nonfiction

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro
(Knopf)
When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the
Battle Against Pollution by Derva Davis (Perseus)
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul
Gawande (Metropolitan)
The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking)
Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes by Steve
Olson (Houghton Mifflin)


Young People's Literature

Feed by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick)
The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (Atheneum/Jackson)
19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye
(HarperCollins/Greenwillow)
This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life & Songs of Woody Guthrie
by Elizabeth Partridge (Viking)
Hush by Jacqueline Woodson (G.P. Putnam's Sons)


Poetry

Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen (University of
California Press)
The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds (Knopf)
The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body by Alberto Rmos (Copper Canyon)
In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone (Copper Canyon)
Shadow of Heaven by Ellen Bryant Voigt (Norton)

From The Miami Herald
Posted on Sun, Oct. 13, 2002

Moby launches book club

Who needs Oprah, anyway? Ever the intellectual, techno/dance guru Moby has started a book club as part of his current world tour, reports Ananova.com.

The singer and musician (real name Richard Melville Hall) -- who can trace his ancestry to Moby Dick author Herman Melville -- wants fans to bring along second-hand books to swap.

''When someone finishes a book, they put it in a little box and when someone else wants a new book, they look into the box and find one,'' he said.

`` Ozzy Osbourne used to snort ants. Led Zeppelin had sex with hookers on private planes. And I start a book club. Because one can only snort so many ants and have so much sex before one starts to long for the comfort and companionship of a book.''

I am enraged over an online column entitled "Who Needs Librarians, Get Some Trained Monkeys." This viciousness is from Uncle Frank's Diary #10, which you may read in its moronic entirety at http://www.newpages.com/unclefrank/Number10.htm

Luckily, I also have a forum for expressing opinion. I wrote the author of that piece, and I'm posting a copy of my rebuttal here:

Dear Mr. Burns,

As a Library Associate, AKA clerk, AKA trained monkey, I must take umbrage with your column, "Who Needs Librarians, Get Some Trained Monkeys - Uncle Frank's Diary #10." It is attitudes like yours that continually besmirch extremely knowledgeable and skillful paraprofessionals, simply because they haven't earned that magical piece of paper with "MLS" stamped on it. Having a degree does not ensure superior customer service, and conversely being non-degreed does not indicate inferior service.

I am the only person in my entire library system, with or without an MLS, to write reviews for the Library Journal. My branch had no Reader's Advisory service until I asked for, and established it. That process included creating a training manual, generating genre lists, and training other "monkeys" and volunteers to work with the patrons. The reference librarians, a lovely group of MLS-clad professionals, were using outdated, outmoded genre lists until I supplied them with mine. They are understaffed and overworked, and consequently are appreciative of the assistance that clerks provide.

Furthermore, when a patron comes into my library with one or two words of a title, no author, a vague memory of plot or perhaps the color of the cover, I am the one who supplies that title. That recall doesn't come with any degree, but rather with being well read and caring enough to pursue it, which as I'm sure you are aware, is merely a personal choice, not an educational or job requirement.

As for collection development, part of my job is to research and recommend titles for leasing for my branch. I also contribute titles to the selection committee on an ongoing basis for the permanent collection, mainly because new authors are often overlooked without this bit of prodding. Cataloguing? I have found errors in our catalogue with regards to translated authors and children's books classified as adult and vice versa. Would I be doing a better job with a degree? Maybe. But I'm certainly not incapable of doing it without it, and that is the point that you don't seem to understand.

Perhaps you are simply unaware that there is a shortage of degreed librarians. My library system has recently created a new position called "Librarian Trainee" because they have had problems filling vacant librarian positions. They are being a little more conservative than the Orange County Library you cited in your piece in that clerks are only able to apply for this new position if they are currently enrolled in an MLS program and have completed at least six classes, and they do not even offer the position until they have exhausted a search for a degreed librarian. Many libraries are migrating towards unconventional methods of filling librarian positions not only to save money, but also because they have needs that cannot be met through conventional means.

Your ignorance about the capabilities of clerks is baseless yet all encompassing. What you obviously perceive as intellectual elitism is actually just a prejudicial smear against those who haven't had a formal education through the graduate level. The virulence you spew not only hurts paraprofessionals, but also contributes to the negative stereotyping of professional librarians as being conservative, resistant to change, superior and smug.

Do you even see the delicious irony here? The patrons that use the library, the very ones you feel are too ignorant to know they are receiving this inept service, lump all of us together. To the overwhelming majority of the public, everyone who works in a library is a librarian.

I have no tolerance for prejudice or bigotry of any type. Personally, I feel sickened to be included in any group of which you are a member.

"PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
BY JOY PRESS
Literary Stars Fight the Second–Novel Syndrome

Everyone nurses a soft spot for the wunderkind—the Jonathan Safran Foer, Alicia Keys, or Harmony Korine who swoops fully formed out of oblivion and into Entertainment Weekly. The publishing industry has become as besotted with these instant prodigies as the music or fashion worlds. Where publishers once allowed a writer's voice to develop over long, wiry careers, now they're impatient for that instant payoff, the debut blockbuster.

All this mad love for the first novel could have long-term repercussions, though, dumping unrealistic expectations on the follow-up. The Second-Novel Syndrome has long been an occupational hazard in the world of letters, as authors struggle with writer's block, intense scrutiny, and the self-consciousness induced by sudden celebrity. Take Ralph Ellison, who spent more than 40 years after Invisible Man laboring over his unfinished novel Juneteenth (which Ellison's executor finally "completed" and published a few years ago). Or Harper Lee, whose output ended abruptly after she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, and who eventually became the literary equivalent of a hermit (she hasn't given an interview since 1964)... "

~~From the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Fall 2002

To read the complete article:
http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/178/press.shtml

Thanks to Morvarn for this link.

HOW TO BE A BOCA MOM
by Anonymous

There are many different kinds of moms in the world. Some are warm and nurturing, some strict and disciplined. Then there is the Boca mom.

It takes work and energy to become a member of this fabled group. Training begins long before marriage. It is advantageous to be born the daughter of a Boca mom, lessons learned by example make a strong impression. For those not so blessed, the task requires determination.

The right look is imperative. Hair should be lightened, or at least highlighted. The hours spent in a beauticians chair are good training for later play group gab fests. Weekly manicures and pedicures are mandatory. Nail enamel choices include a French for the extroverted and bright red for the smouldering, moody types. Should your genes have denied you long, strong fingernails, the miracle of acrylics can make up for the deficiency.

Breast argumentation is another popular procedure for increasing one's desirability. A wardrobe of tight tee shirts and sequined tube tops are required follow up to the operation. The metamorphosis can be completed with designer bags and shoes and the obligatory cell phone. A diamond encrusted model that plays the latest Broadway tunes is guaranteed to move you to the top of the trend setter list.

Dressed to kill and made up within an inch of perfection, our Boca woman is ready to become a Boca mom. All she needs now is a man. And since it is as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one, the choice is clear. The astute Boca babe will check out a mans financial statement before agreeing to the first date. This is not as callous as it may sound. The Boca man seeking the
perfect woman has already decided trophies are of greater value than intellectual discussions. Matches of this sort satisfy the wants of both parties, even if they fail to meet their emotional needs.

With a huge diamond and a band of gold securely on the left hand, the final phase begins. Working around her salon appointments and her husbands business schedule, she manages to conceive. This is when all her training is called into play.

As soon as the delivery date is known, she must set an appointment for her epidural, followed by the post birth massage and hairdressing. With that settled, she can begin to think about her child to be.

With a scant nine months before the arrival, she must organize well to accomplish all the needed tasks. First its off to the mall to register for all the high ticket baby items at the best stores. Then to the auto dealership to trade in that cramped Mercedes for a huge SUV. And in her spare time she has to interview potential nannies (no Scandinavians..they might want to sunbathe nude!), cooks, housekeepers and social secretaries. Its enough to make a woman hire a temp!

When the blessed event finally occurs and the video of the birth has been sent to everyone they know, the Boca mom can finally begin to enjoy all she has worked so hard to attain. There are story times available at bookstores and libraries. It is important to attend as many as possible so you can keep up on all the gossip. Proper attire requires you bring your cell phone to story time so everyone can gauge your importance by the number of calls you have to answer. Although the hosts believe this time is for the children, every Boca mom knows it is the perfect time to share adult conversation and compare the latest fashions. If the children miss a word or two of the
story, they can stay for the next one and hear it again. Besides, its good training for those little girls who want to grow up just like mommy!