Stanley Woodward is best remembered today for a wire he almost sent to Red Smith. Woodward was the sports editor for the New York Herald Tribune and Smith was his star columnist. One spring, according to “Red: A Biography of Red Smith,” By Ira Berkow,  “Woodward had been upset with the general sweet fare of columns” Smith had written. “Stanley was about to send a wire saying, ‘Will you stop Godding up those ball players?”

Woodward did not send the wire but Smith never forgot the sentiment. He repeated the story in Jerome Holtzman’s terrific oral history, “No Cheering in the Press Box.”

Woodward ran perhaps the finest sports section in New York after WWII. His Tribune staff included Smith, Al Laney, Jesse Abramson and Joe Palmer.

“Paper Tiger” is Woodward’s classic memoir. Fortunately for us, the good people at the University of Nebraska Press reissued the book not long ago (and it features an introduction from our man Schulian). Woodward’s gem is in print and it is essential reading. (Check out the “Paper Tiger” page at the University of Nebraska Press website.)

Please enjoy this excerpt. Woodward writes about bringing Smith, and Palmer–a writer who is also criminally overlooked these days–to the paper.

From “Paper Tiger,” by Stanley Woodward

Mrs. Helen Rogers Reid blew hot and cold on me at various times during my prewar and wartime career with the New York Herald Tribune. When I came back from the Pacific I felt I was in high favor. Not only had I written reams of copy about the nether side of the war but I worked largely by mail and so had not run up the hideous radio and cable bills the lady was used to receiving for war correspondence.

Mrs. Reid was extremely active in running the paper. She was the actual head of the Advertising Department but in the late stages of Ogden’s life she played a role of increasing importance in the Editorial Department. He started to fail in 1945, and his death occurred on January 3, 1947.

My first day in the office after getting back from the Pacific theater, Mrs. Reid invited me to her office and asked me what I would like to do for the paper. I believe I could have had any job I named at the time. But I asked merely to be returned to the Sports Department which needed reorganization. I asked to go back as sports editor on the theory, held by myself at any rate, that I would be moved out of Sports after the department had been put on its feet.

The first move I made was to install Arthur Glass as head of the copy desk. Our selection of news had been poor during the war and our choice of pictures was abysmal. Glass improved the paper the first day he worked in the slot, which was September 4, 1945.

At this time Al Laney was the columnist and didn’t like the job. He much preferred to handle assignments or to get up a feature series as he had in the case of “The Forgotten Men” before the war.

The first move I made was to attempt to get John Lardner to write our column. The first time we discussed it we renewed the old crap game argument and got nowhere. The second time I took along our publisher, Bill Robinson, and the talk was more businesslike. We met Lardner several other times but couldn’t come to terms with him. The fact was he didn’t want to write a newspaper column and kept making difficulties. So we dropped him, reluctantly.

Even before we talked to Lardner I had been scouting a little guy on the Philadelphia Record whose name was Walter Wellesley Smith. This character was a complete newspaper man. He had been through the mill and had come out with a high polish. In Philadelphia he was being hideously overworked. Not only did he write the column for the Record but he covered the ball games and took most other important assignments.

We scouted him in our usual way. For a month Verna Reamer, Sports Department secretary, bought the Record at the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square. She clipped all of Smith’s writings and pasted them in a blank book. At the end of the month she left the book on my desk and I read a month’s work by Smith at one sitting. I found I could get a better impression of a man’s general ability and style by reading a large amount of his stuff at one time.

There was no doubt in my mind that Smith was a man we must have. After I’d read half his stuff I decided he had more class than any writer in the newspaper business.

At first I didn’t think of him as a substitute for Lardner. Rather I wanted to get them both. When dealings with Lardner came to a stop I was afraid I would have to go back to writing a daily column myself, which I dreaded. I thought of myself at this time as an organizer rather than a writer, but Laney was anxious to have a leave of absence to finish the book he was writing (Paris Herald).

I telephoned Smith and asked him if he could come to New York and talk with me. We set a date and he arrived one morning with his wife Kay. She and Ricie paired off for much of the day while Smith and I discussed business.

It must be said that I was making this move without full approval of the management. George Cornish, our managing editor, knew I was looking for a man but was hard to convince when higher salaries were involved.

It is very strange to me that there was no competition in New York for Smith’s services. He was making ninety dollars a week in Philadelphia with a small extra fee for use of his material in the Camden paper, also operated by J. David Stern. Nobody in New York had approached Smith in several years. In fact, he never had had a decent offer from any New York paper. I opened the conversation with Smith as follows—

“You are the best newspaper writer in the country and I can’t understand why you are stuck in Philadelphia. I can’t pay you what you’re worth, but I’m very anxious to have you come here with us. I think that you will ultimately be our sports columnist but all I can offer you at the start is a job on the staff. Are you interested?”

“I sure am if the money is right,” said Red.

We adjourned for lunch and I told him about the paper and what I hoped to make of the Sports Department. I told him that I had lost all interest in sports during the war but now I was determined to make our department the best in the country.

“I can’t do this without you, Red,” I told him.

I left Smith parked in Bleeck’s and went upstairs to talk to George Cornish. With him it was a question of money and he blanched when I told him how much I wanted to pay Smith. I got a halfhearted go-ahead from George, but still I didn’t dare make the offer to Smith.

He owned a house in the Philadelphia suburbs and would be under great expense until he could sell it and move his family to New York. I suggested that we would perhaps be able to pay him an “equalization fee” until he moved his wife and children into Herald Tribune territory.

I went back to see Cornish and broached this subject. No one can say George wasn’t careful with the company’s money. He argued for a while but finally agreed that if we were to bring Smith to New York, it would be fair to save him from penury during his first weeks with us.

I was able to go back to Bleeck’s and make a pretty good offer to Red. I explained to him that his salary would be cut back after his family moved.

“But don’t worry,” I added. “You’ll be making five times that in three years.”

Of course, it turned out that way. As our columnist, Red was immediately syndicated. His salary was boosted within a couple of months and his income from outside papers equaled his new salary. Before anyone knew it he was making telephone numbers—and he deserved it.

I am unable to account for the fact that none of the evening papers of New York grabbed him. He could have been had, in all probability, for five dollars more a week than we gave him.

With him in hand I was able to let Laney take a few months off to finish his book while I slaved at the column, in addition to other duties. I didn’t want to put Red in too quickly. I wanted him to get the feel of the town first, and also I needed some of his writing in the paper to convince the bigwigs that he was as good as I claimed.

After Smith had been with us a month or so, I talked to Bill Robinson about making him our columnist. I wanted Bill to talk to Mrs. Reid about Smith so that Red would get away from the gate in good order. Bill had been reading him and was enthusiastic about his work. So not long after Smith had shifted his family to Malverne, Long Island, having sold his house, I told him that he was the columnist until further notice.

“I think that means forever, Red. And I’ll go right upstairs and see if I can get you more money.”

As a columnist Smith made an immediate hit and it wasn’t long before the Hearst people were showing interest in him. I told Bill Robinson it was silly not to have a contract with Smith. He agreed and it was drawn up at once. It gave him a large increase in salary and half the returns from his syndicate, which was growing fast. It now includes about one hundred papers.

I’d like to go back to the question of why Smith wasn’t hired by somebody else. My conclusion is that most writing sports editors don’t want a man around who is obviously better than they. I took the opposite view on this question. I wanted no writer on the staff who couldn’t beat me or at least compete with me. This was a question of policy.

I was trying to make a strong Sports Department and it was impossible to do this with the dreadful mediocrity I saw around me on the other New York papers.

The week the Smiths moved from the Main Line to Malverne was memorable. The kids, Kitty and Terry, were dropped off at our farm for a few days so that the parental Smiths could move in peace. I think the kids had a good time playing with our little girls.

Terry, who is now a bright young reporter and a graduate of Notre Dame and the army, was satisfied to sit on the tractor for hours at a time. To be safe I blocked the wheels with logs of wood and took off the distributor cap. The tractor had a self-starter.

With the Smiths established in Malverne, the next move was to get a racing writer. I wrote about twenty-five letters to people in racing—horse owners, promoters, trainers, jockeys, concessionaires, and gamblers. I asked each one whom he considered to be the best racing writer available to the New York Herald Tribune. The response was nearly 100 percent unanimous: “Joe Palmer.”

I asked Smith if he knew Joe Palmer. He said, “Yes, and he’s a hell of a writer.”

I found that Joe had a regular job on the Blood Horse of Lexington, Kentucky, that he was also secretary of the Trainers’ Association and was currently in New York tending to the trainers’ business.

I got hold of Bob Kelley, my old Poughkeepsie associate, and asked him if he would make an appointment for Palmer to meet for lunch in Bleeck’s restaurant at his convenience. Kelley had left the Times and had become public relations counsel for the New York race track. He got hold of Palmer and conveyed my message. Palmer answered as follows, “Tell that son of a bitch I won’t have lunch with him, and if I see him on the street I’ll kick him in the shins.”

I told Kelley that his answer was highly unsatisfactory and sent him back to talk further with Palmer. This time Joe came into Bleeck’s with his guard up. What he didn’t like about me was that I made a specialty of panning horse-racing. But once we got together we were friends in no time.

Joe liked the idea of working for the Herald Tribune. We came to terms quickly. It was agreed that he should go to work for us on the opening day at Hialeah, some months away. He needed the intervening time to finish his annual edition of American Race Horses.

I didn’t know at this time what a remarkable performer I had hired. Palmer turned out to be a writer of the Smith stripe, and his Monday morning column, frequently devoted to subjects other than racing, became one of the Herald Tribune’s most valuable features.

I was misguided in the way I handled Palmer. I should never have tied him down with daily racing coverage. He would have been more valuable to us if I had turned him loose to write a daily column of features and notes as Tom O’Reilly did for us much later. But Joe was effective whatever he wrote. He even did a good job on a fight in Florida one winter, though he hated boxing.

He and Smith were at Saratoga during one August meeting, and Smith persuaded him to go to some amateur bouts, conducted for stable boys and grooms. On their way home Palmer panned the show.

“I’d rather see a chicken fight,” he said.

“Why?” said Smith, outraged. “Chicken fighting is inhuman.”

“Well,” said Joe, “what we just saw was unchicken.”

Palmer was a big man physically and as thoroughly educated as John Kieran. Joe had earned his master’s degree in English in Kentucky and had taught there and at the University of Michigan where he studied for his Ph.D. He could speak Anglo-Saxon. His knowledge of music was stupendous and he would have made a good drama critic for any newspaper.

He had started his thesis at Michigan when he discontinued his education and went to work for the Blood Horse.

He first attracted my attention with a St. Patrick’s Day story in which he revealed that the patron saint’s greatest gift to the Irish was the invention of the wheelbarrow, which taught them to walk on their hind lefts.

Joe, himself, was of Irish decent and was brought up a Catholic. When he moved into a house in Malverne near the Smiths, he didn’t like the public education and sent his children to the parochial school. He decided on this course after a long talk with the mother superior. She asked him if he wanted his children instructed in religion and he said he did.

One day Steve and young Joe were learning the catechism. One of the questions was, “How Many Gods Are There?”

“That’s an important question and I want you to be sure to give the sister the right answer,” said Joe. “Now say this after me: ‘There is but one God and Mohammed is his prophet.’”

The story ends there. Nobody ever found out whether the boys told the sister what Joe told them. It’s a safe bet, though, that their mother, Mary Cole Palmer, touted them off Mohammed.

A few days before Palmer came to work for us, we carried a special story by him explaining his credo of racing and a four-column race-track drawing by the distinguished artist, Lee Townsend. The main point of Joe’s story was, “Horse-racing is an athletic contest between horses.”

He was not interested in betting or the coarser skullduggery that goes on around a race track. For a long time he wouldn’t put the payoff in his racing story.

“Why should I do that?” he asked Smith.

“Because if you don’t, the desk will write it in and probably get it in the wrong place.”

A few days before Joe went to work for us, Tom O’Reilly, another great horse writer, heard about it. He said, or so it was reported to me, “Holy smokes! Those guys will be hiring Thomas A. Edison to turn off the lights.”

Excerpted from PAPER TIGER by Stanley Woodward. Copyright © 1962 by Stanley Woodward. Originally published by Atheneum, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

You can order “Paper Tiger” here.

For more on Woodward, check out “Red: A Biography of Red Smith” by Ira Berkow and “Into My Own,” a memoir by Roger Kahn.

And read this about Joe Palmer:  blood horse.

(Thanks once again to Dina C. for her expert transcription.)

There won’t be a better book about the Yankees this spring than “Damn Yankees,” edited by Sports Illustrated veteran Rob Fleder. Consider a line-up that includes Frank Deford, Dan Okrent, Roy Blount Jr, Richard Hoffer,  Bruce McCall, Leigh Montville, Jane Leavy, Rick Telander, Dan Barry, Tom Verducci, and Steve Rushin.

Will Leitch has a hilarious article about the uncensored joys of watching a game in the stands at Yankee Stadium; Charlie Pierce offers a wonderful take down of Jerry Seinfeld’s glib “rooting for laundry” routine; William Nack and Michael Paterniti deliver elegant pieces about the Bronx Zoo Era team; Bill James gives us the 100 best seasons ever by a Yankee catcher, and J.R. Moehringer and Colum McCann come through with beautiful memoir essays. And then there’s our man, Pete Dexter, who writes about Chuck Knoblauch in such a strange, funny, and true manner that his story will stick with you for a long time.

The book will be out this spring. And it’s a keeper.

Elmore Leonard is back. Hot damn.

There was a good review in the Times yesterday by Cullen Murphy. It is about a new book on Georges Remi (aka Herge), the creator of Tintin:

What’s most distinctive about Tintin is the artwork. Hergé’s trademark ligne claire style, which developed gradually, dispensed with shading and relied on inked lines of uniform weight. To accentuate that line — “the true backbone,” Hergé would insist — colors were restricted to a range of relatively soft tones. Although the characters were cartoon figures, the backgrounds were realistic, even elegant. Hergé did a vast amount of research into cars, ships, airplanes, animals. His pacing and composition owed much to movies.

You can order “Herge, Son of Tintin,” By Benoit Peeters here.

There is an uneven but engaging essay about Joan Didion by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. I read some of Didion’s early non fiction when I was in college and remember not liking it at all. But I revisited her famous collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem a few years ago and was duly impressed.

I never thought that being a man had anything to do with why I don’t connect with Didion’s writing, and while the following passage from Flanagan’s article is a generalization, it got me thinking:

…to really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

I once watched a hysterically sycophantic male academic ask Didion about her description of what she wore in Haight-Ashbury so that she could pass with both the straights and the freaks. “I’m not good with clothes,” he admitted, “so I don’t remember what it was.”

Not remembering what Joan wore in the Haight (a skirt with a leotard and stockings) is like not remembering what Ahab was trying to kill in Moby-Dick.

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

I watched my mother dress stylishly throughout my childhood. She didn’t spend a lot of money on clothes though her tastes reflected the fashion of the moment–fringes jackets in the ’70s, shoulder pads in the ’80s. I remember what her clothing looked like, I can recall her flair for knowing how to look casual but elegant (in that oh so European way), but I have no idea what brands she bought. I never looked at the labels. I never cared about that stuff. I don’t know if she did either but she certainly would have known the difference between a famous designer and a cheap knockoff.

My Mother, somewhere in Africa, Fall 1966

Check out the entire profile. It’s worth your time, whether you care for Didion or not. And dig this reaction post at Forbes by Brett Singer. Also, here is a fine critique of Flanagan’s essay by Martha Nichols at Salon (with a good comment thread to boot).

Graham Greene was one of the first novelists that I liked. I think I read three or four of his books before I was twenty. I haven’t revisited him in a long time but he came to mind when I read about a new book by Pico Iyer. Check out this excerpt from The Los Angeles Review of Books:

It’s not of great cosmic interest that Graham Greene seems to be writing my life, even as I’m so proud of making it up myself. Or that he reads me better than many of the friends and family members who see me every day do. But what’s more intriguing is that all of us have these presences inside our heads, who seem somehow to shadow us, and in ways we can’t quite explain. “I can’t listen to Joni Mitchell’s Blue,” a friend once told me. “And I can’t stop listening to it. It’s as if she stole my diary and is broadcasting its secrets to the world.” “I’m almost afraid to see what Henry James will write in the next sentence,” another friend says. “Because it’s so close to my life that he might be telling me what I’ll do and think tomorrow.”

These days, in our virtual lives, this sense of spectral affinity may be more intense and unnerving than ever. Every other celebrity seems to have a stalker who feels he’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s other half, if only she would wake up to the fact; and many of us probably know more about Princess Diana or Tiger Woods, at least when it comes to their intimate lives, than about our siblings or parents. It’s almost as if we have one official life, in which we look and sound like our mother or father; but underneath is a more mysterious life in which we’re really closest to Zadie Smith, or that painter who’s produced our portrait without ever meeting us.

One of the writers who was most interested in this secret universe — we dream, again and again, of a place we’ve never seen in life, but almost never of the building in which we live; we meet a stranger at a party, and feel she knows us better than the old friends we came with do — was, as it happens, Graham Greene. At the age of 16, after failing to run away from the school where his father was headmaster, he was allowed (unusually for his time and class) to go and live for six months with a dream analyst in London, and the man’s glamorous wife. For much of his life thereafter he kept a careful diary of his dreams, meticulously indexed, and two of his novels, he said, came straight from dreams. The last book he prepared for publication before his death was a record of his dreams.

And here is a review of Iyer’s book in the New York Times Book Review.

Here is a column that our friend John Schulian wrote about Joseph Mitchell for MSNBC back in 2001. Enjoy.

By John Schulian

Not a holiday season arrives that I don’t think of a gray, clammy day long ago on Baltimore’s waterfront and a lost soul who told me about the woman who had given him his only gift in years: a Christmas card. It was just the sort of story I was looking for when I was making my bones as a newspaper reporter, and now that I have a better understanding of the forces that drove me, I imagine it was a story that Joseph Mitchell would have gravitated to himself. If you don’t know who Mitchell is, or even if you do, the following is my gift to you.

In a perfect world, of course, I’d put fancy paper, ribbon and a bow on “My Ears Are Bent,” a collection of his newspaper features from the 1930s that came back into print this year after a criminally long time as a used-book store treasure. Devotees spent years searching for it in the past because, frankly, Mitchell was worth the trouble -– one of the 20th Century’s most remarkable journalists without being a scandal-breaking Washington muckraker or a dashing, trench-coated foreign correspondent. His specialty was chronicling New York’s human exotica: pickpockets and wrestling impresarios, tinhorn evangelists and burlesque queens, counterfeit royalty and watermen who bragged of sitting down with a friend to eat a barrel of oysters on the half-shell after dinner. And hold the sauce.

Every once in a while, Mitchell would slip and interview a celebrity–the lusty Jimmy Durante, for example, or the memorably rude George Bernard Shaw. But he seems to have always atoned by finding a character like the hooker who explained her calling thus: “I just wanted to be accommodating.”

Mitchell’s greatest affection may have been reserved for saloonkeepers and their well-oiled customers, which leads me to believe he would have liked the characters I chanced upon shortly before Christmas 1973. I never learned the most important one’s name; to me, he was simply The Flier because he claimed to have flown jet fighters in the Korean War. If The Flier had anything resembling a benefactor, it was Uncle Pete Drymala, who ran a bar called Pete’s Hotel. And then there was the girl who had given The Flier his Christmas card the year before. He had to pull the card out of his pocket so he could tell me her name. Francesca–that was it.

The Flier, Uncle Pete and Francesca dwelled by the docks in an area called Fells Point, which had been spared from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 and from being plowed under when I-95 was built. Its reward for surviving, if a reward is what it is, now includes gentrified rowhouses and dives turned into bistros where, according to one review, the cell-phone generation can enjoy “honey-colored beer, steamed shrimp and sushi.” But all that has come to pass since The Flier wandered its cobblestone streets.

Back then, Fells Point was blissfully down at the heels, crawling with merchant seamen who figured no night was complete unless they got drunk, got in a fight, and got lucky with a local sweetheart. The Flier fit in perfectly, drinking white port wine that he bought for $1.25 a fifth, tax included, and pausing only to sleep in boarded-up buildings or to warm himself by the radiator in Pete’s Hotel. He drank at Pete’s, too, and when he got out of hand, Uncle Pete would 86 him, even at Christmastime.

There was an Edward Hopper quality about The Flier’s existence, and I see the same thing when I read Joseph Mitchell. The bleak, the stark and the unforgiving become somehow beautiful because they are in the right hands.

Story after story in “My Ears Are Bent” vibrates with Mitchell’s sense of wonder, for he was a young man out of North Carolina when he wrote them for two New York dailies, the Herald Tribune and the World Telegram. Soon after his anthology was originally published in 1938, he hired on at The New Yorker, where he remained until he died 58 years later, by then a seminal figure in literary journalism. The mature Mitchell’s grandest achievements can be found in a collection called “Up in the Old Hotel,” but as artful and profound as those pieces are, they can’t match the urgency and delight of his newspaper reportage.

At the dawn of his career, I imagine he felt the same way I did when I was breaking in at the Baltimore Evening Sun. My reporter’s notebook was a ticket to the kind of adventures most people with college degrees don’t have. I got tear-gassed by state troopers breaking up an anti-war protest. I heard a mother’s anguished cries after a shantytown fire at five in the morning. I latched onto pool hustlers who spun yarns about fleecing bus drivers and tobacco farmers. And I went looking for Francesca after The Flier showed me that Christmas card.

My search led me to Pete’s Hotel, and to Uncle Pete, who cashed the meager check the government sent The Flier every month, then watched out the front window as the inevitable happened. Sometimes The Flier drank up his money, other times his fellow stew bums stole it. Uncle Pete told him not to put all the money in the same pocket, but The Flier never listened.

It was hardly a scenario to generate Christmas spirit. Uncle Pete, however, wasn’t opposed to proving one of Mitchell’s pet theories: “…the saloonkeeper is apt to know the address or hangout of any citizen dopey enough or unlucky enough to be of interest to a great metropolitan newspaper.” He pointed at a woman sitting at the bar with three beer glasses in front of her, one full, one half-empty, one dead. It was Francesca.

She had made 30 the hard way, living on unemployment when she wasn’t stripping, but there was still a soft spot in her heart, and it was The Flier who found it. “I get mad at him when he sits out there and drinks all that lousy wine,” she told me. “But that don’t keep him from being a good person. He’s always been a good person, and he don’t bother nobody. That’s why I gave him the card. I gave it to him out of my heart.”

The sentiment was perfect for the season, and there was no diminishing it even when Francesca killed her second beer with a deep swallow and a belch. My head spun with the possibility of reuniting her with The Flier. The idea was so melodramatic it would have sent Mitchell running, but I clung to it until I realized The Flier had wandered off to a place that defied finding. It was just as well. He and Francesca had connected long before I stumbled into their lives, and the memory would get them both through another Christmas.

You can buy “My Ears are Bent” here. And here is an excerpt. Finally, here’s a review of “Up at the Old Hotel” by Schulian for the L.A. Times.

[Illustration by Nick Sung]

A friend sent this over. From a 1996 Charlie Rose Show featuring Roger Angell and David Remnick talking about the great Joe Mitchell.

Who knew? Heddy Lamarr was brilliant.

Here’s a review of a new book about photography and jazz.

You can buy “Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz,” by Benjamin Cawthra (University of Chicago Press), here.

[Pictures by Dennis Stock, Herman Leonard, William Claxton, Roy DeCarava, and Gjon Mili]

Here’s ten sports books from 2011 to keep in mind as you tackle that holiday shopping list:

1. “The Whore of Akron”

Scott Raab’s hugely entertaining memoir. I didn’t know what to expect, I thought it could just be a gonzo stunt. Then, after enjoying the first thirty pages, I wondered if Raab would be able to sustain the goodness for an entire book. Would he bang away on one note the whole time? Would the joke wear thin? Hardly. The book gets deeper as it goes along, without losing it’s light touch. A deeply moral, funny, and often moving work.

2. “At the Fights”

The wonderful boxing compilation edited by George Kimball and John Schulian.

3. “21: The Story of Roberto Clemente”

A fine graphic novel portrait of the great Clemente.

4. “Fenway 1912”

Glenn Stout’s definitive history of the making of Fenway Park. Not just for Red Sox Nation.

5. “Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel”

Leigh Montville+ Evel=and a good time had by all.

6. “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand”

A terrific collection of our man Schulian’s best sports writing. A must-have.

7. “The Extra 2%”

Jonah Keri astute take on how the Tampa Bay Rays compete against the monsters of the American League East.

8. “Flip Flop Fly Ball”

The picture book of the year from the one and only Craig Robinson.

9. “Sweetness”

Jeff Pearlman’s best book yet.

10. “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training”

Josh Wilker goes deeper into movies.

Here is a digitized recording of the great Flannery O’Connor reading her story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Here’s the text.

[Drawing by David Levine]

The writer Nik Cohn was profiled in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. A gifted critic of Rock n Roll, Cohn is most famous for this piece–“Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”–the basis of the movie “Saturday Night Fever.”

Thing of it is, he made most of it up:

“There’s nothing I’ve written that I’ve been able to reread in later years without deep, deep dread,” [Cohn] said, waving off a compliment. The prime example remains “Saturday Night.”

It’s hard now to believe anyone took it for literal truth. Its audacious artfulness makes most New Journalism look like court stenography. Vincent and his Bay Ridge posse were composites, based on the mods he knew in London a decade before. Cohn — who appears in the article as a shadowy figure in a tweed suit — never did spend much time at the 2001 Odyssey disco. That “Saturday Night” struck a deep nerve was not particularly comforting to its creator. “I found it very difficult to function,” he says of the aftermath, not overjoyed to be talking about it. “I completely lost my way and had enormous self-contempt. It knocked me off my trolley, and my trolley has never been the solidest base in the universe.”

…“When I was young and on the hustle, there was something that made people not want to talk to me,” Cohn admits, still savoring the turnaround. “So when people actually started talking to me, I thought, Wow, this is far more fascinating than all the stuff I made up. I realized you don’t have to create the myth. You don’t have to embroider. It’s all there.”

I’ve never read Cohn’s stuff on Rock. But I’m curious.

When he was twelve-years-old, Scott Raab saw the Cleveland Browns win the championship game. He was there, in person. No Cleveland team has won a title since, and Raab’s new book, “The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of Lebron James,” is partly about being a Jew and a Clevelander and it is about noble suffering.

This is a good bit:

I know: it’s only a game. But what a game. The Colts were 7-point favorites, on the road. Coached by thirty-four-year-old Don Shula–drafted by the Browns after going to college in Cleveland–they boasted the league’s best offense, with six future Hall of Famers, led by Johnny U at quarterback–and the NFL’s best defense. But Unitas threw two picks into the wind. Dr. Ryan tossed three TDs, and Jim Brown gained 114 yards. The Browns won, 27-0.

The official attendance that day was 79, 544, and not one of them would’ve believed that he’d never live to see another Cleveland team win a championship.

The Cuyahoga River catching fire?

Maybe.

Fish by the thousands washing up dead on Lake Erie’s shore?

Possible.

Cleveland a national joke?

Not bloody likely.

But the notion that generation after generation of Cleveland fans could be born and grown old and die without celebrating a title?

Get the fuck outta here.

I was there. I saw it happen. It gave me an abiding sense of faith–in my town and its teams–that will never fade, that no amount of hurt and heartbreak can destroy. All those fucking Yankees fans are absolutely right. Flags fly forever. Forever.

“The Whore of Akron” can be purchased here.

[Photo Credit: baseballoogie]

No Regrets: A Hard-Boiled Life

By John Schulian

The train to glory left without James Crumley, who seems to have been too busy examining life’s gnarly side to bother catching it. There are no best-sellers for him, no money-bloated deals with Hollywood–just hard-boiled novels that are better than anybody else’s because all those lost nights stashed in the margins make each one a survivor’s story.

Crumley has never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he knows how blood looks when it’s spilled against a backdrop of whiskey dawns, cocaine pick-me-ups, and wall-shaking sex. His is a wisdom acquired by bellying up to the bar in roadhouses where bikers, ranch hands and oil-field workers beat each other senseless for playing the wrong Merle Haggard song on the jukebox. It’s no life for the delicate, but the delicate don’t have a taste for Crumley’s novels anyway, so the hell with them.

The time is right for saying so now that Crumley has again unleashed Milo Milodragovitch, one of his two memorably unapologetic rogue heroes. Milo comes barreling back in “The Final Country” because he needs something to keep Texas and a woman who’s the queen of mood swings from driving him crazy. To tell the truth, he’d rather be home in Montana after reclaiming his father’s stolen inheritance and snagging some unlaundered drug money in the process. Failing that, he uses a sap on a sucker-punching lady bartender, knocks the teeth out of a one-armed man’s mouth, and almost twists the nose off a security-company executive’s face–all before the shooting gets serious. Crumley, for what it’s worth, says Milo represents his kinder, gentler side.

They’ve both passed 60 without a whimper, no problem for Crumley, but strange territory for a hero in a genre that avoids aging as if it were a homely blond. Be advised, though, that when readers first met Milo, in “The Wrong Case,” in 1976, he was in strange territory for a PI then, too–the modern West–and he survived nicely. So when he talks about the two white streaks in his hair early on in “The Final Country,” he isn’t worried. It’s like he says: “I’m old, babe, but not dead.”

Of course, he comes close to making a liar of himself when the simple job of tracking down a runaway wife puts him in the path of a drug dealer “no larger than a church or any more incongruous than a nun with a beard.” The drug dealer, fresh out of prison, is looking for a woman, too, and when he doesn’t succeed, he decides the next best thing is to kill a bar manager. In the midst of the mayhem, over drinks, naturally, he and Milo connect. So it is that Milo decides to help a guy who doesn’t look like he needs any.

The set-up is straight out of Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely,” which Crumley admits and which, when you think about it, is only fitting since he has been described as Chandler’s “bastard son.” Anyone who doubts the accuracy of that label should read Crumley’s 1978 masterpiece, “The Last Good Kiss.” With all due respect to Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and the genre’s other heavyweights, it’s the best hard-boiled novel of the past 25 years. Some admirers swear it is even more than that, comparing it to Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” To make their case for Crumley’s artistry, true believers don’t have to go any farther than “The Last Good Kiss’s” first sentence:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

The hero of “Kiss” is C.W. (Sonny) Sughrue, whose last name, as Crumley once explained it to me, is pronounced “sug as in sugar and rue as in rue the goddamned day.” Sughrue is a little younger than Milo and he isn’t as bright, but he’s a lot meaner, which comes in handy for a private eye wading through obsessions, sordid pasts and the dark places in men’s souls. When questioning a particularly difficult thug, Sughrue shoots him twice in the foot: “‘Once to get his attention…and once to let him know I was serious.’”

Culture critic Greil Marcus recalled that quote in the issue of Rolling Stone devoted to the September 11 attacks, as if to suggest that America can play as rough as any terrorists. But the quote’s presence so many years after it appeared in a novel that didn’t sell all that well also suggests an enduring fascination with Crumley. It’s not just that there’s enough demand for his six novels before “The Final Country” to keep reviving them as paperbacks; it’s that there are people who pay upwards of $300 for leather-bound copies of scripts he has written for movies that were never made. And there are even more people, it seems, who will gladly recall finding this expatriate Texan in his Missoula, Montana, lair and joining him in debauches worthy of rock stars.

Documentation of such events is hard to come by, if not impossible, but nothing Crumley has written or said in interviews discourages the telling of such tales. “I think there are more people who drink a lot in America than ever show up in fiction,” he said once, the implication being that he was one of them. And he said, and implied, the same about drugs. But there was a 10-year lull after 1983’s “Dancing Bear” that left the impression his excesses may have gotten the best of him. When he finally reappeared with “The Mexican Tree Duck,” he used the acknowledgments to thank his agent for sticking with him and his publisher for gambling on him. The sentiment didn’t sound like it was coming from someone who’d been lounging on top of the world.

Three years after that, Crumley delivered “Bordersnakes,” which teamed Milo and Sughrue for the first time. And now there is “The Final Country,” his finest work since “The Last Good Kiss,” a splendid balancing act between Milo’s sense of moral outrage and his flare for the outrageous. It’s good to know there’s still a private eye who can enjoy a ménage a trois and then face down a rich, corrupt Texan he sees as “a hyena in the rotten wake of the multinational prides.”

Crumley obviously has a full head of steam, and the news from his camp is that he’s deep into writing his next Sughrue novel, “The Right Madness.” It’s hard to say what’s driving him. Maybe he feels the dogs of mortality nipping at his heels, maybe he has decided to get the most out of his vast talent. Not that he has ever given the impression of someone burdened by regrets. He did, however, apologize the day he showed up 10 minutes late for a writers’ panel on which he was the cult hero.

“I lost my watch,” he said.

“Any idea where?” asked an unsuspecting straight man.

“Yeah,” Crumley said. “I threw it out a car window in El Paso in 1978.”

Crumley died in 2008 at the age of 68. This piece originally appeared on MSN.com (12/3/2001).

Check out these blog posts about how people organize their books. I’ve arranged my books by topic but am too lazy to do it by author within a topic. Sometimes, I do it by size, or I clump together one author’s titles.

Once a year, I might be inspired to clean the mess up but maintaining it is another thing. Plus, I’m forever running out of space so things tend loose any sense of strict purpose. What I need is more space (the New Yorker’s lament), or less books, or a nook or a kindle. But I can’t imagine not collecting more books. It’s how I was raised and I don’t see it stopping.

Course, there’s also the books that are stacked on my night table, but here’s a look some of my library.

Tonight at the Varsity Letters speaking series, Harvey Araton will talk about his new book about the great Knicks teams from the 1970s, and Scott Raab will discuss his latest, “The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of Lebron James.” They will be joined by True Hoop blogger, Henry Abbott.

Promises to be a fun evening.

A new book on the Doors, reviewed by Steve Zeitchik in the L.A. Times:

At first glance, the Doors seem to be an unusual object of study for Greil Marcus, the music critic and cultural historian who likes to draw connections between punk music and world history (“Lipstick Traces”) or Elvis Presley and the American myth (“Mystery Train”). The Los Angeles band is, after all, an act that these days mainly gets airplay for a few scattered hits such as “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” They wouldn’t seem substantial enough for Marcus’ intense gaze. And besides, didn’t Oliver Stone already spend too much time engaging us in a discussion about the Doors’ legacy?

But as he often does, Marcus dives deep, in this case into rare tracks, seminal performances and offhand interviews. The band of Morrison, Manzarek, Densmore and Krieger — referenced by last name only, like old high school friends (they are of course the late frontman Jim Morrison as well as keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger) — is in fact worthy of the author’s scrutiny. As he makes clear, this is a band “at war with its audience,” and thus merits a paradox-riddled Marcus-ian exploration.

Readers don’t need to be especially familiar with the Doors’ music to appreciate Marcus’ meanderings. But they’ll need to know, or at least quickly adjust to, the author’s unique blend of rock criticism, cultural commentary and first-person narrative, which once again takes the form of impression more than argument. It’s not often one finds a meditation on a song — say, the Doors’ ode to that woman fashionably lean and late, “Twentieth Century Fox” — wandering into a discussion of the Pop Art movement, post-feminist sexual politics and the author’s own childhood.

And also by Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

The best piece of advice I’ve heard someone give an aspiring rock critic is this: For God’s sake, don’t try to write like Greil Marcus.

It was meant as a compliment. Mr. Marcus’s style — brainy but fevered, as if the fate of Western society hung on a chord progression — is nearly impossible to mimic without sounding portentous and flatulent. This voice is so hard to pull off that 15 percent of the time even Mr. Marcus can’t do it. He takes a pratfall in the attempt.

But, oh my, that other 85 percent. Reading Mr. Marcus at his best — on Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Sly Stone, the Band, Sleater-Kinney, Dock Boggs or Randy Newman, to name just a few of his obsessions over the years — is like watching a surfer glide shakily down the wall of an 80-foot wave, disappear under a curl for a deathly eternity, then soar out the other end. You practically feel like applauding. He makes you run to your iPod with an ungodly itch in your cranium. You want to hear what he hears. It’s as if he were daring you to get as much out of the music as he does.

Mr. Marcus’s acute and ardent new book, “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” is his 13th and among his best. I say this as someone who has never cared deeply or even shallowly about the Doors, a band that to my ears (I was 6 in 1971, the year Jim Morrison died in Paris) has always been classic-rock sonic wallpaper.

And here is a recent profile of Marcus by Sam Whiting in the San Francisco Gate.

[Photo Credit: SF Gate]

My grandmother on my mother’s side had dementia and spent the last years of her life in a home. I was told that she liked to bite people. I never saw her during that time–she was in Belgium, I was here in New York–but hers is the only experience I have with Alzheimer’s. I got to thinking about her as I read Charlie Pierce’s beautiful memoir about the disease, his family curse, which claimed his father and four uncles, and which may eventually claim  him, as well.

Here is an excerpt:

The waking dream is of a dead city.

There was a great fire and the city died in it. I am sure of that. I can see the smoldering skyline, smoke rising from faceless buildings, flattening into dark and lowering clouds. I can hear the sharp keening of the scavenger birds. I can smell fire on damp wood, far away. I can feel the gritty wind in my eyes. I can taste the sour rain.

The waking dream comes upon me when I forget where the car is parked, or when I buy milk but forget the bread, or when I call my son by my daughter’s name. Wide awake but dreaming still, I walk through the ruined city.

When it happens, I remember. I remember everything. I remember anything. For years, I have been a walking trove of random knowledge, but I’ve come not to believe in the concept of trivia. I do not believe that anything you remember can be truly useless because I have seen memory go cold and dead.

“Why do you know stuff like that? people ask.

I smile and shrug. I do not tell them about the relief I find in remembering that Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley. Not to remember Leon Czolgosz is to realize that one day you may not remember your son.  Leon Czolgosz goes first, and then your children. Not to remember is to realize that the day will come when you cannot find your way back home, that the day will come when you cannot find the way back to yourself. Not to remember is to begin to die, piecemeal, one fact at a time. It is to drift, aimlessly, deep into the ruined city, and never return.

…There’s a game I play now, when the waking dream comes. I make a deal with the disease. All right, I say. I will allow you to have some of my memories. You can have my first polio shot, all the lyrics to “American Woman,” two votes for Bill Clinton, and both Reagan administrations.

Leave me my children’s names.

Let me know them, and you can have all four Marx Brothers.

This is not clinical. I know the disease does not work this way. But sometimes, when the waking dream comes and I can feel the wind all gritty on my skin, I play this game anyway, and I am very good at it. I was born to play it. I was raised to believe that truth is malleable, and that you can bend it so that even its darkest part can be shaped into the familiar and the commonplace. I can play this game. I can play it well.

Makes you appreciate the moment, this moment, for what we have.

You can order Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer’s Story, here.

[Photo Credit: Best of Rally Live and  Jason Langer]

Over at How To Be a Retronaut, check out this gallery of lesbian pulp fiction (1935-’58):