Author: Corey Mesler

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Rebecca Wait’s The Followers

There’s something about cults, or large movements, that fascinates me. What makes so many follow a deluded, even dangerous, guru? Is it the charisma of the leader (Hitler and Manson — really? Charismatic?), or is it the need in a large percentage of the population for inclusion, even if inclusion flies in the face of sense and decency? Certainly, there are a lot of sad people who have a yawning lacuna in their soul, and there are religious doyens ready to take advantage of that. Why is religion so often the trap? Because people easily believe that something unseen, something mystical, will fill their void? But when the cult or movement begins to exhibit criminal, amoral behavior, why do so many still follow, even into the jaws of hell?

These questions seem to me to be at the heart of The Followers, the second novel by British author Rebecca Wait. The protagonists are a mother and daughter, Stephanie and Judith, who fall under the sway of a preacher who runs a “church” called The Ark, far away from the nearest town, on the remote outskirts of the dangerous and forbidding moorland, surrounded by bogs and forest.

Very often the leader of a cult presents himself (is it always a man?) as the only answer, the only prophet, the only hope. Such is the way Nathaniel controls and coerces his community. Everyone outside The Ark are living in Gehenna, in sin. They are bound for eternal damnation, fiery melting of soft tissue, punishments severe and eternal. Only Nathaniel has the ear of God. Only Nathaniel knows all and sees all.

Fear and faith form the backbone of this brainwashed sect’s “structure,” and its camp is somewhat reminiscent of the Branch Davidians’ compound, as Nathaniel is reminiscent of David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, who called himself the “final prophet.” It is male-dominated. Women are not allowed to go to town or to make decisions that affect the group: “Men held the power, of course,” Stephanie thinks. “Men were made for war and heroics, to fight and conquer for God. But women were made to suffer.” It is a communal and totalistic organization, where the smallest misstep, the briefest bad thought, is met with a punishment called a “session.” The description of Judith’s session is particularly harrowing. As a stubborn teenager, she does not fall so easily for the emotional and spiritual coercion going on, much less the physical punishment doled out for errant comportment. She is chagrinned that her mother is under Nathaniel’s thumb. Stephanie even lets Nathaniel rename her Sarah, but Judith refuses a new name. It is her strength and determination that make the chapters that take place in The Ark so compelling.

Judith is the book’s heroine. She asks one of the other children in the community: “Is your God a good God?” She seems, for a while, to be the only freethinker, the only one willing to ask such things. Initially, her mother questions Nathaniel, “You mean — I’m not supposed to leave here ever?” But, soon, under Nathaniel’s love and sexual attention, Stephanie becomes Sarah.

The Followers begins with a brief chapter called “After,” meaning after The Ark. Judith is visiting her mother in prison. The riddle of the novel then is — what happened? What did Stephanie/Sarah do, and how did they escape Nathaniel’s oppression and godly bullying? Wait masterfully slips in these short “after” chapters, deepening the mystery until she’s ready for the big reveal. When it comes, it is jolting, though inevitable. Overall the story moves like a thriller, with a deep undercurrent of spiritual mystery and dread of the unknown. The reader cheers for Judith and genuinely fears for her safety.

The Followers reminds me of Emma Cline’s The Girls, which I also thoroughly enjoyed. The Girls limned a Manson-like commune, using real details from that murderous madness for verisimilitude. The Followers is its British cousin, a story that seems so real, with empathetic characters and credible, convincing circumstances, you will be forgiven for thinking at times you’re reading true crime. It will be interesting to see what Wait writes next. Her lucid, sharp, and sinuously subtle prose is the perfect conduit for this mesmerizing tale.

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On Andrew Sean Greer’s funny new novel.

How amiable and witty this is, its wit as dry as the clicking of a clock. Insert joke here: Blank is easy; comedy is hard. One may be able to quickly compile a list of great books, but great comedic books would take more time. Wodehouse, yes. Russo’s Straight Man, yes. Peter De Vries, yes. Heller’s Catch-22, of course. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, definitely yes. Add Andrew Sean Greer’s newest novel, Less, to this august group. I love funny; it’s a rare commodity, even in the works of our best writers.

Furthermore, I love novels about writers — John Updike’s Bech books, Anthony Burgess’ Enderby series, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels, Powell’s monumental A Dance to the Music of Time — so this little tale hits me right in the heart.

Of the aforementioned, this slim, delightful novel feels most like one of Updike’s Bech books, its gay, peripatetic novelist-hero, Arthur Less globe-hopping for months to escape having to attend an ex-lover’s wedding. There is much humorous expatiation about airports and planes, escorts and awards, foreigners and fans. And the self-deprecating Less is at his best describing his feeling of outsiderness wherever he goes and whomever he goes with. It is said that most writers feel a fraud, especially around other writers, and Less has this malady in spades. “What does one ever ask an author except: ‘How?’ And the answer, as Less knows, is obvious: ‘Beats me’!”

From Mexico to Italy to Germany to France to Morocco he goes, here a reading, here a literary prize, here a trip by camel, and as Arthur Less travels in space he correspondingly travels in time, each stop initiating memories, good and bad, of love and lust, won and lost. He’s also approaching 50, a milestone he dreads like the Day of Doom’s tick. He thinks he will die alone. He thinks he is un-mateable, like a wild animal in captivity. And he is fighting becoming a bitter, cynical, oldish man. He thinks, “Sicilians talk about being struck by lightning. We know there’s no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning.”

Arthur Less feels the way many writers feel about being a public person as a “reward” for writing novels. His readings are sparsely attended. His assignments, one after another, seem designed only to make him feel ridiculous, rather than celebrated. “How has it come to this? What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth?” And, like many writers, Arthur is trapped inside his own head. He overthinks everything. “The brain is so wrong, all the time … Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.”

Following Arthur around the world is like living inside his Jiffy Pop brain. He is droll and affable, while inside he seethes with self-hatred, self-doubt, and a desire to know what it’s all about. Is 50 really such a liminal signpost that he keeps moving across international time lines to avoid what catches us all up eventually? We age. If age is only loss, how much less life can Less tolerate? His name is well chosen, of course, symbolic, ironic, useful in many of the book’s best jokes.

Along the way the reader will learn much about the writing life and about gay life and about capital “L” Life. The book’s first line, spoken by a narrator who remains hidden until it’s time for the big reveal, is “From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.” So, reader, is it? Is Arthur’s life better than he thinks it is? It’s an instructive way to read Arthur Less’s chronicle, and, I won’t be spoiling anything by saying, the trip is worth it. Greer is as entertaining as a riddle and as funny as a flood in a Fizzies factory. Oh, plus you learn the correct way to pronounce “Pulitzer.”

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Talking to the Tillinghast brothers.

Richard Tillinghast and David Tillinghast are brothers, poets, and children of Memphis. Richard is the author of Journeys Into the Mind: A Book of Places. David is the author of Sisters, Cousins, and Wayward Angels. In advance of their signing in Memphis, I was able to corner the Tillinghasts and ask them a few questions. They are eloquent — and loquacious — fellas.

Memphis Flyer: What was it like growing up with two writers in the house? Did both of you know you were going to be poets early on, and did you read each other’s work? Any competition there?

David: From the start, Richard knew that he would be a writer. My interests lay in other areas, such as sports and girls. I enjoyed hunting and fishing, while Richard was concentrating scholastically. I joined the Navy. I saw lots of the world.

Certainly, there is no competition because that’s in bad taste.

Richard: Competition? Well, of course, all siblings compete with each other, but in this case I would say not so much. In my last couple of years in high school, David was in the Navy and off at college, so we weren’t at home together. I don’t think at that time it was clear to either of us that we’d be poets. I was taking classes with Mr. Callicott and playing drums in a band, and my ambitions were to be a painter and/or a drummer.

I was still playing in bands [when] I went off to Sewanee, and it was only there that it became clear to me I wanted to write poetry and make my living as a college professor.

I’ve known the Tillinghast name for as long as I’ve been a bookseller, and I was told long ago that you are Memphians. Tell me the particulars and what Memphis means to you.

David: Memphis is our hometown, historical as well as actual; our 1888 home on South Cox was way out in the country then. Mother and her two brothers went to Central High School. My grandfather, A. J. Williford, was a prominent attorney in Memphis. I remember hot, sweaty summer nights eating watermelon at the Pig and Whistle. Some of us boys would ride our bicycles to the Malco Theater to watch Randolph Scott. Some afternoons, I would take the street car up to the Falls Building on Front Street where my father had an office.

Richard: Yes, even with the old New England name of Tillinghast, David and I are both Memphians. This identification gets stronger and stronger for me as I get older and now spend my summers at Sewanee.

Our father was a New England Yankee, and our earliest American ancestor came to Rhode Island in 1640. The Williford side of the family has been in West Tennessee since before the Civil War. When you grow up in Memphis, that’s what you are, a Memphian and a Southerner. Though I have traveled all over the world, I am very proud to be from Memphis. David and I both graduated from Central High. I was among those who hung out with Furry Lewis. Bill Eggleston was a friend, and his work epitomizes something important about our region, as do the paintings of Carroll Cloar and Burton Callicott. Jesse Winchester as a singer and songwriter, the great historian Shelby Foote, and Peter Taylor as a friend and mentor are also Memphians whose work means a lot to me.

And my favorite question to ask writers: whom do you read and, if apropos, who influenced you?

David: Of the yonder writers, there is Homer’s Odyssey; the letters of Peter Abelard to Heloise; and of course, passages from Shakespeare, the old English ballads. Moving sketchily forward, there is Bobby Burns, James Whitcomb Riley, Winston Churchill’s histories, W. H. Auden. The Georgian poets of the first war: Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke. Erich Maria Remarque, John Steinbeck’s stories, Hemingway. On a more immediate level, I was influenced by my mentors George Garrett and James Dickey, not stylistically, but through our everyday contact, which eventually developed into friendship.

Richard: What do I read? Here is my summer reading: Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks. Dennis Covington’s riveting Salvation on Sand Mountain. Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty. Two books by Sewanee graduate Jon Meacham: American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and Franklin and Winston. The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court by Peter Taylor. And I’m re-reading “The Bear” by the greatest of them all, William Faulkner.

Richard and David Tillinghast booksigning at Burke’s Book Store Thursday, July 13th at 5:30 p.m.

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Hey Hey: On Mike Nesmith’s memoir Infinite Tuesday

Things I knew about Mike Nesmith before reading this book: He was the best songwriter and most interesting persona in the Monkees. His mother invented Liquid Paper and made a fortune. He was one of the first musicians to play country-rock. And he invented MTV, making one of the first music videos to promote his song “Rio” and conceiving of a show devoted to such videos, a show he wanted to call Popclips.

First, a few personal remarks. The second album I owned was More of the Monkees (the first was Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow). I loved the “prefab four,” but my nostalgia for them is not what makes me still listen to them today. The made-for-TV band, against all odds, made some great music. I also own every solo CD Nesmith ever made, even the obscure ones like The Wichita Train Whistle Sings. I think he is one of the most unappreciated songwriters in pop music. I love his songs from the Monkees albums, from “Sweet Young Thing” and “Papa Gene’s Blues” to his ethereally beautiful “I Know What I Know” on their most recent album, Good Times. And I love his solo work, which I would put on a par with Stephen Stills’ or Lou Reed’s, to name two artists who started in a group and then made vital music afterward.

So, I came to his memoir Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff (Crown Archetype, $28) with high hopes. I was not disappointed. Nesmith, as narrator of his own life, is engaging, intelligent, lyrical, and sincere. And it doesn’t hurt that he has quite a story to tell.

Rather than a linear approach he imparts his narrative nonconsecutively, in well-thought-out vignettes and portraits. He name-drops Timothy Leary, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Nicholson, and Johnny Cash, among others, but through all his tales runs a humility and genuineness that is disarming. And, even when he’s not talking about the Monkees or his solo career or his movie star friends, the vignettes are still fascinating because of this honesty and because he’s such a charming narrator. He’s equally appealing talking about his mother, his friends, his study of Christian Science, his interest in quantum physics. He knows what’s meat and what’s fat, and the book is decidedly low-fat. And, eventually, it coalesces into a compelling chronicle, like a novel made from attractive mosaic shards.

If you’re looking for dirt on Micky, Peter, and Davy, you won’t find it here. Nesmith glosses over the Monkees years, mostly substituting self-deprecating feelings of otherness and disassociation for descriptions of on-set craziness or backstage peccadilloes. A reluctant TV star, he outlines some of the surrealistic events which created the show and, ultimately, led to its demise. He says “The creators of The Monkees may have thought they were creating a simple television property, a paean to the times, but what they were actually producing was Pinocchio. The show and all its parts and characters would come to life and begin to breathe and move and sing and play and write and think on their own. What had started as a copy of the 1960s became a fact of the 1960s. What had started as fanciful effect became casual fact.”

Along the way, he experienced some dark times, some periods of self-doubt and instability. He chronicles these gloomy days with grace and wit. Behind the accomplished rock star and actor lies a vulnerable human being, open-hearted and seeking, and I appreciated the opportunity to walk in his shoes for a while.

And, much later, discussing how he came up with the concept which would become MTV, about which he is characteristically humble, he says “To American eyes the little film was a white elephant, a trinket, fascinating and entertaining but with no apparent application among current television outlets. In the U.S., the music video had been born an orphan, without a place to be played.” That, as we know, changed, and a monster was birthed, a monster that would change how folks listened to or thought about rock music.

And, finally, here is a one sentence fractal that can serve as a sum-up for Nesmith’s sometimes absurdist, sometimes moving, sometimes funny, always diverting autobiographical riffs, “I tiptoed through my inner world looking for the rules that governed, being careful not to damage the tulips.”

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A Q&A with John Grisham

John Grisham, as we now know, is not just a writer of legal thrillers. Among other excursions, he has written a series of young adult novels, a novel about baseball, a nonfiction book about the death penalty, a novel about Christmas, and an excellent collection of Southern short stories. Sometime, mid-career, he became unpredictable, not just a thriller machine. I suppose we don’t expect writers of bestsellers to tamper with success, to attempt to find the outer limits of their gift. John Grisham is different. So, it was not extraordinary that his newest novel is closer to Donald Westlake than Scott Turow. What surprised and delighted me was that the story concerns a subject dear to my heart and one that has been my livelihood for the past 29 years, the buying and selling of first editions and rare books.

And after reading Camino Island and finding its antiquarian bookstore setting as comfortable as a warm bath — except for the, you know, illegal parts — I formulated a few questions for the author. He was kind enough to craft some thoughtful answers.

The Memphis Flyer: Much of your fast-paced story is set in the world of antiquarian bookselling, especially in its murky underbelly, where stolen manuscripts and doctored first editions are sold. I’m an antiquarian bookseller, though an honest one, and, as you might imagine, I found those parts fascinating. You obviously did your homework. Your discussions among the thieves and fences were peppered with the argot favored by used book dealers. Tell me a little about how you came to write a story set in this milieu.

John Grisham: I have been collecting modern first editions, along with a few older ones, for over 20 years and find it fascinating. I enjoy hanging out in used bookstores and chatting up dealers, and I’ve met some hardcore collectors over the years. Three years ago, during a long summer road trip to Florida, Renee and I were inspired by an NPR story, can’t really remember who it was about, and started kicking around plots for a mystery involving stolen rare books. I tinkered with it for a year or so, and last fall the story fell together. It was quite enjoyable to write.

Have you read some of the bibliophile mystery writers? I thought I detected a clever nod to John Dunning, and his detective, Cliff Janeway, in your story.

A few. Charlie Lovett is good, and he actually read the manuscript for Camino Island and found some areas that needed more work.

Your depiction of the heist of the Fitzgerald manuscripts, which opens the book, is worthy of Donald Westlake. Where do you get your knowledge of spy craft and the tools of high-stakes larceny?

I faked it all. I didn’t want to learn and sound too accurate for the same reason I stayed away from the Firestone Library at Princeton. I don’t want to inspire some misguided soul in need of an adventure.

Your protagonist, Mercer Mann, the authoress suffering from writer’s block, reads only women writers. I liked her a lot though — maybe your best female protagonist since Darby Shaw in The Pelican Brief. Is she based on anyone? And do you think of your bookseller, Bruce Cable, as a charming rogue, a sort of modern-day, bookselling Raffles? Should the reader find him sympathetic?

Mercer is quite sympathetic, especially as she slowly gets in over her head. No, she was not based on anyone.

Bruce is not sympathetic. He was developed as sort of a roguish character. Enough said. Don’t want to give away too much.

And, finally, without spoiling the ending, tell me if you might return to Mercer Mann, the reluctant infiltrator?

I doubt it. As you and I have discussed before, I find little attraction in sequels or more adventures by the same characters. I tend to forget about them as soon as I start the next book. Which, by the way, is clicking right along. Just wish I had a title for it. After all these books and 30 years of writing, the hardest part is still finding good titles.

Camino Island will be released June 6th.

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Dylan on Dylan

Chronicles: Volume One

By Bob Dylan

Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $24

Bob Dylan has written some of the most important songs of the 20th century. For one sequence of albums alone, produced over a mere three-year span (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding), he deserves a place at the top of any list of pop-music composers. And for this work for his songs! he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature.

But in the world of books, Dylan has made little impact, producing only one eccentric, impressionistic “novel,” Tarantula, in 1967. Until now. With the publication of this, the first volume of his autobiography, Dylan has presented a whole new side of himself: eloquent, candid (in his own fashion), and touchingly personal. It is Dylan emerging from the myth. It is the voice of the man, rather than the voice of the singer.

Much may be written about what Chronicles: Volume One doesn’t do. In this narrative, Dylan jumps from the folk scene in the early 1960s to the New Morning album in 1970. Nowhere does he touch on the years when he was the voice of his generation (a tag he refutes here). Perhaps he is saving those surely rich tales for a later volume. Even if he is not, one must celebrate what he is willing to tell. He has opened up his heart and given us a man who values family over fame, people over money. And his prose here is clean, sharp, humble, and poetic.

When he isn’t discussing his boyhood in Hibbing, Minnesota, or his feelings about being a husband and father, he is heaping praise on his early supporters and friends. About John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia records: “I would have gladly signed whatever form he put in front of me.” About singer Ricky Nelson: “I had been a big fan and still liked him.” About singer Dave Van Ronk: “He was passionate and stinging I loved his style.” And so on. His assessments about these early influences and compatriots sound, well, sweet. Overall, the man who surfaces here is smart, inquisitive, sensitive, bookish, and charming.

“I really was never any more than what I was a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad.” This is Dylan on Dylan, or perhaps Robert Zimmerman on the mythic Bob Dylan.

The middle sections of Chronicles are much darker and desolate. After early fame, we are witness to Dylan in the throes of despair. Yet he never sounds bitter, small, or whiny. Instead, he sounds like a man who takes responsibility for his own life, and in the end, that’s the most engaging message of this first volume.

Now there are two voices, two authoritative voices, Dylan has mastered. There is the singer, who can break your heart or kick you awake with songs like “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” or “Visions of Johanna” or “On the Road Again” or “Clothesline Saga” or “Watching the River Flow” or “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Dark Eyes. And there is the chronicler who has penned a frank autobiography.

In these disjunctive times, a vision this sincere and singular can offer hope, if only in the form of an artist’s cri de coeur. Bob Dylan’s story in Bob Dylan’s voice is, finally, inspiring. As Dylan sang, “People disagreeing everywhere you look/makes you wanna stop and read a book.” n

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TIGER FOOTBALL

A CORNER TURNED?

“The Toilet Bowl, that’s all it is.” That’s how my good friend Gordo McAlister, in his usual graphic fashion, characterized last Saturday’s contest between the University of Memphis and Army — each ranked in the bottom ten of Division One in many of the polls — while explaining his reasons for declining my kind offer of a free ticket to the game. “I’d rather watch grass grow,” he growled before hanging up on me.

Well, not a whole lot of grass was growing on the Liberty Bowl playing field on that brisk, picture-perfect autumn afternoon. But maybe, just maybe a football team was, as the University of Memphis comprehensively whipped the Cadets by a 38-10 margin that did not do justice to the Tigers’ complete domination of the proceedings. And now that they’re growing up, maybe, just maybe I’ll be able to talk Gordo into going to a game next season.

He may have stayed home Saturday to watch Michigan/Ohio State on the tube, but, amazingly, an incredible number of Memphians chose instead to come out for the show at the Liberty Bowl. Officially 20,906 were in attendance; even deducting a few thousand no-shows, that number is remarkable, given the fact that this was a battle between two bad teams going nowhere.

I have long argued that Memphis is first and foremost a football town, and that if the Tigers ever again has a winning season, they’ll easily average 40,000 a game. And if they ever were to become a perennial powerhouse, U of M football tickets would end up being scarcer than hen’s teeth. Give Memphis football fans a winner, and the Liberty Bowl would come to resemble Neyland Stadium, only decked out in blue not orange.

Even with the sorry excuse for a football season Tiger devotees have “enjoyed” this year, the U of M is a C-USA attendance behemoth. Take a look around the league last Saturday, and you’ll see what I mean. A mediocre Houston team could only draw 12,856 for its game against South Florida, but even bowl-battling outfits like East Carolina and Tulane could only draw 23,189 and 21, 832, respectively, despite first-rate (TCU and Southern Miss) opponents. And I recall our own game in Birmingham against UAB earlier this season, where the entire crowd could have easily squeezed into the Mike Rose soccer complex.

Let’s face it: this year’s Tiger MVPs are the fans, the folks in blue that never play a down but are there by the thousands, in blazing sunshine, pouring rain, and in constantly trying circumstances. U of M football fans, having taken the concept of “delayed gratification” to never-before-imagined levels, take a licking and keep on ticking.

But maybe, just maybe, the payoff is just around the corner. Assuming that Coach Tommy West can find someone who can play the offensive line (four of the five starters are seniors), 2003 just might bring an end to all this existential agony. The defense, young and inexperienced when the season began but significantly better in November than August, will return nine starters. And the team’s two big offensive guns — sophomore quarterback Danny Wimprine (who broke the U of M single-season passing record Saturday) and freshman running back D’Angelo Williams — are just hitting their prime.

Of course, nothing will change if the Tigers don’t find a cure for their desperate case of turnover-itis. The defense may well have pitched a shutout Saturday were it not for two first-half fumbles, and turnovers this season have already cost the Tigers 99 points. Regardless of talent, you can’t give away a touchdown and a field goal a game and hope to enjoy a winning season.

Saturday’s game in Fort Worth should be interesting. Having blown their national ranking by losing at East Carolina last week, the TCU Horned Frogs ought to be well-focused on the matter at hand.

But if the Tigers can execute the way they did in the second half Saturday, and hold onto the football in the process, Christmas might just come a few weeks early. And if ever a football team deserved a favor from Santa, this one is it.

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FROM MY SEAT

SPORTING THANKS

This is a week — more than any other — when we need to count our blessings. After family and friends, there are a few sports-related “gifts” I’d like to pause and appreciate.

  • I’m thankful for Memphis high school basketball. From Treadwell to Hamilton, from Ridgeway to White Station . . . if the local sports scene can be described as a machine, prep hoops is certainly the engine.

  • I’m thankful for the Kroger St. Jude, FedEx St. Jude Classic, and AXA Liberty Bowl Football Classic. I don’t care much for title sponsors but, hey, this is the 21st century and these three organizations are as professional as they come. Year in, year out, Memphis puts on a week-long sports festival . . . three times a year. No, we don’t have Wimbledon, the Masters, or the Rose Bowl. But find another city our size that can match these three events.

  • I’m thankful to have Shane Battier in Memphis. It can be hard — very hard — to root for NBA players these days. Somehow the percentage of miscreants in the NBA seems to dwarf those in the NFL, NHL, or major league baseball. Not only do I enjoy pulling for Mr. Battier, but I’d be happy for him to babysit my daughters.

  • I’m thankful for the leftfield bluff at AutoZone Park.

  • I’m thankful that my 3-year-old daughter, Sofia, can name two baseball players, and they happen to be Albert Pujols and Stubby Clapp. (And I’m thankful that she describes — without provocation — the San Francisco slugger who wears a dangling earring as “a silly man.”)

  • I’m thankful for Larry Finch. All due respect to Keith Lee, Andre Turner, Penny Hardaway, Lorenzen Wright, and the many other Tiger hoop studs. Larry Finch IS University of Memphis basketball . . . always will be. The U of M was right on in giving his name to its new training facility. All they’re missing now is the statue. Get well soon, Coach.

  • I’m thankful for Shyrone Chatman. Playing out of position at point guard, Chatman got the absolute most out of his abilities in leading the over-achieving 2000-01 University of Memphis Tigers to the NIT semifinals. Making the most of his abilities off the court, Chatman became the first Tiger basketball player in years to earn his degree last spring. Dajuan Wagner has a fat NBA contract and Penny Hardaway has a banner hanging from the Pyramid rafters. The fact is, the U of M needs more players like Shy Chatman.

  • I’m thankful for Tuesday Night Boxing on Beale. Where would we be without the New Daisy?

  • I’m thankful for memories of Darryl Kile’s curveball. You know how certain songs, certain smells will take you back to a special time, place, or person? Anytime I see a big-league curveball break three feet — straight down — I’m going to remember number 57.

  • I’m thankful for Joye Lee-McNelis. She’s been at the helm of an under-appreciated U of M women’s basketball program for more than a decade. She’s won five conference championships and sent two players to the WNBA. And she’s been wooed by outsiders year after year. How nice to have a familiar face build a local program, keep it clean as a whistle, and stick around to enjoy the fruits.

  • I’m thankful for C-USA basketball. No, it’s not the ACC, Big East, or SEC. And it’s struggling to establish its identity as a top flight hoops league. But you can do a lot worse than a group that includes Cincinnati, Marquette, DePaul, Houston, Memphis, and Louisville. Think about naming an all-time team, selecting only from those six schools. Here’s hoping DePaul and Houston find their way back toward the national elite. For that matter, here’s hoping the same for the U of M.

  • I’m thankful for East High football. Coach Wayne Randall has built one of the Mid-South’s finest programs and won a state championship . . . without a home field! Hollywood makes movies about this kind of stuff.

  • I’m thankful for 10 years with the prettiest calico cat you’ll ever see. We watched countless ballgames together, my lap as her box seat. And she was a terrific fan . . . never seemed to mind who won or lost. Rest in peace, Beale.

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    Art Art Feature

    UPDIKE’S STILL UP THERE

    Seek My Face

    By John Updike

    Knopf; 288 pp.; $23

    John Updike, perhaps America’s preeminent man of letters, like his contemporary Philip Roth, has become prolific in the autumn of his career. He, also like Roth, is producing some of his best work still. The high-wire act that is an Updike sentence is very much in evidence in Seek My Face, Updike’s 20th novel. These sentences could have come from Rabbit, Run or even Of the Farm, his earliest work — sentences that seem to accordion-out like intricate origami, sentences that are exhaustively beautiful.

    Seek My Face tells the story of Hope Ouderkirk, a semisuccessful, octogenarian painter. She is being interviewed by a brash young New York magazine writer, Kathryn, an occasion which brings about a self-examination for the artist as well as a recitation of her wide-ranging life. While the “action” of the story takes place in a single day, the flashbacks offer a time-capsule reflection on 20th-century art, a subject dear to Updike’s heart and one he has written about on numerous occasions but never before in fictional form.

    Updike admits to using two texts as reference: Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith and the anthology Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. It is useful to consider these jumping-off points for the novelist’s exploration of the innovative explosion that was modern art.

    Hope is a reluctant interviewee at best — she confesses to having “a wandering, frayed, old mind” — and the testy, contentious back-and-forth between her and Kathryn gives Hope (and Updike) an opportunity to expound on art, fame, and the creative spark. “Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery,” Hope muses, sotto voce to the reader, “the indeterminacy that gives art life.”

    The focus of the discussion is Hope’s life with her painter husband, Zack. The parallels to Jackson Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, are obvious and give the book a verisimilitude and center it would not otherwise have. There are other thinly veiled portraits of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, among others, but it is the fascination surrounding Pollock that’s given the primary spotlight. “He began to drip when?” Kathryn asks. “What do you remember of that moment? Did it seem epochal to you and Zack? Did he talk about it as something revolutionary?”

    But art is not all Updike wants to talk about, of course. Especially, in his later books, a spiritual dimension has entered in, a concern with religion. In Seek My Face, he makes Hope a Quaker. “Hope had loved herself,” he writes, “having been raised in the illusion of a loving God; she had found the facts of her body amazing, as they emerged from beneath the quilts and the Quaker silence concerning such matters.” And about an early teacher, Hope says, “The whole world comes to us, as we experience it, through the mystic realm of color. The Real in art never dies, because its nature is predominantly geistlich, spiritual. He had us believing that to make art was the highest and purest of human activities, the closest approach to God, the God who creates Himself in this push and pull of colors.”

    And, as usual with Updike, he gets all the details right. He may be the most “concrete” writer working, one who can make you see sunshine slanting through the window, hear the raindrops pattering on the skylight. He still cares about setting, what Iris Murdoch once called the “thingy world.” He is … well, painterly. He can make the creation of a cup of coffee seem a holy thing: “For her guest the Taster’s Choice undecaffeinated with its red label and friendly waist (the incurved glass sides in her bent fingers remind her of something: what?) .”

    In Seek My Face, John Updike kindles a fire for art in the reader — the art of his painter characters and the art of his novelist gifts. “The Real in art never dies.” This is both a statement of purpose and a prayer.

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    News News Feature

    THE FLOWER WILTS

    The Yellow Rose Cafe, a mainstay of the downtown Court Square area, will serve its last meal at the end of the month, ending a 30-year history of home cooking.

    Joe and Becky Keating, the cafe’s owners for the past 15 years, said the lack of downtown traffic forced the restaurant’s demise. “A lot of the offices that contributed to our clientele have moved out east,” said Becky. “And the spotlight on dining has shifted to Peabody Place and Beale Street. There was no way we could continue to stay in business.”

    The restaurant, located at 58 N. Main, has a staff of 10, including some cooks who have been with the restaurant 20 or more years.

    “You got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em,” said Becky. “It was a decision we had to make, and we will miss the many friends we’ve made over the years.”

    Ironically or not, on the next to last week of its existence, the Yellow Rose seemed to be drawing turnaway business, with the wait staff scurrying to keep up with demand. One diner after another commiserated with Becky Keating upon checking out, and she told each one, “I could cry.”

    The Yellow Rose’s last day will be Friday, November 29th.