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Enigma, Georgia was a dead end. The courthouse had been built square in the middle of highway 229 where it stopped abruptly on the edge of Big Harrikan Swamp like a cut ribbon.

This is geography as metaphysics, and I can never read about the Big Harrikan Swamp without thinking of it. William Gay’s horrifying Twilight followed Crews into the literary Harrikan. Now Crews, who died on March 28 at age 76, has followed Gay all too closely into that bigger, scarier Harrikan that eats us all.

Before that was Barry Hannah, and before that Larry Brown. It’s hard not to notice the way the obituaries make all of these writers sound the same, when they don’t in their own prose. An excessive journalistic focus on their hard-scrabble lives creates the illusion of a school: the rough-and-tumble “Southern Writers.” It’s true enough that the manners described by Hannah, Brown, Gay, and Crews were those of the mid-to-late twentieth century South. However, the mystery each grasps at in his own way extends beyond any real-life coordinates. In Crews’ case, when we look past the haggard face and the thrilling biography full of fights and fornication, we find a fictional world closer to the Eastern Europe of Kafka and Hrabal than to today’s good ole boy.

I first heard about Crews when I was trying to write a novel about people I’d known when I was living in South Carolina with a stripper several years my senior. I was embarrassed of my novel and of South Carolina. I’d tried my hardest to get the hell out of there — to become unSouthern. But as any Southerner who is a writer and an exile knows, it only really gets in your blood once you’re gone. I wasn’t  trying to convince myself I didn’t hate it, like Quentin Compson; I was trying to convince myself I did. A friend, seeing my struggle, suggested I try Harry Crews.

I picked up A Feast of Snakes and was astounded by how radically unSouthern its South was. The book had all the tropes of a “Southern Novel,” sure — alliterative names, bootleg whiskey, dog-fights — but it pushed them so far as to blow them to kingdom come. Which was what I’d been waiting for. I’d read a ton of Faulkner and all of Flannery O’Connor, but, with apologies to Faulkner, the past is, after a certain point, past. (Today, it’s hard to believe that when O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, nobody could understand what she was saying. Southern kids text “OMG” like everyone else.) Crews’ book had come out the year I was born, and yet, as I read it at the turn of the millennium, I saw an old coot way out-doing what I thought was new; this wasn’t past at all. Joe Lon, Berenice, and all the snake freaks, dog-fighters, and castrated cops pushed the real South I knew into an ecstatic, rhapsodic space. It was right next door and out of this world.

In a lot of ways, Crews’ irreverence toward regional tradition is to be expected. With World War I, generation displaced region as the primary literary category, Malcolm Cowley once argued. This seems pretty sound today. We don’t really talk about “Midwestern literature” post-Sherwood Anderson (or maybe Saul Bellow). “New England literature” sends us all the way back to Emerson and Thoreau. Yet you still hear “Southern Literature” all the time. It resounds like the drone-string of a banjo every time one of these old white rebel novelists dies.

There is still plenty of debate about the implications of the term. Marc Smirnoff, editor of the Oxford American, recently wrote a controversial essay attacking an upstart, upscale rival, Garden and Gun, for “white washing” the South. I like Garden and Gun, but I loved Smirnoff’s attack — except that much of his criticism applies equally well to his own pages. Why does the Oxford American have to be a magazine of “good Southern Writing?” It might not fetishize the South in precisely the same way as Garden and Gun (or Southern Living, to which Smirnoff compares G&G), but it still fetishizes it. There are amazing writers in the South — Suzanne Hudson is the best, in my opinion; seriously check out In A Temple of Trees — but they aren’t good because they’re Southern. So maybe the most fitting tribute we could pay to Harry Crews’ achievement is to bury the term “Southern Literature” alongside him.

But we need Southern Lit, you might say. The South is different — they’re crazy down there — and we require a certain quota of drunk, hard-living scribblers in order to understand them. I’d reply that that’s precisely the reason Southern Literature should be kicked to death like the dog, Tuffy, in Feast of Snakes — with a vicious brutal love. Because it is not the job of Harry Crews to school you on the quaint anthropology of a foreign region or to make you feel better about living there. It is his job to take you to a different Georgia, Enigma and Mystic, a Georgia of the mind. Crews is not a romantic writer, but his works are now being romanticized — and civilized. The Southern Lit industry tells us what to expect when we read these dead gritty Southern white dudes. But the only way to do justice to the  sledgehammer prose of Crews — to allow it to do its work — is to kill off the genre, sacrificing the adjective “Southern” for the sake of what really matters here, which is Literature.

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The wind was blowing as morning broke over Beirut. In the kitchen, I poured a glass of milk for our daughter. Firing up the iPhone, there it was: New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid had died on assignment in Syria. He was 43 years old.

“Kelly!” I hollered, running down the hall, into the bedroom, where my wife was entombed in warm sheets. “Anthony Shadid is dead.”

She shot out of bed, ran to her computer, and a few minutes later was filing a news spot for NPR. About the death of a man she’d sat on a panel with, a guy who’d met her parents, a neighbor of hers in Baghdad, a colleague in the Middle East, and one of the best reporters in the business. He was also a father of a kid our daughter’s age, and one of the main reasons we thought it was a good idea to move to Beirut.

In a daze, I put Loretta into fresh clothes and watched Kelly pace the room. Rain came down in sheets. We were late for school, and I loaded Loretta into the stroller.

“Daddy, I’m cold,” she said. “It’s bad out there.”

She was right: A new squall was rearing up, water slapping against the pavement, the storm drains overflowing. The kind of day you dread.

According to reports, Anthony was allergic to horses. He had asthma. He and photographer Tyler Hicks squeezed through barbed wire on the border with Syria and Turkey. They would be traveling with horses. Anthony had trouble breathing but recovered after resting. Days later, on the way back out of Syria, his lungs apparently gave out. Tyler says he tried for 30 minutes to revive him, but Anthony was dead. There would be an autopsy in Turkey.

At my daughter’s school, I held Loretta’s hand, walking in a daze. I was confused to find an administrator waiting for me with open arms. She smiled, clapping me on the back.

“Congratulations!” she said. “You should be so proud.” What? Of all the mornings, Loretta had just been accepted into the school’s exclusive kindergarten.

In a steady rain, I stood outside, holding the acceptance letter, suddenly bereft. Where did Anthony’s son go to school? The letter in my hand began to turn to mush, and my chest tightened with grief.

You could read any one of Anthony Shadid’s recent dispatches and see he was a man who told the story with heart, who did whatever it took to get it right. The Middle East isn’t an easy place to work, and everyone was in agreement: no hands were as deft as Anthony’s.

Siting there in my living room, my wife about to cry, I tried to picture his empty shoes, knowing it was just as hard to imagine them ever again being filled.

Then Kelly picked up the phone. It was a colleague. They had been in conversation the other day about crossing into Syria. Now what? I shuddered, for his family, for my family, and for everyone else, too.

RIP.

Image: Luciana.Luciana/Flickr

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I have been one of the few to extract a plausible living from a bookshop. When I was hired to work at Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Whitman had recently taken over running the place from her father, George. She wanted a permanent staff to confront the multitudes who flooded in on a daily basis, and she knew a good salary would keep people around. I was glad Sylvia was my boss. She was sweet and even tempered, while George was known to be irascible and unpredictable. Furthermore, everyone told me that George “didn’t like men.” (At one of his heralded Sunday breakfasts, he spied a single boy among the crowd of young female admirers and remarked, with narrowed eyes, “There’s a weed in my flower garden.”)

My shift lasted from 6 p.m. to midnight. Sylvia warned me that George often came down in the evening, after she’d gone home, to engage in sabotage. Father and daughter were embroiled in a simmering conflict over “improvements.”  Telephone, or cash register, or books organized by genre  – George was revolted by the idea. A few weeks earlier, under orders from the French authorities, the famously-treacherous staircase, described by Anaïs Nin as “unbelievable,” was taken down and replaced by a wider, sturdier, more conventional thing. Enraged, George attacked it with a hammer. The night of my first shift, I sat at the register, nervous that he would renew his assault.  What should I do if he appeared with that hammer again? But when he turned up midway through the evening, it was not the stairs he had in mind. A friend was coming from Atlantic City. We needed another bed! Ignoring the line of waiting customers, George ordered me to climb out onto the dilapidated roof (of the 16th-century building) to retrieve a piece of rotting plywood, skewered with nails. I obliged, of course. Later, he brought me gluey pancakes, which I clandestinely flushed down the toilet.

When readings were held outside the shop, George would sometimes throw chewed pieces of chicken out the fourth-story window. This was a snack for Colette, the shop dog. We all prayed the scraps would not fall on the author. George was thrillingly indifferent to appearances.  When Bill Clinton visited, he descended in his pajamas to inform the former president that he had “betrayed his principals,” by executing a mentally-disabled man during his tenure as governor of Arkansas.

George was epically and, at times, autocratically uninterested in anything convenient, orderly, or efficient. Cell phones? Computers? Kindles? No thanks. If we organized the books, he disorganized them. If we brought in the cleaners, he was livid. Cockroaches roamed and flourished. The wishing well was raided constantly by gypsies. George didn’t care; as long as people had books.

Over the course of 60 years, he gave shelter to almost 40,000 people, many of that desperate genre: the aspiring writer. When I worked at the shop, we would often find scraps of paper under the stairwell that revealed themselves to be thank you notes to George from people like Langston Hughes or Graham Greene or Jacqueline Onassis. And so I, and the many thousands of others who passed through, add our not-quite-as-illustrious thank you notes to theirs.

Photo courtesy of Harriet Lye.

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My first reaction on hearing this morning about the death of Christopher Hitchens was not one of shock–obviously, we have all known for some time that this was coming–but one of despondency. What, I immediately thought, are we supposed to do now? Hitchens was, and still is, an indispensable person, a completely necessary man. You didn’t have to agree with him on everything in order to recognise this (he made it more or less impossible, in fact, for any one person to agree with him on everything). Like almost everyone I know, I thought he was very wrong on a number of major issues, but that didn’t stop me wanting to read him, and listen to him talk, and it didn’t stop me from admiring him greatly. The whole point of Hitchens–a major element of his necessity–was that when you disagreed with what he said, you really disagreed, and when you agreed, you wished you had said it yourself. Either way, it was necessary to hear his opinion; the matter in question, whatever it was, hadn’t been fully aired until Hitch had rolled up the sleeves of his off-white linen jacket and got stuck in.

He was the embodiment of the public intellectual, a gifted and prolific writer who was also one of the most gifted and prolific talkers in the English-speaking world. Perhaps the saddest part of his slow dying was the moment, last April, when he lost his voice. His actual physical voice, perhaps even more than his writing, was the substance of his cultural presence. In an essay published in Vanity Fair shortly after this happened to him, he wrote of how an editor at The Guardian once gave him what he saw as an invaluable piece of advice–to “write more like the way you talk.” For most of us, this would be extraordinarily poor counsel, but for Hitchens it turned out to be very useful. Anyone who met him was inevitably struck by the sheer authority and eloquence of his speech, his ability to talk in perfectly formed sentences, with audible parentheses and semi-colons, and (seemingly but not actually) premeditated paragraphs.

I met him only once. It was June 16th, 2007–Bloomsday–and he was in Dublin to promote his book God is Not Great, which had just hit the top of the New York Times bestsellers list. Back then, I worked for a magazine called Mongrel which was run by a couple of friends of mine, and they called me and asked if I wanted to interview Hitchens. I have never in my life answered a question so vehemently in the affirmative. I went along to his hotel the following morning. Within seconds of his opening the door and sitting me down at a table in the small hotel room, he announced that he needed to use the toilet. Instead of closing the door to the en suite, however, he kept it wide open and talked loudly and authoritatively over the sound of his own micturition. He was enthusing about the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, who was due to pick him up after the interview and run him out to a party at the home of U2’s manager Paul McGuinness, and whom he claimed was one of the greatest conversationalists he knew, “maybe even better than Mr. Rushdie.” I remember thinking (and later writing) that it took a particularly potent kind of charisma to allow a person to engage in such concentrated namedropping, urinating all the while, and still manage to come across as charming. Hitchens had that kind of charisma. It’s still a source of stinging regret that, when he asked me what I wanted to drink, I opted timidly for a small bottle of white wine from the minibar rather than joining him in the Johnny Walker Black he’d ordered up from room service. It felt a little early in the day for the hard stuff, I think was my rationale. More fool me.

There is no question of anyone coming to occupy anything like the cultural position he created for himself. One of the surest signs of his greatness, for me, is the reaction I have to seeing people trying to bite his contrarian style. I feel sorry for them; it simply can’t be done. Only Hitchens could do what he did. Only Hitchens could write a book-length assault on the reputation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta–denouncing her as, amongst other things, a “lying, thieving Albanian dwarf”–and come out of it looking like the good guy. Only Hitchens would have the audacity, and the intractability, to appear on Fox News the day after the death of the televangelist Jerry Falwell and remark that “if you gave him an enema you could bury him in a matchbox.” We expected a spectacle, of course, and we usually got one, but he was much more than a contrarian exhibitionist. He was a superb writer, and a ferocious advocate of reason, intelligence and intellectual autonomy in a cultural marketplace that is often a rummage-sale of received ideas and half-considered positions. He was also, let’s not forget, an excellent literary critic. He was a sort of combination of John Lydon and Lionel Trilling, and he made that combination seem like a perfectly natural one. As frequently, as bluntly and as eloquently as he wrote about his illness, and as long as we have known that we would eventually lose him, his death still feels like an unexpected loss. It’s too early to measure the extent of it, but we’ll start taking that measurement soon enough; we’ll start as soon as we are compelled to ask, on the occasion of some catastrophic event or monumental political stupidity, “what would Hitchens say about that?”

Jonathan Swift–an Irishman and a cleric with whom this English atheist nonetheless shared some common ground–wrote his own epitaph, perhaps because he didn’t trust anyone else not to mess it up. It’s inscribed, in Latin, on a plaque near his burial site in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. W.B. Yeats translated it into English as follows:

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

It’s always a sign of a grim juncture when you’re reduced to quoting Yeats, but it seems particularly apt here. Christopher Hitchens has sailed into his rest. Imitate him if you dare.

(Image: Hitches? Hitchens! from allaboutgeorge’s photostream)

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Public domain e-books are dear to me as a writer (where would I be without my fixes of Dreiser and other favorites?), and the man most responsible for them is now dead.

Vinton Cerf and colleagues gave us the Internet, with Al Gore cheering them on. But it was Michael Stern Hart of Project Gutenberg who popularized the Net as a book library. He died September 6 at age 64 at his home in Urbana, Illinois, after a long series of health woes, with more than 36,000 free Gutenberg books on the Web, in 60 languages, as his legacy. How to take this personally? I, too, have devoted years of my life to e-books, and coincidentally my middle name is the same as Michael’s last. He and I were born just weeks apart. In September 2008, I suffered a heart attack, and in the same month in 2011, he died of one.

Like many boomers, both of us distrusted Washington politicians. But Michael outdid me. He passionately opposed my vision of a well-stocked national digital library system, a priority to me as an ex-poverty beat reporter who had seen too many bookless homes but knew that cheapie color tablets would one day reach Kmart. Even William F. Buckley, Jr. could go for that one, in two “On the Right” columns, despite my port-side politics. But Michael’s fear of Washington knew no bounds.

Michael also loathed my advocacy of the ePub standard for the formats of digital books, now used by Apple, Sony, and Barnes & Noble (albeit often gummed up by proprietary copy protection).

As both a reader and editor-publisher of the TeleRead e-book site, I hated the Tower of eBabel that the industry had created before ePub. You don’t need Company X’s glasses to read paper books by author Y. Shouldn’t even commercial e-books be the same, regardless of Jeff Bezos’ proprietary tendencies? Michael somehow never understood.

But regardless of major differences about e-books and life in general–the man so often thrived on chaos, whether technical or organizational–how could I not respect Michael’s vision and idealism? Not to mention his tenacity. Michael’s very first digitization, on July 4, 1971, was of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Even with optical character recognition technology used today, it can be challenging for volunteers to produce accurate digital editions in ePub and other text-rather-than-image formats. Automation will take you only so far if you want a top-notch reproduction. Distributed Proofreaders, an allied group, originates many of the titles and is now Gutenberg’s main source of books.

Michael’s big gift to the cosmos wasn’t just the creation of the Gutenberg Web site and the accompanying communities of diligent volunteers. He also encouraged other sites to spread the books around–realizing that the best way to defend the public domain was to promote the popular use of it. Google may make the most money off the classics, and at the most lofty level, let’s hope that the Harvard-based Digital Public Library of American can succeed; just don’t forget the real Godfather of free E.

Certain academics and librarians have knocked the Godfather’s books for less than perfectly accurate reproductions of the originals. Scholars should care. But what about another kind of preservation? Michael helped keep the classics much more on the minds of the young than they would otherwise be.

The 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the ultimate anti-Michael, anti-library law or close to it, outraged many beneficiaries of his toil. Washington doled out 20 more years; that meant a writer’s life plus 70 and still more for corporately authored works. Even and especially as a writer, I agreed with Michael. Copyright exists to spur us on, and last I knew, F. Scott Fitzgerald was not churning out Great Gatsby sequels from St. Mary’s Cemetery. Some posthumous royalties for wives, sons, and daughters of writers for a reasonable time? Definitely, as I myself see it. But, to cite Michael’s wit from years ago, America does not need a “copyright gentry.” Without him around to popularize digital freebies, the Bonoized terms might have stretched even longer. Of course, if e-books hadn’t existed, not to mention Walt Disney’s profits to safeguard, maybe Congress would never have passed the so-called Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the first place. Ironically Michael’s free e-books helped put the medium on the radar of lawyers keen on monetizing as many bits and bytes as they could, schools and libraries be damned.

Alas, Michael was too wild as a potential lead plaintiff for Lawrence Lessig, a noted copyright lawyer, to use in lawsuit against the Bono Act (yes, named after the late entertainer), so another worthy purveyor of free books, Eric Eldred, substituted.

The fight reached the Supreme Court, but, sadly, they lost.

Not everyone loves the public domain. Gutenberg’s giveaways have unnerved even some writers without multi-million-dollar estates awaiting their families. Imagine having to compete against dead geniuses whose brilliance the masses can download at no cost. But as an author, I’m better off for Michael’s digitization work. I can more easily draw inspiration from Dreiser’s compassion and realism, visit and revisit the Dickens classics I missed in school, or instantly look up a quote from The Education of Henry Adams.

To teach or write literature, you must read it first, and not just modern books; and Michael vastly simplified the process.

Even some publishers may have come out ahead, since lively classics like Jules Verne’s can encourage readers to go on to modern novels and actually shell out cash. Goodwill and advertising and other commercial possibilities are hardly the only reason why Google, Amazon, Apple, and others carry free public domain writings on their Web sites.

Beyond the world of e-publishing, imagine what Michael’s thousands of free e-books mean to, say, community college students without the cultural and intellectual advantages he enjoyed growing up.

Michael’s own parents were professors at the University of Illinois, his father a Shakespearean scholar, his mother a mathematician. Alice Woodby survives her son, as does his brother, Bennett. The Hart family reared Michael to be unconventional and skeptical, which jibed with his love of a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

Of course, on e-book standards, I thought Michael was endlessly unreasonable in the traditional sense. He most of all venerated the plain old ASCII text format, which really isn’t a book standard at all, given the need of publishers for little amenities such as italics and bold rendered in good form without fuss. I joined a brave and prescient techie named Jon Noring in pushing a consumer-friendly format called OpenReader, the existence of which prodded the main industry trade group to create and promote ePub, which in the end was fine by me since I cared more about a standard format than about the OpenReader organization. Michael at least tacitly encouraged a wacky troll to go after us standards advocates. At times like those, Planet Earth would have been better off with Gutenberg’s leader as a quiescent son of Dale Carnegie.

Physically, Michael was a short, stout, bearded man fond of showmanship; in at least one photo he wore a top hat, perhaps in part to flaunt his love of the supposedly obsolete, not just to “pull books out of the hat.” That wasn’t the only eccentricity. I never visited his house in Urbana; but a mutual friend did as one of Gutenberg’s thousands of volunteers, and in an online chat she recalled it was “bursting at the seams with books and computer gadgetry. He had to shower in the basement. No decent bathroom.” Michael cared less about such trifles than about tidy e-files for Project Gutenberg (and about amassing the paper books he so often gave away). Remember, this guy sprinkled sugar on his pizza.

Michael could be just as quirky in composing his emails. As remembered by his friend Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, which built on Gutenberg’s work, Michael would manually insert extra spaces between words in correspondence to justify them so they lined up evenly to the right. Michael saw word-wrap as a wicked destroyer of “my phraseology.”

What a mix of the backwards and forward looking! As a novel, Michael would have been a brilliant, sprawling classic from the 19th century–offensive to the order-minded but still a “must read” for the discerning.

The good news is that Shavian unreasonableness notwithstanding, Michael was realistic about his health and–to use his own words, quoted in Brewster’s blog–planned a “graceful exit.” Gregory Newby, a computer scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the same visionary who included a 1990s incarnation of my national digital library proposal in an MIT Press/ASIS information science collection, is Gutenberg’s chief executive. He has devoted thousands of hours of his life to running Gutenberg day to day. And the format wars? Well, I hope they’re winding down at least somewhat. Nowadays you can download thousands of Gutenberg books not just in plain ASCII and in other formats but also in the one of my dreams–nonDRMed ePub.

Many thanks, Michael and Greg, for that and much more regardless of the detours along the way. I hope that Gutenberg lasts at least as long as the most durable of the classics it has digitized.

Image credit: Marcello

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