The Book Shopper - Atlanta

Somebody Get Molly Haskell A Drink

Last Saturday night, the Margaret Mitchell House (MMH) burst with insatiable Gone With The Wind fans. Driving up to 10^th & Peachtree I found the streets overflowing with traffic-stopping pedestrians and a full MMH parking lot— but I guess some of the congestion could be attributed to the Dogwood Arts Festival.   

The attraction at the MMH was a panel sponsored by the Atlanta History Center featuring Turner Classic Movies’ host Robert Osborne, Michael Sragow, film critic of the Baltimore Sun and author of a voluminous biography of Victor Fleming (one of the GWTW directors), and Molly Haskell, author of the recently published Frankly My Dear: Gone With The Wind Revisited.

 A recent review of Haskell’s book piqued my interest enough to get me to fight the traffic and attend the talk. But after a few initial questions from Osborne to Sragow and Haskell, the evening turned into a rambling question and answer session as the audience traded glowing (OK, gushing) GWTW anecdotes and opinions with the panelists.  For those who weren’t there, you should know that everyone in the room agreed that Leslie Howard was generally considered a dud as Ashley Wilkes. Not that the WWII hero Howard wasn’t a good actor; rather, his style was more suited to playing a 19^th century romantic poet than the love interest of the ripe and lively Scarlett.

The Residual Effects of Book Readings

Going to book readings can have unexpected impacts that linger long after the authors leave the stage. This happened to me recently.

While sitting in the audience of the Junot Diaz reading at Agnes Scott College last month, a friend told me about Rita Mae Brown’s 1988 book, Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual.  Later he loaned me a copy of this shoot-from-the-hip discourse on writing and the writing life, which I just finished reading.

Quiara Alegria Hudes – 26 Miles

Even though the AJC gave the Alliance Theatre’s production of Quiara Alegria Hudes’ 26 Miles a lukewarm review and a B- grade, it didn’t keep me away and, in fact, reaffirmed my view that B’s are often good enough. The play is about a precocious 15 year-old girl named Olivia who slips away from her American father and stepmother’s troubled suburban home to join her estranged, biological mother – the passionate, Cuban Beatriz – on a road trip to Wyoming.

I was curious about the play, because Hudes, like Junot Diaz (see below), was in town recently for the Agnes Scott Writer Series. For the record, Hudes takes no back seat to Diaz when it comes to dropping f-bombs on her audience. (I can only imagine what kind of “blue streak” stories the Agnes Scott students will be writing next semester).

Eyes on Flannery

Following through from last month’s posting on Flannery O’Connor, I finished rereading her novel Wise Blood about a World War II vet Hazel Motes who returns to the South to wander among the street evangelists and to begin his own Church of God Without Jesus Christ. To say the least, O’Connor’s macabre characters still make me a little uncomfortable, but you have to smile the way she describes people like the woman whose “brown hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull” or the  “tall bony woman, resembling the mop she carried upside down.”

And the eyes—the eyes are critical for O’Connor especially in this book since two of the main characters are blind. Some examples:

- The eyes “were the color of pecan shells and set in deep sockets.”

- The eyes “glittered on him like two chips of green glass.”

- “One eye was a little smaller and rounder than the other.”

- "Her eyes took in everything whole like quicksand."

Next up: renting a copy of John Huston’s 1979 movie adaptation of Wise Blood.