My Detroit

The May/June 2012 issue of The American Interest contains my take on several Detroit-related books, including Scott Martelle’s Detroit: A Biography, John Gallgher’s Reimagining Detroit, John Carlisle’s 313: Life in the Motor City and Scott Lasser’s Say Nice Things about Detroit, among others. The first few paragraphs of the essay can be read online (follow link below), but I encourage folks to seek out the magazine in print because it also features photographs of the city by my father, J. Gordon Rodwan.

 

http://the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1236

 

Read Full Post »

Rodwan Does Still Write

Although the long temporal gap between the last post and this one might suggest otherwise, the title of this site remains true. Here’s some evidence: two essays and a short story.

• “The Fighting Life: Boxing and Identity in Novels by Philip Roth and Norman Mailer,” Philip Roth Studies, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 83-96.
• “The Great Migration,” The American Interest, Vol. VII, No. 1, September/October 2011, pp. 95-99.
• “The Punch Not Thrown,” Spot Literary Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 38-39.

Read Full Post »

Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries 101

Modern American boxing writing began with coverage of Jack Johnson’s defense of his heavyweight title against Jim Jeffries in 1910, or so George Kimball asserts in At the Fights, the Library of America anthology he edited with John Schulian. In the single selection concerning that bout, novelist Jack London says Johnson “played and fought a white man in a white man’s country, before a white man’s crowd.” Thus, from its beginning 101 years ago, boxing writing has never been exclusively about sports. Like many others in the rapidly constructed arena in Reno, Nevada, where Johnson and Jeffries fought, London thought the contest expressed something about racial politics, although as Kimball and Schulian point out in a head note, London’s most infamous line about a Johnson bout – “Naturally, I wanted to see the white man win” – occurs in an earlier article, one on Johnson’s ascension to the championship via victory over Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, in 1908. In still another piece, London urged Jeffries to return from retirement and retrieve the title for “the White Man.”

Johnson’s success did reveal something about racial identity, though not in the way London wanted. Though he preferred not to view himself as a representative of a race or a cause, Johnson did topple the myths of racial superiority harbored by the likes of London.

Kimball and I both spoke at events commemorating the centennial of Johnson-Jeffries and both contributed to the literature about it. In his collection Manly Art, Kimball includes an article about efforts to pardon Johnson for a bogus 1913 “white slavery” conviction. My Reno talk about the resonant symbolism of Johnson beating Jeffries on the Fourth of July, subsequently appeared in fall 2010 edition of The Nevada Review, and on their website the editors of that journal direct readers to some related works. Further, I write about At the Fights and Manly Art (as well as Johnson-Jeffries) in the May/June 2011 issue of The American Interest.

Read Full Post »

The Art of Assembly

Putting together a well-made collection of short writings takes special skills. One must have an eye for meaningful groupings and provocative juxtapositions. Literary collagists must find the happy balance between too much and not enough. They must also make plain the justification for gathering already published pieces.  

When I saw that half of the stories in E.L. Doctorow’s All the Time in the World had previously appeared in some of his earlier volumes, including one that came out not that long before, I was skeptical about the need for the collection. However, the book succeeds because of the way the pieces fit with and play off of each other, as I argue in my review in The Oregonian (section O, p. 10 in the April 10, 2011, edition of the paper).

Particular challenges confront editors of anthologies of works by different authors, especially if they have a very specific organizing subject. They run the risks of, on the one hand, achieving comprehensiveness at the cost of wearying repetitiveness, and, on the other, of leaving out something essential. Compliers of such books unavoidably leave themselves open to criticism for faulty choices. A Los Angeles Times reviewer, for instance, spies an East Coast bias in George Kimball and John Schulian’s selections for At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing. While I might question some of the choices, on the whole I think they do an admirable job of constructing a cohesive story, albeit a rather dispiriting one, as I discuss in an essay for May/June 2011 issue of The American Interest.

Read Full Post »

Best Books of 2010

In order to write about them for The Oregonian, The American Interest and other publications, I read a fair number of brand new books in 2010. Nevertheless, I can’t make an honest top-ten list. Here are six that truly stood as exceptional:

1. Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Alfred A. Knopf)
2. Kevin Canty’s Everything (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
3. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (Scribner)
4. Charles Goodrich’s Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden (Silverfish Review Press)
5. Randy Robert’s Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (Yale University Press)
6. Richard Williams’s The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (W.W. Norton & Company)

The short list reflects my tendency to read roughly proportional amounts of fiction and nonfiction. I probably read more poetry in 2010 than in most years, and Goodrich’s small volume was my favorite of several contenders.

The year 2010 saw new books by authors I once thought of as reliably remarkable – Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera – that I found disappointingly inferior to their earlier efforts. I could name several very good but not quite excellent books. Here’s one: George Kimball and John Schulian assembled a fine collection of boxing-related poems in The Fighter Still Remains. A few years earlier, however, Robert Hedin and Michael Waters edited Perfect in Their Art, an anthology containing much of the same material – and a great deal more.

This leads to the Achilles heel of year-end lists: the absence of the great older stuff. While I read many books published during 2010, I also read many from other years, which are automatically disqualified from “best of” contention but deserve mention all the same. I reread some classics, like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. (I also read several books about Mailer, but these weren’t so good.) I also finally got around to some wonderful books I should have read much sooner, such as Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. If I were to list the ten books I most enjoyed during 2010 regardless of publication date, the four named in this paragraph could be added to the six above.

Read Full Post »

Mailer Coincidences

“The most electric of nations must naturally provide the boldest circuits of coincidence,” Norman Mailer proclaimed. My coincidences involving the writer my not amount to anything grand or revealing, but they might be worth mentioning all the same. Twice now Mailer-related work of mine which was written earlier appeared in print very soon after one of my subject’s death.

The title essay of Fighters & Writers was first published in an edition of The Mailer Review commemorating the novelist’s life soon after it ended. I discuss several writers, but Mailer does figure prominently in the piece. I’d started composing it years earlier and finally finished it soon before he died in 2007. In another essay in the collection, I mention a critic who made a derisive remark about Mailer in something that ran soon after the public memorial service held to honor the author of The Naked and the Dead, The Fight and The Executioner’s Song.

Which brings me to coincidence number two. The January/February 2011 issue of The American Interest contains my assessment of three Mailer-focused memoirs, including A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer, who died on November 21, 2010. I wrote the not-very-kind review essay a few months before it actually ended up in the magazine.  

While my essays about Mailer and his wife simply happened to show up soon after their deaths, two instances of this put me in uncomfortably proximity to the narrator of J.G. Ballard’s story “Now: Zero” who believes his writing about people can spell their demise…

Flipping through a copy of TAI, I stumbled on minor coincidences of another kind. On one page I saw a reference to Edith Wharton; on another, a poem by Walt Whitman. As it happens, the fourth short film in the Poetry In Pictures Series is based on a Wharton poem; the second, on a Whitman poem. (I wrote the third.)

Read Full Post »