Mississippi Books

Riverborne traces the erosion, confluences, and--inevitably--growth that is available to men of awareness, even as the Mississippi River itself erodes and gives promise to our continent and society. It is a remarkable book, a leaning back into the time when poetry was both literature and timeless social commentary.

It is a collection of poems built around the brotherhood of two men who have lived their separate lives together for over 40 years, wandering the country and building lives and families, following cross-country roads, reading and teaching and loving, losing wives, going on. More than a discussion or remembrance from these men, it is a book of correspondence with past literary figures, most prominently Mark Twain, and the American voices he created and recorded. And it is a discourse with the waters themselves, and the backwater tributaries that pour into the vast Mississippi drainage along with their pollutants and other industrial discharges, and basic "FOUR WORD SIGNS" of eternal hope and food. All of these are washed away, immersed in the waters, and brought back as something more complex and stronger, more multi-textured and more seasoned, than the individual visions these men set out with 25 years ago when they first traveled along the banks of America's river.

Dates in time are given in the titles of the opening poems of this book, emphasizing that change and growth happen over lifetimes, but soon the exact dates disappear from the titles "gone the way two men get bleached/under fast moving suns, rained upon, lose/ the shade of hair, their speed." Time itself becomes another mingling force within the stream, another distillant. Known objects, animate and inanimate change their places and interact: "we parallel their path on the bridged height,/approach tall branches of bare trees/dressed with castaway pairs of gym shoes/a girl's brassiere, strange ritual of wintered students...Here, I said to Jim, `Here's where we start.'"

The travel is a landscape of real symbols...hard, bitter, cruel, and shock-edged:
One sun-glassed cyclist's lettered leather jacket:
IF YOU CAN READ THIS
THE BITCH FELL OFF
`Fell or jumped?' cracks Jim;
he knows about women
who leave men in a hurry...
Her dream; his fear; her insistence; his fury.

Time and experience speak from varied perspective echoes...overlapping universes subsumed in poetic vision. The varied locational echoes are important, adding depth and pull to the currents:
The running river speaks in signs, spills a low wave
to shore, startles a bare-armed mother spoon-feeing
her baby on the grass. Slow sun scorches
the torpid air, the wakened man lifts
a staticky radio to his ear,
catches the first pitch from St. Louis.

There are disembodied shocks that pull one in and out of reality:
"and then Jim spots real trouble in very fine print
THIS PARK MONITORED BY VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

Well, as this book develops its full field of experience, it becomes clear that when you break away, when you are free even in a media-covered country scared of its own shadows, you cannot be nailed to time. You cannot be monitored by video surveillance because the force of life lies outside of time. The river is to vast, too complex within its currents, too inevitable for technology or paranoia to comprehend.

Here is America's heartbeat:
two spinning rivers writhe in circles,
charge into the watery labyrinth:
another beat, another maddened run.

Here is America's torn body,
battered as the continent.
Here tectonic plates broke the earth,
shuddered plains, shook the river
until her water ran backward.

Here in this book is a slow building power that can splinter and reshape us in the heart of our country, where the New Madrid fault will someday reassert itself in the heartland of our country,
as it did in 1811 and 1812 when the waters rolled backward as they will again. This is a book well worth reading and keeping on your shelf, and an experience well worth keeping in your mind.

This book is wonderful for any age of reader. It describes events in his family's life that shaped him into the person that he is today. He is a person of great character and this book gives you a taste of his character. It tells how he remembers the unjustices of his life growing up in Mississippi. It gives you a plain view of what it was like to grow up that way, in the Jim Crow era. He has gone through many experiences, but still managed to come out on top regardless of the adversity that faced him.

This is the best book I have read in the U. of Mississippi series of interviews with filmmakers.

The first interview catches Aldrich just after the start of his career, so the interviews proceed with the career, as opposed to just having him reflect back on things from years later. We see what Aldrich is doing and hear him talk about projects that never come to pass.

A few fascinating things emerge. He apparently never got over getting fired from "The Garment Jungle." Even when he is a success after "The Dirty Dozen," he still is bitter/regretful about that. Also, his relationship with Burt Lancaster, which seemed okay on the outside (they made about four films together) is revealed as contentious and mistrustful.

If you like Aldrich's films, you need to read this book. It will tell you things you never knew and will add to your appreciation of this man.

I haven't read the book, however, I know from attending his classes when in the USA that Robert Alexander knows his subject! I would recommend learning something from this guy - I did!
Cheers

This is one of those books that are force on you at school. The basic story is of a Southern belle driven mad by isolation and her ties to the past. If this is your first reading of something representative of Faulkner this is the best example, as it is short and the story is intriguing. You can enjoy reading it for what it is and not have to analyze the thing to death. Even if you do not particularly cotton to Faulkner's style or subject matter, this book will transcend both. In 1982 they made this story into a movie with John Houseman and Anjelica Huston.

James Silver was a quiet historian at the University of Mississippi. He began teaching there in 1933 where he wrote books that would rankle any Confederacy-phile. When Emmett Till was murdered, Silver asked around and did the work of a true historian; when James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi, Silver was there and chronicled what he observed. "Running Scared" is about Silver's experiences through the years at this well-known school and he has some pretty fascinating stories to share, beginning in the early 30s and moving forward. Silver was finally chased away and ended up as a professor at Notre Dame. Not too bad for someone who was fired ...

Mary Gardner takes you on a journey to Eagle Grove, which would remind me of Lake Wobegon if it happened to have bikers, adulterous Lutheran ministers, gay couples, and chicken rolls. An intelligent story populated by imperfect people doing the best they can. The writing is spare and perceptive.

Sam Peckinpah became famous at a time when Hollywood, and American culture in general, was in crisis over the Vietnam War. Peckinpah became associated with violence in American film, and this label "violent filmmaker" allowed people to dismiss him.

This book gives the reader the flavor of Sam Peckinpah. He was both a serious artist and the prisoner of his reputation, and ultimately the reputation helped wreck his health and career. The interviews show how he never forgot a slight and always held a grudge, but despite everything he remained an interesting guy, far deeper than the image. Some of the later interviews are revealing for what was going on around Peckinpah as expressed in the circumstances of the interviews.

I got the impression that some interviews were not included in the book (as more are talked about in the introduction than appear in the finished book.) That is disappointing, but what is here reads like the skeleton of a novel about a talented artist being swallowed by a black hole of resentment, changing tastes, and booze.

Perhaps the last word should go to Dustin Hoffman, who said of Peckinpah: our society is going to the moon, and he's the last of the gunfighters.

Great book. The introduction is, along with Robin Wood's introduction to woods masterful book "Apu Trilogy", the best short introduction to the works of Satyajit Ray. The interviews ofcourse contain many repetitions, but all in all, a great insight into the mind of a peerless artist.

In the years before he became a Civil War general, Cook was on several expeditions across the American west. In 1827 he was in St. Louis, at about 18 years old. In the 1840's he was fighting in California during the Mexican war.

In this book, which he wrote from his journals he describes the west as it was before settlement began. This book is a reprint of the original book published in 1857. It reads just a trifle old fashioned, but clear and rich in detail from a time of which little has been written.