Welcome to the Jungle
A few years ago I wrote a feature story about the future of libraries in the age of the internet (that future is quite good, actually -- unlike the internet, libraries are about organized information, and as one of the last public spaces in America, they do much more than keep the rain off books). One library expert said that the internet isn't really the answer to all our data-MP3-JPG-weblog-newsfeed needs. It isn't even the "information superhighway." 
It's "the stuff swamp."
True. So I've put on my waders and I'm going to go dance with the Swamp Things.
As many readers know, last month I took a "voluntary severance" from the book columnist's job at The Dallas Morning News because the paper was dumping a lot of its staff. After 20 years there, the environment had become wearying and bleak as futile focus group followed silly "leadership seminar" followed desparate "re-invention," and the staff lost all faith that management had any faith in what we did. In fact, the managing editor made it plain how expendable he considered arts journalists and quality cultural coverage.
So I walked -- even though I had no plans, no work lined up. Actually, I should say I never left the job. I was the only full-time, on-staff book critic in the state of Texas. But it's the job that left. It doesn't exist anymore.
As I tried to convey in my farewell column, none of this has made me particularly bitter about newspapers or books. Or even the Morning News, as sad as it is. No, nothing -- not this blog, not all the blogs combined -- has really replicated what the book or the big-city newspaper does, although neither of those has been helped by panicked owners, giant media mergers and Wall Street-dictated profit margins.
For me, it's just that a lot of the fun and the smarts had left the field. So that's what I hope to do here. Not replace my newspaper work. Just return to the original motivating pleasures. To a level of discourse, lively inquiry and irreverent humor.
Thanks to readers and co-workers who expressed their support. Thanks and love to Sara. Thanks to John Freeman of Critical Mass for printing the farewell column that the Morning News wouldn't.
And thanks to Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com for giving me the opportunity to work all this out while I recover from shoulder surgery and learn to dance in waders.
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Recommending
Richard Price's best novel since Clockers, Lush Life is a slice of life on the Lower East Side, complete with the ghetto kids, the new bohemians, the old Jews and the cops. A restaurant manager at 35 fears he's no longer the wannabe artiste who'd turn into a full-blown artiste some day. When he sees a younger version of himself get shot during a mugging (and then gets blamed by the cops), he comes apart. Price takes these cultures and stares through all of them. Lush Life is a crime novel, a terrific literary thriller, a sampler of Price's namebrand talents with dialogue and deadpan humor. Price is after more than just law-and-order, crime-and-punishment, justice-is-served. This is a portrait of big-city America..You think The Wire, Law and Order, the old Homicide are the best TV has to offer? This is all that -- between covers.
In Life Class, Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker returns to World War I, the setting for her magnificent Restoration trilogy. Where those novels followed shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen through their convalescence, Life Class follows three painting students (based on real Slade School artists Christopher Nevinson and Paul Nash) as the war approaches. Elinor wants little to do with the war or with men: They're distractions from her art. Kit, a hot, young futurist, is primed for the war's industrialized destruction, while Paul flees his working-class background. As usual with Barker, the sexual relationships, war-time atmosphere and gruesome battlefield details are brilliantly conveyed: Her prose is lean but lyrical, compassionate yet cool-headed. No character is quite as compelling as Regeneration's bitter bisexual, Billy Prior, but the Great War's upheavals in art and combat, sex and class, provide Barker with material for exceptional historical novels. A new trilogy? One hopes so.
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