
 |
|
May 22, 2013
John Thorne:
They launched the 'Arab Spring' but now yearn for the good old days of a strongman
May 20, 2013
Richard A. Serrano: Is Meir Kahane's assassin now a changed man?
Melissa Healy: Genetic copies of living people from embryos no longer science fiction
Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : Jews Inducted into Rock Hall of Fame; Anton Yelchin co-stars in New "Trek" film; Kutcher (but not Kunis) visits Israel; Jewish TV Star Praises Jewish Rap Star
The Kosher Gourmet by Cathy Pollak: WARNING: This WALNUT CAKE WITH PRALINE FROSTING, perfect for afternoon coffee, is addicting
May 13, 2013
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Why the giving of the document that would permanently change the world could only be done in desolation
David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
May 10, 2013
Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
May 8, 2013
Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
|
| |
Jewish World Review
July 24, 2012/ 5 Menachem-Av, 5772
Tale of the South
By
Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The Oxford American is a peripatetic journal of Southern culture whose checkered past has been a series of crack-ups. It got started back in 1992 in Mississippi, deepest of the Deep South states, where the soil seems to bring forth literature as naturally as cotton and kudzu. In Oxford, Miss., naturally -- Faulkner's town and shrine. By now, the magazine has shut down four times, not counting suspensions. At one point, it took refuge in Arkansas, where it found shelter at the University of Central Arkansas.
Now both its founding editor and managing editor have been fired in circumstances not yet completely clear. The one good thing you can say about its latest crisis is that at least it's more interesting than anything the magazine has published in years. The combination of mystery, scandal and general confabulation surrounding the OA's latest misadventure has all the makings of a good second-rate Southern novel.
Naturally, this potboiler comes with the usual talk of a lawsuit. The magazine is called the American, after all, and litigation is our common national plague North or South. This latest scandal out of the OA comes with an admixture of speculation, aka gossip, and what could be more Suthuhn than that?
It's all enough to give any faithful follower of cheap fiction, or even cheap non-fiction, the vapors. Aunt Amanda would be just thrilled to death, while old Colonel Ambrister would probably just snort, and dismiss the whole matter in a word. ("Typical!")
A publisher's dream the OA has never been, though its various collapses might qualify as an accountant's nightmare. All through its ups and downs, or rather downs and further downs, the magazine has remained what it was at the start: a great idea. But one that has never fully blossomed -- or taken root.
It's a great dream, to resurrect Southern writing in the spirit of Faulkner or at least Thomas Wolfe, but the magazine has never had what made Thomas Wolfe a great writer: a Maxwell Perkins as his editor and amanuensis, someone who could take his logorrheic chaff, run it through a fine and discerning mill of a mind, and make great or at least semi-great literature of it.
Instead, it's been left to a glossy latecomer like Garden & Gun to combine both of those in fine Southern and commercially successful style.
Who ever thought the South would have anything to do with commercial style? Wasn't that sort of nouveau thing fit only for Yankees, carpetbaggers and scalawags? One can imagine Rhett Butler at a fashionable magazine's helm, but never the noble Ashley Wilkes, who was too good for anything as mercantile as journalism.

Granted, there have been all those New South types who promised to industrialize us from time to time. They've kept coming along since The War destroyed the old one. Even if some of us refuse to believe it's gone, and try to keep it alive as a kind of tourist attraction.
But the New South types always gave way to Newer South types who proved just as ephemeral. Nothing lasts in these latitudes except dreams. And it's the pillared past we dream of, not some glass-and-chrome future. For a prettied-up South wouldn't be the real one.
Ah, the South, the South, the South.... We never tire of talking about her. And how, like the Oxford American, we keep failing to bring back her Faulknerian glory. Let's put it this way: The OA remains the magazine of the future in these Southern parts and, sadly, may always be.
That's very Southern, too -- the dream never fulfilled. Issue after issue, this little magazine set out to answer the question every Yankee keeps asking: "What is life really like down there?" But, bless its heart, the OA got so caught up in its self-absorption, it never seemed to have sufficient time, talent, money or perspective to really answer the question.
The magazine did succeed in personifying Yankee editors' idea of what an interesting Southern literary/cultural journal should be. Which is scarcely the same as the real thing. You might as well trust a German to say what Russia is really like. The South, like any great lady, remains elusive, especially to Southerners.

Now that its Founding Editor has been cleared away, like an old plantation being cleared of underbrush, the Oxford American may yet find itself. Though it may be too much to hope that it will ever find the South.
Yet someday, who knows, the OA might fulfill its potential. It could still happen. The way The New Yorker started to sound a bit more like its old Harold Ross self after it had freed itself of the awful Tina Brown, the editor who was going to modernize it. But modernize the South? Then it wouldn't be the South anymore.
Good luck, ever new, ever displaced, ever shook-up Oxford American. You've still got a great future, kid, the danger being that that's all you will ever have -- and never a great present. For a great magazine requires a great editor.
Paul Greenberg Archives
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Send your comments by clicking here.
include "/home/jwreview/public_html/t-ssi/jwr_squaread_300x250.php";
if (strpos(, "printer_friendly") === 0)
{}
else {
=<<
© 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Christine Flowers
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
A. Barton Hinkle
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Greg Schwem
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Lenore Skenazy
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Lisa Benson
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
Matt Davies
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Walt Handelsman
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
David Horsey
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Jimmy Margulies
Jack Ohman
Michael Ramirez
Rob Rogers
Drew Sheneman
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Scott Stantis
Danna Summers
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters
Dan Wasserman

Tech Q&A
Mr. Know-It-All
Ask Doctor K
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|