Baltimore native Jaimy Gordon wins National Book Award
Congratulations to Baltimore native Jaimy Gordon, whose "Lord of Misrule" this week won the National Book Award for fiction.
Here's how the book is described by the publisher: "At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts are all struggling to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. ... Lord of Misrule follows five characters -- scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain -- through a year and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia."
Gordon is an English professor at Western Michingan University. According to a news release from the school, she based the novel partly on her experience in the late 1960s working as a groom and hot-walker at Charles Town Race Track in West Virginia. In an NBA interview, she also noted that some key research took place at Pimlico, namely through "Bubbles Riley, born in 1914, now age 96, one of the people to whom Lord of Misrule is dedicated. Bubbles had done much more than rub horses in his day, at West Virginia tracks as well as Pimlico, and he is far too foxy, worldly, gregarious, savvy in business, and downright postmodern to have been the model for Medicine Ed, but he told me hundreds of things I needed to know in the course of writing Lord of Misrule, and he still does." You can see Gordon's acceptance speech in this video.
For all you Small-timore folks, the author is the daughter of the late David and Sonia Gordon. He was a founding partner of the Baltimore law firm of Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger and Hollander; she was an artist, educator and anti-war activist.
AP photo
Comments
Yes and thanks to her for exposing the "soft" underbelly of Amurican capitalism- eveywhere ignored by most authors- b they poets, play writers, tv or movie script writers!
Where are the Odets, the Brechts. the Millers, the Salingers? Can anyone tell me- I don't see them (but I know they're there).
My feeling is that most writers have never been taught logic nor ethics nor history in school- and believe me I didn't know abt Marx and his cogent analyses until I was in my 60's- (and I had one of the best educations in the world- great prep school- great college).
Thank good ness the greatest authors- except for Heinrich von Kleist and Shakespeare (in that he had to keep his politics secret) have all been clearly ON THE LEFT!
cool capcha- top cut off- wow
Posted by: david eberhardt | November 21, 2010 5:46 PM
Errr, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Ezra (ugh) Pound, Louis-Ferdinand (double ugh in spades) Celine? Lionel Trilling observed 60-odd years ago in 'The Liberal Imagination' that the writers he and his fellow New York intellectuals respected the most were indifferent or hostile to the intellectuals' politics.
Posted by: greeneyeshade | November 22, 2010 5:36 PM
Thanx green eyes- I was hoping some one would refine me- but it gets complicated-Lawrence? (I'm not so sure); the Trilling comment is embarrassing- whomever he talked to lied to him.
Some one like Eliot seems to me debatable. He certainly treated Valerie badly.
Celine- you r right.
Yeats- plainly no- wasn't he active fighting UK imperialism?; Pound- probably, stupidly.
It's just that if you can put the human condition down in words imaginatively, you are not likely to smeer it w ideology- the way the right always does.
So called "conservatives" do not seem very imaginative to me.
We on the left? We're liberal- we're open minded- we're, um, progressive.
Posted by: david eberhardt | November 24, 2010 1:13 PM
Thanks to you too, David. Sorry to be a bit slow responding to this. I could have added Willa Cather, Henry James (if you can reduce him to a political position you've got way too much time on your hands), Robert Frost ... I don't know whether the right "smeer[s] at the human condition," the way the left tends, as Trilling (and his contemporary, Orwell) observed, to reduce it to propaganda.
And as for Yeats, fighting "British Imperialism" doesn't make you a "progressive." Conor Cruise O'Brien argued in "Passion and Cunning" that what drove Yeats around the bend was trying to be an anti-clerical, Protestant conservative in Ireland; that his involvement with fascism was a lot more serious than he let on afterward; and that it was probably lucky for his reputation that he didn't live to see Hitler's forces on the English Channel.
Posted by: greeneyeshade | November 29, 2010 12:47 AM