Kevin McFadden’s Hardscrabble, one of the inaugural titles in the VQR Poetry Series, published by the University of Georgia Press, has just been awarded 2008 Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry. The award, which recognizes work by emerging poets living in and writing on the South, will be presented in April 2009 at the Arts & Education Council Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Past winners include Charlotte Matthews and Thorpe Moeckel.

“I’ve known the Fellowship through its distinguished roll call of authors,” says McFadden. “Robert Penn Warren was one of my earliest influences in deciding to move to the South.” McFadden received the news from George Garrett, a founding member of the Fellowship, just before the acclaimed Southern novelist, essayist, and poet died in May. “All the reasons to be honored by this award reside in the generosity and warmth of a spirit like George’s, a spirit he helped kindle the Fellowship with.”

The Fellowship of Southern Writers was created in 1989 to nurture literature in the American South. Among its founding members were Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Walker Percy, Ernest Gaines, William Styron, and Elizabeth Spencer.

Here’s a gem from our Spring 1968 issue: Bruce Russett’s “Rich and Poor in 2000 A.D.: The Great Gulf”:

By many tests the world of the not-too-distant future will be a far better one than the present. We have confident and compelling predictions of vast automation, greatly diminishing the amount of physical drudgery required in production and freeing members of the labor force either for leisure or for intellectually stimulating and satisfying work. Time and facilities for the leisured pursuit of science and the arts seem within reach for many. We have the prospect of major breakthroughs in medical science, with artificial organs and the control of killer diseases. We are promised supersonic transports to circle the earth at three times the speed of sound, and instantaneous electronic communication with data banks and libraries anywhere. A computerized financial system for pay, credit, and tax collection is virtually in preparation. In a recent RAND Corporation survey of scientists who should know, the likelihood of a manned landing on Mars and of a permanent base on the moon by 2000 A.D. was taken for granted. There is held out to us the image of a new Eden, a stable period wherein many of the most unsettling aspects of modern life may be brought under control and we can more fully reap its great benefits.

But how many of the three billion people on this globe can afford to circumnavigate it? How soon will the Indian villager install his automated farm and devote himself to experimentation in his laboratory? Have you paid a hospital bill recently? It is crucial to recognize that the gains from these developments will not apply at all equally to all men.

The Yale international relations scholar figured that none of these benefits would be of much good to the global poor. So, instead, he sought to envision what the gap between the global rich and the global poor would be like 32 years hence.

For the rich, things look pretty rosy in 2000 A.D. We’ll be able to afford organ transplants (true), most forms of cancer will be cured (not hardly), a “major breakthrough” in life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe will extend lifespans to a century (not yet), and a severed head could be kept alive indefinitely (thankfully, no). “Millions of middle-aged and elderly Americans and Europeans will doubtless shortly wear pace-makers” (bulls-eye), and the blind will be given radar (unawesomely, no).

It’s a mixed bag for the poor. The bad news is that they’ll live just half as long as “a citizen of the privileged West.” (This is precisely correct.) The good news is that the literacy rate in poor countries will climb from 25%, such that “the bulk of the populations will be literate” (again, precisely correct), fresh water will be available to them by “economical desalinization of sea water” (nope—it’s hugely expensive), they’ll enjoy the “cheap manufacture of palatable synthetic food” (such food is commonplace but, weirdly, only the global rich have access to the stuff), and income will be available by “the profitable ‘mining’ of sea water for minerals” (nope).

Come 2000 AD, things look dim for the world in some crucial regards. “The poor half of the world will not able to challenge the rich fifth for control—but it will have the ability to harass the rich and bring the entire system into chaos.” (Yup. Exhibit A: September 11, 2001.) “A third of the [poor] population [will live] in cities of 20,000 or more.” (Russett is correct, but the cities are a great deal larger than he envisioned—urban slums are the theme of poverty for the new millennium) “Asia and Africa are likely to comprise a huge slum in the social as well as material sense, with close parallels to present-day Harlem.” (1968 Harlem was a far sight better than the enormous slums of Asia and Africa. Kiberia’s half million citizens and the five million Mumbai shantytown dwellers support Russett’s theory, though cities like Tokyo, Tianjin, Wuhn and Manila show that this is far too broad a brush with which to paint half of the globe.)

All in all, Russett’s is a rather prescient look at the world of 2000. I have to wonder what he would have forecast for himself these many years later. In updating his bio, I learned that Bruce Russett still teaches at Yale, and in the intervening four decades he has written dozens of books and become a widely-known, well-respected political scientist.

To see more paleofuturism, I recommend Paleo-Future, a blog that looks back at similar long-ago forecasts of the far-off world of today.

VQR has always carried a few pages of advertising in each issue. One of our long-time advertisers was Bell Telephone. I recently wedged a 1953 volume into a scanner and saved a few of my favorites from the year:

Of the three, one of them is sexist, one is racist, and all are gloriously anachronistic. I especially like the advice to use telephone numbers when calling somebody and the suggestion that you write to Bell to order “an attractive booklet for your telephone numbers.”

John W. Aldridge reviewed Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” upon its release in our Spring 1953 issue:

I confess that I am unable to share in the prevailing wild enthusiasm for this new book of Hemingway’s, “The Old Man and the Sea.” It is of course a remarkable advance over his last novel; and it has a purity of line and a benignity, a downright saintliness, of tone which would seem to indicate not merely that he has sloughed off his former emotional fattiness but that he has expanded and deepened his spiritual perspective in a way that must strike us as extraordinary. But one must take care not to push these generosities too far, if only because they spill over so easily into that excess of blind charity we all tend to feel for Hemingway each time he pulls out of another slump and attains to the heroism of simply writing well once again. I have these standards in mind when I say that “The Old Man and the Sea” seems to me a work of distinctly minor Hemingway fiction.

It wasn’t for another decade that it became en vogue to lambaste “The Old Man and the Sea.” This was demonstrated most spectacularly in the form of Robert P. Weeks’ devastating fisking, “Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea.” Perhaps we were ahead of our time. Or perhaps, in light of Hemingway’s 1953 Pulitzer and 1954 Nobel Prize, we were just wrong.

For those of you who haven’t already read it, Kwame Dawes contributed a remarkable piece on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica to our Spring issue. The essay, made possible through a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, chronicles the lives of several people living with the disease as well as the health care workers who help them.

We now have updates on two of those people described in his piece—one hopeful, one tragic.

First, Kwame has updated the story of Annesha Taylor in a story for the Outlook section of today’s Washington Post. VQR readers will remember that Annesha was the poster girl for the HIV/AIDS abstinence program in Jamaica—until it was discovered that she had become pregnant. She became despondent when she was ostracized and openly toyed with the idea of discontinuing the use of the medication that keeps her alive and healthy. Now, Kwame writes:

a few days ago I spoke with Annesha again. This time, she sounded tired but optimistic, as if her hopeful spirit could carry her through her struggles. I pray that it will keep her going for as long as possible.

We, like Kwame, are heartened to hear of Annesha’s newfound optimism. Unfortunately, our feelings are tempered by the sad news Kwame sent directly to us:

During the times I spent in Jamaica, I admit that a part of me was always aware of the presence of death, a presence that many of those living with the disease had come to terms with. They taught me a lot. What I was not expecting was the death of those working with people with the disease, those without the disease. A few days ago, I learned that John Marzouca, a wonderfully generous and tender spirited man who co-directed the Hope Hospice in Montego Bay, died tragically in a fire at his home. John and I were not close friends, but in the long time I spent talking to him, I grew to admire this man whose gentle wit and pragmatic wisdom were a revelation to me. I do think about the people who came to depend on him at Hope Hospice and I think of his family, and I have thought that his death is such a loss. May he rest in peace.

Even those of us who knew Marzouca only through Kwame’s words will feel his loss. He seemed the classic gentle giant—a quiet, thoughtful man who willingly gave everything of himself for others. When I think of Marzouca I think first of this wonderful passage from Kwame’s essay:

John seems to have been collecting lives instead of a litany of deaths. He laments forgetting the names of many who came to the hospice and died, but he always remembers something small, something specific and human, even when he cannot conjure up a name. He speaks of the gift he has been given, as people open up to him, allow him into their lives. You can tell he thrives on these moments, as if he is humbled and strengthened by them.

He tells me about the young man, Noel, who had always loved mangoes, but the medication mixed with the acidic fruit made him vomit. Then one day he asked for mangoes. “Hey, bring the mango,” he said, “because if I eat the mango, I die, and if I don’t eat the mango, I die, so bring the mango.”

And I think now, too, of Kwame’s extraordinary poem (part of the sequence “Quilt,” included in the interactive feature), spoken in John’s voice:

Thank you for your appetite for ripe mangoes
I washed in caught rain water, wiping
them down, then cutting them into two
succulent cups, thank you for the eating,
your mouth moving quickly, your body
savoring every sting of Bombay sweet-
sour; thank you for sucking white gleefully
each seed; thank you for the heat
in your gleaming head; the gurgling melody
of your pleasure; thank you that though
you became sick, that you thanked me
for my gift to you. I pray that tomorrow
you will wake in mango heaven; feasting
on bushels of sweet, your renewed body shining.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of John Marzouca. And we thank him for welcoming us, as he did so many, into his life.

Michael Pollan’s January release of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” came as welcome news to a newly-created generation of foodies. It was Pollan who (arguably) created this generation of foodies, with his 2007 book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” While the latter explained the problems with the American diet, the former provided solutions. Laura Shapiro summed up the thesis Pollan’s latest book for Slate:

The science of nutrition, he argues, has little to do with food and has no business influencing our eating habits. Scientists don’t yet understand precisely what makes healthful foods healthful; they haven’t identified the full range of nutrients, and they have no idea whether packaged products “enriched” with factory-made vitamins and minerals are adequate substitutes for whole, natural foods.

If all of this seems a little familiar, I congratulate you on your sixty-one year subscription to VQR. Economist and engineer David Cushman Coyle reviewed a similar book in our Autumn 1947 issue:

“Tomorrow’s Food” by James Rorty and N. Philip Norman is a crusading book, written in anger and disgust against the conditions that have undermined the health of most of the American people. Whatever may be the world situation, there is enough to eat in this country, if we would eat it instead of wasting it by wrongheaded food habits.

Apparently the nearest thing to a general prescription, good for whatever ails you, is quite simple: never eat white flour or refined sugar. After that, don’t eat white rice, over-processed foods or “refined” food in general. The nearer you come to gnawing it raw, the healthier you will be.

[...]

The indignant part of the book is directed against the commercial bakers and the many processors of food who have found it profitable to take out the food values in order to get a product that would be easy to store and ship; and against government officials who have been pressured into consenting to “enrichment” of white bread when what the people clearly needed was a darker bread; and against scientists and medical authorities who have compromised at points where in the face of commercial advantage the scientific facts at least should have been kept clear.

Good luck finding a copy of “Tomorrow’s Food” (they’re as scarce as hen’s teeth), though “In Defense of Food” sounds like a reasonable substitute. If this back-to-our-roots eating concept doesn’t catch on, expect a third book in 2069. Watch this space for a review.

Author Thomas E. Kennedy relates the story of his big win at the National Magazine Awards for “I Am Joe’s Prostate” in New Letters:

Finally, Charlie Rose was on stage to present the award in the essay category, and we experienced this surreal moment of having the pages of Bob’s magazine with my essay projected up on a huge screen on the stage while 500 people looked on and the voice of a woman who sounded equally educated and merry was saying over the sound system, “Wince-inducing, outrageously honest and wickedly funny, Thomas Kennedy’s account of his prostate-cancer scare is essay writing at its most original…”

Then Charlie Rose was saying, “The winner is New Letters, Robert Stewart, and Thomas E. Kennedy’s essay, ‘I Am Joe’s Prostate.’” Bob yelled in triumph, pumping his fist in the air, while his wife Lisa and staff members Betsy and Amy screamed from the balcony (that scream was reported by the New York Observer), and I muttered, “Holy shit.”