While Cheeks is correct that I have nostalgic impulses, I also am crazy enough to think the species is capable of a more comprehensive “modernism” that elevates the primitive to an equal level with the technological in a way that eliminates the cockeyed notion of “external costs” and does not sacrifice the local and beneficially traditional at the altar of “Progress”. We need both an historical reference and a fundamental urge to better our futures.

On the other hand Mr. Berry’s characters’ language sounds just like my grandparents, and there’s no question that’s one reason I love his books. Still, they also have a richness and complexity I’d like to think would interest plenty of city people, and they do some, only not many at certain outlets. His books are never optimistic, but they are full of hope–he has imagined a community of people who live in awareness of their ties, claims and need for one another. I think that notion is more out of fashion than plowing with mules. And newspapers are all about the new.

The other troubling thing is the day may come very soon when all of us, even Mr. Sabin, will be nostalgic for the Times (or the Boston Globe). We seem to be going the way of the Huffington Post.

I agree with Mr. Chappell about the importance of university presses, and of other small presses, all of which I expect are going to have a tough few years. Good luck to yours.

The Times and many of it’s fellow newspapers used to have the good sense and courage to hire journalists rather than commentators. These journalists could bang a type writer and did not have the glib ability to Google things…they actually had to go out and hit the pavement to research a story and more often than not, they assembled at smoky bars at 3 in the afternoon and compared notes across paper lines. The best ones possessed a narrative quality that was rich in novelistic flourishes. They might have had “confidential sources” but they didn’t grant these sources final word. They were beholden to the big boys in their upper floor offices but they were not cowed by them. The editors nd publishers respected them more for it. They made a career out of puncturing conventional wisdom rather than pumping it up to a planetary size.

Newspapers are fast becoming simply a slightly more comprehensive television . The best thing to do after wading through all the expanded “lifestyle” coverage and actually garnering a bit of real news is to read a few papers, conjure the opposite of what they say and average it all out to a kind of tentative reality, confirmed only when the paper says it isn’t true.

I stubbornly pay a few drachmas to read the Times near every day but it can generally be chalked up to an unseemly desire to be pissed off about something. I think the clinical term for it is paranoid schizophrenia.

Who has the better shot? A bright kid studying at Princeton under Joyce Carol Oates or an elderly, unpublished genius laboring in a burg in Oklahoma? This is nothing new, of course.

Certainly, the folks in NY choose many worthy works and authors, including a few from the hinterlands. They take risks on young and unknown writers, and, often as not, lose money in the bargain. But I suspect that most editors and agents make their choices with a sophisticated (and perhaps subtle and unconsious) urban bias. If you were born and raised in New York City or choose to live and work there, you might wonder who’d care about a collection of stories set in and around Winesburg Ohio. In Sherwood Anderson’s time, an urban sophisticate probably wasn’t more than a generation or two removed from the farm and probably counted farmers or small town merchants among his kin.

To be fair and honest, if I were an editor or critic and something like Portnoy’s Complaint crossed my desk, I’d probably pass. I was born, raised, and educated in Kentucky, and during the past 26 years I’ve lived in Texas, I’ve spent as much time as possible in what many people call The Sticks. As hard as I try to avoid provincialism, my experiences (reading included) shape my outlook. I find small town and rural concerns very real and worthy of exploration. Sure, I can enjoy an urban novel, but it’s unlikely to resonate like a story or essay by Eudora Welty or John Graves. That says a lot more about me than about the urban novel in question.

As newspaper book and arts sections continue to shrink and disappear, it seems likely that the infliuence of the New York Times and a few other publications will only grow, and their outlook will become even more provincial. Sure, blogs and online reviews will help, and regional and university presses are publishing works that NY publishers wouldn’t touch, but unless newspapers like The Courier Joural, Dallas Morning News, and Houston Chronicle can afford (and choose) to publish substantial reviews of works by local artists, writers, and producers, indifference from NY will continue to sting far more than it should.

(Full disclosure: My books are published by a university press. This subject is near and dear to my heart, wallet, and ego.)

And they are not simply arbitrary subjects. Nature, especially, both as a thing and an idea, is inseperable from American history. Our poets have been wrestling with the conflicts and problems that resulted as European civilization pushed itself into a vast wilderness, a New World.

And what kind of literature would we have without rural culture? Not much. Of course having a dearth of literature means that there is an absence of culture to nourish it. At some point, the Times will feel the consequences of this loss of culture, but, I expect, they will fail to recognize its cause.