Afternoon update

Former UMass professor John J. Clayton pays tribute to the late Saul Bellow.

It disturbed me to hear on U.S. public radio and read in The New York Times that Saul Bellow was to be seen as simply an American writer — which, of course, he is — and not significantly a Jewish writer.

Maybe they think they’re doing him a favor? I think they’re bleaching out a lot of the substance of Bellow, who died Tuesday at 89.

The Times quoted him as saying he had no wish to be part, along with Roth and Malamud, of the "Hart, Schaffner & Marx" of American letters. Well, who would? No good writer wants to be pigeonholed or limited in scope. But he is deeply a Jewish writer — not just a Jew by birth.

Jewish culture, Jewish sensibility, a Jewish sense of holiness in the everyday, permeate his work.[...]

Bellow has given us a rich Jewish-American world. But he has also given me as a writer a complex style, a way of handling contemporary reality, that he derived from both Jewish and American fiction.

You find in Sholem Aleichem, in I.L. Peretz, in Isaac Bashevis Singer, a way of finding the beautiful, the holy, the meaningful in the midst of the comic, the ordinary, the tragic. Bellow is a poet who works with laughable, vulgar materials and works them in the service of a noble vision.

Only the good die young...but they left off Phil Hartman and Gilda Radner, probably several others as well.

House Speaker Jody Richards has company in Joseph Brett "J.B." Hines.

Bowling Green attorney Joseph Brett "J.B." Hines, a Republican, announced Monday that he will run against Richards in 2006. Hines, however, would have to be his party’s choice in the May 2006 primary.[...]

He is a member of the well-known Hines family, related to Confederate soldier Thomas Henry Hines, author Duncan Hines, Warren Circuit Court Judge Thomas Hines – who also served as a state senator and representative – and founders of barge company Hines American Line, he said.

Hines has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in public administration from Western Kentucky University, and a law degree from the University of Louisville, he said.

He is a member of the law firm of Travelsted and Crocker, and is married to the former Shaska Combs of Hazard.

Hines is on the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce Governmental Relations Committee, and a board member of Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the Barren River Children’s Advocacy Center. He is a Mason and member of the Kiwanis Club, he said.

Although Hines has never run for public office before, his interest in politics goes back to citizenship badges in Eagle Scouting and two years as student bar association president in law school, he said.

Richards entered the General Assembly in 1976 and has been speaker since 1995.

"I’ve been honored to be the only speaker from Warren County in its history, and I’m proud of that,” he said. "And it allows the people of the 20th District to have a strong advocate and a clear voice."