Saying Things About the South

LSU Press Director MaryKatherine Callaway and I doing the author picture. Photo by Maya Cook.

Monday:
Various artists, Bartók: Contrast & Mikrokosmos (excerpts)
Andrew Bird, Break it Yourself (streaming at NPR)
Marc Smirnoff, "G&G Me With a Buccellati Silver Spoon! The OA Editor Takes Down the Competition" at OxfordAmerican.org
Dan Deacon, Spiderman of the Rings
Louisiana Red, Sweet Blood Call and Dead Stray Dog

First, RIP Louisiana Red


Louisiana Red and Paul Oshar, "Dead Stray Dog"

Second, Louisiana Saturday Night actually exists! As is evidenced above! I can see a copy from where I'm sitting. Copies are headed out to reviewers. I signed a copy for my editor even. I can't say how great everyone at the Press has been and is being. The posters just came in for the launch party (Saturday, March 10, 2012 at Teddy's Juke Joint in Zachary, LA. Here's the Facebookr event, if you keep up that way.) if you are in the area, please come. Teddy's is totally worth the drive even when there isn't a fabulous book launh party happening inside.

Plus, these gentlemen are playing.


Floyd R. Patterson and the O.M.T. Band (One More Time)

Third, I feel I have somewhat of a rooster in the cockfight ruffling between the Oxford American and Garden & Gun, having written a few times for the former. I'm a reader of both magazines and someone engaged professionally in Saying Things About the South and will say it is the kind of place that leads one to attempt to define it and, in the process, leads you to a rabbit hole of contradictions. The OA's striving for understanding is more in line with my thinking than are G&G's aspiration, but The Truth About the South is like the truth about anywhere - complicated, a rickety scaffold of facts bolted together by the perception of facts and in that wobbly vantage point does one gain a little perspective before the whole thing falls. It's like the fretboard on the Deliverance banjo that, to many, symbolizes the Southern experience; the particular twang you get depends on where you put your finger. I'm going to stop before I quote Hank Williams or something.

I do like highbrow smack talk, though. It reminds me of the wager between the museum directors from New Orleans and Indianpolis during the Super Bowl: Then he concluded by apologizing that "we have no farm scenes or portraits of football players to send you." Here's hoping G&G has a comeback in them and maybe something enlightening will emerge. If they don't mind getting their seersuckers dirty.