NMissCommentor

As I noted, Eudora Welty took a picture of the Presbyterian church at Rodney that lacked the “civil war cannonball” now lodged in the front.  After an outraged believer in the myths of the Old South commented in disbelief, I poked around and found that Marion Post Walcott captured the same image, although not as [...]

Marty Kittrell, the Vicksburg photograph who specializes in photograph historic buildings and the like (along with nature) in the Vicksburg, Jackson, and Old Southwest part of the state, makes regular visits to Claiborne County, where my father’s family is from.  A recent post revisits the Freeland family cemetery in Westside very near Windsor.

The cemetery is [...]

Tom Junod, who once wrote the worst celebrity profile ever written (“But when it comes to fawning, there is nothing quite like the elaborate, elevated, wannabe-highbrow fawning that gentlemen’s magazines (mainly Esquire and GQ) do when they produce a cover story on a hot actress.”  That one was [...]

This piece doesn’t exaggerate the emotional impact on Oxford this week.  There’s a “well, this might be over now” aspect to the piece that I don’t want to think is so.
Word of Barry Hannah’s death hit a lot of people hard this week, nowhere more so than in Oxford, Miss., where Mr. Hannah lived, [...]

A large part of Oxford has paused to think about and remember Barry Hannah.  Night before last, Tom Franklin, Jim Dees, Ron Shapiro and others read from Hannah’s fiction and talked about him from the stage at Proud Larry’s.  Last night, there was a showing of interviews with Barry at the Power Station.  On tonight’s [...]

William Grimes obit for Barry Hannah in the New York Times is well worth reading.  Check it out.

At 5:00 (in about 10 minutes), Sid Salter is going to have Curtis Wilkie and some other guy from Oxford on the phone talking about Barry Hannah on Mississippi Supertalk Radio.

The Eagle has reported this.  The Oxford Conference of the Book this weekend centers around his work.

Jerry Mitchell has started a blog, devoted to his investigative work about civil rights era murderers who are still alive and not prosecuted.  His latest series of posts describe four individuals, still living, who he believes participated in the 1964 killings of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman (here, here, and here, particularly), and sets forth the [...]

My daughter, Sarah Simonson, had a movie in the Oxford Film Festival this weekend.  It’s called “Dinner on the Grounds: A Soul Reviving Feast,” is about 17 minutes long, and is about traditions involving dinners for all-day sacred harp sings, decoration days, and memorial days in Mississippi and Alabama.  Here it is on Vimeo; if [...]