This Week’s Various

As always, unless otherwise noted, all images here copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Ask me before using in any fashion. Thank you.

The July Anthropologie catalog = New Orleans.  And it’s fabulous, of course.


Pie week on NPR Morning Edition.  Winning recipes here, more here.

Lorraine Motel, Memphis Tennessee

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis will open the balcony at the Lorraine Motel site for visitors to the museum while a renovation, beginning in November, is going on.  From the AP:

Museum president Beverly Robertson told The Commercial Appeal (http://bit.ly/O6Ebu6) that officials didn’t want to deny visitors the opportunity to see the room, so while it isn’t accessible from the inside, people can view it from the outside by way of the balcony.


She says a tunnel with information about the civil rights movement will lead to the steps of the balcony, where a museum worker will stay to ensure the site is admired properly.


“We need to make sure there is great respect for this space,” she said. “Because that is the whole power of that space, that balcony and that room where Dr. King spent the last minutes of his life.”


Museum founder D’Army Bailey called opening the balcony to the public an “excellent idea.”


“I always felt the balcony should be shared with the public,” Bailey said. “That’s an experience that is rare anywhere in the world.”


The 1830s Ceres Plantation home in Warren County, MS is being dismantled.


The Sound and the Fury in 14 colors; as Faulkner had envisioned.  From the LA Times:
It begins in the voice of Benjy, a mentally disabled man whose perception is jumbled, immediate and distinctly hard to parse.

One of the reasons Benji’s narrative is hard to follow is because it jumps around in time with little indication of the change, other than italics. But when Faulkner was working on the book in the 1920s — “The Sound and the Fury” was published in 1929 — he imagined a way to make the section clearer to readers. “I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink,” Faulkner wrote to his editor, “as I argued with you and Hal in the Speakeasy that day.”

“I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up,” he added, inadvertently launching a challenge to future publishers. Nine decades later, the Folio Society took it up.


The color edition of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” is being published July 6 in a limited edition of 1,480 and is priced at $345. One thousand preordered copies have been sold.

Rhea County Courthouse

Commemoration later in July of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, from the AP in the WP.



The AP on engineers and mechanics working to restore Vollis Simpson’s whirligigs.


A beautiful piece on Louis Michot, Song Man With a New Métier, in the NYT by Michael Tortorello.  Michot has founded the Cultural Research Institute of Acadiana.
…“Then it became a mansion, because he met a woman,” Mrs. Michot said.

On their very first date, she recalled, he asked her to pick him up at a gas station in Milton, La., a rumor of a town largely defined by having a gas station. “He said his truck was in the shop,” she said. When she pulled up, “he was on his bike with a six-pack of beer, eating a boudin breakfast” (a pork sausage).

They drove off to collect a song from an old Cajun sorcière, or medicine woman, named Ethel Mae Bourque, who had recently sung it to her dying father as a kind of musical palliative. Mr. Michot ultimately gained a few important things from the visit: a wife, for one; a collection of field recordings with Mrs. Bourque; and a pile of cypress beams that now run through his house.

With $100,000 to spend, and some sketches on graph paper, Mr. Michot was already imagining a different kind of house: a piece of bayou bricolage made from sunken cypress logs and salvaged shacks, architectural heirlooms and family junk.

And all that Spanish moss…

Slideshow here.

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