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“Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite,” a previously unpublished short story by Tennessee Williams (well, before it was included in last April’s The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories — here at Amazon) is available to read free, here.
Was reading Guest of a Guest for their take on FX’s new FEUD: Capote Vs. The Swans, and they mistakenly have him as a Mississippi native (he could claim New Orleans as that’s where he was born, but we all know he’s an Alabama boy who played with Nelle Lee in Monroeville and continued their relationship into adulthood, and Eugene Walter knew him from his visits to Mobile, and Truman didn’t move from Alabama to NY until the early ’30s). Will be watching this for the incredible, incredible casting and knowing it’s going to be just beyond in ALL ways (but found his Answered Prayers miserable).
On InsideHook’s list of 27 Best Luxury Hotel Openings in 2024, Quercus in Georgia
Roasted Mushroom Soup recipe at Blackberry Magazine (from The Barn at Blackberry Farm)
At the NYT:
The World Hasn’t Seen Cicadas Like This Since 1803: Brood XIX and Brood XIII will both emerge this spring. The last time these bugs showed up at the same time in the United States, Thomas Jefferson was president.
In other words, it’s going to be loud outside.
The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year period, Thomas Jefferson was president. After this spring, it’ll be another 221 years before the broods, which are geographically adjacent, appear together again.
“Nobody alive today will see it happen again,” said Floyd W. Shockley, an entomologist and collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “That’s really rather humbling.”
Going through the line at Arnold’s, 2017
Arnold’s Country Kitchen in Nashville has temporarily reopened — just until their building sells. OMG LET’S GO.
BTW, in this same article, it mentions a restauranteur asking Ella Brennan before she passed away the secret to how they do so well in the business:
She told him in every Brennan restaurant, on every shift, there’s a Brennan on duty. And they didn’t open a location unless there was a Brennan — a family member or someone who married into the family, “who has skin in the game.”
Johnson Square, from a 2020 visit
At Garden & Gun: Thirty Years of Savannah’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The bestseller’s author, John Berendt, on what he’d do differently and what it’s like as the book’s sole surviving character
(about Savannah changing:) I just hope they keep the Oglethorpe Plan intact. The design with the squares is the gem that makes Savannah special.
Andy Warhol/Friends and Frenemies: Prints from the Cochran Collection opened last week at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, with 36 original prints by Andy Warhol along with 60 works by other boundary-pushing 20th C artists.
Starting March 21, they’ll have One Stitch at a Time: Vernacular Southern Quilts
An eclectic collection of handmade quilts crafted by Southern vernacular artists including Yvonne Wells, Sarah Taylor, Chris Clark, Otesia Harper, and ladies from the renowned Gee’s Bend, Alabama community.
That top one in the article is this Chinese restaurant with the distinctive sign in Selma, Alabama — took this pic in 2020
Rewind: The 2018 feature, Dine In / Take Out by Julian Castronovo, at Oxford American
Photographer Julian Castronovo’s project, All You Can Eat, traverses the visually distinct subject of Chinese restaurants as they appear throughout the South. Inspired by his family’s history as grocers in Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta, Castronovo made this series of images in the summer of 2018
The June Carter Cash documentary is out on Paramount+
and guess what else is new-ish on Paramount
Cast iron cornbread made at home, 2022
On the latest Tennessee Farm Table, one of my fave podcasts, Iva Spoon Wilde (“she could dress a chicken at the age of six”) with cast iron cornbread, make your own butter, and fried peach pies. here. Oh, it’s so winter right now. Let’s dream fresh fried peach pies a little.
Coming out January 30: The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade. Available for pre-order here at Square Books:
The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible and significant period in world history.
In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.
Red Paden, who owned Red’s juke joint — one of the last — in Clarksdale, has passed away. Obit in the NYT.
The Parthenon, from a 2017 visit
The Parthenon in Nashville has Duncan McDaniel: Fountain on through March 31 and it looks incredible.