1111 I '-1\ 11\-11\
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LAS'f CHANCE TO~RECEI'VE THE REGIStER - 'Tex says, "Listen up, pardners. We're rwt just whistlin' Dixie here." he Center's director, Charles Reagan Wilson, has issued a special appeal to all partners in the continuing study of the American South. As the Center works to strengthen its programs for the 21st century, your help is needed with one simple but important task: saving this publication. "We mail the Southern Register to more than 30,000 recipients in the U.S. and abroad," Wilson says. "It's a good way to keep in touch, and we certainly would like to keep publishing the newsletter, but we're concerned about rising costs." Words of warning: In an effort to preserve the Southern Register, the Center is engaging in more than tough talk. Be aware of the consequences. If you do not respond to this query using the enclosed response card, your name will be removed from the 'mailing list. "Our mailing list has not been updated in a while," Wilson says. "We want to make sure we're hitting the target, not shooting in the dark. We want to make sure we're reaching people who really have an interest in Southern culture." In addition to significant increases in the price of paper and postage, the Center also must shoulder the cost of newsletters that are returned without delivery. The Postal Service charges the Center for the return mailing, and the growing number of returns represents an unacceptable drain on current resources. Readers of the Register can help alleviate the burden. Please communicate your preferences about receiving the newsletter. Readers who wish to remain on the mailing list Charles Reagan Wilson, Age 3
must reply. A special response card is inserted in this issue for your convenience. If you wish, you may continue to receive the newsletter by mail. Please verify that your name and address are current. Notify the Center if multiple copies have been arriving in your mailbox. You may also cancel your subscription by mail and read the Register online. You will find it on the Internet at http://www.cssc.olemiss.edu. Along with your correspondence, please consider showing your support by making a pledge to the Center's Annual Appeal. On the same card you will find information about making a tax-deductible contribution, to help out in a time of tight budgets. "We need to shore up our academic programs and bund a broader base for our conferences and other public activities," Wilson says. "The American South continues to be a fascinating laboratory for exploring many issues pertinent to the country and other parts of the world. Racial and ethnic diversity or the role of religion in everyday lifethese are just a couple of examples made prominent when tragic violence in Northern Ireland or the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism are making the news. "We intend to strengthen the Center's involvement in exploring many aspects of the South's culture, and we want to make those findings widely available," Wilson adds. "But we need new and especially renewed support in order to be able to succeed." Please turn to the enclosed response card and reaffirm your interest in the Center's work.
Published Quarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone 601-232-5993 Fax: 601-232路5814 E路mail: staff@barnard.cssc.olemiss.edu Internet: URi http://www.cssc.olemiss.edu
IN
THIS
ISSUE
Sumrn.erIFa1l1998 1 2 3 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 10 10 10 11 12 13 16 16 16 17 17 18 19 19 19 20 20 20 21
LastChance to Receive the Register Director'sColumn NEH Celebration BrownBagSchedule - Fall 1998 HistorySymPQSium to Explore SoutheasternIndians Mark YourCalendars! TennesseWilliams Festival Decorative Arts & Preservation Center to ReleaseRed Tops CD Previewof Delta] ews Southern FoodwaysSymposium BarnardObservatoryExhibitions McKnight Exhibition Teaching Faulkner Newsletter BlakeIs 1998 Faux Faulkner Winner 1999F&Y Call for Papers Faulkner in America: Summer 1998 Southern BooksellerABA President Reading the South: Reviews& Notes 1998Eudora Welty Awards McKee'sEnglish676 New Arrival ProfessorAirs Sounds of Africa Southern Studies Graduates In Memoriam:Joanne Varner Hawks EugeneWalters Walker PercyProject Kentucke Makes Debut George Washington Bicentennial Call for Proposals:Country Music Notes on Contributors Regional Roundup
REGISTER STAFF Editor: Ann]. Abadie Contributing Writer: Lynn McKnight Editorial Assistant: Anne Evans Publications Manager: Mickey McLaurin Graphic Designer: Bea Jackson Mailing List Manager: Ananda Bollu Lithographer: Metroweb The University complies with all applicable laws regarding affinnative action and equal opP'brtunity in all its activities and does nOt discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, creed, color, national origin, race, religion, sex, handicap, veteran or other status.
Page 2
Renewal is essential
pare our students to be thoughtful, productive citizens. One of our highest priorities during the coming year will be to focus our collective attentions upon the academic program, adding new courses and building on the strengths of existing classes. These efforts will profit from new additions to the Center this fall. Michael Bertrand is joining the faculty as visiting assistant professor of History and Southern Studies. The University of Illinois Press will soon be publishing his dissertation, entitled "Southern Youth in Dissent: Rock 'n Roll, Race, and Elvis Presley, 1945-1960." Leah Hagedorn, who is completing her doctorate in American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is directing a two-year research project on JeWish life at the University of Mississippi and, more broadly, in the state of Mississippi. She will also be teaching a course in the spring semester, bringing to bear her expertise on ethnicity and the South. Research is integral to the Center's academic program, as faculty and students collect information, analyze it, and write about the South. Southern Studies faculty with joint appointments in history, literature, anthropology, and art are especially vital to the Center's mission, but so are the other faculty on campus who teach courses on the South as part of our extended curriculum. Their efforts in documenting the region's culture are creating a notable body of scholarship that will be the Center's great legacy to future efforts to study the South. Center staff members are also integral parts of the educational mission. Living Blues magazine connects with people around the world who now look to the University as an important source of information about one of the South's most significant art forms. The magazine is filled with interviews and other documentation that provide a unique resource for scholars as well as providing information and entertainment for its readers. Similarly, the Center's Southern Media Archive has quietly accumulated a magnificent collection of photographs, videos, and distinctive home movies that document the South's visual tradi-
Summer/Fall 1998
The Southern Register
for institutions as well as individuals. In the traditional South, revival was the summer ritual for church folks that brought renewal, as crops were "laid by" and people's thoughts turned to the spiritual. In the modern South, summer is vacation time, bringing renewal through departure from normal routines. This summer, the Center has continued the process of renewal through selfexamination and looking toward future plans. This process has been a part of the transition that began when Bill Ferris left to become director of the National Endowment for the Humanities last January and Ann Abadie assumed her stewardship of activities this spring. I began my new role as director of the Center on July 1, after extensive meetings with Southern Studies faculty, students, and alumni, Center staff, University administrators, and our State Advisory Committee. I have been teaching at the University since 1981, but these meetings were an in-depth education for me in the workings of the Center. They were especially valuable in giving everyone associated with the Center a forum to share concerns on its future directions. We all agreed, it seems, that academics provides the solid foundation for the Center's work. The Southern Studies bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees provide students training in multidisciplinary course work that prepares them for work in cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, historical archives, research centers, and newspapers and magazines that cover the South. The degrees give students the research, writing, and verbal skills to work in the booming businesses of the South or to take on advanced graduate training in the liberal arts or the law. The Southern Studies curriculum touches many people at the University, from our students who major in it to the countless students who take the courses as part of their overall education. The academic program brings hundreds of students to the Center's activities each year. The Southern Studies faculty has exciting ideas about additions to and revisions of the curriculum to better pre-
tions of the 20th century and reach out to a wide audience. Other Center activities bridge the gap between the University and the broader public, which has surely been a major objective of this institution in its two-decade history. We are all proud of the Center's achievements but look t~ provide focus for the future. Southern Studies faculty and staff members have been sharing ideas and concerns with me and with each other in a frank airing of views on the Center's priorities. This dialogue has really only begun, as the Center embarks on a new stage in its mission to teach, research, and serve the broader community. That word community lies at the heart of coming efforts to provide a mission statement and a five-year plan for the Center. This institution connects with many people, on campus at the University but in other places as well. The Center's communities are in Oxford, throughout MiSSissippi, in the South, and around the world among those friends who read the Southern Register and attend conferences here. As Center director, I will strive to remember these differing communities and the
The Southern Register
ways they can connect with our primary mission of academics. I was involved this summer with several events that represent something of the Center's continuing role in supporting the study of Southern culture. In May, the Center hosted the first Southern Foodways Symposium. The theme of this unique conference was "The Evolution of Southern Cuisine," and formal sessions were interspersed with cooking demonstrations. The well-known Food and. Wine magazine mentioned the symposium in an article on the distinguished food scholar Jessica Harris, who enlivened the gathering with her spirit. A month later, the Center was a sponsor of the ninth annual Natchez Literary Celebration, which explored the theme of "The South: Its Land and Its Literature." The Celebration honored authors Richard Ford and Will Campbell with awards in the name of Richard Wright, and their acceptance speeches were eloquent testimonies to the power of the word in the South. July saw Mound Bayou, MiSSissippi, hosting a homecoming for scholars who had grown up there before leaVing for their academic training and work. The Center collaborated with organizers of
Summer/Fall 1998
the meeting, which was a reflective occasion held at the First Baptist Church in Mound Bayou, founded as an all-black community in the 19th century. Late July saw the Center hosting the 25th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. With the theme "Faulkner in America," the conference brought together scholars and over 130 registrants to examine literary and cultural aspects of Faulkner's attitudes toward the idea of America. Finally, in midAugust, I served as moderator for an educational program preceding the Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The panel focused on visual and poetic traditions of documenting the blues. The Center's involvement in all these meetings celebrating literature, food, homecomings, and music reassured me of the diversity of approaches to studying the South. Southern culture remains lively, with much to analyze. And the music still makes you want to move, the words on paper still inspire you, and the food is still worth a special trip. CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
Page 3
SEPTEMBER 2
.'0
"Mississippi Writers' HOlnetowns:
28
A PilgriUlage"
Below the Mason-Dixon:
Teresa Parker', Assistant Director,
The South as Depicted
Oxford Tourism CouncJ
in Modern Horror Cinema"
Ann Mueller*,
Center for the Study of Southern Culture THE BROWN BAG LUNCH AND LECTURE SERIES
FALL
Steve Budney,
Development Associate/Research
Doctoral Student in History
Coordinator,
University of Mississippi
University Foundation
NOVEMBER 9
"Southern
Human Rights
4
Conference"
16
Jaribu Hill, Attorney,
Gray Tollison, Senator,
Human Rights Activist
Mississippi Legislature
Oxford, Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi
"Recycling, Art, & Poetry"
11
"Pot Likker: Southern Symbol and Sustenance"
Department of English
John T Edge', Journalist
Artist
Oxford, Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi 18 23
The Brown Bag Luncheon Series
"Delta and Pine Land COUlpany"
"Ole Miss Coeds of the '50s: Reflections on Impressions"
Mary Ann Connell Percy,
Mary Stewart,
Communications,
Assistant Professor of English
Delta and Pine Land Company
Shippensberg University
Scott, Mississippi 25 30
"The Conscious Adventurer:
Wednesday at noon
Barnard Observatory
Charles Raiteri,
Mary Anderson Pickard
Assistant Professor of Journalism
Ocean Springs, Mississippi
University of Mississippi
OCTOBER 7
"The Battle of}ereUliah Gage and the University Greys"
Walter Inglis Anderson"
in the
"The Legislative Session of 1999: A Loolz Ahead"
Blair Hobbs, Instructor,
1998
tal~esplace each
"Maniacs & MayheUl
"Labor in the American South"
DECEMBER 2
"Quapaw Canoe COUlpany:
Yuri Rogoulev
Expeditions
University of Moscow
Lower Mississippi River"
Moscow, Russia
on the
John Ruskey
Lecture Hall
Clarlzsdale,Mississippi 14
"Poor White Body" Jay Watson,
during the regular
Associate Professor of English University of Mississippi
academic year.
9
"Children,
Scarecrows,
and Their Gardens" Felder Rushing, Horticulturist, Mississippi Cooperative
21
"Celebrating and Preserving the State's TraditiQ1lal Arts
Extension Service Jackson, Mississippi
Through the Heritage Program" Larry Morrisey, Heritage Program Director Betsy Bradley, Director Mississippi Arts Commission Jacl~son,Mississippi * indicates Southern Studies Graduate Student
SummeriFall1998
The Southern Register
History,S路 mposium to Explore Sout eastern Indians arly Social History of the Southeastern Indians, 1526-1715" is the topic of the Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium to be held at the University October 7-9,1998. Sponsored by the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the symposium is named in honor of Porter L. Fortune Jr., chancellor emeritus, to honor his contributions to the success of the symposium. Past events have examined topics in Southern history such as emancipation, the Southern political tradition, childhood, the civil rights movement, religion, and the role of gender in shaping public power. The 1998 Fortune Symposium reaches further back in timeto the beginnings of Spanish, French, and English colonization-and places Native Americans at the center of the historical action. In the past 20 years, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have made considerable progress in interpreting the lifeways of the native peoples of the late prehistoric and early historic Southeast. From these works, we now understand that the first 200 years of the historical era was a time when fundamental-even catastrophic-changes occurred in native societies of the South. The task of this year's symposium is to examine the various forces at play and to assess their role in the transformations of the native peoples of the Southeast between the era of Spanish exploration durjng the 16th century and the Southern Indian uprising of 1715, known as the Yamasee War. The symposium will open at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 7, with Charles Hudson, Franklin Professor of Anthropology, University of Georgia, presenting a lecture on "Genesis of the Indians of the Old South." Morning sessions on Thursday, October 8, will feature historian Paul Kelton, Southern Connecticut State University, examining "The Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic, 1696-1700" and anthropologist Marvin Smith, Valdosta State University, discussing "Early Population Movements of the Southeastern Indians and Their Causes." Three lectures will be presented on Thursday afternoon: "Spanish Missions and the Persistence of Chiefly Power" by John Worth, director of programs, Coosawattee Foundation; "The Mother of Necessity: Reflections on the Role of the English Trade in the Southeast," by Stephen Hahn, history graduate student, Emory University; and "Trouble Coming Southward: Emanations through and from Virginia, 1607-1675" by Helen Rountree, professor of Anthropology, Old Dominion University. Chester DePratter, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology
The Southern Register
and Anthropology, will begin Friday's program with "The Role of Carolina in the Transformation of Native American Societies," after which Patricia Galloway, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, will present "Colonial Period Social Transformation in the Mississippi Valley: Alliance, Confederation, Playoff." The program on Friday afternoon will include Timothy Perttula, Frontera Archaeology, presenting "Social Changes among the Caddo Indians in the 16th and 17th Centuries" and discussions led by Vernon James Knight, professor of Anthropology, University of Alabama, and Peter Wood, professor of History, Duke University. The symposium is free of charge and does not require registration. For more information c9ntact the coordinators: Robbie Ethridge, Department of Anthropology, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, 601-232-7317 or Ted Smith, Department of History, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677,601-232-7148. The symposium website may be viewed at www.olemiss.edu/depts/ history/symposium.
Summer/Fall 1998
Page 5
Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival The sixth annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival will take place in Clarksdale on October 15-17,1998. Events on the opening day will include the screenings and critiques of Williams's films; a prayer service at St. George's Episcopal Church, where the playwright's grandfather was rector; and a dinner at Uncle Henry's, known in Williams's plays as Moon Lake Casino. On Friday, following the presentation of scholarly papers, Paul Budline of Arts & Entertainment will show his film biography of Tennessee Williams and take questions from the audience. Coahoma Community College will sponsor a program of gospel music as a means of acquainting the audience with aspects of Southern culture that greatly influenced the playwright. Following a multicultural buffet at Lyon, another Williams setting, actress Erma Duricko will present dramatic readings from Williams's plays. Saturday's schedule will include an acting competition for high school students, a session with Clarksdale residents who
knew Williams, walking tours of historic sites from the playwright's childhood, and one-act plays staged on porches in the neighborhood. Following dinner and music at Hopson Plantation Commissary, Theatre Oxford will perform Sweet
Bird of Youth. This year, for the first time, a special program for Elderhostel participants will take place in conjunction with the festival. Scheduled for October 13-18, the Elderhostel program will enable registrants to learn about Tennessee Williams in the playwright's boyhood home and also study cotton culture and blues music. The cost, including meals and lodging, is $415, double occupancy. For information about Elderhostel sessions, contact Ronald Gorsegner, Carnegie Public Library/Delta Blues Museum, 114 Delta Avenue, Clarksdale, MS 38614; telephone 601-627-7341; fax 601-627-4344. For information on the 1998 festival and drama competition, III write Tennessee Williams Festival, P.O. Box 1565, Clarksdale, MS 38614-1565; telephone 601-627-7337.
Columbus Forum to Examine Arts and Crafts Movement The Columbus Historic Foundation announces the 7th annual Decorative Arts and Preservation Forum and the 27th annual Antiques Show and Sale to be held October 22-25, 1998, in Columbus, Mississippi. The weekend features scholarly lectures, gala entertainment, house tours, and retail sales. The American Arts and Crafts Movement is the theme of the two-day forum, which is funded through a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council and will include four free public lectures. The first, scheduled for the evening of October 23, will be a lecture/performance on "What Is Ragtime?" by Richard Zimmerman, musical director of the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival of
Page 6
Summer/Fall 1998
Sedalia, Missouri. Speakers scheduled for October iii 24 are author Ray Stubblebine, a trustee of the Craftsman Farms Foundation, lecturing on the contributions of Gustav Stickley to the Arts and Crafts Style of architecture; historian Martha Swain, presenting "The Political and Social Context of the Bungalow Home, 1890-1930"; and John W. Keefe, New Orleans Museum of Art, discussing the origins and the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement and its impact on the decorative arts. For information on free lectures and events, call the Columbus Historic Foundation at 601329-3533 or the Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau at 800-327 -2686.
The Southern Register
Center to Release Red Tops -Compact Disk his November the Center plans to
Walter Osborne, Red Tops drummer and manager, graciously donated his collection of Red Tops recordings and memorabilia to the Center in 1985. Roberts Wilson Jr., a 1969 graduate of the University of Mississippi Law School, is providing financial support for the production of the compact disk. Among the ~ÂŁ!dTops songs to be included on the disk are "Danny Boy," "Swanee River Rock," "Hello, Is That You?," and "I'm in the Mood for Love." The $17 compact disks will be sold for the first time at the Red Tops Reunion Party on November 7. For more information about this event, con-
release a compact disk recording of the Red Tops dance band at a Red Tops Reunion held at the Southern Cultural Heritage Complex in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Red Tops, an ll-piece band, played regularly at colleges, nightclubs, and country clubs in Mississippi and Louisiana during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. In the 1950s the Red Tops were the most popular and innovative dance band in Mississippi, in part because they often added humorous skits to their acts and always performed in a lively manner, with great personality.
THE
CENTER
FOR THE
STUDY
OF SOUTHERN
OX'FORD TOURISM MISSISSIPPI THE INVITE
YOU TO JOIN
SOUTHERN
SUNDAY, PANEL CENTER
DISCUSSION FOR THE
1
THE
The Southern Register
DEWITT
ETV
AT
2:00
RECEPTION
P.M.
TO FOLLOW
OF SOUTHERN
CULTURE
OF MISSISSIPPI
FOR THIS
MISSISSIPPI
OF
OBSERVATORY
UNIVERSITY FUNDING
1, 1998,
AND
STUDY
BARNARD
SCREENING
''''jEW"S
BY MISSISSIPPI
OCTOBER
CULTURE
EXPERIENCE
PREVIEW
A NEW DOCUMENTARY BY MIKE PRESENTED
to right) Willard Tyler, Joe Custard, Jimmy Bosley, Napoleon Fleming, "Doc" Raymond, Walter Osborne, Jesse Hayes, Louis Spencer, Curtis Dunning, Rufus McKay (not pictured: Anderson Hardwick, absent because of military service) Inset: Red Tops CD
COUNCIL JEWISH
US FOR A SPECIAL
DELTA
Above: The Red Tops in the 1950s (left
COUNCIL
HUMANITIES
MUSJ=:UM OF THE
tact Michelle Walton, Southern Cultural Heritage Complex, at 601-631-2997. To purchase a compact disk after the November release, call the Center's catalog office at 800-390-3527.
EVENT
PROVIDED
HUMANITIES
BY
COUNCIL
SummerlFall1998
Ben Llmensdorf; atWrdgeneration Mississippi Delta cotton farmer
Page 7
Southern Foodways Symposium . 'w"路 __ a Great Success路. Food and Wine magazine called the first Southern Foodways Symposium "ground-breaking." "Extraordinary," said the St. Petersburg Times. For three days in May, Oxford, the University, and the Center played host to a diverse collection of scholars, chefs, writers, and a few self-professed "good eaters." They gathered to discuss matters of race, class, and regional identity. They gathered to eat fried catfish and hushpuppies. At the core of the conference was a series of 10 lectures, ranging from John Martin Taylor's "Toward a History of Southern Food" to Bill Wiggins's "Chicken Are Dying So That Men Might Live!: A Look at the Role of Foodways in the African American Religious Experience." Entertainment spanned the spectrum from the rousing sounds of the University of Mississippi Gospel Choir to the contemplative musings of Norma Jean Darden's play, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine. And mealtime offerings ranged from Ed Scott's criSp fried catfish to Frank Stitt's rich pork rillettes. Primary thanks for the event's success go to sponsors Bryan Foods and Viking Range as well as supporting sponsors Ellen Rolfes Books and Mississippi Madness. The American Institute of Wine and Food was an advisory sponsor. Caroline Herting of the Institute for Continuing Studies did a masterful job at managing logistical affairs. Plans are taking shape for a second symposium, to be held in the fall of 1999. Though the dates have not been set, the theme
Page 8
Author Richard Schweid talks with Ed Scott, the first African American catfish farmer in the Mississippi Delta.
of next year's gathering is to be "The Creolization of Southern Food." Expect discussions of how different ethnic groups influenced the development of Southern cuisine, of food at the Southern borders, and of how Southern food changes when it makes its way north to cities like Chicago or west to Oakland. Expect to eat well. Look for details in the next Southern Register or contact symposium director John T. Edge by phone at 601-236-7803 or email, johnt@dixie-net.com. Based upon suggestions from attendees, registration will again be limited to 75 persons. Those planning to attend are advised to register by early 1999 in order to secure a space.
~
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oo
The Southern Register
Page 9
Teaching Faulkner
CALL FOR PAPERS THE
FAULKNER & YOKNAPATAWPHA CONFERENCE
Newsletter
"Faulkner and Postmodemism" THE
The Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University publishes Teaching Faulkner, a newsletter that appears twice yearly (fall and spring). The newsletter features brief articles, notes, and queries related to the teaching of Faulkner in high school, college, and university classes. Teaching Faulkner is edited by Robert W. Hamblin, professor of English and director of the Faulkner Center at Southeast, and Charles Peek, professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Hamblin and Peek have directed "Teaching Faulkner" sessions at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference since 1990. Subscriptions ($5.00 a year), manuscripts, and suggestions should be mailed to Teaching Faulkner, Center for Faulkner Studies, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, M063701.
Blake Is 1998 Faux Faulkner Winner Robert L. Blake Jr., of Columbia, Missouri, won the ninth annual Jack Daniels Faux Faulkner Contest. Blake's parody, "Pile On," was chosen the best of the "Bad Faulkner" by contest judges George Plimpton, John Berendt, Barry Hannah, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The contest is sponsored by the Jack Daniels Distillery, the Yoknapatawpha Press and its Faulkner Newsletter, and the University of Mississippi. The contest winner receives a trip for two to Oxford and complementary registration and lodging for the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held each summer at the University. Blake, a physician and teacher at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, read his winning entry on July 26, the opening day of the conference. Deadline for the 1999 Jack Daniels Faux Faulkner Contest is February 1, 1999. Entries, no longer than 500 words each, must be typed and double-spaced. Send entries to Faulkner Newsletter, P.O. Box 248, Oxford, MS 38655. For additional details, visit the website http://www.watervalley.net/yoknapatawphapress/ index.htm.
Page 10
26th ANNUAL
UNIVERSITY
OF MISSISSIPPI
July 25~30,1999 The Department of English is issuing a call for papers for possible presentation at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference to be held on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi July 25-30, 1999. Papers on any aspect of the theme "Faulkner and Postmodernism" are eligible. The purpose of the conference will be to study and situate Faulkner's work within the context of what has been termed "postmodern," although certainly that concept is one of the trickiest in current literary theory. We hope to elicit papers that provide some working definition of the postmodern, as it pertains to Faulkner, either as a way of incorporating his work within that definition or exploring his differences from it. Among the questions that papers might address are the following: What are the texts of Faulkner that most qualify as postmodern and how do they differ from his other work? Is there any sense in which Faulkner may fit into both the concepts of modernism and postmodernism, either as a pattern of development, an abrupt shift, or even as simultaneously practiced modes? Does modernism always imply postmodernism, as structuralism may imply poststructuralism, or are they distinctly different modes? What role might Faulkner's Southernness play in his identity as a postmodem writer? Authors whose papers are selected for presentation at the conference will receive (1) a waiver of the conference registration fee, (2) lodging at the University Alumni House from Sunday, July 25, through Friday, July 30, and (3) reimbursement of up to $500 in travel expenses within the continental United States ($.31 per mile by automobile or tourist class airfare). Papers presented at the conference will be published by the University Press of Mississippi. The 14th edition of the University of Chicago Manual of Style should be used as a guide in preparing manuscripts (3,000 to 6,000 words). Three copies of manuscripts must be submitted by January 15, 1999. Notification of selection will be made by March 1, 1999. Manuscripts and inquiries about papers should be addressed to Donald Kartiganer, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677. Telephone: 601-232-5793. E-Mail: dkartiga@olemiss.edu.
Summer/Fall 1998
Deadline January 15, 1999 The Southern Register
25th Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI • OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI
"Faulkner in America" SUMMER
1998
"You're a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in MississiPPi where you started from. But that's all right too. It's America too .... " -SHERWOOD
Clockwise
ANDERSON
TO WILLIAM
FAULKNER
from top left:
Award-winning actresses Alice Berry (front) and Jenny Odie dramatized a Joan Williams short story about her relationship with William Faulkner and scenes from the novel Light in August. Berry and OdIe are founders of Voices of the South. a theater company dedicated to preserving great Southern literature by adapting short stories and novels for the stage from languages and images inspired by the text. Diane and M. C. "Chooky" Faulkner pose in front of their new home, where they hosted the closing party for the conference. structure is a replica his parents' home, Memory House, now headquarters for the University Foundation. Speakers at the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference are (seated. from left) Charles A. Peek, University of Nebraska at Kearney; Noel Polk, University of Southern Mississippi; Kathryn Burgess McKee, University of Mississippi; Catherine Gunther Kodat, Hamilton College; (standing. from left) Donald M. Kartiganer. University of Mississippi; Richard Godden. University of Keele; Peter Nicolaisen, Paedagogische Hochschule, Flenburg, Germany; Candace Waid, University of California, Santa Barbara; Hortense Spillers, Cornell University; Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Joseph R. Urgo, Bryant College; and James B. Carothers, University of Kansas. Not pictured is Center director Charles Reagan Wilson.
Southern Bookseller Elected ABA President A vocalchampion of independent bookstores, Richard Howorth of Oxford, Mississippi, has been elected president of the American Booksellers Association, a national nonprofit organization that supports privately held bookstores across the country. Howorth's own store,"Square Books in Oxford, is known for its fine general selection and its emphasis on Southern literature, history, and other topics pertaining to the American a South. Square Books has been an Oxford landmark since 1979. As a member of the board of directors and as an officer, Howorth long has backed the work of the ABA, which he says is "in the realm of missionary duty when one considers the objectives of the organization." Founded in 1900 and based in Tarrytown, New York, the trade association tackles the big issues related to books and independent bookselling. ''What with the publicly funded big box corporate bookstores, massmerchandising 'wholesale' clubs, and Internet 'bookstores,' most members of the ABA lately have been in for the fight of their lives,"
Howorth writes in the July/August issue of Dear Reader, the newsletter from Square Books. "The ABA, by being for booksellers a formidable entity that can deal with these threats in the style of battle that those who threaten like to employ themselves, is doing work that we feel in noble and necessary." It's not just about selling books, Howorth adds. Independent bookstores "are necessary to a healthy reading society." Richard Howorth
Become a Subscriber to MississiPPi FoUdife, a twice~yearly publication that documents and analyzes tradition and creativity in Mississippi cultural life. The next edition, a special issue on Folklife and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, will consider relationships between political activism and religion, music, memory, and social life and manners. Future issues will examine folklife in landscape, recreation, and storytelling and literature.
----------------------------~---------------------------The annual subscription price for Mississippi Folklife is $10. For your subscription, please caUl ..800..390..3527. MississiPpi Folklife is published by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
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SummerlFall1998
The Southern Register
Readin the South Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell. By Ellen Douglas. New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998 238 pages. $18.95. Ellen Douglas is the pseudonym of Mississippi author Josephine Ayres Haxton, who was born in Natchez, lived in Greenville for more than three decades after her marriage, and taught in Oxford and other places before settling down in Jackson. Her first eight books are all fiction: the novels A Family's Affairs, Where the Dreams Cross, Apostles of Light, The Rock Cried Out, A Lifetime Burning, Can't Quit You, Baby, and two story collections, Black Cloud, White Cloud and The Magic Carpet and Other Tales. Having published fiction for four decades, with Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell, the 77 -yearold author crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact. This crossing is actually not a radical departure for Douglas. She adopted her pseudonym in 1961, before the publication of her first novel, because, she explains, "A Family's Affairs was based closely on the lives of my two aunts, very private ladies who would take a dim view of having that privacy violated in a book that anybody might buy and read." Douglas continued to use her own experiences and those of her family in her fiction. In Truth, however, she writes openly, without disguise, about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about her relationship to black MiSSissippians, and about her family' guilt for the murder of helpless slaves. In "Grant," the first story, Douglas tells of her husband's old uncle who moves in with her family during the last year of his life and of the beautiful black woman who nursed him as he was dying. The sons of the house, young men dis-
covering sex, helped care for the old uncle, who had not given up sexual desire. On the morning of his death, bees swarmed. "Julia and Nellie" reveals the secrets of a liaison of close cousins who lived at the
Douglas discovers the secret of her family's involvement with the murders of 30 slaves suspected of plotting an uprising in Adams County in 1861. Trying to discover "truth," she examines longconcealed family ledgers, interviews an ancient aunt, converses with blacks who once lived on the family's property, and meditates about Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, historian Winthrop Jordan's recent account of the incident. "With regard to ancestors one has few choices," Douglas observes in this story. "They're back there. One can remember or forget them, investigate or let lie, lie or speak what may perhaps be the truth about them. Of the more recent ~ ones there may exist portraits, letters, ~ diaries, perhaps ambrotypes and photographs. Further back, things are con~ siderably vaguer." ~ Choosing not to ignore her ancestors, > i< Douglas uses every tool imaginable durEllen Douglas ing her journey to discover them. Truth, as she says, is a book "about remembering Natchez landmark Longwood, a Moorish and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying mansion left unfinished in 1861 when and truth-telling. It's about secrets, judgthe Civil War broke out. The Nellie in ments, threats, danger, and willful amnethe story is the author's paternal grandsia. It's about the truth in fiction and the mother. Julia is Nellie's cousin, Julia fiction in truth." Readers will welcome Nutt, daughter of the builder of Truth and hope that the author will write Longwood. Discovering details of Julia's four more stories like those in this vol40-year affair with their cousin Dunbar ume and four more and four more for Marshall and the circumstances of his many years to come. burial are central to this story. "Hampton" focuses on the author's Angels of Mercy: An maternal grandmother and the black serEyewitness Account of the vant who worked for her as director of the household, chauffeur, mechanic, garCivil War and Yellow Fever. dener, and handyman from 1931 until Compiled and edited by Sister Mary 1954. Douglas later made visits to him in Paulinus Oakes, RSM. Baltimore: the nursing home where he spent his last Cathedral Foundation Press, 1998. years, trying to learn about his life, his 112 pages. Paper $16.00. disapproval of Jews, his reactions to the civil rights movement, and his strong As a child growing up in Vicksburg, conviction that "Only an evil God could Mississippi, Sister Mary Paulinus Oakes, have created the world we live in." RSM, was a history buff, particularly And finally, in "On Second Creek," interested in the Civil War. Her kinder-
5
Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
The Southern Register
for lhere and other boolo
Summer/Fall
"n Il00-648-4001or mx 601-234-%30_1~1 160 Courthouse Square'
1998
Oxford, Mississippi 38655
i~:l~ Page 13
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Reading the South continued
LIVING ON A DREAM A Marriage Tale By Patt Blue uThis book stands as for above confes· sionolliterature as its photographic images rise above fami~ snapshots. Rother than se~lIbsorption, the family's history tenders a row lesson in what it sometimes tokes to survive." • Publishers Weekly $28 doth
ApPALACHIAN LEGACY Phofographs by Shelby lee Adams A intimate look into the lives of nine Appalachian families over the (ourse of a Quorter-century and into the life of the man who photogrophs them $50 cloth, $30 paper
THE LOVED AND THE UNLOVED By Thomas Hal Phillips An unforgettable novel in which violence is tempered by compassion and love $17 paper
INVENTING SOUTHERN LITERATURE By Michnel Kreyling A skeptical view of the way the mainstream has defined and studied southern literature $45 anjatketed doth, $11 paper
THE JIM DILEMMA ReDding RDee in Huclcleberry Finn
By Jocelyn Chadwick·Joshua An eloquent defense of Jim, Twain,
and the use of Huckleberry Finn in the classroom $45 unjacketedclath, $17 paper
(HILDREN OF THE DARK HOUSE Text Dnd Context in FDulkner
By Noel Polk Polk's probing look into the Freudian world of Faulkner's life and works $37.50 clath, $18 paper New in paperbatk!
Page 14
garten classroom had been a hospital for wounded soldiers during the Siege of Vicksburg, and for a time Grant's forces had occupied the schoolSaint Francis Xavier Academy, opened by the Sisters of Mercy in 1860. Sister Paulinus recalls as a child hearing stories about the Sisters of Mercy, heroic women who dedicated their lives to service as teachers and nurses. Her passion for history sparked intense research to learn about their work, and Angels of Mercy: An Eyewitness Account of the Civil War and Yellow Fever is the result of her 10-year mission. The book is organized around nine biographies: four nuns and two women preparing for the order who left their convent in Baltimore in October 1860 to establish and staff a school in Vicksburg; the first woman from Vicksburg and one from New Orleans who joined the order; and Father Francis Xavier Leray, the priest who recruited the Sisters to Vicksburg and, as a Confederate chaplain, accompanied them to Jackson, Oxford, and other sites where they nursed throughout the Civil War. In addition to the biographies, the book contains the journal of Sister Mary Ignatius Sumner, who gives accounts of events from 1860, when she and her five companions arrived in Vicksburg, until her death from malaria fever in 1895. During this time the Sisters of Mercy built a convent and an auditorium next to their original quarters, a house built in 1830. Sister Paulinus proVides extensive footnotes to supplement the journal, and she traces the history of the Sisters as they constructed two additional buildings, occupying an entire city block in downtown Vicksburg until the early 1990s when they moved the convent and closed the school. The City of Vicksburg purchased the property in 1994 for the development of the Southern Cultural Heritage Complex, a multi-
SummeriFall1998
use facility that will include a museum, an education center, and an inn. This facility will provide a lasting monument to the Sisters of Mercy. All proceeds from Angels of Mercy will benefit Mississippi Mercy Ministries with the Poor. Copies are available from Square Books and other independent bookstores. Mail orders (checks payable to Sisters of Mercy) to Sister Emmanuel Harper, 103 McAuley Drive, Vicksburg, MS 39180.
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. By Leon E Litwack. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.599 pages. $35.00. In a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Been in the Storm So Long, distinguished historian Leon Litwack has once again created a thoughtful, engaging account of one of the most significant periods in the history of American race relations. While his 1979 book focused on the aftermath of slavery, Litwack now has turned his attention primarily to the years between 1890 and the Great Migration, when black The Southern Register
Reading the South continued Southerners endured a "sharply proscribed and deteriorating position in a South bent on commanding black lives and black labor by any means necessary."
The disturbing details of the era's violence and brutality, and the explanations of larger forces at work on the Southern landscape, do not escape Litwack's attention. Yet Trouble in Mind largely deals with these events in terms of their impact upon the everyday lives of the vast majority of black Southerners, who coped with immense political, social, and economic challenges without having the power or affluence to make their mark in broader terms. Lending an intimacy to his story, Litwack draws on contemporary documents and first-person narratives from both blacks and whites to show how many black Southerners managed to battle the repressive system by creating their own institutions and preserving their culture through religion, music, and other avenues of expression. It is this "interior life" that forms the framework for Litwack's inquiry. As he puts it, "This is not so much a study of black leadership and ideology as it is a story of daily struggles by black men and women to wrest some meaning and value out of their working lives. It is less a study of the institutional life of blacks than of the experience of being black in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury South."
A broad interpretation of Southern culture, the book analyzes, among others, novelists, journalists, advertisers, United Daughters of the Confederacy speakers, the builders of Stone Mountain, and lynch mobs. The concepts of whiteness and white supremacy emerge as complex works in progress, full of tensions and insecurities that different Southerners tried to explain through various narratives. Hale explains the rise of new kinds of thinking about whiteness in several ways. Along with emancipation, urbanization, and new forms of African American activism, the rise of consumer culture triggered new ideas about what it meant to be white. Since shopping and access to goods had the potential to undercut traditional privileges in the South, racist advertisements and newly segregated public spaces became ways to sustain or create social differences. Grace Hale's writing is powerful and generally free of the jargon that mars so much scholarship on identity construction. The conclusion-that since some people made whiteness, we should be able to unmake it-is a wise reinterpretation of ideas C. Vann Woodward developed many years ago. Perhaps even inspired is Hale's suggestion that we can only begin to "reimagine integration" (296) by learning or remembering that Southern history is the story of interdependence and shared experience.
Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890,1940.
Lee~Siiiith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group A Genesis of Writers
Nancy
"Nancy Parrish writes of extraordinary women in a most extraordinary place." -Jill McCorkle Southern Literary Studies • Fred Hobson, Editor Illustrated·
Christopher Morris, Susan A. Eacker, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Charles Joyner Introduction by Michael O'Brien Edited by Christopher Morris and Steven G. Reinhardt "These excellent essays show how thoroughly recent scholarship is redrawing the landscape of the literary South." -Journalo/Southern History $11.95 paper
TeIIAllout the South The Southern Rage to Explain
Fred Hobson
$30.00.
"A lively and original study .... Hobson makes plain ... how few white southerners have understood the black contribution to southern culture." - The New Yorker
Making Whiteness is an exciting volume
The Southern Register
$29.95
TED OwNBY
By Grace Elizabeth Hale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.427 pages.
that analyzes how people in the J 1m Crow South came to understand and articulate the meanings of being white. Equally importantly, author Grace Elizabeth Hale, an assistant professor of American history at the University of Virginia, shows how different Southerners developed new narratives to deal with the privileges they claimed in the name of whiteness.
C. Parrish
Southern Literary Studies $16.95 paper
ffl'tlil,/;/('
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SummerlFall1998
Page 15
Reading the South continued nto the Sound Country: k\ Carolinian's Coastal Plain. ~y Bland Simpson. Photography by f'\nn Cary Simpson. Chapel Hill: ~niversity of North Carolina Press, 1997.269 pages. $34.95 cloth, $19.95 baper. Part travelogue, part autobiography, nd part natural history. Into the Sound ountry is a book to settle into for a ood read. In it, the natural world of orth Carolina's eastern coast, a soundotted, swamp-soaked, pine-pocked 'lsh-and-feathered region of rivers runing out to sea, is captured by two atives who affectionately recollect and e-create their fascinating home land as hey rediscover their roots. Bland Simpson, an author who teachcreative writing at the University of orth Carolina at Chapel Hill and a ember of the acclaimej string band ~ he Red Clay Ramblers, guides the eader on an entertaining tour of scuprernong vineyards, swamps, pine savanras, oyster bars, fishing shanties, waterronts, and beyond. His narrative is illed with accounts of his ramblings hrough the region, enriched by the ales of the people he knows and meets. Ann Simpson's photographs proIvide a sweeping view of sounds and hare lines, accompanied by closer 'nspection of slow-paddled rivers and treams and their surrounding en vions, giving visual form to her husand's personal prose portraits. The ook also includes her selection of rchival illustrations, which, like old ~ amily photographs, give Into the Sound k:ountry an even homier feel.
Page 16
McKee's
English 676 Southern Studies and English Professor Kathryn McKee created English 676 to cover an element of Southern literature that has been largely absent from standard seminars: 19thcentury Southern women's literature. Indeed, English 676, Writing the Tradition of Southern Women's Literature, seeks to answer several important questions: (1) Is there a tradition of distinctly Southern women's literature? (2) If so, is this an important distinction to study? (3) Can women's literature be linked by gender as well as by region? Focusing on women's literature from 1830 to 1930, McKee's course requires students to read a wide variety of 19thcentury literature, including the works of Sherwood Bonner, Kate Chopin, Augusta Jane Evans, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Harper, Frances Newman, and Evelyn Scott. In studying and discussing these authors, students are considering not only the tradition of Southern women's literature, but also how region plays a part in how women view their gender through their writing. McKee is encouraged by the reaction of the students to this "experimental" class. "I don't think any students had read any of the books in the seminar," she said. "Certainly, they had heard of many of the authors and their work. But it is encouraging to think this class gives voice to Southern women's literature that has not been Widelyread." The course requirements include leading class discussion on the readings as well as writing a final paper on either one writer or an overall theme of Southern women'slitera-
Summ.er/Fall1998
ture as a reflection and/or criticism of Southern culture. Writing the Tradition of Southern Women's Literature, though listed as English 676, appeals to Southern Studies graduate students for its emphasis on gender, literature, and culture. It reassesses the way the canon of Southern literature has been structured and, according to McKee and her students, has proved to be an extremely successful venture. For more information on the English 676 seminar, contact Kathryn McKee by telephone at 601-232-7161 or bye-mail at kmckee@olemiss.edu. SCOTT SMALL
The Southern Register
Professor Airs the Sounds of Africa
Bob Brinkmeyer
hosting African music show on campus radio
here would an American professor of literature learn to love African music? Would you believe-Finland? That's exactly where Robert Brinkmeyer, professor of American Literature and Southern Studies at the University, developed his taste for the sounds of Africa. And since Jan'll,ary, he has been spreading those sounds around through The Source, a show he hosts every Sunday afternoon on the campus radio station, WUMS. "This is some of the tightest and mellowest music you'll ever hear," the 46-year-old professor tells his listeners. "If you ever see this CD, buy it. If you don't like it, I'll buy it from you." Brinkmeyer started hearing African music in the 19805 and liked some of it, but he remained mainly a rock 'n' roll fan until that trip to Finland.
The Southern Register
In Helsinki as a visiting professor in 1994-95, Brinkmeyer began frequenting a world-music record store whose owner introduced him to dozens of African artists. Brinkmeyer spent hours listening to the music, reading about it, and buying it. "It helped me get through those long winter nights," he said. III What is it about African music that grabs him? "It's hard to say. I just love it," said Brinkmeyer. "It's so different. It's such a wonderful mix of traditional and modern. It's so varied, so rich." It's not so different from rock 'n' roll as one might think. "There's a lot of give and take between Western and African music," Brinkmeyer said. "Rock 'n' roll's origins are in Africa, but then rock'n'roll went back and influenced African music. And you've got African reggae, African blues, Afro-Cuban music, and Afro-funk." Returning to the the States with a new collection of African recordings, Brinkmeyer began dreaming of doing a radio show. This year, a slot opened up on WUMS. He proposed his idea, and it was accepted. "I just steeled myself and did it," said Brinkmeyer, who had no previous broadcasting experience. "I was messing up a lot the first time. Now I feel much more comfortable. I love it; it energizes me." ''It's going really well," Matt Chatham, the station's program director, said of the show. "We get a lot of positive feedback. And I personally enjoy listening to the show. It's not like anything we've had before." Like the other disc jockeys-mostly students-on the UniverSity-owned station, Brinkmeyer receives no pay for his work. One of his rewards is getting to hear the new releases that record distributors send to the station, after Brinkmeyer tells them about his show. "The distributors have been very cooperative," he said. STEVE CHESBOROUGH
Page 17
JOANNE VARNER "JAN" HAWKS ( 1932-1998) Joanne Varner "Jan" Hawks, director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women's Studies and assistant professor of history, died of heart failurepn Saturday, July 4. She had served as dean of women from 1972 until she became director of the Sarah Isom Center in 1981. Hawks grew up in Georgia, was an honor graduate of Agnes Scott College, and, in 1960, came to the University of Mississippi, where she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history and served on the faculty and as an administrator except for six years when she taught at Blue Mountain College. She is survived by her husband, Paul Harvey Hawks, two sons, two daughters, a sister, and three grandchildren. Joanne Hawks will be missed by family, friends, colleagues, students, and countless others whose lives she enriched. Carolyn Ellis Staton, associate provost and associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, worked closely with Hawks in many campus activities and collaborated with her on a research project on the impact of women legislators in the South. Staton remembers Hawks as "a very supportive fritmd." "To most she was a role model," Staton said. "She was a champion of women and women's' rights. She really helped create a good environment for women here on campus. She was the epitome of loyalty, commitment, and service-a truly wonderful person." "Jan was an impOrtant mentor to many, many women, not only in Oxford but across the state," said Brenda West, associate director of Alumni Affairs and a longtime friend of Hawks. In addition to working for the advancement of women in numerous capacities within and outside the University, Hawks made significant contributions through teaching and writing about the history of '"women in the South. Furthermore, she was a strong supporter of the Center for the
Study of Southern Culture from its beginning. Hawks helped plan the Center's pioneering Southern Studies curriculum and taught Women in the South, the first Southern Studies course offered at the University. She developed the course as a result of her participation in "Teaching Women's Literature from a Regional Perspective," a project sponsored by the Department of Education and the Modern Language Association. The course, which was first taught in the 1979 Spring semester, became a favorite of undergraduates and graduate students in Southern Studies as well as history. With historian Sheila L. Skemp, who is currently serving as interim director of the Sarah Isom Center, Hawks organized "Sex, Race, and the Role of Women in the South," a symposium sponsored by the Center and the Department of History in 1982. Together Hawks and Skemp edited the volume of proceedings of that event. Hawks made many presentations at professional and scholarly meetings. ill Among these was "Mother, Servant, Saint: Historical Images of the Southern Nurse," a lecture delivered at the Barnard-Millington Symposium in 1985. The Sarah lsom Center was a sponsor of this program, and Hawks assisted with its planning and implementation. Shortly thereafter, Hawks helped develop and administer the three路year (1986-89) Ford Foundation Project in Southern Studies sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in cooperation with the Sarah ,~\
Isom Center for Women's Studies and the Afro-American Studies Program. The project, funded by a $310,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, helped the University and other institutions of higher learning in Mississippi and surrounding states enhance the teaching of Southern history and culture. Hawks was active in many organizations and served as president of the Southern Association of Women Historians, the Mississippi Association of Women Deans, and the Oxford branch of American Association of University Women. Her memberships included Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Mortar Board, Mississippi Historical Society, Mississippi Women's Political Caucus, Southern Historical Association, and the Southeastern Women's Studies Association. She was a ruling elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Oxford and a member of the board of the Historical Foundation of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches. Contributions to the Joanne Varner
HUMANITIES ON THE INTERNET Hawks Memorial Fund, which supports scholarship and research at the Sarah 'II!! Isom Center, may be sent to the University of Mississippi Foundation, P.O. Box 249, University, MS 38677. EUGENE WALTER Author Eugene Walter died on May 29, 1998, at his home in Mobile, Alabama. Walter was honored as a "renaissance man" at a 1988 Auburn University celebration of his life and work. He was an actor, artist, costume designer, culinary expert, dancer, filmmaker, lyricist, singer, translator, and writer of both fiction and poetry. Walter's published works include the novel The Untidy Pilgrim, winner of the 1954 Lippincott Prize; The Byzantine Riddle, a short story collection; and Monkey Poems. He was a founding contributor of the Paris Review, an editor of the Transatlantic Review, and an assistant at the poly lingual review Botteghe Oscure. Born and raised in Mobile, Walter left the South to serve as an Air Force cryptographer in World War II. After the war, he studied at the New School for Social Research in New York and designed sets and costumes for the beginning of the off-Broadway theater movement. Walter then lived for two decades in Europe, attend~ng the Sorbonne in Paris and the Istituto Dante Aleghieri in Rome. In Rome Walter worked as a translator on several Frede,rico Fellini films, including Satyricon and 8 1/2, in which he also played a journalist. He wrote the lyrics for the song "What Is a Youth?" in Franco Zefferelli's film Romeo andluliet. It was Walter's dedication to the preservation of Southern culinary heritage that brought him back to the South in 1969 to write American Cooking: Southern Style, the bestseller in the Time-Life Food of the World series. Walter then settled in his native Mobile with his beloved cats in a house full of books and papers, where he said, "My muse continues to visit daily."
The Walker Percy Project Having debuted online in early 1995, the Walker Percy Project has grown into a successful model for merging the humanities with the latest in information technol路 ogy. In a discipline where technology is often believed to contribute to depression of the human spirit-what Percy referred to as "the malaise"-the Walker Percy Project is proving that showcasing the humanities through technology can indeed be beneficial to the modern mind. The Walker Percy Project at http://sunsite.unc.edu/wpercy conceives of itself as an Internet-based Literary Center that, among its many programs, serves as a nexus linking all of the institutions that house collections on the philosophical 20th-century Southern writer, including the three major Percy manuscript collections held at the University of North Carolina, Loyola University, New Orleans, and the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center. Hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but existing as an independent, nonprofit educational service, the project combines the features of an encyclopedia with the ongoing activities of a conference in a visual and aural setting that allows visitors to actively engage themselves in Percy-related materials. Internet facilities include an administration center, a museum and display area, a research library, a conference center, and classrooms. Essays and comprehensive bibliographic resources on Percy, photographs and video footage of the National Book Award-winning author, calls for papers, information on forthcoming and recent Percy books, conference information, and location guides to Percy collector's items are aU available through the project. The Percy Project's founding director, Louisiana State University graduate Henry P. Mills, is currently planning production of a digital CD-ROM in conjunction with Interactive Architex, a multimedia production company in Austin, Texas, and a major corporate sponsor of the project. The CD is slated to include Percy's nonfiction works in a searchable format accompanied by digital video of the author's significant public appearances, lectures, and interviews. Plans are also under way for an online Percy conference to be held on the Internet in the spring of 1999. For more information on the project, visit the project's web site or contact Henry Mills at wpercyl@sunsite.unc.edu or 512-305-0751. ALLISON VISE FINCH
JUDY LONO
Page 19
1999: George Washington Bicentennial Next year will mark the bicentennial of George Washington's death. The life of the first president will be celebrated throughout 1999 with events held at Mount Vernon and around the country. In Mississippi, several events are being planned, including the presentation of a new musical tribute to George Washington written by composer Luigi Zaninelli of Hattiesburg. The voice and piano work is based on a poem written by PhylliS Wheatley in 1775. A symposium featuring nationally known scholars will be held at the University of Southern Mississippi October 28-30, 1999, during which decorative arts historian Wendell Garrett and other scholars will discuss interdisciplinary topics related to the subject "George Washington and the American South, 1799." Events in Mississippi are being coordinated by Lynn Crosby Gammill of Hattiesburg, vice regent, Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and a member of the Center's State Advisory Committee. Materials relating to the national celebration, including packets for teachers and a CD entitled Dig into George, are available from Mount Vernon. Write George Washington Bicentennial, P.O. Box 110, Mount Vernon, VA 22121; telephone 703-7998652; fax 703-799-8698; e-mail jriley@mountvernon.org. Information is also available on the Internet website www.gwashington1999.org.
Page 20
Spring 1998
The Southern Register
Mississippi University for Women will hold the 10th annual Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium on October 1-3, 1998. Speakers are John Dufresne (two novels, Louisiana Power and Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little, plus a collection of stories), Ashley Warlick (The Distance from the Heart of Things), Steve Yarbrough (MississiPPi History and two other collections of short stories), Nanci Kincaid (two novels and stories in various magazines), Jerry Ward (professor at Tougaloo College, poet, editor of Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry), Vicki Covington (The Last Hotel for Women and three other novels), Dennis Covington (Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia plus a novel and essays), and the winner of the 1998 Welty Prize, to be announced. The symposium is partially funded by the Mississippi Humanities Council and is open to the public without charge. For information, contact Ginger Hitt, Division of Humanities, Mississippi University for Women,W-Box 1634, Columbus, MS 39701; telephone 601-329-7166; e-mail ghitt@MUWEdu.
The Great Oaks Storytelling Festival will take place October 9-11 in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Storytellers from North Carolina to Texas will perform. Tickets for Saturday are $5 for the entire day, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and are available for all ages. Adults-only tickets for evening events are $7 for the Showcase Concert on Friday and $10 for the Concert and Dessert Reception on Saturday. Sunday's events include Sacred Telling in the morning and Lagniappe Concert that afternoon. Family and group discounts are available. For information, contact the Ocean Springs Chamber of Commerce at 228-875-4424. The Southern Register
1811: Year of Wonders in the MississiPPi Territory is on exhibit at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, MiSSissippi,through November 8. The exhibit celebrates 1Pe bicentennial of the opening of the territOrial period, when the United States took posseSSion of this area from Spain. The focus is on the year of wonders, 1811, when all extraordinary confluence of events occurred in the Mississippi Territory: the New Madrid Earthquake made the Mississippi River run backwards, the Great Comet appeared in the sky, and the first Mississippi River steam boat launched its maiden voyage. Call 601-359-6920 for more information about the exhibit.
A Century of CoUecting will be exhibited at the Valentine Museum of Richmond, Virginia, from October 2, 1998, through September 6, 1999. Since its opening a century ago, the Valentine Museum has collected more than a million artifacts, costumes, photographs, and other materials that document the history of Richmond and Virginia. Reflecting both the physical and intellectual organization of the museum's holdings, the centennial exhibition focuses on the museum's six collecting areas: The Research Library, Costumes and Textiles, Fine Arts, Decorative Arts, Industrial History, and General Collections. A major emphasis of the exhibition is the relationship between the museum's collecting initiatives and its mission to collect, preserve, and interpret the life and history of Richmond. Call 804-649 -0711 for more information.
Spring 1998
The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, offers selections from its Southern Collection and Contemporary Collection throughout the year, plus 12-15 changing exhibitions annually. Its Southern Collection traces the history of Americall art from the colonial period to the present through works of art that relate to the South. From a 1726 pastel by Henrietta Johnston, the first profession. al woman artist in America, to a 1991 painting by South Carolina's own Jasper Johns, the collection includes an example from every major movement in American art and is known as one of the finest regional collections in the country. Among the Contemporary Collection are 24 watercolors by Andrew Wyeth and works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and other 20th-century American artists. The Museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m, and Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Admission is free of charge. For more information call 864271-7570.
"Magical Muse: The Drama of Tennessee Williams" is the theme for the 23rd Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature to be held in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, February 4-6, 1999. Invited speakers include Jackson ill R. Bryer, Al Devlin, Allean Hale, Kenneth Holditch, Philip Kolin, Lyle Leverich, and Nancy Tischler. Papers on all aspects of Williams's life and drama are welcome and must be received by October 15, 1998. For additional information contact Don Noble or Ralph Voss, Department of English, Box 870244, Tuscaloosa, AL35487-0244. Email: dnoble@english.as.ua.edu or rvoss@english.as.ua.edu.
Page 21
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Shipping and Handling Costs United Stotes: $3.50 for first video or other item, $1.00 each additional item sent to the same address. Foreign: $5.00 for each item. Posters. United Stotes: $3.50 for any number of posters sent to the same address. foreign: $10.00 for any number of posters sent to the same address.
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All sales are final. No refunds will be made. If an order contains faulty or damaged goods, replacements will be made when such items are returned with problem(s) noted.
Item #
Title/Description
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Price
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Fax: 601-232-5814 e-mail: staff@barnard.cssc.olemiss.edu Internet Address: http://www.cssc.olemiss.edu
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MS 38677 • 601-232-5993
University,
I/We would like to contribute $ to the Center's Annual Appeal (ight now. Enclosed is my tax-deductible contribution. Annual Memberships:
o Student: $25 o Sponsor: $250
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0 Regular: $50 0 Associate: $100 0 Sustaining: $500 0 Patron: $1,000
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