between the magnolias

Flannery eccentrics vs. Welty eccentrics.

I like to classify Southern eccentrics into two groups: Eudora Welty eccentric or Flannery O’Connor eccentric. If you are a Welty eccentric, your sister is called something like Cattie Paw because her name is Katherine and she walks quietly. If you are O’Connor eccentric, your sister is called Trampasaurus Oceanus because she gets around during Fleet Week. Welty eccentrics may leave a family dinner to go sit in the woods and sketch lichen. O’Connor eccentrics leave a family dinner after announcing they’ve ended the affair with the Methodists’ choir director to move to Hilton Head with the Piggly Wiggly produce manager and his spiritual guru.

In case y’all missed it, over in Union City, Tennessee a man assaulted his momma with a ham. Yeah, he shanked her. Now, the alleged ham chucker said he indeed did throw that ham, but was not expecting his momma to be walking down the hall and get smacked by his lofting of the pork. I’m sorry, but you don’t go willy nilly throwing ham around without hitting something unless it’s a spiral sliced ham. Then obviously it’s going to cut to the right and miss momma altogether. I know that assault with smoked meats can happen anywhere, but there’s just something so Southern Gothic about knocking momma out with dinner. And let’s face it, in the South, that’s the only way you’re gonna knock your momma out with dinner because your sweet potato pie will never be as good as hers. I don’t know what kind of eccentric that makes our ham-handed assailant. I’m leaning more towards O’Connor eccentric because the government-owned buildings Miss Eudora’s characters inhabit tend to be more of the post office persuasion than the jail persuasion.

Susan Wilson, "Embracing My Inner Flannery"

Rural decay near Tuscaloosa.

The Alabama meteor that wasn't.

Glynn Wilson made me giggle and curtsey all over myself today:

This may come as a surprise to some, but the so-called meteorite near the No. 8 green at Audubon Park is a chunk of iron ore from Alabama, most likely Birmingham’s Red Mountain. It didn’t drop in from space. It was dropped there by a fool public relations man, and sat there too heavy to move after the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition ended in 1885.

Laughing Stock: The Autobiography of T.S. Stribling.

T. S. Stribling (1881-1965) was a restless man. It takes a certain thick restlessness to make like a bum and travel across the country hopping from train to train relying on the spruce of the moment to send the manna from the heaven you hardly believe. And it takes a certain stubborness to write about the South while maintaining your political and economic distance from it. 

Though he followed the path deemed proper by earning a law degree at the University of Alabama in 1905, he might as well have worked at Wendy's. His autobiography, Laughing Stock, recounts the pleasure of a life as lived by a man who intended nothing greater than to experience and write. In his own words:

My idea of an autobiography is that it should tell precisely what one remembers about oneself and nothing more. Hearsay evidence, logically, should be ruled out of autobiographies just as it is ruled out of murder trials, because if you have to inquire about yourself, that phase of your life forms no part of your conscious existence and should be omitted. I intend to follow this rule strictly. 

And then, he cleverly continues:

For example, I cannot remember my birth so I do not feel at liberty to put down the amazing and completely justified portents that accompanied my entrance into a waiting world. I will not tell how, when I was born in Clifton, Tennessee, a neighbor girl asked my mother what object she should first place in my hand. That was important, because the first thing a baby touches, it will work with all the rest of its life. My mother didn't know what to put in my hand, but she said the Bible. The neighbor girl, however, in glancing around the bedroom, could not find the Bible but saw a pen. So she put the pen into my hand, and that fact has always colored my output of fiction. Then, as a kind of great seal assuring the fulfillment of the prophecy, this neighbor girl, later in life, went crazy.

He has a way with words, this man. And a way with life that makes you wish you could see how he eats a freshly-roasted pig (so much can be known about someone by how they eat pork). 

• Bio from UNA page.
• The Store, published in 1932, won a Pulitzer Prize. 
• You can read Birthright and The Cruise of the Dry Dock for free online courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
• Memories and tributes to Stribling from his hometown of Florence, Alabama.
• The TS Stribling Museum in Tennessee was restored by the Tennessee Historical Foundation, through a grant from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). A 1924 Craftsman Bungalow style house built by T.L. Kloss, a local business man, and later the retirement home of 1933 Pulitzer Prize winner and author, T.S.Stribling, a Clifton native. Stribling married Lou Ella Kloss, the builder's daughter. The restored house is now the T.S. Stribling Museum and houses the Clifton Public Library. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is located in the historic district of Clifton, TN. The site is open Tuesday-Friday, 11:30-6:30pm. Guided tours can be arranged by contacting: Wanda Johnston Email: [email protected] Tel: (931) 676-3188
• "T. S. Stribling", a handy printable bio with images from Maria Pietuszka. 
• Drive the Tennessee River Trail Scenic Byway and visit Stribling's house along the way.
• Explore Wayne Country driving map is a great, easy printable go-to.
• Books by and about Senor Stribling.

Rock and roll in Birmingham.

This summer, the Birmingham Museum of Art presents Who Shot Rock & Roll, the first major museum exhibition on rock & roll to put photographers in the foreground, acknowledging their creative and collaborative role in the history of rock music.

From its earliest days, rock & roll was captured in photographs that personalized, and frequently eroticized, the musicians, creating a visual identity for the music. The photographers were handmaidens to the rock & roll revolution, and their images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock has fostered since the 1950s.

The exhibition is in six sections: rare and revealing images taken behind the scenes; snapshots of young musicians at the beginnings of their careers; exhilarating photographs of live performances that display the energy, passion, style, and sex appeal of the musicians on stage; powerful images of the crowds and fans that are often evocative of history paintings; portraits revealing the soul and creativity, rather than the surface and celebrity, of the musicians; and conceptual images and album covers highlighting the collaborative efforts between the image makers and the musicians.

Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Gail Buckland.

General admission to the exhibit is $10 a head, not much considering all the goosebumps you'll accrue as you view.

FIRST THURSDAYS ROCKUMENTARY SERIES AUGUST 4 and SEPTEMBER 1 // FREE

The Museum is partnering with the experts at Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival to bring you a series of the "baddest rock-and-roll documentaries ever produced". Not bad.

William Christenberry's photo of Tuscaloosa.

This photograph is Alabama Landscape-- near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was printed in 1981 with type C print on paper. The photographer, William Christenberry, was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1936. The photo was gifted by Michael B. Gross to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Parking at the University of Alabama in the old days.

I found these wonderful pages from an early issue of Rammer Jammer on the University's digital archives page. Note the cars and pun on the word "parking".

The New Deal in Carbon Hill, Alabama.

William C. Pryor's photographic document, "A New Deal for Carbon Hill, Alabama", provides a captivating glimpse into the New Deal's effects on a small Alabama town. In Pryor's description of Carbon Hill, we find a fairly nondescript, poor town distinguished only by the affinity he discovered for its residents:

The people of Carbon Hill regardless of whatever shortcomings they may have are swell. Almost without exception they were extremely friendly, even cordial and very cooperative. They display, in spite of the economic adversity that they faced for years due to technological unemployment as well as the depression, a great deal of courage and fighting spirit without which they probably never would have obtained the improvements that they did. These improvements have made Carbon Hill a healthier and a pleasanter town than it was, although there still is much to be done especially in the matter of paving to relieve the awful redrock dust. Carbon Hill was and is an ugly town as most coal mining towns are and the improvements have not and could not make it beautiful.

There is in fact nothing beautiful in Carbon Hill but the spirit of the people. That, however, seems to be quite enough to have enabled the town to survive through a period of economic disaster and the people we talked to were practically unanimous in feeling that the Administration has saved the town from oblivion and they were, therefore, grateful. Whether the town can ever depend again entirely on the income from the mining industry and get along as it is now is a question, but if the courage and the will of the people mean anything they will make a good try.

Pryor visited Carbon Hill to take photos and get positive feedback on the Works Progress Administration's projects in Carbon Hill (see letter to George L. Davis). You can see his photos in this slide show. (The photo featured from his slide show in this post shows the social spot for Carbon Hill on a Saturday night, the makeshift dance hall.)