South Highlands Walk

Longleaf Forest Song

I.
October falls to the ground
Red is a leaf is a dress
Flimsy. Cheap. Tight.
Wear ‘til someone tears it off
On Halloween costume backless
But tonight modest leather Birkenstocks

II.
The forest primeval?
Longleaf’s a road in the city
Home of the happy dog
It is the click of the clip on leash

III.
Scarlet leaved tree wish I knew your name
This far South most turn brown or not at all
Sun muscles out one blazing farewell
Time to circle back to the gold van
Before spiders fall out of trees
Waving thin crotchety legs
To work down tire swing chains

Kathryn Usher
October 28, 2008

Bloggers

RRBJ has a section over to the left that says Red River Area Bloggers. We need to do a better job of updating it because there a couple of interesting reads we don't have listed. Voice of Schleuss is one. We just added Highland neighbor Deb. Don't know why don't have Loren Demerath's down.

If you want to be added to the list we do have some rules. We'd like for you to have been blogging for a couple of months before we list you (we're still pouting because Nadine hasn't updated since February).

Trudeau always has good reads listed on his two main blogs Shreveport and Faces. Did you know he also blogs here and here? It's fun finding these almost secret blogs. Almost as much fun as walking the dog at night in South Highlands just so we can look in the windows of all the houses that have the lights on and no drapes hanging. We are peeking in!

Plain Folk Houses - Backside

RRBJ intended to make it to BOTB 2008 but just a few steps away from The Shell the light diverted us. We filled our digital camera with images of the backside of a block of houses. Difficult to fathom a campus of the leisure class, with the time, money, and energy to pursue higher forms of education, is just across the street from where these were taken.

It is ironic that some of the papers of Jack London, with his need to escape extreme poverty, are housed at Centenary College. From the rear, these homes radiated decay. You'd never know this was the 100 block of Wilkinson, just across the street from the college's gravel parking lot #15.

Jon Schleuss has supah-dupah coverage on BOTB 2008 at the KSCL Blog.
We'd planned on posting this a couple of days ago but the RRBJ offices have been suffering with a Comcast Internet outage.

Kathrine Anne Porter

...winter in this part of the South is a moribund coma, not the Northern death sleep with the sure promise of resurrection. But in my South, my loved and never-forgotten country, after her long sickness, with only a slight stirring, an opening of the eyes between one breath and the next, between night and day, the earth revives and bursts into the plenty of spring with fruit and flowers together, spring and summer at once under the hot shimmering blue sky.

Katherine Anne Porter from Holiday

Submissions for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, close April 30, 2008.

Shreveport Sounds

Dan Garner penned a chapter entitled The Legend of Old Blue Goose in the new book Shreveport Sounds in Black and White (American Made Music). It was published last month by the University Press of Mississippi and edited by Kip Lornell and Tracey E.W. Laird.

What, musically, is the "Shreveport Sound?" A big mix up of country, blues, R&B, rockabilly, and rock. RRBJ would add folk and bluegrass in there seeing as Leadbelly was from these parts as is The Cox Family. Can't think of a better example of SB Land sounds than Garner's new collection, The Second Album.

Captured in front of the black wall outside of artspace, just up from Tipitina's is Garner along with his son Paul.

John William Corrington

I’ve been gone from Shreveport for almost thirty years [at the time of the writing], but, as you can see, Shreveport has never left me. It remains the subject and matrix of my work, and it always will. Not because my recollections of it are without pain, or because I lived a golden untroubled childhood here. It wasn’t that way. But the experiences I had here, the places I remember, the people I loved–and even the ones I despised–have been as useful to me, as evocative, as Paris of the 1880’s and 90’s was to Marcel Proust. Not in a direct sense, certainly. I have never written an roman a clef about Shreveport, using real people with fake names. Yet at the same time all my characters live here. They fitted smoothly and anonymously into the interstices of time and space in the period between 1863 and 1960. * * * * Even today, with thirty years . . . between me and Shreveport, when someone asks where I’m from, I invariably answer without thinking, “Shreveport.” When I start to put together a new story, I think of its setting here, or in New Orleans, or somewhere in between. Even when I write of New York or London or Los Angeles, the people are from Louisiana–simply because those are the people I know in the same way I know myself.

John William Corrington

Shreveport Words

SB Land fills the current edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas, the quarterly publication of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. The front cover is a 1940 painting of the Texas Street bridge. Inside there are photos from Burch and Bill Grabill and excerpts from Joshua Clark's Louisiana in Words.

Pictured above is Tara Schemer de la Fuente's vignette of 2:30 PM on Fannin Street from page 75 of Louisiana Cultural Vistas Summer 2007.

Picture of the Day

Happy May Day! When RRBJ grew up in Oklahoma May 1st was the first day Mom let us go barefooted.

If you're looking for a way to celebrate this almost forgotten holiday, you might try dancing in the waters of the Riverfront Park and then scooting up Milam Street to West Edge Books (inside WEACo at 725 Milam) for a gathering at 7 tonight of folks reading Kurt Vonnegut's work.

Also in the same place Friday night there's a reading and a book signing by three of the contributors of the anthology "able to...". Shreveporter Becky Haigler is one of the authors.

Thanks to Calamitylaine for the use of her photo.

Strange is Good

The current issue of Oxford American (Issue 55) with the front cover art of a blonde holding a revolver features the poem "Three Days After Easter, 1994" by Shreveporter Jennifer Strange.

This issue of OA will be on sale at newsstands through February. OA bills itself as "The Southern Magazine of Good Writing." It was started in 1992 in Oxford, Mississippi by John Grisham and Marc Smirnoff. It now is published as a nonprofit quarterly in alliance with the University of Central Arkansas.

Strange is a lecturer in English at Centenary College. The OA contributor notes also mention she has more poems forthcoming in Poetry Southeast and Christianity and Literature.

Cap'n Shreve Says Have a Good Holiday...

...or he'll make you walk the plank.

While Henry Miller Shreve didn't come over on the Mayflower, he did build a ship that allowed the westward expansion of America possible... and also cleared up that log jam and made the Red River navigable.

While we're blogging about Shreveport history, this Sunday at Barnes and Noble in Shreveport Gary Joiner will be signing copies of his latest book, Through the Howling Wilderness. Get your copy November 26 from 2-4. While you're there have a Grande Peppermint Mocha, Pilgrim.