I'm heading to the land of my imagination--Mississippi and New Orleans. As a guy mesmerized by Faulkner in the abstract and in the concrete since before undergraduate days, Mississippi has always represented the real south. North Carolina was, well, north. Not far enough south to be south. Even moving to Georgia didn't seem to qualify because it touched North Carolina, and therefore was contiguous with, well, north. Stupid, I know. That's never stopped me from thinking so.
I'm heading to Mississippi and then on to New Orleans for work. I actually may come out ahead financially on this expedition, thanks to the University of Georgia's First Year Odyssey Seminar program. An friend from grad school, Bob Cummings, has made good in the academic world, and as the director or the Ole Miss Writing and Rhetoric Program has asked to come down to talk to the faculty. Now, there are very few things that people ask me to talk about: actually only one--teaching portfolios. How this happened I'll never know. But I'm going down to talk to the faculty of Ole Miss about how to encourage their graduate students to create teaching portfolios. I will be wearing a suit, or at least the pants and a vest.
From Oxford, I plan on heading down highway 61, which snakes down the Mississippi Delta. An old road made famous from the true Blues era, I don't know what kind of Wal-Mart crap they'll have thrown up over any vestige of the past, but there are plenty of towns with Blues history.
I originally thought to spend a day in Natchez because that was the starting point of the Natchez Trace Parkway of bicycling fame, but I'm leaning toward Port Gibson because I want to see the ruins of the Windsor plantation house. I've got a spooky print of the columns from a photograph by Lebonese Karekin Goekjian. My buddy Eric Whiteside visited there during a summer program on Faulkner at Ole Miss. It's 10.3 miles off of Highway 61. I want my own photograph of the place.
From there it is on to New Orleans, a new city for me and one that I've always wanted to visit. It is another South entirely.
Let's see what the week has in store for me.
