November 5, 2010 In a long essay for The Huffington Post, Roy Blount Jr. considers this humble mollusk, a delectable morsel that is, for Blount, what madeleines were to Proust. “They make me think of my photographer friend, Slick Lawson, who lived in Nashville but hailed from Louisiana and loved New Orleans–maybe even more than I do, because he could stay up longer,” Blount writes. “Over the years Slick and I went out into the Alabama woods, to observe the Ku Klux Klan; and into the hills of Hazard, Kentucky, to interview an opponent of strip-mining (Slick was delighted when the man said, “You know who owns this property here? Doris Day”); and to Paris and the palace of Versailles to chronicle one of the many political escapades of Edwin Edwards, then the roguish governor of Louisiana, now in prison. In 1981 Slick and I went to New Orleans for the orphans.” Read the full meditation on oysters, and Slick, and orphans, and–most of all–New Orleans, here.
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