December 1, 2015 “After class, I sat outside on the lawn, revisited Baudelaire. Were there chemicals in my book that made me swoon––something in the paper of Les Fleurs du Mal that affected my senses? I licked a page to see if it had LSD on it. How did poetry achieve the effect of making me feel drunk?” Marilyn Kallet will discuss a new translation of Chantal Bizzini’s poems at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on December 3, 2015, at 3 p.m.
November 20, 2015 We moved to Paris just shy of five years ago because, above all, we wanted our sons to become global citizens, to learn another language, to go to school with children from countries the world over, to see more of the world than a more conventional life in the United States would allow. But the very centrality and symbolism of Paris is what’s now making us all feel more vulnerable than we ever have.
October 9, 2015 Twenty-seven years ago, if you had asked me about the best time to visit Nashville, I would have said the second weekend in October—the weekend of the Southern Festival of Books. It’s a guaranteed good time. Rain or shine. At the festival, just showing up to hear the same author is considered invitation enough to engage your seatmate in conversation. Attending the Southern Festival of Books is the closest a visitor can come to being an instant insider in Nashville, where the New South begins. If you asked me that question today, I would say the same damn thing.
July 27, 2015 “When I first read Thoreau as a teenager, I quickly realized that I had found a magic carpet to my own rural Tennessee world. Henry helped me see and hear and smell my own woodland paths, and my own pond, with fresh senses.” Michael Sims will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015. All festival events are free and open to the public.
June 1, 2015 I grew up wanting something I couldn’t name. I was raised in the Reform Jewish “tradition,” though the word here is gross hyperbole. The temple I attended as a kid in Memphis represented a variety of Judaism designed to be invisible, to blend indistinguishably with the Christ-haunted Southern landscape. As a consequence, I was virtually untouched by tradition and had not even an awareness of its absence. Nevertheless, one Sunday, playing hooky from confirmation class, I went exploring the old red brick pile of our temple along with a couple of partners in crime.
May 8, 2015 When one of my old friends finally asked me what exactly I was doing in Nashville, I said I was working in a letterpress shop that specialized in nineteenth-century printing techniques. I left out the fact that I wasn’t being paid. Even so, at the moment, it sounded a whole lot better than toiling away at law school.
