Essays

February 2, 2011 Unlike most publishing houses, we accepted unsolicited manuscripts, and it was my job to wade through the slush pile and pluck out the undiscovered gems. At least half of them turned out to be memoirs of the authors’ rural childhoods. Although there were times when I thought I would go mad if I had to read one more account of hog-killing time, I wrote scores of rejection letters in which I tried to soften the blow with assurances that their children and grandchildren would treasure these priceless written histories for years to come. I doubt the recipients were much comforted, but I was sincere. In fact, I was envious.

January 20, 2011 Memphis artist William Eggleston is all over the news: this week marks the closing of a retrospective exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the announcement of a proposed Eggleston museum in his native Memphis, and the opening of an Eggleston exhibit at the Frist Museum of Art in Nashville. In addition, Twin Palms Publishers recently brought out a new collection of Eggleston prints—itself a companion volume to Michael Almereyda’s documentary film, William Eggleston in the Real World. Today, journalist Stanley Booth, a longtime friend of Eggleston from his own Memphis days, considers the work of the man known as “the father of modern color photography.”

August 20, 2010 I’ve never had a baby, or a kidney stone, or even a broken leg; the brain-spearing throb of a bad tooth is about the closest thing to agony I’ve ever known. I’m not especially fond of agony, so all my adult life I’ve trotted off to the dentist every six months, in the naïve belief that check-ups would save me from ever again experiencing the dental nightmares I endured as a kid. But no. The tooth demon paid a call over the last long holiday weekend, which I spent gobbling Advil and watching with horror as the right side of my face puffed up like a bullfrog’s throat. Bright and early on the first day office hours resumed, I was reclining in the dental chair, contemplating my complicated relationship with authority and pain.

August 18, 2010 I am a reader, and this fact is as much a part of my self-image as being a mother, or a Southerner, or one who tans easily. It’s a proud kind of condition, that of the chronic reader, whose boasting that she can’t live without books is much like the lament of the genetically blessed that she can’t gain weight no matter what she eats. But I am a reader and not a collector, and that is an important distinction.

August 13, 2010 Last weekend I stopped by the local baby superstore and was struck by how much our newborn’s story has diverged from the dream the store is peddling. Margaret Grace’s metal hospital crib is a far cry from the nursery suites of Buy Buy Baby.