On my travels to hear music throughout Mississippi, I enjoy setting the tone by visiting Mississippi Blues Trail markers. Scott Barretta, author of State of Blues, has written and designed,with Jim O’Neill, many of these blues trail placements. I’ve found it’s fun to slow my journeys, seek out a marker while listening to the music of the placement honor.

One special afternoon, Jeanie (my blues-hound girlfriend) and I stopped in Indianola to visit Club Ebony. We read the marker, visited with the hangouts, and walked into to get a beer. Mary Shepard, Ebony’s owner, was friendly and offered to visit over a beverage. While talking, she ordered up a fresh batch of fried catfish. As it turned out, an old Ebony music pal of Jeanie’s also turned out to Mary’s buddy. Mary called him and he quickly showed up. A couple of beers later we drove up 49 eating a batch of fresh catfish, laughing about our fun.

“It’s nice to be important and it’s important to be nice.” -Mary Frances Shepard

This quote from Mary’s memoir sums it up.

Blues trail markers have special placement festivities, usually featuring live music. Honeyboy was on hand for Stovall’s placement at Muddy’s Cabin site. Recently, I caught the Ike Turner introduction on his Clarksdale corner.

Surprisingly, to me it seems there is no John Lee Hooker Blues Trail marker. Tell me if I’m wrong, and if I’m right, but let’s start an e-mail campaign to Scott to help get him a marker.

I would love to hear about your favorite Blues Trail markers so I can check them out. You can click on the trail map below to enlarge it.

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Zita recently introduced me to the quirky essays of Sloane Crosley (which is great because I was starting to get a little stuck in the 639 page task that is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and needed a quick pick-me-up read).  Sloane is a young woman living in NYC who has a tendency to stumble upon awkward situations–whether they be Portuguese circus clowns, a guy named Daryl who smuggles expensive carpets, throw pillows, and whatever else you might want from a fine furniture store, or curious children inquiring about what happens to butterflies after they die.

As a girl who wanders into some awkward situations herself and never seems capable of tempering the awkwardness, I can relate to Sloane.  In fact, I’d love to be friends with her and exchange stories.  I’m sure it would be a fun time. Who knows, maybe we’d become B.F.F.s.

Below is an excerpt from Sloane’s essay “Bastard Out of Westchester.”  After finishing this essay, I actually called my boyfriend and read this excerpt aloud to him over the phone.  “Joseph, this is me,” I chirped. “I have this same idea! Don’t you think I should be best friends with this girl?”  I’m sure he was rolling his eyes at me on the other line while placating my excitement with an “Mmhmm, honey. That’s funny.”

From I Was Told There’d Be Cake (pg. 67-68):

If I ever have kids, this is what I’m going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil–preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp–destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you’ve been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers.  All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.  This is where I want to raise my children–until the age of, say, ten, when I’ll cruelly rip them out of the stream where they’re fly-fishing with their other lederhosened friends and move them to someplace like Lansdale, Pennsylvania. There, they can be not only the cool new kid, but also the Belgian kid.  And none of that Toblerone-eating, Tintin-reading, tulip-growing crap. I want them to be obscurely, freezingly, impossibly Belgian. I want them to be fluent in Flemish and to pronounce “Antwerpen” with a hint of “vh” embedded in the “w.”

Oh, if only my parents had done this for me.

For more about Sloane Crosley, check out Nell’s blog here.  -Kaycie

A good dream book is hard to find.  This is the lesson I’ve been learning since this summer.  Already fascinated by the idea of dream interpretation, seeing Christopher Nolan’s Inception and having it blow my mind proved to be the starting gun on my dream research. But I soon found that I would have to wade through volumes of repetitive dream interpretation dictionaries and  cheezy dream journals; not what i was hoping for.   Unhappy with the market’s selection, I was pleased to meet Gillian Holloway’s The Complete Book of Dreams.  Having sections specifically on dream symbols and interpretation, she also provides insights on other aspects of the dreaming process, including its evolutionary purpose and how we can use this subconscious state to connect with others’ dreaming patterns.

This read, engaging from cover to cover, has helped push-back my bedtime for months.. I’ve often woken from a night’s sleep totally exhausted and for years, thought there was nothing I could do about it.  Having a history of lucid dreams and nightmares, this book has helped me understand the connection between these experiences, and that I can cultivate a voice in my dreaming life as much as in my waking life.  Learning the brain’s involvement in connecting these two realities has allowed me to understand the power i can actually hold.  Holloway writes, “There is nothing more taboo than owning your own power, and in a variety of amazing ways, anxiety dreams can be part of this passage.”  -Peyton

“The night I met Billy Joe Shaver, my hair caught on fire. I kid you not. The year was 1971. The place was Nashville, Tennessee.”

So begins the reading with Marshall Chapman for her new book They Came to Nashville. And after a song, another funny story of her initial unwillingness to accept Willie Nelson’s agreement to interview. In her new book, Marshall interviews the big names and small names who humbly came to Nashville to follow their dreams. She asks them what exactly brought them to Nashville and what enabled them to persevere.

Singer/Songwriter Marshall Chapman first came to Lemuria years ago for the Sonny Brewer event for the Blue Moon anthology. She closed the night with music but also had her own essay in the anthology. Ever since then, she hasn’t missed an opportunity to visit us at Lemuria as well as other bookstores in Mississippi.

The great thing about about coming to Lemuria events is that sometimes it’s impossible to know what to expect. After so many good laughs, and beautiful, tender songs, Marshall’s visit was a welcome treat at the end of a hectic day.

This South Carolina native is also the author of the best-selling memoir Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller and has also a dozen of her own albums in addition to her extensive list of song writing credits.

And now, I am going to quit trying to write about Marshall. She is just a someone you have to experience in person. If you weren’t able to make it last night, the video below will give some idea about what a funny charming delight she is.

Her latest CD “Big Lonesome” is also for sale at Lemuria. If you would like to learn more about Marshall, check out her website: www.tallgirl.com

Dear readers, there is something big out there, about to happen. This something is as old as the hills but the awareness of it is about to burst open–if we just pay attention. Rumors, scores of books, television–they’ve all been hinting at it. Even Depak Chopra, the guru of all things healthy, wise and mostly obvious, has written a new book about “it”–veering from his well trodden, written path.

. . . . . . . . . . . . No one has been able to capture both the minutiae and the big picture of it, but Tim Flach has come close in his new big, beautiful coffee table book Dogs, artfully published by Abrams, one of our most esteemed publishing houses of very fine books.

You can immediately tell there’s a big punch to this book with the choice of a small but spirited white corded puli dog somersaulting toward us and jumping out at us, like the most animated of 3D. At the top of this cover is Dog written in subtle gold, implying that something treasure-worthy beckons inside.

The $50 gem is #1 on my list of Christmas gifts from someone close (you realize most of us Lemurians are never given books by our friends and relatives, for obvious reasons. But we are no different than our customers, grateful for that special book we dare not buy ourselves). There is such a wide array of interesting tidbits that make this book such a written and visceral work of art–for ANYONE. But I will tell you that Flach masterfully gets across the truthfully, unembellished idea mentioned at the beginning of this blog.

He lets us know indeed, that there seems to be a reason dogs have shorter life spans and are evolving more quickly than we are and that this evolution is reciprocal and vital and exciting for both humans and dogs and the well-being of both species. Or as Flach states it, we are recognizing that dogs are a “hairy canvas for our imagination.”

One little teaser tidbit for you: Did you know that during WWII there was an English pointer named Judy who could spot, scent and point toward the sky (while indiscernible to the human eye or ear) enemy Japanese aircraft, thus saving the lives of her shipmates over and over again? She was generously and humbly honored by historians.

There have been many such hero dogs in similar near fatal events and many of them are also recognized in this book. Did you know that the now gentle giant, the distinguished Irish Wolfhound who quietly watches over children and babies was once used to drag knights from horses? What Flach does in this book is more than narrate. Remember, he is a renowned photographer and with keen intuition and superb visual talent, capturing the essence of all things Dog.

Tim Flach, born in 1958 in London, is widely collected around the world. News of his extraordinary talent came to us in his first book Equus, a photographic masterpiece about horses–also available at your favorite, fine, independent bookstore Lemuria.

-Pat

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