I don’t know about y’all but my friends and I are still on cloud 9 after the Saints not only went to the Super Bowl but won it on Sunday!!  We were so excited that we had a second line parade down Brecon Drive!

At Christmas time we had a lot of you come in asking for books about the New Orleans Saints and well, we just didn’t have any so I wanted to let everyone that a book is on its way!

The Times-Picayune is putting out a book, Super Saints, that will be available in the next few weeks.  It will include 160 pages of full-color photos, stats and columns by the staff of  The Times-Picayune and also have 12 pages of Super Bowl coverage.  The hardcover will be available  in about 2-3 weeks and is priced at $26.95 while the paperback at $18.95 will be available in about a week.

If you would like to order one from Lemuria give us a call at 601.366.7619 and we will save one for you when we get them.  I have a feeling these will be going fast!

Check out Mississippi Remixed on MPB Thursday night at 8 o’clock.

Mississippi ReMixed is a documentary about the current state of race relations in Mississippi.

Mississippi Remixed tells the personal story of Canadian, Myra Ottewell, who returns to her birthplace in Jackson, Mississippi determined to celebrate the great racial transformations in the state since the 1960s, but discovers that understanding race relations is far more complicated than she bargained for. Mixed with never before seen archival footage, the controversial documentary explores the state of race relations today, celebrates the transformations occurring, and exposes the struggles and successes Mississippi is having with integration today.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo.  I talked to Nan about it on Saturday, and she said that along with Coetzee’s new one, Summertime, she considers Point Omega to be one of the most important novels she’s read in some time.

Excerpted from the New York Times Book Review article, “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Geoff Dyer:

The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project “24 Hour Psycho ” (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-­minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of “the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,” “Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.” Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece — what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time — that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the “radically altered plane of time”: “The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.”

Within the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim. He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and — such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction — become a hostage to the habit of “gyrate exaggerations” (the phrase is in “The Body Artist”) and the signature patterns of “demolished logic.” “Point Omega” starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It’s barely had time to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it’s the latest increment and echo: a “last flare” that — we’ve been here before, too — may not be the last after all.

See Nan’s Blog on Point Omega.

Steve Yarbrough, a Mississippi native, already has a following; now after the recent publication of Safe from the Neighbors, he will have a larger one! I read this new novel, set in the Mississippi Delta, as most of his novels are, over the weekend, and even when I did not have it in my hand, I was thinking about it and could not wait to pick it up again.

Yes, it is readable! Yes, the characters are true Delta figures of the 1960s! Yes, the tumultuous Civil Rights time rises to the surface, but in a meaningful way! During the other time period, a present day protagonist, a history teacher at a local high school, whose wife teaches writing at Delta State, spends half of his time reflecting on his poverty stricken childhood and his uneducated, farmer father, while at the same time trying unsuccessfully to keep his slowly dissolving marriage intact. The unexpected entry of a  previous childhood friend as a newly hired teacher at the high school, who has now grown up to be a tempting  seductress, throws a spark into the picture; in addition, the lives of their parents intertwined closely.

Having just read Richard Russo ‘s new novel That Old Cape Magic, I became strangely aware of the very similar writing styles. In fact, if I had closed my eyes, not having read either one, it would have been hard to differentiate. So, if  you like Russo’s writing, you’ll like Yarbrough’s. But, that is where the similarity ends. I did like That Old Cape Magic, BUT I liked Yarbrough’s Safe from the Neighbors MORE!  Why????? Because I like a novel to give me some profound insights about either life, people, or events. Yarbrough’s last chapter did that for me! I am richer for having read Safe from the Neighbors. Those of us who grew up in the confusing and upsetting ’60s in Mississippi will forever be looking for new ways to interpret and understand our complex experiences. Yes, I had many questions then as I still do now. I will always have questions and also few answers. Kathryn Stockett’s smash hit The Help posed the same questions for me. Yarbrough’s new novel answered some of those questions for me in its last chapter, and that is what sets it above some others for me.

I look forward to Steve Yarbrough’s reading next Thursday, February 11, at 5 p.m. at Lemuria’s dotcom building. If you have never heard Yarbrough read, then for sure come. I remember with satisfaction the excellent reading of his last novel The End of California in the summer of 2006.

-Nan

The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell

Basic Books (2009)

While recently reading 2010 articles on how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are attempting to avoid strangulation, I’m reflecting on Sowell’s eye-opening book I read last summer. Sowell’s wisdom is a reliable cornerstone of stability among all the babble on economic solutions spewing from Washington.

Housing Boom is a plain English explanation of how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of the housing markets. Sowell explains the evolution of the boom, pulling no punches when discussing the political culprits of either party, the financial damages they created or the BS used to escape their own responsibility for what happened.

Reading The Housing Boom and Bust has helped me have a defrosted view on how to better interpret the facts and lies flowing out of Washington, 2010. (Whatever that means is up to me.) However, I feel the more informed we are the more likely we are to put forth the right business decisions in our own little worlds.

Awareness as a whole could prevent us from being blindly led to dysfunction. Thomas Sowell’s easy-to-read book is a step in the right direction.