Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi: Where Faulkner outranks fiction 2:1

A self-drawn map hanging in Faulkner's hallway, showing his fictional Yoknapatawpha county (click for full version)

Note the technically impossible depth of field:

In order to keep track of the complex plot twists in A Fable, Faulkner started writing on his walls

Faulkner's liquor cabinet!

An example of the 5% of the time when Photoshop’s photomerge feature inexplicably returns insane results:

Faulkner hand-built the bookcases in this room so they would better store shotgun shells

Faulkner's bedroom

Faulkner's stables

Margaret with Wild Bill in the Oxford town square

More photos from our trip across the GW Bridge (as introduced in Part I) below the jump:

Inspired by Creative Time’s KEY TO THE CITY project, in which participants are presented with a key that unlocks interesting places around New York City, Greg, Lizzie and I decided to walk across George Washington Bridge. The key was supposed to unlock the gate to a normally-closed pedestrian walkway, but we arrived to find it already unlocked, with pedestrians streaming across. Nevertheless, the views were spectacular.

It also gave me a chance to use a technique that I’ve been playing with in subtler ways for quite some time: vertical panoramas. On a vertically-oriented webpage like a blog, I think the results speak for themselves:

More vertical panos in future posts: putting a few of them in a single one just crashed my browser…

Inexplicably, given the amount of space for more horizontally-oriented buildings, Clarksdale is home to a many-story windowless structure

Many more photos after the jump:

Robert Johnson's deal with the devil supposedly took place at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 – the same 61, in fact, that links Bob Dylan's Minnesota hometown with Canada

The following are from Ground Zero (Morgan Freeman’s jook joint) during Oxford American’s MOST SOUTHERN WEEKEND ON EARTH:

Mose Allison – who virtually never opened his eyes during the set – at Ground Zero

BONUS WADE:

I’m sure much of the difficulty stems from the general psychological need for distance in making good judgments, but it occurs to me that there may be a physical/physiological component as well. It takes a long time for our eyes to adjust between one light condition and another, and if we are so immersed in a condition as to be capable of taking good pictures then we are probably not able to correctly judge how the colors and contrasts will look when an image is displayed in totally different conditions. No doubt most of this gap is made up by the visual/mental gymnastics required to take non-automatic photos at all – but so much of what makes a good photo is precisely that subtle, striking color/light contrast that it shouldn’t surprise us to see how digital, despite its promise, has failed to eliminate the traditional divide between shooting and editing.

Click through for larger panoramic image

BONUS:

Lizzie Wade, under the W A D E Tractor sign outside of Clarksdale

One of the last surviving Bluesmobiles from John Belushi and Dan Akroyd's 1980 film is housed at the Hopson Plantation, outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi

A slight detour on the drive from Birmingham to Clarksdale took us through two of the three major Elvis-related attractions in the South: Tupelo, Elvis’s birthplace, and Graceland Too, the home of Elvis’s greatest fan and memorabilia collector, Paul McLeod.

Elvis bought his first guitar at Tupelo Hardware Co in 1945

Elvis's childhood outhouse

Stained glass in the Tupelo chapel devoted to Elvis: the king receives his crown?

The colonel's pew in Elvis's Tupelo chapel

A complete documentation of Paul’s home – if such a thing is even possible – would require so much more time and energy than we had on this trip that I didn’t even really try. But since it was Margaret’s third paid visit to the “museum,” she was awarded her lifetime membership and a chance to wear Elvis’s jacket, belt and guitar.

Paul McLeod, framed by Elvis's image and a sheet of hundreds out of the tens of thousands of Elvis-related photographs he has collected

A tiny, tiny sample of Paul's record collection

Paul amuses all comers

Margaret's Graceland Too photo opp

Margaret's Graceland Too photo opp

After driving 15,000 miles last summer, even the normally intimidating 1,100 or so of this trip seems like a piece of cake. We will unfortunately miss the 50th anniversary celebration of To Kill a Mockingbird in Monroeville, Alabama, since it is a state and a half away from an event we’ll be attending in Clarksdale, Mississippi. But I am excited that our route (as planned) will inscribe an enormous cross on Mississippi – and about the fact that when it’s all over I will have visited forty-three out of America’s glorious fifty states.

A. Birmingham, Alabama: the town of Margaret’s youth and current summer residence.

B. Huntsville, Alabama: home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Depending on how our visit goes, it could be a test case for the continuation of the summer of science beyond our lab visits during the summer of 2009.

C. Tupelo, Mississippi: Elvis’s hometown.

D. Oxford, Mississippi: Faulkner’s hometown.

E. Clarksdale, Mississippi: we’ll be just in time to catch The Most Southern Weekend on Earth, a “two-day shindig of Southern music and spirits in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.” Clarksdale is also home to Morgan Freeman’s juke-joint and a great deal of blues history.

F. Holly Springs, Mississippi: the site of Graceland Too – a vast, personally curated house/museum dedicated to whom else but Elvis Presley.

G. Jackson, Mississippi: the present home of Margaret’s parents, we will use Jackson as a temporary base of operations for the rest of the trip. Eudora Welty’s house is also located here.

H. Vicksburg, Mississippi: really the only Civil War battlefield in the deep south – most of the fighting happened either further north in Tennessee or further east in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia – Vicksburg was the site of Grant’s successful capture of the Mississippi River on July 4th, 1963.

I. New Orleans, Louisiana: no trip to the south would be complete without a stop in New Orleans.

I(a). Oil Spill, Gulf of Mexico: I’m definitely trying to get some photos of the Gulf spill – or, as the case might be, of BP’s attempts to stop people from getting photos of the Gulf spill.

J. Jackson, Mississippi (again): our last stop. Lizzie and I fly out of Jackson for Washington, DC on July 14th.

Stay tuned for photos!

One thing I can promise: this won’t be just another personal blog.