Sunday, July 31, 2011

Mississippi Sissy - Keven Sessums

Read (and blogged) about this book a while ago - but I think it was on a different blog which I have since merged into this one.  Anyway, my recent trips to Jackson and tours through Bellhaven (Thanks, Giselle), have made me think about it again. 

Here's the original post:
Finished this book - it was really, really good. There are like two explicit scenes, but it's worth it to get to see glimpses of the inner circle of Jackson's most cultured - Eudora Welty for example - and some of the New Stage Theatre crowd. The ending of the book was just....Wow.
Some of my favorite bits:

"They liked jazz too - Miss Welty had done a lot of club-hopping in Harlem - and taught me that bourbon was never to be augmented by anything other than maybe an added ice cube if one simply must when yet another Mississippi August demanded such a dilution, and sipping at a slightly watered-down potation was the only reasonable exertion that such heat and humidity humanly allowed."

"...[My mother] taught me that a companionless soul could comfort itself with the beauty of a well-chosen word, a well-written sentence, a well-parsed phrase. Salvation, she imparted, was offered in a paragraph's perfect form when one was capable of reading it with understanding, empathy, and purpose."

"My imaginary friend, a replacement for Cecil once she had arrived on the scene, was a tiny thing just like Matty May, who was but a bent slip of a woman, a comma typed onto the white world around her." (this made even better knowing that his imaginary friend is called Epiphany).

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