Writers reflect on Charles Portis
He was the real thing, but he was modest about it. An awestruck fan meeting him by chance in a Little Rock bar named the Faded Rose gushed at him, praising him as a great American writer. Portis shrugged saying, “I’m not even the best writer in this bar.”
Gathering Charles Portis’s many contributions to the Oxford American
Following the death of the this “least-known great writer,” we’re revisiting his life and work.
Track 9 – “Paradise” by Charlie McAlister
It might sound like kitchen-sink music at first, seemingly made with whatever junk was lying around and played by whoever happened to be there. It might seem off, even uncomfortably so. But listen closer. The warble of stretched tape, the loose tuning, the home-recorded hiss. It’s all a disguise. At heart, lots of his catalog is strange, charmed pop music, wry without being goofy, ineffably simple, personal and universal at the same time.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Esquerita and Little Richard stayed in touch as friends, collaborators, and rivals until 1986, when Little Richard was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Esquerita died, a victim of AIDS who was buried in an unmarked grave on Hart Island, New York. Their careers had mirrored each other over rock & roll’s first thirty years, playing out the dualities of the sacred and the profane, music and money, and God and the Voola, what Esquerita called his mojo, the spirit that motivated his music.
The Oxford American Literary Project is thrilled to welcome two new key staff members: managing editor Danielle A. Jackson and development director Adrienne Anderson.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
In her series New Orleans & the Levees, Karen Halverson alternates between bright, uninhibited portraits and stark industrial landscapes, capturing the inherent tension of living in a city that is always sinking and the extraordinary engineering measures taken to protect it.
A Conversation with Nickole Brown
“And now? I’m still doing what I’ve always done—the only thing I know how to do—to use poetry to find words for those who have little voice of their own, to try to articulate stories without a ready language.”
A feature essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Funk is at once spiritual and pugilistic and reparative and confrontational. It does not demand you apologize for slavery but absconds over the Atlantic with its freedom and hovers over the water on the downbeat, wishing you would try to come steal it again. It buries itself deep in the dirt of a sea island and makes its rhythms shake the earth and then shoots out the ground on a spaceship.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
I didn’t even know if I knew how to let go of the pain of my past. It has, after all, made me the woman I am.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
We call it the Stono Rebellion because it started in a plantation district (a “general area of settlement,” in one scholar’s suitably vague phrase) known as Stono, which had taken its name from the river that ran near it, the Stono River, which had taken its name from a Native American tribe, the Stono or Stonoe or Stonowe, who when Carolina was founded in 1663 were settled close to Charles Town. By one of those dark coincidences history delights in, the Stono themselves are remembered principally (almost entirely) for having started an uprising against the colony.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Men and women—sometimes pairing off, sometimes dancing alone—cluster in the center of the club, lightly prancing just off their heels. In unison, the dancers then form a circle, shifting to the side counterclockwise from time to time, giving each other just enough space to continue moving their feet and legs. At times, they wind their bodies in place, moving unpredictably like twisting leaves in the wind. Whether they know it or not, for a moment or two, the dancers are linked back to their ancestors in coastal South Carolina in the previous century and, further back, in West Africa, also dancing—for tradition, for religious beliefs, for sheer joy.
Track 3 – “Down to the Graveyard” by Moon Pie
In clubs and bars they played ninety-minute shows, at the least, filled with three- to four-minute narratives about living in a town and wanting to get out, being away from home and wanting to return, hating a job, being unemployed and willing to work for the worst boss ever. Unrequited love. Main Street drag racing. Bad, bad radio station formats. Moon Pie was a mix of Springsteen, the Modern Lovers, Hank Williams, and the Blasters. Some years later I saw Jason and the Scorchers—a band I love—and thought, Moon Pie, back in the day.
