Tag: William Faulkner

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Hot Toddy

CREDIT: Jeff Wasserman | Dreamstime.com

It’s hot toddy time. And no, I’m not referring to Ole Miss’ dismal football season, which ended with a 35-point home loss to Mississippi State. I’m talking toddies, the only manmade concoction that makes having a cold — or, for that matter, being cold — palatable. The drink that Oxford’s most famous resident (move over, Hugh Freeze) relied on, seemingly whenever the thermometer dipped below 50 degrees.

William Faulkner’s hot toddy recipe has been making the rounds on social media, thanks to a well-timed mention in last month’s Town & Country magazine. According to the Nobel Prize-winning author’s niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, “Pappy alone decided when a hot toddy was needed, and he administered it to his patient with the best bedside manner of a country doctor. … It never failed.”

Jeff Wasserman | Dreamstime.com

Faulkner made his toddies with Heaven Hill or Jack Daniel’s, but historically, the tincture is made with whatever might be handy. Brandy, rum, or even a liqueur can suffice for the whiskey. The recipe is simple: a shot of alcohol, a teaspoon of sweetener, fresh lemon, and boiling water, poured over a spoon so that the serving glass doesn’t crack. In some regions, a cinnamon stick is de rigueur; in others, it’s sacrilege.

Hot toddies, however, existed long before Faulkner walked Oxford’s town square. The drink harkens back to 18th-century Edinburgh, Scotland, where a spring called Tod’s Well bubbled up at a location called Arthur’s Seat. Mixologists and food historians universally agree that the toddy was popularized because circa-1700 Scotch tasted disgusting. The only way Scots could get it down the hatch was to dilute it with water and add sugar and herbs to mask the bitterness.

Today, hot toddies are a welcome adult alternative to Theraflu, NyQuil, or any of the dozens of nighttime cold and cough medications on the market. Like a steaming mug of tea, the hot toddy opens nasal passages and promotes mucous secretion. It’s even better than tea, because alcohol dilates your blood vessels, allowing your mucus membranes to work their magic. The alcohol also acts as a sedative. It relaxes you, inhibits your cough, and helps you drift off to sleep. That last part is important — your body needs downtime to fight off a cold. Too much alcohol, though, and your nasal passages will dry out, leaving you to feel even worse in the morning.

Take heart, drinkers: The results of a 1993 Carnegie Mellon study of 391 subjects who were intentionally exposed to one of five respiratory viruses showed that moderate drinkers are associated with a decreased risk for developing colds. I know that in my poorly insulated Midtown house, I like to drink toddies preventatively during wintertime. On particularly gloomy and dank nights, it chases the cold from my bones.

And when you’re sick enough for a toddy, making one is easier than getting a childproof cap off a bottle of cold medicine. Just pour a shot of whiskey into a microwavable mug, add a teaspoon of honey, squeeze half a lemon into the mug, and top off the mug with hot water. Zap it in the microwave for a minute, repair to your bed, and sip.

If you want to get fancy, add a cinnamon stick or stud your lemon slice with cloves. Or take Faulkner’s cue, and serve your hot toddy on a silver tray. According to Wells, her uncle always advised his patients to drink it quickly — no doubt to chase it with another one in between the coughing spells.

Categories
News News Feature

Faulkner and Yoknapatawhpa in Oxford

Modern, postmodern, cubist, hack, Count No ‘Count, genius, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winner.

There’s a reason why scholars still get in a tizzy close to a century after he published his first book and why the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference is the longest continuously running conference in America dedicated to the work of a single author.

Alberto Moravia said, “You can find Faulkner’s fingerprint everywhere.”

For the past 42 years, scholars and William Faulkner enthusiasts from around the globe have gathered in his little postage stamp of native soil that is Oxford, Mississippi, and through annual themes, taken stabs at wrangling his indomitable voice that could very well be described as a singularity.

This year the conference takes place Sunday, July 17th through Thursday, July 21st and focuses on Faulkner and the Native South.

“His influence on native writers has become more and more interesting to scholars of Southern literature, and it is time to look at the native presence and elements in his work,” Dr. Jay Watson, the Howry Chair of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi, says.

More than 30 scholars, experts, professors, and others will serve as either keynote speakers or panelists during the conference, including some of the leading Southern Native American writers and scholars of today.

“Well, I’m biased, so I think it’s all exciting, but one of the more exciting guests is LeAnne Howe, who is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation and a novelist, poet, and playwright, and she will talk on what Faulkner has meant to her as a writer,” Watson says.

Melanie Benson Taylor will present a talk on “Faulkner’s Dialectical Indian: Modernity, Nativity, and Violence in the New South” on Sunday afternoon and is considered the leading scholar on Southeastern Native American Southern literature.

“[Taylor] wrote Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause, which is probably the most important book anyone has written on literature of Southeastern Indians,” Watson says of the Dartmouth chair of Native American studies.

The conference kicks off Sunday with a 1 p.m. reception at the University Museum on University Ave. and concludes Thursday with a closing party at the iconic Square Books on the Oxford Square.

Most panels and presentations take place in Nutt Auditorium across the street from the Ford Center on University, and full conference registration includes a cocktail party on Tuesday evening and a picnic on the grounds of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, Wednesday evening. A choice of three guided tours either through north Mississippi, of the architecture of Oxford and the surrounding Lafayette County, or of the Mississippi Delta is available for an additional fee.

Coupled with the sometimes obsessive behavior that Faulkner can inspire, the conference serves as a draw to the 100 to 200 people every summer because of the uniqueness of the environment.

“The lightning in the bottle is that at the conference we bring participants into Faulkner’s world, not only the world that he worked in and that shaped him, but also the world on which he based his fictional Yoknapatawpha County,” Watson says. “It is still possible to see the places and sites that inspired him and his imagination. There’s a lot of energy there. That is why people are willing to come to a small town during the hottest part of the year.”

Registration for the full conference is $175 for students and $300 for others, and walk-ups are accepted. The fee covers admission to all program events, a buffet supper on Sunday, a reception Tuesday, the Rowan Oak picnic, refreshments, and a closing reception. It does not cover lodging or other meals.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About Alexandra Pusateri’s News Blog post, “Uber and Lyft to Receive Cease-and-Desist From City” …

Lyft is an illegal car service that needs to stop. They do not have proper insurance. We pay a lot of money to the city to have the right to operate.

Taxi driver James Edgar Tate

I live in a city where Lyft and Uber are legal, and it has been such an improvement! I get picked up in less time, and the drivers are friendlier and don’t blow through red lights in a rush to drop me off and get another rider. The drivers also make good money. I can’t believe Memphis is going to give in to pressure from outdated taxi companies.

Heather

About cover story, “Endpapers: Time to Take Stock of New Books of Local Interest,” edited by Leonard Gill…

Thanks for another great Endpapers literary issue. I wish you did it more often since writing in Memphis seems to figure far down the list of promoted arts, somewhere below music, painting and sculpting, photography, serpent handling, cow tipping, and barbecuing. I’d like to think that reading about books makes people read more, discuss books more often, and buy more books. I’d also like to think that the beautiful woman on the cover is reading a novel of mine.

Corey Mesler

About Alexandra Pusateri’s Flyer Flashback on controversy over a William Faulkner statue in Oxford, Mississippi…

The writer wrote that Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi. He was in fact born in New Albany, Mississippi, also my birth place. There is a museum in new Albany, the Union County Heritage Museum (UCHM ), on the same block where the Faulkners lived at the time of his birth. [In addition to] exhibits, artifacts, and recorded history of the South, UCHM also features a William Faulkner Literary Garden, as well as much information on the writer.

Jane Thayer

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s editor’s column about “tight” states …

I’m a little slow, but I think I get the gist: Red states like briefs, blue states prefer boxers, and those crazy independents are just out there catching every breeze, letting ol’ freedom ring.

Poots

About Toby Sells’ story “Memphis Police Department Hit with ‘Blue Flu’ Protest” …

Toby Sells’ story on the “blue flu” was not quite correct. It was reported that officers were upset about the 24 percent rise in premiums. We understand that the cost of insurance has gone up. What officers are upset about is the fact that all retired city employees will have to pay 100 percent of their health-care premiums. 100 percent. Some of the retirees are not capable health-wise to work anymore, and all they have is their pension. Some do not have Social Security, because unlike the private sector, officers and firefighters do not get Social Security. All they have is their measly pension. With the cost of insurance for a husband and wife being around $1,700, that is their whole pension. Then some say they can get Obamacare. Not so. They make too much to receive Obamacare, or its premium is higher. This is what everyone is so upset about. The city is basically turning a deaf ear to the retirees. They don’t care if they have insurance or not. The retirees did their jobs for 25-plus years and retired expecting to have these benefits, and now they don’t. How are they going to afford their needed medications or be able to go to the doctor? Some have very serious health conditions. Yet all the while our city leaders continue to spend, spend, spend on other items that are not necessary. We are willing to meet the city halfway on this, to come to some sort of a resolution, but not so for the city. Our pension is actually very well funded, more than a lot of other large cities. When the times are hard you have to make cuts, but you should never balance the budget on the backs of city employees. At home when money is short, you might not be able to go out to eat or eat steaks; we eat a lot of hamburger meat in our home, sometimes maybe we get to eat a steak. The city wants to eat steak at every meal, and to be able to do this they make cuts to the city employees. Not right at all.

Brad Newsom

Categories
News The Fly-By

A Look Back at the Fight Between a Faulkner Statue and a Tree

In the January 23, 1997, issue of the Memphis Flyer, Phil Campbell detailed a struggle between a tree and a writer’s statue in Oxford, Mississippi.

The proposed statue would be a tribute to William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize-winning author from Oxford, who penned Southern classics such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, among many others. The writer was born in New Albany and bought a home in Oxford for his family in 1930 that he called “Rowan Oak.” Despite this, however, the town had not done much to pay homage to him, according to the article.

“Even Square Books, the town’s popular bookstore, displays more photos of one-time Oxford resident John Grisham than it does of Faulkner,” the story read.

The statue was set to be built with $70,000 raised by businesses and the Oxford Board of Aldermen, one that would show Faulkner “standing with dignity, with a pipe in his mouth, looking off into the distance, sporting his signature tweed coat and baggy britches.”

Faulkner’s oldest-living relative at the time, his nephew Jimmy Faulkner, gave his approval for the project until Oxford residents became upset with how the project began to unfold.

The William Faulkner statue in Oxford sits in front of City Hall.

On the plot in front of Oxford City Hall, where the statue was to be raised, sat a magnolia tree. The mayor during that time, John Leslie, privately told the city’s electric department to cut down the tree because “the board of aldermen hoped to pass an ordinance creating a ‘tree board’ that would effectively have prevented the tree from being removed,” Campbell wrote.

Residents wrote letters against the mayor’s actions and two dozen showed up to the tree stump on one particular day, even laying a wreath on the dead tree. The Faulkner family pulled its support of the project after the writer’s daughter, who lived in Virginia, spoke out against the tree being cut down. The nephew originally believed the project had the daughter’s blessing but ended up speaking out against it, even going in front of the board of aldermen.

“Jimmy Faulkner appeared before the board of alderman, with dozens of other people in tow, to protest the mayor’s decision the week after the tree was felled. His presence made a strong statement, given the family’s affection for privacy and general apathy for politics,” the story read.

Some people felt “manipulated,” and the convoluted situation surrounding the fallen tree involved many parties. Joseph Blotner, who wrote a biography on Faulkner, was quoted in the article in favor of the statue.

“In ‘Go Down, Moses’ and other works, Faulkner deplores the disappearance of the big woods in the Delta,” he said in the story. “However, there are many, many magnolia trees in and around Oxford. There is only one native son that brought honor to his town, his state, and his country.”

Despite the controversy, the statue went up as planned. The bronze statue now sits in front of City Hall in Oxford, depicting Faulkner on a bench with his legs crossed and holding a pipe.

Categories
Sports

Faux Faulkner, Horrible Hemingway Win Sports Writing Contest

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If I ruled the world there would be a squash court in every community center, squash would be in the Olympics, Rami Ashour would be Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year, James Willstrop’s triple fake to win a point — one crummy point! — against Ashour would be shown every time some tennis announcer says “that’s a squash shot” at the U.S. Open next week, and squash would have its rightful place in literature and journalism.

Ian McEwan wrote about it — well — in his novel “Saturday.” Woody Allen played it — badly — in his movie “Manhattan.” For the most part, however, squash — in contrast to baseball, boxing, and hunting and fishing — has been ignored by men and women of arts and letters. My winning entry of horrible Hemingway and worse Faulkner in The Black Knight Squash Short Story Contest offers a glimpse of the possibilities.

What if famous writers had made squash the focus of their passion, rage, and creative efforts? Might we have seen such works as these?

To read the unpublished squash chronicles of Hemingway, Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, Elmore Leonard, Lee Child and more
click here.