On the Horizon: Oraien Catledge Photographs

Oraien Catledge: Photographs is a celebration of a life's work in fine art photography. This collection of 70 black and white photographs, featuring an introduction from Richard Ford as well as an interview with Catledge, will be available from UPM in August.

Catledge was born in Sumner, Mississippi, in 1928, and came to his photographer’s vocation near the end of a long career as a social worker in the state of Mississippi, and as an advocate for the blind throughout the South.

Although principally a photographer of people, Catledge’s sensuous, fastidious black and white work documents the landscapes and cityscapes of Mississippi and New Orleans, as well as imagining and recording the insular, working-class lives of the Cabbagetown neighborhood in center-city Atlanta -- the signal achievement upon which his considerable reputation rests.

As novelist Richard Ford states in his introduction, Catledge’s remarkable photographs insist on the world as a movingly shared place. They seize their subjects with a palpable and seemingly inexhaustible relish, “as if the photographer has found each subject’s…face, expression, physical attitude and posture [so] full of dense complexity….” that the choice to make the photograph became an intoxicating one.

Catledge’s photographs do more than simply arrest us. By their great affirming particularity, by their ambition , their perceptiveness, by their searching and patient eye and by what Ford calls their subjects’ “radiant sense of chosen-ness,” they cause us to concur in a spirit of munificence, which transcends their southern subjects and settings and achieves an indisputable connection with the great photography of the last century.

Click through the jump for video of Catledge talking about his time in Cabbagetown.

New Book: My Life with Charlie Brown

While best known as the creator of Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) left behind scores of great nonfiction writing about his craft, America, religion, the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and of course Charlie Brown. Despite his chosen profession as a cartoonist, Schulz was a thoughtful and precise prose writer who knew how to explain his craft in clear and engaging ways.

Along with 25 b&w illustrations, My Life with Charlie Brown brings together his major prose writings, many published here for the first time.

UPM Turns 40

On Saturday, March 6, the University Press of Mississippi celebrated its 40th anniversary with an afternoon picnic held during the Oxford Conference for the Book. The day’s events culminated with a book signing and toast to UPM at Square Books in Oxford. These events were a kickoff to a year-long celebration of UPM’s 40 years of publishing.

The afternoon picnic was attended by festival-goers, UPM staff members, and longtime friends of the Press. The culminating event to the Conference for the Book was the party at Square Books featuring a birthday cake and champagne toast for UPM by Square Books owner Richard Howorth.

Click below to see UPM Director Leila Salisbury address the crowd at the picnic. Also after the jump are pictures from the event as Square Books.

New Book: Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine

Anthony Slide's Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers provides the definitive history of a little known artifact. The book charts the development of the fan magazine from the golden years when Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay first appeared in 1911 to its decline into provocative headlines and titillation in the 1960s and afterward.

Today, fan magazines such as People and US Weekly are quickly dismissed as publicity tools or fluff journalism. But, the American fan magazine represents a fascinating and indispensable chapter in journalism and popular culture.

Slide discusses how the fan magazines dealt with gossip and innuendo, and how they handled nationwide issues such as Hollywood scandals of the 1920s, World War II, the blacklist, and the death of President Kennedy. Fan magazines thrived in the twentieth century, and they presented the history of an industry in a unique, sometimes accurate, and always entertaining style.

This major cultural history includes a new interview with 1970s media personality Rona Barrett, as well as original commentary from a dozen editors and writers. Also included is a chapter on contributions to the fan magazines from well-known writers such as Theodore Dreiser and e. e. cummings. The book is enhanced by an appendix documenting some 268 American fan magazines and includes detailed publication histories.

Slide lives in Studio City, California, and is an independent scholar who has published more than seventy-two books on popular entertainment. He has been a specialist appraiser of entertainment memorabilia for more than thirty years, an associate archivist for the American Film Institute, and the resident film historian of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine is now available from UPM.

Casual Questions with Roben Jones

Roben Jones is the author of Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studio.  The book chronicles the story of the American Studios rhythm section from 1964, when the group occasionally began working together, until 1972, when studio boss Chip Moman shut down the studio and moved the entire operation to Atlanta.

Roben Jones lives in Gallipolis, Ohio and has published poetry in various magazines and in Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, 1950-1999.

• What was your first job?

When I was learning my craft as a poet, my parents looked after me.My mother had always wanted to be a writer herself and she proposed a Vincent-and-Theo sort of arrangement .We had hardly any money at all, but she saw it as an investment in the future because she was sure I'd make good.

           
So my first real job came rather late in life. I did the morning show on radio station WMOV-AM, in Ravenswood, West Virginia. ''Thirteen-twenty on your radio dial,the Voice of the Mid-Ohio Valley.'' One of my old high-school teachers was working there as operations manager and he remembered me and got me hired. I had an oldies show, so I was able to play a lot of the music I'd later wind up writing about. I loved being on the air but the personnel at the station was unnervingly sleazy.They made the bunch on ''WKRP In Cinicinatti'' look like choirboys. It wasn't my sort of scene so I didn't last long...but I left there with enough material for a novel, if I ever want to write it.

Mississippi Author Barry Hannah dies at 67

Noted Mississippi author Barry Hannah passed away Monday afternoon at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67.

Hannah was a leading figure in contemporary American literature and was the author of Geronimo Rex, Airships, Ray, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome, and Yonder Stands Your Orphan among several others.

He was unquestionably one of our state's greatest writers," said Richard Howorth, a longtime friend of Hannah's and owner of Oxford's Square Books. "I'd be willing to wager that his books, his stories in particular, are read in creative writing classes at universities around the country more than any other writer's."

The upcoming Oxford Conference for the Book was scheduled to be dedicated to the works of Hannah.  UPM had the privilege of publishing Hannah's novellas Boomerang and Never Die. The books are available in one collection.

**UPDATE** The New York Times ran an obituary on Wednesday and mentioned Hannah's connection with UPM.

“He played an important role in introducing Southern literature to postmodernism at a time when Southern writing was trying to live up to and move beyond the great achievements of the modernist Southern Renaissance authors, especially William Faulkner,” Martyn Bone, the editor of “Perspectives on Barry Hannah” (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), wrote in an e-mail message on Tuesday.

Stories of O: Oprah's Culture Industries

Kimberly Springer, co-editor of Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture, recenlty curated a Oprah-themed presentation at In Media Res.

Below is Springer's curator's note which raises several questions and touches on the same issues that are discussed in the book.  Also, below the jump is a video clip that speaks to Oprah's omnipresence.

Why do Americans care so much about Oprah,” is a question I hear with surprising regularity. A more precise question is, how does Oprah get people to care about her? In both constructions “care” is the operative. Care can denote attention to paid to Oprah, her show, and her actions. Care can signify disdain for blackness, femaleness, or class status implicit in tone as in “Why do Americans care what Oprah thinks?” This disdain requires its own interrogation. Care also stands for respect and reverence. In each instance, “Oprah” is imbued with flexible meaning.