TODAY

 

It was a day that ought to be remembered, though you will not remember much about it come July 18, 2022.

 

You will recall delivering a keynote address "Faulkner, Welty and Wright" The Tragicomic Histories of Mississippi" for the 47th Annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference and a few of the questions from the ZOOM audience about Faulkner's 1945 letter to Wright, the meaning of "authority" when one talks about writers, and how to identify the tragic and the comic in the State of Mississippi in 2021.

 

You will recall some points in the keynote that preceded yours, Susan V. Donaldson's "Witnessing Jim Crow; The Mississippi Writers and the Politics of Invisibility."  You believe politics is ever a matter of visibility.

You will recall Jay Watson's eloquent words as he introduced you.

You will recall Natasha Trethewey's giving The Inaugural Ann J. Abadie Lecture in Southern Studies.

 

You will not remember much else about the day a year from now.  Memory is selective.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            7/18/2021 10:46:39 PM

 

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