Life of ‘Lewie’
A decade ago, the writer and humorist Roy Blount Jr. took a journey down the Mississippi River for a film called “The Main Stream,” a travelogue he narrates in the soft- edged accent of his native Georgia. He said he wanted to travel along the country’s “liquid divide” to discover “what holds this wildly diverse (pronounced die -verse) country together.”
Blount, who will journey to Memphis this week as a guest of the River City Writers Series, said by e - mail that the past 10 years have made the country less cohesive.
“I would say that we are more divided if you judge by politicians who are exploiting absurdly backward issues (anti- evolution, anticontraception for God’s sake),” he wrote. “Meanwhile most people practice contraception and don’t care about evolution.”
Blount will be reading from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday in Room 300 at the University Center on the University of Memphis campus. The event and an interview with the author Friday are free and open to the public.
Among the two dozen books Blount has written are “Crackers: This whole many-angled thing of Jimmy, more Carters, ominous little animals, sad singing women, my daddy, and me,” published in 1980; “Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story” about his mother and his childhood in Georgia, published in 1998; a 2005 traveler’s guide to New Orleans called “Feet on the Street”; and “Alphabet Juice,” a book on words and the English language which has a subtitle that begins: “The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof....”
A mention of the re - enactors who gathered in the Mid-south last week to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh east of Memphis, drew this response from Blount:
“I wrote a short biography of Robert E. Lee (published in 2003). One thing I concluded is that he would think that Civil War re - enactors were crazy. It was a horrible bloodbath, that war, whose only justification is that slavery was a cancer on the land of the free, and the war ended slavery, de jure if not de facto.”
To read his “self-promotional bio, in third person” go to royblountjr.com. There he gathers some praise of his work:
“Norman Mailer said of his second book, ‘Crackers,’ ‘Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time,’ and Time placed Blount ‘in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H.L. Mencken and W.C. Fields.’ Garrison Keillor said in The Paris Review, ‘Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth and soulful all in one sentence.’ Playboy said he was ‘known to the critics as our next Mark Twain.’ Whether, on the one hand, it is his place to quote these plaudits and whether, on the other hand, he feels that they are adequate, are questions not for him to answer at this time.”
Books by Roy Blount Jr. will be available for sale, and some will be raffled, at his reading Thursday at University of Memphis. On Friday, Blount will be interviewed at 10:30 a.m. in Room 456 of Patterson Hall on the U of M campus. For information, contact Cary Holladay, director of the River City Writers Series, at (901) 678-4405 or caryholladay.net.
The prominent Memphis lawyer and GOP stalwart will sign his biography, “Lewie” (Rhodes College, $25) at 6 p.m. Thursday at The Booksellers at Laurelwood.
A founder of the firm Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, he also served as chairman of the board at Regional Medical Center at Memphis for 10 years and on the Memphis City Council in the 1960s.
The Booksellers at Laurelwood is at 387 Perkins Road Ext.
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