#Oxford American

[agirlnamedbone]

Jason Kyle Howard, "If God Had a Name," (on Joan Osborne's "One of Us") in Oxford American (2020)

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Our Glorious Spring: Jeff Buckley

Andria Lisle, Oxford American, Summer 2000

THERE IS A PICTURE, taken early in May 1997, at Ellen’s Soul Food Restaurant in Memphis. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and we’ve just arrived from a harrowing 3-hour service at Al Green’s church. Jeff is wearing a "Sweet’s Trailer Hitch" thrift store T-shirt, his dress shirt discarded.

His suspenders frame the "Sweet’s" logo nicely; sadly, his belt is not visible from the angle of the photograph. He’s leaning back in the booth, one hand wrapped possessively around his iced tea glass. His delicate face and pouty lips are striking, yet nothing about his demeanor suggests that this young man was once nominated one of People magazine’s "50 Most Beautiful."

Following Jeff’s gaze, to his left, sits a girl – me. I am also dressed for church, in a silk blouse and skirt, my hair pulled back and pinned up. My bangs are crooked. I am making a face – clenched teeth, lips pulled back menacingly – the type my mother warned "would freeze that way." Over our shoulders, a man at the next booth smiles, perfectly centered in the frame. A picture of Martin Luther King hangs behind him.

All movement is arrested – frozen. But Jeff’s face comes alive every time I look at this picture, which is often. His eyes look alternately bemused and alarmed at my moon face. The real action is taking place beneath the table, out of sight of the photographer. Jeff is swinging his legs sideways, kicking me, prompting these faces. Kick – smile. Kick – grimace. Kick – smile. Kick – grimace, and my friend Lely captures the moment with a click of her camera.

Earlier that morning, Jeff wasn’t ready when we went to pick him up. He was talking to his aunt on the telephone, and painting his toenails green. He looked great in his pinstriped suit, but I noticed that his fly was undone. I said, "Jeff, zip your pants up." He shot me a pained expression – so uncool – zipped his pants, locked the door, and hopped off the porch. I introduced him to Lely and Alec, friends from DC, and we were off.

Most of the time I spent with Jeff was like that photograph. Funny, jesting. Our introduction, that February, involved spontaneous karate kicking. Another night, I took him to a gig in Oxford, Mississippi where a group of Ole Miss sorority girls invited him to their house for a party. The band that followed Jeff, Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, opened their set with the song 'Loser’s Waltz'. Jeff turned to me and asked "Shall we dance, Madam?" Then he purposefully fell off his barstool, like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. He hit the ground and bounced back up. By the time we waltzed around the room, the girls, horrified, were gone.

Down here, Jeff could definitely be himself, or be whichever self he wanted to be. Memphis is easy and comfortable and I don’t think people were too concerned about him. It’s also a very easy town to live in without too much money – much cheaper than New York, so I think he thought he could be here without bothering anybody, just sit at home and record. Jeff didn’t have many needs while he was here. He’d lie in the yard in the weeds – he never mowed his yard so when he lay outside you couldn’t even tell he was there. He would hide like that for days.

He was such a sweet baby. And it was funny because my roommate and I started listening to his music in earnest. I was often embarrassed because he’d be knocking on the door while Grace was blasting on the stereo. I never talked to Jeff about his music or asked him about it. It never came up. I do wish I had told him how much I liked it – but the topic was unbroachable. Even though I worked in a record store I knew nothing about Jeff’s history. I knew who his father was, that’s about it. Sometimes I would go out and hear other people talk about him in a completely different vein. Like, "Oh, I heard Jeff Buckley’s going to be at this bar tonight," which was weird, because he was somebody who walked my dog with me.

The whole time that we were friends, I was careful not to count on him because I knew that he would eventually leave – it seems that I am always friends with people who are in transit. Our relationship was completely platonic, but I was afraid of falling in love too much. Just the way he would look at me made me feel on top of the world. He made me so happy and we had so much fun. Despite that, I would give anything not to know him and have him be alive.

Jeff was always an actor. The last week he was here, I was walking down Madison Avenue and spotted him coming out of a Mexican restaurant. When Jeff saw me he started prancing like a fairy down the street towards me. I said, "Jeff, someone’s gonna pull over in a pickup truck and kill you – just like the end of Easy Rider, they’re gonna shoot you off your bike." He thought that was hilarious. I felt awful because I warned him about everything except the river.

The night Jeff drowned, I had gone to the casino with some friends. He and I had talked about going down there for free drinks. We discussed it, but that particular night his band was flying in from New York for a recording session. I walked my dog over to Jeff’s before I left. Keith Foti was there, and Gene Bowen, Jeff’s road manager. We decided that Jeff would stay home and I would go to the casinos. Then when I got back I would come tell him how much I won.

At about 12:30 AM, I walked my dog over with a gambling report. After a knock on the door, I was asked "Who’s there?" I was told to go away. I was perturbed, thinking – uggh... musicians. I just thought they were having a discussion. I didn’t think another thing of it and I went home and went to sleep, then to work the next day. My boss asked me if I was with Jeff the night before and I said yeah and he said no you weren’t and I said yeah and he asked again and at that point the telephone rang and it was a reporter from the newspaper wanting a comment about Jeff’s death.

I was so naïve about Jeff. I wanted to protect him. Looking over my journal entries, I can count on my fingers and toes the number of times we hung out. It was a brief period of time – three months. At Jeff’s memorial, Elvis Costello sat in front of me and Marianne Faithfull performed. And I was in shock, thinking no, this wasn’t the Jeff that lived down the street. This wasn’t the kid who rode a bicycle because he couldn’t afford a car.

To paraphrase something Robert Gordon once told me, I didn’t know Jeff Buckley – I knew a Jeff Buckley. I can lay no claim to his life, or his art, or his happiness. But I will never forget the glorious spring of 1997. There is a photo of us, and we are happy. We are two shining stars stuffed with fried chicken and collard greens. We are alive, and we are happy.

© Andria Lisle, 2000

[theoxfordamerican]

Newsstand Day!

Our Fall 2024 Southern Lit Issue is here, offering a literary feast of new stories that resonate and linger. 🍂 Explore themes of loneliness, legacy, lost innocence, and chance encounters in Issue #126, available now at your local bookstore or on OA Goods!

Shop now: https://www.oxfordamericangoods.org/collections/good-reading/products/issue-126-southern-lit-issue

COVER: Scene from Alligator (1980) (detail), 2019, acrylic and mixed media on canvas by Thomas Deaton © The artist. Courtesy Lemieux Galleries, New Orleans. Deaton’s work will be on view from November 2 to February 2, in the exhibition Prospect.6: The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home, in New Orleans.

[dahliaduvide]

"His name is lost to history, but perhaps he wouldn’t mind. His motivation was a speedy payday, not posterity. A ballad that stirred the passions could sell for a penny. Sometimes he sold his work directly to the printshops, but he often took to the streets himself. He borrowed tunes from familiar songs, and had a talent for singing his work that helped him draw a crowd and sell his broadsides."

"Our modern notion of a songwriter would have been nonsensical to him, of course. His trade was partly creative, but his task was also to record and remember the familiar songs already sung, and re-shape them for new events and local happenings. He was a kind of tabloid journalist in his time. Today, we might think of him as a historian of oral traditions, a cataloger of folkways. But that’s not quite right. He was no mere archivist, no passive documentarian. He shaped and reshaped these traditions. Writing was an astonishing technology, and the reach of the printing press gave it newfound power. Oral traditions were chaotic, unfixed, unwieldy—stories forever in revision, never complete. Versions would branch without end, and older branches would be lost with time. How did the lyrics go? Well, that would depend. You could say a song existed in superposition, until someone sang it in their particular way."

"Though he would have been dismissed as a scabrous hack at the time, the ballad writer has such a knack for poetic and efficient depictions of monstrous violence that it can start to feel like he is an artist, or a proto-artist, who is governed by a bloodthirsty aesthetic. But the truth is, he may not be a single man—he may be a composite, his single authorship an anachronism. Or he may be merely a transcriber. The song’s structure and rhythm are so clean that it suggests a writer’s hand, but it could be that the story and its language were born entirely in song, from the community. Later, scholars would bicker over what counts as folk tradition, but a song’s evolutions in oral tradition and popular writing surely would have crossed back and forth countless times. The past is so foreign and strange that we should be left humble when we write our histories. Whether he is one writer, or several writers, or the people as a whole, the shape of his thoughts—his entire manner of thinking—is unreachable."

Excerpts.

Thoughts.

Truly a beautifully written article, and you should totally take the time to read the entire thing. He interweaves perspectives from performers, listeners, and even what the creators of these broadside murder ballads might have been like. Artful writing, hard thoughts, and self-examination.

This article really put into words a vital part of my vision for this project, creating modern murder ballads to draw attention to cases, raise awareness and hopefully get some justice for the Knoxville girls of today.

[postcard-from-the-past]

"Americans in Oxford"

British vintage postcard

[disease]

"SURGICAL GLOVES ARE STERILISED AND DRIED ON STANDS" (CHURCHILL HOSPITAL) LEE MILLER | OXFORD, 1943 [platinum-palladium print | 11 x 10 ½"]

[agarthanguide]

Thank you so much for revealing the layers of Laudna's outfit you will not believe how happy I was when I saw it. I would still like to know about the shoes, is the red from tights that she's wearing or is it part of the shoe?

Hey! Thank you for the kind words. I intended (and still intend) to finish Laudna's layers, but I got distracted by a very large project. That is now finished, so I am at liberty to tell you that Laudna is wearing something like these Oxfords by American Duchess. The toe is in black leather and the body is in dark red canvas/leather/whatever.

[nixie-deangel]

started watching The Great British Baking Show and am now having thoughts and ideas for AUs. Nothing set yet but I can feel them forming.

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 80: Postcards from linguistics summer camp

What if there was a summer camp for linguists? Like, imagine you could just go somewhere for a few weeks or a month and do linguistics classes and go to linguistics talks and eat your meals with linguists all day every day? Well, this event exists, sort of, and they're called linguistics institutes. 

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about Gretchen's visit to the 2023 LSA institute at University of Massachusetts Amherst this summer. We talk about cool projects that Gretchen learned about at this year's Lingstitute, including the Linguistic Atlas Project, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (talks about all of these projects are now available online). We also talk about the history of LSA summer institutes (the first one was in 1928, almost a hundred years ago!), why they're not to be confused with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which is a missionary project for Bible translation (awkward), and both Gretchen's history attending various institutes and Lauren's history not attending them (sorry about the FOMO though).

Listen to this episode about linguistics summer camp and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

[the-bleeding-typewriter]

happy to report that after what some may call an "obsessive" spree of researching tiger attacks, i finally have an outline for a Prey fic

i ALSO went back in my notes and put together a helpful little table of symptoms associated with henbane, mandrake, and jimsonweed...if anyone knows what episode that pertains to, you should know the other Endeavour fic i have planned :)

[f1restart3rr]

I had a very low quality version of this I made ages ago...but its 2023 and I deserve better so I made a new one!

[incorrectsibunaquotes]

Do y’all really think Fabian would go to college in America (specifically Ohio) to chase after a girl who, while he cares for and misses her (bc lbr they also trauma bonded on top of having a thing for each other), dumped him over a letter and ghosted him? Like, yeah maybe they found each other again later in life after Anubis, but it would not be because Fabian was chasing after her. Why must we refuse to let him have dreams and a life outside of Nina?

[theoxfordamerican]

I’m proud that we have fashioned, over the past few years and multiple forms of media, a body of work that has chronicled and illuminated the Black roots, and future, of country. If Black country is having a moment because of Beyoncé, we are here like always to guide and probe and make the necessary connections. To reveal antecedents and carve out a pathway for a future in which we’re all able to shine our brightest, sing our loudest.

(via Oxford American | Black Country: A Love Letter and Living Archive)

[lessviolencemoreapplejuice]

Skirt I made for the Vampire Weekend concert in Berkeley 🤓🤓 so proud of it!!

[zarvasace]

Mini fic: "warm" or any variation of that word. Vidow and it doesn't really matter the AU

Fluff! Fluff! Fluff! 💜🖤

---

Vio heard the front door open and close, then the jingling of a sparse key chain and the thunk of shoes. The light in the apartment kitchen stayed off, so Vio slid into the corner of the couch. Though his poetry book remained a comfortable weight in his hands, he lifted it to give Shadow room to slide in. 

Like so many nights, Shadow curled up like a cat on the couch, but tonight, he pressed a little closer. His arms wrapped around Vio's waist, and his face squished into Vio's stomach. 

"Warm," he muttered, muffled by the couch pillows that were more comfortable than decorative. 

Frowning just slightly, Vio shifted his book to one hand, index finger trapped between pages. His other hand settled in Shadow's hair. They should do another dye party in the coming week. "Long day?" 

Shadow nodded as best he could. "Was I that big of a brat in middle school? Don't answer that. I just need a hug." He peeked up at Vio, a slight smile tugging at his lips. "Read?" 

Vio's frown vanished, and he settled back more comfortably to rest the book on the couch arm. "Of course. This one is Longfellow, Divina Commedia, I'll start it over. 'Oft have I seen at some cathedral door A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor…'"