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Friday, April 25, 2014

Happy National Poetry Month





                                                       



 April is National Poetry and Poetry Writing Month, and in celebration we want to recognize Natasha Trethewey.  Trethewey is currently State Poet Laureate for Mississippi and U.S. Poet Laureate.  She is in her second term for U.S. Poet Laureate, and has taken on a signature project, a PBS NewsHour Poetry Series.  She is also teaming up with Jeffrey Brown for a series of on-location reports in cities across the United States. 

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi on April 26, 1966.  Her father, Eric Trethewey, was a Canadian emigrant and a poet.  Her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was a social worker in Mississippi.  The two married illegally, as the anti-miscegenation laws were still in place.   Her parents were later divorced when she was six.

Trethewey’s inspiration for her work is a combination of historical and personal.   Native Guard is centered on Louisiana’s Native Guards, which was a Black Regiment in the Union Army composed of former slaves.  In an interview with Trethewey from the New York Times she states, “My birthday is April 26th, Confederate Memorial Day…I was born 100 years to the day after that holiday was invented.  I don’t think I could have escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented.”  Her more recent collection of poetry Thrall focuses on mixed-race families and on fathers’ relationships with their children.
Trethewey is the author of two more collections of poetry and one book of non-fiction.  


Works by Natasha Trethewey at MLC:
Domestic Work  -MS 811.6t799
Bellocq’s Ophelia  -MS 811.6T799
Native Guard  - MS 811.6T799
Beyond Katrina: a Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast –MS 363.34922 T799
Thrall  - MS 811.6T799


 

Friday, April 18, 2014

What's In A (Mississippi) Name?

Mississippi, like any other state, has towns named for a grab-bag of things: last names (McComb was named for a Colonel H.S. McComb, President of the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad), other towns (Kilmichael was named for Kilmichael, Ireland), Native American names (Pascagoula means bread eater or bread people), and a various other odds and ends.


Here are a few of our favorites:

Bogue Chitto, in Lincoln County, is a Choctaw phrase meaning "big creek" (307).

Veto, in Franklin County, asked its citizens to submit name ideas when it applied for a post office. The postal authorities nixed all the names its citizens suggested and named it Veto (143).

Mahrud, in Humphrey's County, was settled by a man named T.F. Durham. He named the town after himself, but spelled it backwards (195).

Deovolente, also in Humphrey;s County, was an African-American settlement established in 1865. It means "God willing" in Latin (194).

Tallaloosa, in Marshall County, is a Native American name meaning "black rock" (336).

Buttahatchie, in Monroe Coumty, is also a Native American name. It means "river which comes from the hills" (339). I think that's downright poetic.

Locopolis, in Tallahatchie County, was a combination of two root words, loco, meaning "place", and polis, meaning "city"(467). Apparently, it was a fine place for a city.

Bovina, in Warren County, was named by a pair of comedian settlers, Cowan and Bullen (507). Get it?

Brozville, in Holmes County, was named for its first settler, Zoo Broy. Apparently the hand-written request for Broyville was a bit too messy for the short-sighted postal officials (185).

D'Lo, in Simpson County, is a shortened version of the French De Leau. It seems that the French named the Strong River this, meaning "deep water" (439).

Want to know where your town got its name? We'd be happy to oblige! Drop us a line in the comments and we'll try to track it down.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mississippi_90.jpg
Brieger, James. Hometown, Mississippi. 1980. Print.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Happy National Bookmobile Day!

Today is National Bookmobile Day, a part of National Library Week. Bookmobiles are an important part of library history in Mississippi as they provided library services to those in rural areas who couldn't reach libraries themselves. Many people remember the bookmobile as their first library experience. Here are just a few bookmobiles from Mississippi library history:



This bookmobile served the seven Choctaw schools in Neshoba County in 1967. Librarian Inez Allen and Library Assistant Malcolm Isaac are shown here with several of their students.



This Copiah County bookmobile was brand new in 1969. It had carpet, air-conditioning, and books.





Back in 1978, these first graders at Long Creek Elementary School loved the bookmobile. Mid Mississippi Regional Library System called it their "Library on Wheels".




This converted bookmobile was on loan from the Mississippi Library Commission to Waveland, Mississippi in 1969. It served as their first library.


This snazzy bookmobile from Warren County is a converted mobile home: a Travco mobile home body on a Dodge M-375 chassis and a bookmobile-adapted interior. It held 3,000 books, in addition to several hundred records, tapes, and magazines.

When she retired in 1978 after 25 years of bookmobile service, librarian Pamela Vaughn had this to say, "Giving pleasure to older people who can no longer do all the things they once did, has made their life and mine richer... To go on any road (in the Lincoln-Lawrence-Franklin County area and know that because of the bookmobile service I now have lasting friendships along the way which have enriched my life and hopefully theirs means everything to me."


Need more bookmobile fun? ALA has provided these nifty do-it-yourself bookmobiles. Enjoy!


http://www.ala.org/offices/olos/nbdhome
Mississippi Library News, March 1967
Mississippi Library News, March 1969
Mississippi Library News, September 1969
Mississippi Library News, June 1973
Mississippi Library News, June 1978
Mississippi Library News, December 1978

Friday, April 11, 2014

Book of the Day: The Drunken Botanist

The Book of the Day, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart, happens to be one of our new books (and graces our New Books display)! If the whimsical cover and title doesn't grab your attention, we're sure the contents will. This book contains little to well-known facts about various alcoholic drinks and the many syrups, infusions, garnishes, etc., that go in them. And if that wasn't enough, they include drink recipes!
Neat facts in this books include....
Lorikeet
  • Drunken Lorikeets! - Eucalyptus nectar is their normal food source, but these Australian parrots become intoxicated when they consume it after it has been fermented on the tree. This causes them to be unable to fly, stumble, and become vulnerable to predators. Luckily, "bird rescue organizations routinely take in drunken lorikeets and help them sober up" (Stewart 246).
  • Waspy figs? - While figs can be distilled or infused, for example, in vodka, it's their waspy origins that stuck out to us. According to this book, around 11,000 BC figs had to "be pollinated by a wasp in order to set seed and reproduce, but the wasp lays her eggs inside that fruitlike structure and often dies inside" (270). So what happened when you picked it and opened it up? You'd find bits of wasp corpses. Today's figs have longer flowers that doesn't require the wasp to go inside the actual fruit. Some figs today don't even need to be pollinated at all.
  • Not the snails! - The book describes an "interesting" recipe following a much more normal one from the year 1737. The recipe from that era "called for boiling snails with milk, brandy, figs, and spices" (271) and was offered "to people with consumption" (271). Drink up!
This book is sure to delight if you love nuggets of information mixed with your cocktails. So come on by and check it out!

Stewart, Amy. The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World's Great Drinks. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; Chapel Hill, NC 2013. Print
Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swainson%27s_Lorikeet.jpg

Friday, April 4, 2014

What would you do for a drink right now?

It's Friday and, as the old adage goes, "It's 5 o'clock somewhere!" I'm not knocking back libations at the library right now, but I believe the fellow mentioned in the article would be. While the event took place in Bowling Green, Ohio, I found the article on the front page of the March 11, 1909 issue of the Simpson County News of Mendenhall, MS.

The article reads as follows: "Claiming that her aged husband, suffering from a deep-seated thirst in a dry county, had traded her for a keg of beer that some more fortunate neighbor had succeeded in smuggling over the line, Mrs. Goddell, aged 65, of Bowling Green, O., was taken in care by the Wood county trustees. She was found living with her daughter, the latter's husband and six children, after running away from the man whom she claims bought her. The family was living in the most abject destitution."


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