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152 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c09 Nine Mexico When I left Bloomington, I took a job at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and settled into academia. Although I do not mean to slight the many years I spent there, I do not intend to drone on about them. LSU and Baton Rouge turned out to be a bit of the Old South where I found the material for stories about white-coated black men who served coffee to university administrators or took your tray to your table at the local cafeteria and of new neighbors who took us to Natchez for the Pilgrimage, which likened the Old South to divinity and visiting its relics to a religious journey, and of other black men who would come only to your back door or who mowed your lawn for years and then simply disappeared. But though older parts of Baton Rouge did drip a certain graciousness, with canopies of thick, shady trees, by and large the town seemed to be transitioning from an oldtime provincialism to a newfound blandness, neither terribly attractive; and LSU seemed to be moving a bit painfully from the stodgy to the modern and trying to do it on the cheap. It is not surprising, then, that my stories fix on the elements of life that seemed unusual—even odd—and culturally unique, on eccentric personalities or strange encounters and incongruous signs in the very landscape. The stories transmit a taste of bizarreries reassuring us that all was not the football and malls and fast food joints that did seem to loom large in our consciousness. That is, the stories pose a vision in opposition to what I possibly perceived, perhaps unfairly and inaccurately, as the blandness of everyday reality. In these stories: On the larger stage strode Governor Edwin Edwards, who would become nationally famous for declaring that he couldn’t lose an election unless he was found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. In my own stories about him, he shimmers with rhinestones embedded all over his Mexico 153 pantsuit or gives an electoral victory party with Cajun, blues, and countrywestern bands to cannily cover the state’s voting blocs. In a friend’s story Edwin makes his bodyguard hold his wallet because it would, in his own pocket, spoil his profile. In general accounts he sends his minions to the LSU campus to pick up willing coeds for amorous trysts. On the more local story stage, a man called Colonel Emerson devotes his property to weekly occult activities like pyramid power and telepathy. At LSU one colleague displays noted extravagances: he loves first-class air travel, buys $200-dollar bottles of champagne, and trades in his cars when minor things misfunction. Another colleague obsessively collects holy cards, is devoted to his plastic dipping bird, and hates Stalin sufficiently to hang the dictator’s picture upside-down. Yet another raves about the dean as a “fat pimp” while others forge the department chair’s initials to play pranks with fake memos. The chair himself utilizes an office chair that automatically puts faculty visitors at a lower level and stories from other times tell of departed professors who raved in the hallways or how the chair’s innate stinginess drove a famous poet professor away. In stories about the Louisiana Folklore Society, one noted member engages in tirades against the Swiss, picks up lounge lizards to bring to official parties, and offers to take a distinguished visiting folklorist out to the swamps for nude photo sessions. Another has countless stories of his Creole ancestors while the ability to chatter a few phrases in French is a mark of the right stuff for this mostly southern Louisiana crowd—rather like wearing a Stetson and boots at Texas Folklore Society gatherings. The first state folklorist pokes around cemeteries , disappoints informants who want their traffic tickets “fixed” because he is a state official, and coinvents the “Creole meter,” which detects levels of Louisiana-ness. As we visit local plantation houses—a significant local pastime —we discover faded chatelaines and movie sets where governors have bit parts, and we tell stories about this too. Obviously stories do not form around the most ordinary or the most routine levels of existence but around things that seem unusual, if not actually extraordinary (though what is unusual to a teller may not always seem so to others). The very nature of stories suggests that they contrast with the ordinary...

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