1.

I’ve just been road-tripping and hiking for a week around parts of the South I somehow missed as a kid growing up…in the freaking South. I was struck by the shards of interesting (inter-sting) language I came across. There was the odd sign that read “Paches” instead of “Peaches,” and the randomly hyphenated “To-day” along winding country roads, but also the above wonderfully descriptive poster  from Yee-Haw Industries in Knoxville, TN (and also online here). They have great stuff, and their shop is 90% letterpress studio with only a storefront sliver of retail space.

2. The Knoxville Museum of Art had a fabulous exhibition called Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South by Baldwin Lee, Walker Evans, and Eudora Welty. Great stuff. Some photos from the now-closed exhibition are here. I didn’t know Welty was also a photographer, but I discovered in her photos a wonderful sense of composition, a writerly eye, if you will, creating character and mood and narrative in one shot. The dean of the library I work in uses the phrase One Stop Shopping. I like that for the feeling of completeness I get from her photos.

Here’s one that I loved:

3. Have you ever been to Gatlinburg, TN? What a redneck Disney World. Some t-shirts from a storefront in Gatlinburg:

READ MORE >