| From | Subject |
| ANDREI CODRESCU | FROM THE EC CHAIR |
| MELISSA SARAT | Raucous painted stories thick with baroque imagery and intense color |
| ROBERT GOLD | a series of classical government interventions and fuckups. ask the people who used to live in Alton, IL. |
| SUSAN GRIFFIN | Diane Wilson, a fourth generation shrimpboater who lives in Seadrift Texas on the Gulf of Mexico |
| ANDREA MAYO | My friends Evan and Dave have been living on the Mississippi for a few years now on a boat that they built themselves. |
| BARRY BRENT | Here I can imagine things becoming suitably dark, river red in tooth and claw, that sort of thing. |
| AUDREY ELIZABETH EMMETT | 5 beautiful women dressed in yellow dancing for the river goddess Oshun |
| ALICE SHAW | Have you seen the book Deaf Maggie Lee Sayer? |
| JASON SANFORD | I go through the tunnels and drainages of the Twin Cities. You get plenty of interesting sights exploring the sewers that empty into the Mississippi |
| MIKE STANDAERT | So, as you see, this River was nearly my last resting place, and I hold it near and dear. I've since wondered how far my body would have gotten since I was downriver from Locked and Damned No. 15. |
| ACHAEA | When all else fails, claim the Mississippi River in the name of Espana. |
| CHARLES TRAVIS | In other words as Joyce incorporated the Liffey landscape as both a somatography and a mapping of a postnational Irish organic identity, perhaps a similar angle on the Mississippi Mud Mother could incorporate approaches to alternate mappings of American history and identity. |
| JANET MASON | My mother's father, who left when she was seven, was from Biloxi. He was a terror to his family, better off gone, a merchant marine swept away by water. |
| EVAN MATHER | Back in 2000, my friend Jerry Schumm paddled the whole river from Minnesota to the Gulf. |
| MOLLY SNYDER | after waiting many years to become a mother, my son was born aug. 7 in guatemala city. we named him kai river. "kai" from the gary snyder poem "the bath" and "river" because we have lived in wisconsin our entire lives and are deeply moved by the milwaukee and mississippi rivers. |
| REGINA | a bunch of kids hold a drum circle on the river every Thursday |
| CARY N. MACK | When you do your Mississippi thing you should take a look at the "culture" of the Hansen's Disease facility at Carville. |
| CHARLES CANNON | It's this dark mythical force, a primal thing rearing its head. I think my book should be added to the pile of American artworks ruminating on river sludge. |
| SUSAN | dredging up of the river gods and goddesses in artistic, ecological, social expression via an event, or series of events |
| GABRIEL GUDDING | Would you be open to filming me giving enemas to the effigies of George W. Bush and Laura Bush with Mississippi river water? |
| FRANCOIS MEURSAULT | my idea of the Missi river would be to have a bunch of different races (males) ejajulate in it and then downstream have naked women in the water. |
| KEVIN MOLONY | Sanctifying the local landscape with death. |
| EUGENE HALTON | You are the living earth, bleeding in chemicals and floating to the New Jerusalem. You are a catfish underwater, singing with Muddy Waters: "If whiskey were a river, and I were a divin' duck, I'd dive down to the bottom, an' I'd never come up." |
| CAROL BORZYSKOWSKI | Transformation
is slow but steady--from city girl to river woman |
| ANDREA GARLAND | I tossed my bottle in as far as I could and watched it wash right back up on shore at my feet. |
| CHRIS BERNAT | all bands involved have strong roots in Davenport IA |
| KEVIN McGOWIN | I decided that if I could find the Mississippi River's Pussy I could work out a deal with Fleetwhite that after he marries his Drunken Tourists, instead of a goddamn Carriage Ride in the Old Square we'd say, Hey! That there's the Mississippi River. |
| C. MAHER | I would hope and expect that you could help create something that is utterly frivolous, yet sacred in its way. The river (and ocean) was the ORIGINAL media... newsbearer... the original monitor that glowed in the light... and changed with every moment... Protean... |
| AMANDA PETRONA | I thought of having a lufa farm and planting a swamp garden on the batture of the river. That was before the river took away the bather, and the land was sold to pay my mother's gambling debts. |
| CLAUDIA COPELAND | I would express the suffering of the river itself (water, fish, plants, microorganisms...) and its yearning and hope for purification. |
| BRIAN KIMBERLING | Peter Taylor’s story, In the Miro District, features a crusty old confederate veteran hiding from murderous Klansmen in a bog and hallucinating all kinds of beasts rising from the mud of the Mississippi during the tremors of 1812. |
| TOM BRADLEY | Pour a lot of red food dye into the Mississippi, so it looks like a river of blood, and stick a sign on its bank that reads "Tigris and/or Euphrates." |
| VALERY OISTEANU | The cursed island reappears periodically on Mississippi river! Otherwise it is invisible! |
| CAPTAIN GORRILLA | Don't forget to look into some of the corruption with the Army Corps of Engineers and the lock and dam projects up and down the river. |
| DAVID SULLIVAN | We did an art installation that largely focused on the river. The main part of the installation was a 200'+ inflatable "intestine," made entirely of plastic bags taped together. |
| SUSAN MEGARGLE | My husband is an Isle of Capri casino guy, who visits the locales all up and down the river. |
| ROBERT E. McGOWAN | Noah Webster, in the introduction to one of his dictionaries, compared American English to the Mississippi. great sperm bent
|
| KATIE BOWLER | I have been working on a photoessay on the river, for which I've traveled from Pilottown, Louisiana, to Itasca Park, Minnesota, a number of times. |
| STEVEN LESSER | i moved to the spot I’m in, by the river, to fulfill my quiet dream of having a sculpture studio… a board of incestuous greedy selfserving downtown buisnessmen, using a cloak of supposed public good, used the power of the state to seize the studio offering a check for less than the place is mortgaged for and a demand to be out in 2 weeks,to allow for the construction of some awful plastic building that completely closes off access to the river for the population that actually lives here |
| CHARLES VERMONT | Greenville, Mississippi, a delta town with an illustrious literary history and a before its time progressiveness: Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Hodding Carter III… |
| EDWARD FIELD | Honey,
my bags are packed. Just get me on Amtrak north to Chicago. Luckily, you’re heading west and there’s a bridge. |
| HENRY GOULD | A couple years ago I published a very long poem called "Forth of July", in three volumes. The third vol., "July", is basically literary/imaginary/historical trip up & down the Mississippi. |
| ANNE BLONSTEIN | hymn
of the chloroplast fugue of the mitochondrion. |
| JIM S. BORCK | If I can relocate the site, there's another one: “Mississippi House Trailer Tour." To qualify for being placed on the tour, the trailer must have a Trans-Am parked in the front yard, on concrete blocks. |
| SPENCER JOHNSON | Employees are dressed and play the roles of many early characters including soldiers, officers, Indians, riverboat men, fur traders. |
| SUMMER BRENNER | THE FLOOD: Direction: All voices begin in unison in LOUD WHISPER/sotto voce. The following lines are broken by the number of voices associated with each line: |
| MICHAEL KUCZYNSKI | students construct pieces using flotsam and jetsam from the river itself and photograph these pieces (some of them quite beautiful) with the river as backdrop. |
| DEAN LENANE | New Orleans is the great pudendal aperture leading into the great vagina of the Mississippi river. |
| TERRY JACOBUS | if
you're a decent young poet and think you're connected to god you're supposed to know stuff like that |
| JOHN PAUL | I live nowhere near the Mississippi. |
| BILL KRANZ | I was a part of Artica 2002 and would like to be a part of the film with The Celestial Theatre. |
| CLARITY CLARITY | I believe that the Mississippi river used to be much much shorter when it was located in Greece, but then most rivers lose alot to the big water in passing.... |
| BOB PARKER | There's a guy I used to know a long time ago that put together these really nice, grassroots style festivals along the river. I think they were called the Great River Revival. His name is Larry Long. I haven't seen much of him lately. He was a real Woody Guthrie type of guy back in the '70s. I'm sure he's still a political troubador somewhere. Our girlfriends were room mates then; I played mandolin and worked in a hippie beer bar/vegetarian cafe. I reckon I'll go Google him. |
| JOHN SINCLAIR | I'd enjoy creating a piece with verse and blues music for the Mississippi River film. |
| PHILLIP M. COBB | You can hire us to show you the river from our prospective. 25' Mako with a Tuna Tower great for camera work and a 17' skiff for cruising the bayous. |
| ALICE HENDERSON | Alice Henderson pastels the River |
| DAVID | I used to rent a little house down in Lower Algiers back then and we actually swam in the river quite a bit on hot days (dumb idea) until my best friend and his cousin drowned one afternoon while I was tending the Food Coop. |
| MATTHEW NESBIT | I just pulled into Budapest and need to find cheap lodgings near the river. |
| YOUSSEF ALAOUI | Siddhartha Gautama met the riverman first, and importantly so; because, as he left the life he knew, the river was the most important lesson of his voyage. |
| WILLIE SMITH | I would suggest rounding up a dozen male virgins over the age of eighteen (well, perhaps they could be each "like a virgin"), issuing them gold lame jockstraps and handing each an uncooked hotdog skewered on the end of a Saab or Citroen antenna. Their instructions would be to flog hebephrenically the mud of a pre-selected bank of the MS, while chanting in falsetto unison: "Sling the mud! Bring the flood! Put the jerk to work!" |
| LIBBY REUTER | Have you seen the water intakes on the Miss river just South of the confluence of the Miss and Mo? Like German castle turrets. I'd love to boat out there and spend the night. Bed and breakfast on the River anyone? |
| SH4LOM | An Image from Shalom's Evolving Visions of the River |
| JEAN
FREIDL (THE BEAST & PUPPET THEATRE) |
Our MayDay festival is an annual event which features at water parade/ tree of life ceremony on Powderhorn Lake and that always takes place the first Sunday in May. |
| DOUG GRAY | BTW, did you know Minnesota's Senator-elect, Norm Coleman, had an idea to run a funicular skylift between a proposed McDonald's on the St. Paul bluffs and Harriet Island? |
| RAMBART | I loved it when the boat stopped at certain ports, and we'd party all night in some bar, and then get one hour of sleep and start serving customers scrambled eggs by 7 pm. |
| BEN SANDMEL | In my young/wild early 20s I spent about a year-and-a-half working as a deckhand on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and various tributaries such as the Kanawha River in West Virginia. I worked on floating hotels such as the Delta Queen and Mississippi Queen, as well as towboats pushing gasoline barges. Staying on board for stretches as long as 50 days straight, I tied up boats and shoveled shit at all points between New Orleans, St Paul and Pittsburgh, and encountered several asylums full of extreme people in the process. |
| JD HOLLO | We see noted Road (now River) Scholar AC being rowed out to small submarine waiting offshore (in St Paul, maybe?), then go down the hatch, submerge ... |
| VENUS ENVY | Venus Envy is an amazing program which depends on the volunteer efforts and financial support of artists and non-artists from all backgrounds. Through art, performance, spectacle, food and drink; we have attracted over 4000 people to the event in one night. |
| JEFF CROOK | I could help spread the word here in Memphis, where I live. |
| SALLY STEVENS | The primary physical aspects of the BLUES HIGHWAY are the MS River and Highway 61, beginning @ Charity Hospital & running along the river from Nola theought the Delta, Memphis and on to Chicago... |
| MARIA FINN | Are you familiar with the novel, "Christopher Unborn" by Carlos Fuentes? He has a section where Borges visits the Mississippi River and wants to drink a glass of water from it in tribute to Mark Twain. Since he's blind, and Argentinian, they gave him a glass of Pepsi instead figuring he'd never know the difference. |
| JERRY ROSEN | When the New Yorker was founded in the Twenties their motto was "Not for the little old lady in Dubuque." Yet the magazine was founded by midwesterners and in its prudish language etc that's exactly who it was for. The irony is that I went out of my way about 10 years ago to visit Dubuque Iowa (on the Mississippi) and it's ten times as soulful as the New Yorker- a still-born St. Louis. |
| IVY TWINES | My great aunt Therese (who lives in town but grew up in Plaucheville) has some great stories about the flood--babies being born on haystacks, weird shit like that. |
| DAVE EASLEY | I have a song called "The Eerie Road" that Dennis Formento referred to as a "Blues March". If you're interested in hearing it sung by Coco Robicheaux I'll send you a CD. |
| DAVID ROZELLE | Florence Bird, a sculptress , has been seduced mightily by the Big Brown One. Ms. Bird, working in her drafty barn studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin, has gone so far as to sculpt mock-ups of perhaps two dozen figures (now clay figurines) of historical and prehistorically personages attached to the lore of the river. |
| GENE TANTA | In New Orleans, I remember seeing cemetery cockroaches thriving by moonlight cutting our paths portentously as any black-cat. |
| BILL DAVIS | My Mom forwarded your message about the documentary on the river. My band, Dash Rip Rock, has a few songs about the mighty muddy: "Fly to the Gulf" off the CD Pay Dirt, "Mud Island" off the CD Ace of Clubs, and a couple more. |
| HENRY TURNER | I wasn't aware that you make films, but if you have something you'd like to show in L.A. at a great venue, please let me know. |
| SARAH DANFORTH | i have been dreaming about boats moving through sludgy water in some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland kinda thing |
| NITA TURNAGE | Artica 2002 was an unauthorized art festival that took place in an abandoned and neglected industrial section of St. Louis just north of the Gateway Arch and along the banks of the Mississippi. This area was the site of the St. Louis Mound Group, which at one time held the third largest pyramidal structure in the world until it was torn down for "progress". It was also the site of slave trade and the underground railroad. |
| BILLY X. CURMANO | I'm the artist that swam from the source of the river to the Gulf of Mexico. We should probably talk. |
| JOEL LIPMAN | I've long held in mind doing a book on rope swings that hang from trees & bridges over swimming holes and for years would seek them out, try them out and take a few snapshots. |
| JULIA O’NEAL | I heard years ago that the navy was leaving the port of New Orleans because it was filling up with silt and there was no way to stop it. The series of dams that the WPA/Corps of Engineers built during the depression apparently is falling apart and can't be fixed. (I don't know if this is true or not.) |
| BUDDY HARRIS | I’m not sure I fully understand what you’re looking for, but I’ve always envisioned the huge fault line that runs directly through upper Mississippi, Memphis and eastward into Kentucky, finally giving way, opening a trough ofmuddy water beneath Tunica sucking its casinos and all they’ve built down nature’s vengeful hole. |
| MICHELE OWENS | I not only sandbagged for the ‘73 Flood but my family took in another family of 12 who had been flooded out of their home/farm. |
| CORRADO FILIPPONI | I am very interessted in talking to you later on when your shooting starts. Till then, have a good time. Corrado, the Swiss Kayaker |
| DAR WOLNIK | We are committed to keeping the water system publicly owned. |
| JORGE
LUIS BORGES (via Michael Alemereyda) |
The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the grandest river in the world, was the worthy stage for the deeds of that incomparable blackguard. (Alvearez de Pineda discovered this great river, though it was first explored by Hernando d Soto, conqueror of Peru, who whiled away his months in the prison of the Inca Atahualpa teaching his jailer chess. When De Soto died, the river's waters were his grave.) Ths Mississipi is a broad-chested river, a dark and infinite brother of the Parani, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of mulatto-hued water; more than four hundred milion tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. All that venerable and ancient waste has created a delta where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetual dissolution and where labyrinths of clay, dead fish, and swamp reeds push out the borders and extend the peace of their fetid empire. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water. |
| IOAN T. MORAR | De multa vreme m-a interesat un fel de copr diplomatic al riurilor. |
| MEESH | The King Biscuit Radio Show is the nations's longest running blues radio show. |
| UNIV.
OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO (via Elinor Nauen) |
Rising sea levels and subsiding land are combining to gobble up more than two acres of the Mississippi Delta every hour. |
| WALTER MURCH | The Mississippi River is unique in the world because it flows "uphill" - the mouth of the river is 27 feet higher - ie. 27 further away from the center of the earth - than the source of the river. So how does it happen? Why does water not flow into the river from the sea? |
| CHRISTINE | Iya mi ile odo....Our mother's house is the river... |
| HARIETTE SUROVELL | A film that makes you jump into the river. |
| CRAIG H. | Good luck. That is a big topic for one movie. |
| ALAN | We rowed in celebration of all the freedoms we have in the United States of America. |
| JOSH BELL | Will carry the body of a drowned boy from Minnesota all the way across the country. |
| ANONYMOUS | How to sing the blues primer |
| CHRIS SAUNDERS | Corpse Gastronomy attacked by reader |
| ROBIN DURAND | A few of my Mississippi landscapes... |
| EDDIE WOODS | Dickens Trashes the Mississippi! |
| STEVE TAYLOR | Andy Miller, Budding Visionary |
| CHRISTOPHER LOCKE | Locke Takes It Personally |
| NATHAN YOUNG | Dashing to Class Over the Mississippi |
| JAVIER AGUILAR | Urinary metaphor tied to poet's heart problems |
| KARIN LIND-McAULEY | Nostalgia Opens Floodgates of Autobiography! |
| EDWIN LYON | Mixed Among the Poets Now and Then A Pro! |
| BILLIAM | Amphicar Journey Possible |
| RIC CARTER | Script-Fountain Unleashed in Ric Carter |
| MATTHEW JORGENSEN | Matthew Offers His Camera! |
| JOHN ROCKWOOD | live recordings from toledo |
| CDUNCANSTS | River Rat Revealed by Angry Pal! |
| DAVID KENYON | David M. Kenyon on the the Mississippi prior to 1812 |
| HEATHER CORRIGAN | Heather Warns: Don't Forget Jeff Buckley! |
| ALEX HAVERFIELD | Tersely, from Trash Man! |
| LOIUS CARLSON | Professor Remembers Childhood on Skis! |
| GINA BACON | Great Adventurers |
| PETER JUNG | Cement Atrocity Brewing in Missouri |
| DANUTA BORCHARDT | Danuta Borchardt Smells Body in the River and Ties it to Anthrax Scare |
| JOHN HORVATH JR | A Poem-Fleuve that Out-St.John-Perses Whitman, by John Horvath, Jr |
| CA CONRAD | a bloated deer drifting by at breakfast entered my dreams over and over |
| Via AMY TRUSSELL | ***An
Evening of Sacred poetry, dance, and Music*** Saturday, December 6, 2002 8:00 P.M. The Voodoo Spiritual Temple 828 North Rampart 504-522-9627 $5-$8 Donation Requested Hosted by Priestess Miriam, Seer, Founder of the Temple With Oswan Chamani, & Former Bishop of Angel Angel All Nations Spiritual Church |
| ALICE GAIL BIER | Urgent Rituals Along the River |
| TOM SNEE | Minnesotta: The Mississippi Unmasked, Or Fake Street, USA |
| MIKE PHILLIPS | Geologist Mike Phillips Offers Pro-Inundationist Leads |
| JOHN GUSLOWSKI | Poetry for that 'Dark Mud' refered by John Guslowski |
| JENNA BAUER | Have you heard of Artica? |
| SHARA FASKOWITZ | Steamboats & steamboatish poem from Shara |
| DOREEN LOCICERO | River memories |
| NORM ROWE | Mr. Rowe offers wife for film project: "Maybe it's the only interview we need," offers the editor. |
