October 2, 2014 · 7:07 AM

“It’s not the place that it maybe was once.”

(Photo via Colonel Reb Foundation/Saveolemiss.com)

Ole Miss:  making the effort to escape the unsavory part of its past, but holding its breath over what signs or flags might show up on GameDay this Saturday.

Faulkner smiles wryly.

42 Comments

Filed under SEC Football

42 responses to ““It’s not the place that it maybe was once.””

  1. OrlandoDawg
    October 2, 2014 at 8:09 AM

    Is that arch where the visiting team comes in? I don’t recall Ole Miss football ever being the champion of anything.

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  2. Spike
    October 2, 2014 at 8:17 AM

    The Colonel needs a drink in his hand..

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    • uglydawg
      October 2, 2014 at 8:49 AM

      They’ve got Count Faulkner, but we have Grizzard.

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      • Doggoned
        October 2, 2014 at 9:21 AM

        That’s plus-1 for them.

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        • Moe Pritchett
          October 2, 2014 at 9:48 AM

          It depends on how much bourbon one has had, Faulkner is wonderful whilst sipping bourbon slowly; Grizzard is a literary great after the fourth shot.

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          • Slaw Dawg
            October 2, 2014 at 9:57 AM

            I dunno, man, you ever try reading “Sanctuary” or “As I Lay Dying” with head swimming amounts of bourbon in your system? I almost think that’s what Mr. F intended. Matter of fact, isn’t that how he wrote them?

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            • MJ
              October 2, 2014 at 10:07 AM

              It was when he wrote the screenplay to “To Have and Have Not”. “You know how to blow. . . “

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              • Mayor
                October 2, 2014 at 10:59 AM

                None of those compare to “Shoot Low Boys, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies” or “They Tore out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat.”

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                • doiknowu
                  October 2, 2014 at 11:03 AM

                  “At the Ball Game With My Dad” remains Grizzard’s masterpiece. At least to this reader whose father experience closely mirrored Grizzard’s.

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                • uglydawg
                  October 2, 2014 at 12:13 PM

                  I’m still wonderning what “Light in August” was about. I agree with Slaw about WF’s “condition” when he was writing.

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                • Slaw Dawg
                  October 2, 2014 at 1:21 PM

                  That’s a very, very good one, alright but my favorite (at least about the Dawgs) is the one he wrote after the ’78 Kentucky game (maybe ’cause I read it fresh with the buzz of that game still in my head), especially this:

                  “There was one other hero Saturday besides the Eddie Lee Iverys, the Willie McClendons, and the Rex Robinsons. He is a fiftyish fellow from Minnesota.

                  “He worked in Wyoming for a time, and then spent years and years in Nashville. He moved to Atlanta only a few months ago, but he is one of us now.

                  ” ‘The traffic here,’ he says, ‘is murder.’

                  “Larry Munson has been broadcasting Georgia football games for thirteen years. Saturday night was his finest hour. His description of the closing moments of the Georgia-Kentucky game, said a man listening with me, ‘is Bobby Thomson’s home run against the Dodgers all over again.’

                  “It was so good, the Sunday paper reprinted Munson’s call of the winning Georgia field goal word-for-word.

                  ” ‘It’s set down, it looks good – watch it! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! Three seconds left! Rex Robinson put ‘em ahead, 17-16!’

                  “It was so good, Dorsey Hill said, ‘listening to Larry Munson was better than being there.’ ”

                  “Frame that one, Larry. There is no higher praise.”

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  3. Scorpio Jones, III
    October 2, 2014 at 8:54 AM

    If I may, Bill, “the past is never dead…especially when you just cover it up with changes in symbolism.”

    Funny how things work out. Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter (Gault) would probably see little difference in the campus reaction to their matriculation compared to that of James Meredith.

    I guess the difference is that the institutionalized bigotry in Georgia could be passed off to the state government, not held by the University.

    Not that it did not exist there, trust me.

    Based on other schools in the South who play big-time football, Bama, for instance, whose image during that time was similar, it appears winning does make most things forgivable.

    Maybe Ole Miss’s real problem is that they have been losing since before the stone age.

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    • ripjdj
      October 2, 2014 at 12:29 PM

      What SEC school gets to cast this stone first? The Board of Education in Brown v Bd of Education was Little Rock Arkansas right? Alabama/George Wallace ,The admittedly racist President Woodrow Wilson was from Georgia right…even though history seems to have forgiven him because he was President of Yale. Let it go ,it s history, Ole Miss sucked b/c it is a small state with 3 D-1 schools in it that just spreads the talent too thin.

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  4. sectionzalum
    October 2, 2014 at 9:01 AM

    i wonder why the reporter described the dipshits that left a noose and old GA flag on a statue of Meredith as teenagers instead of the more accurate description, 3 teenage Ole Miss frat boys.

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  5. jim cope
    October 2, 2014 at 9:18 AM

    … and you’re saying what about living in the past ?

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  6. Paul
    October 2, 2014 at 9:48 AM

    /threadjack

    While reading I reflected a bit on my preference of the Atlanta Braves mascot vs an alternative. Definitely softened my stance a bit.

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    • aristoggle
      October 2, 2014 at 10:41 AM

      I miss Chief Noc-A-Homa …

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      • Normaltown Mike
        October 2, 2014 at 10:56 AM

        I have his autograph somewhere. Was fortunate enough to meet him about 30 years ago when they had all the teams in our little league out on the field for The National Anthem. I got mustard on my jersey, but it was a Phillies jersey so I think that’s a good thing.

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  7. Smitty
    October 2, 2014 at 9:51 AM

    I will be glad to see Ole Miss get knocked back down to earth. That lofty ranking is based on beating no one. The rest of the season will not be too kind to them.

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  8. Dog in Fla
    October 2, 2014 at 10:17 AM

    “It’s not the place that it maybe was once.” Because it’s been remodeled (poorly).

    The winning entry in the 15th annual Faux Faulkner parody contest, “As I Lay Kvetching,” David Sheffield’s answer to the literary question: What if William Faulkner had written a script for the Three Stooges? Nick plays the role of Moe, Hugh plays the role of Curly and Bo plays the role of Larry in a Crooked Letter State production of

    “As I Lay Kvetching,” by William Faulkner — Stooges Episode .1632; Revisions by Mort Freberg, Abe Shineman, Paul DeMarco,

    Curtis Ney; Eighth Draft, August 12, 1941.

    By David Sheffield
    FADE IN:
    INTERIOR: THE COMPSON HOUSE — DAY
    She (the old woman, Mrs. Compson) had spent the better part of the morning waiting for them (the workmen) to arrive, yet they had not come; and when at length they drew the wagon into the yard and tied the mules beneath the scattershot shade of the water oak and climbed down amid the dust and moiling dogs to survey the house, she perceived to her dismay that they were stooges: two of whom were brothers (Moe and Curly Howard) and a third (Larry Fine) who claimed no part of their lineage but who was nonetheless of their ilk; come to wait, slack-jawed and splayfooted, before the great stair which led to the room where she (the old woman, Mrs. Compson) had retired; come with paints and pots of glue and damask wallpaper to cover them (the walls) afresh, while she (the old woman, Mrs. Compson) could only pray that they (the stooges) could refurbish and thereby sanctify it (the foyer) which now suspired with the age-old effluvia of honor and sacrifice and obduracy, still redolent with the wretched sweet scent of inviolability which they (her father and her father’s brothers, whose boots these stooges were unworthy to suck even so much as the laces of) had impressed into the very grain of the cypress balustrade upon which he, Moe, the eldest, now knocks — not obeisantly, not malevolently either, but indolently. Hearing no response, they break into something resembling song:
    MOE: Helloooo…
    LARRY: Helloooo ….
    CURLY: Hellooooo …
    ALL THREE: Hello!
    CURLY: Nobody’s home. Let’s break for lunch. Nyuh, nuyk, nyuk.
    MOE: Ix-nay! Put that away, numbskull!
    Then Moe, aiming his extended fore and middle fingers, thrusting them into Curly’s eye sockets, heedless of the pain or even the surcease of sight this might inflict.
    LARRY: Hey! He didn’t do nothin’!
    MOE: Oh, yeah? Sez who? (This is not for you to judge or even acknowledge, this grievance between Curly and me, but is an old blood enmity which only we Howards can comprehend, while you, being a Fine, can’t begin to plumb the depths of it. That is it. We are Howards and you are only a Fine, and being a Fine, you are not fit to regard us with anything more than sullen trepidation.) Now get going, lame brain. We got work to do.
    CURLY: La dee, la dah …
    At last it is Curly who picks up the plank, rough hewn and smelling of sweet gum, and — feeling the weight and heft and fiber of it — swings it innocently (bending to retrieve the tool, the ball-peen hammer dropped casually on Larry’s toe) and feeling the awful force of the blow as it (the plank) catches Moe upside his head and hearing the dreadful thunk of wood against bone and sinew, a sound the like of which he has not heard since his uncle (Irving) took them (Curly and Moe) to the park where he (the uncle, Irving) slapped with the blade of an oar the rotting rind of an overripe musk melon.
    MOE: Spread out!
    With his pliers Moe grasps his brother’s nose, twisting his nostrils inside out.
    CURLY: Woob, woob, woob, woob, woob.
    FADE OUT

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    • Tlkdawg
      October 2, 2014 at 11:37 AM

      Well done!

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      • uglydawg
        October 2, 2014 at 12:19 PM

        I should have said, “We have DIF”. That is priceless, DIF.

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      • Dog in Fla
        October 2, 2014 at 1:22 PM

        Thanks Tlk and ugly! I’d couldn’t have done it without cut and pasting only a few of the Faux Faulkner writers out there:

        “The Best of Bad Faulkner: Choice Entries from the Faux Faulkner Contest”

        “A Wal-Mart For Jefferson” by Unknown

        “First was the nameless plot of land: doomed to be encompassed in the apotheosis of the white man’s trade; transmogrified by the hands of man from its moiling earthface, gully-drawn plow-turned ammoniac mule-ambulated; its immortal destiny to be parking-lotted and Wal-Marted; where the once indomitable trees fell to the ax and the horny-handed (and nameless now too) sons of the earth: the myriad and mired and miscegenated and more—mixed up—who thought that by having they could own when owning wasn’t possessing…Overnight and timeless the big store rose; they all shopped there; some of their sons and daughters even worked there (though one said, this is a Ratliff again, he “could never actively flush one when he was hunting for one”) myriad in the aisles, each item in its ordered place, where now nothing smelled where long ago once the aspirant shopper inhaled the earthy kerosene and cheese smells and man-odors of the general store. Now no more; gone, doomed, damned—Wal-Mart.”

        and/or

        “Appendix: The Sound and the Furry”
        Michael Edens (2003 Faux Faulkner Winner)

        “GOLDILOCKS. Slim blond avatar of unreasoning womankind: who loved not the porridge itself, nor even the act of receiving it from whatever unknown animal might have been responsible for its preparation (and that was her third mistake: the first being forcible or at the very least unlawful entry into the house, the second being her disturbanceof the food; for what might have seemed her third mistake—falling asleep in the bed of the youngest of the household—was actually not a mistake at all, being that no self-respecting bear would harm a sleeping prey, any more than he would have harmed young Ike McCaslin once he had relieved himself of the compass and the gun, and tracked Old Ben without malice or even curiosity through the as yet
        undespoiled square of ground which old Ikkemotubbe had, knowing it was not his to grant, nonetheless ceded to whatever Great White Father had chosen to accept it, knowing it was not his to take): even so, that
        was a different bear and another novel, and I can no longer remember
        the subject of my sentence.”

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  9. jabo052
    October 2, 2014 at 11:21 AM

    Are they still doing the black bear rebel thing? Surprised the FCC hasn’t threatened to fine any announcer who says their name on air…like the Redskins. Am I allowed to say that word in this fine establishment, Senator?

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  10. NoAxeToGrind
    October 2, 2014 at 3:09 PM

    Hell, we know what it’s all about…. Money, money, money. Anything else is pure BS.

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