Jennie Lightweis-Goff at The Point:
College towns are a little like Vegas. They’re fallen capitals, scourged by development and game-day apartments. The boomer professors got there and built the Museum of the American Rebel; soon after, they withered into Cadaver Bohemias. The Godfather, the department chair who hired me in 2016, was nonetheless confident that I’d assimilate to the sprawling “family” he had helped build there. “Faculty regard Oxford as a suburb of New Orleans,” he told me, referring to the city where I’d lived for more than a decade. “So it won’t be too much of a change.” It was an amiable conversation, in which he assured me he’d hired his first choices for the two posts they’d needed: me as an instructor, and the Superstar writer-in-residence, a bestselling novelist and infamous Twitter provocateur.
On the first day of my visit, I heard someone call Oxford “the Little Easy”; no one has said it to me since. To be fair, I’ve never heard its referent—the Big Easy—used in conversation down South in New Orleans, and I don’t think anyone calls Oxford “the Velvet Ditch,” its alleged nickname, without well-earned embarrassment.
more here.
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