Y’ALL HUNGRY?

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This is a great book for anyone who loves American regional cuisine — Southern cuisine in particular. It focuses on the Delta region of Mississippi, one of the quirkiest places in America and one of the most interesting, culturally and historically. Its food reflects its nature — a blend of traditional Southern dishes and eccentric local oddities. The book is part travel guide, part restaurant guide — laced with recipes for many of the dishes it describes and profusely illustrated with gorgeous and evocative color photographs by Langdon Clay, depicting both the food and the places it’s served.

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After spending some time with it, I guarantee you’ll want to throw this book in the back of your car, head off to the Delta and start looking for some Delta-style tamales or fried okra or crawfish cakes. The mouth waters just thinking about it.

You can buy the book here — Eat Drink Delta.

WHAT I’M SPINNING NOW

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Discounting the unaccountable misdirection of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, this is an album of songs about love, romance, sex — mostly sex. You could think of it as Dylan’s Smiles Of A Summer Night — a roundelay of amorous interludes recounting a young man’s erotic adventures in the downtown world of New York in the 1960s.

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Before Blonde On Blonde Dylan’s love songs had been either songs of worship or songs of rueful farewell. Things get more complicated here — worship and rue get subsumed in bewilderment and awe. The album ends, as Smiles Of A Summer Night ends, with a lyrical paean — in this case to the woman Dylan would soon marry.

Sad Eyed Lady Of the Lowlands was, however, only a first-act ending — the third act would play out in excruciating pain on a later album, Blood On the Tracks. But this album captured forever the feckless romance of youth in Manhattan before Manhattan became a posthumous realm, a yuppie feedlot.