Road Trip 2026 #1

This will be a series ... I am headed for a week in New England, but since I am retired, I don't have time pressures. I'll be driving as I usually do, but I decided it was time to see the sights.

Last year I noticed something about my route ... I normally take I-10/I-12 to Slidell (LA) and pick up I-59 which goes all the way to Chattanooga - part of it concurrent with I-20, part concurrent with I-24. I then pick up I-75 to I-40 through Knoxville and on to I-81 which goes along the "back spine" of Virginia through West Virginia and Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Last year I went all the way to Scranton to pick up I-84 to traipse into Connecticut. What I noticed was that even with that variety of Interstate routes, and numbers, I seemed to be paralleling US-11.

 In its inimitable way, Wikipedia, that source of all good pop culture info, has a comprehensive article on US-11. In that article it notes: "U.S. Route 11 or U.S. Highway 11 (US 11) is a major north–south U.S. Highway extending 1,645 miles (2,647 km) across the eastern U.S. The southern terminus of the route is at US 90 in Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in eastern New Orleans, Louisiana." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_11)

 I had a dentist appointment in the morning, and my dentist is in New Orleans, so I decided to start this year's trip by heading out on US-11 from the beginning! 

Here's my intrepid traveling companion, Chickie, on the car roof with the intersection in the background. The starting point has no marble marker, nothing to indicate that it is the beginning of such a long route!

Getting there involved taking Claiborne Avenue through the City and then catching up with Chef Menteur Highway on the other side of "the high rise." The early part of the journey on US-11 goes though the swamp ... parallels some waterways, and works its way through Irish Bayou before crossing I-10. The bridge for US-11 is low, but not unreasonably low to the water. It runs across Lake Pontchartrain between the railroad tracks and "the Twin Spans" of I-10. I saw a freight train headed to New Orleans as I headed towards Slidell. {No photos, I was driving!}

 The route through Slidell goes through some of the more water-focused neighborhoods before becoming a major street headed through the city. Eventually, it joins for a bit with I-59 to get into Mississippi. I went back on US-11 and followed it through Mississippi to just north of Laurel. It served as a reminder of how rural so much of the country is. There were large stretches of just vegetation. I saw areas where timber harvesting had taken place -- and saw about a dozen loaded log trucks along the route. Many small communities with older abandoned gas stations and other businesses. Some nice houses, and some trailers. Some were very well kept, and others, not so much.

I was charmed by downtown Hattiesburg -- although the route signage disappeared after the business district. I thought it was a cute little city. I had heard much about Laurel (MS) and the charming houses. However, it must be that US-11 does not travel through those neighborhoods, and I was underwhelmed.

After Laurel, I got back on the Interstate, and reached Tuscaloosa for the first night's stay.

More tomorrow! 

ALA Annual 2026 - Where is Michael?

 It's been a couple years. ALA stopped doing the January event a couple years ago (and I had stopped attending before that). Last year, with retirement imminent, I did not go to Philadelphia. But this year, I am in Chicago! It has been a few years since Aaron Dobbs and I pushed the envelope of Google Calendar and the ALA-provided scheduling app. [Google Calendar has (or had) a maximum of 42 events a day!]

 Here's what my Chicago schedule looks like -- always subject to change:

 I am having issues in getting this to show as an agenda ... so you may have to click on the icon in the upper right to see that format.

Books Read 2025

This list is, once again, really, really late! I have sort of abandoned this blog. And, for whatever reasons, I have not been reading books -- lots of reading, but mostly email, newspapers, social media. Here's the 2025 list:  

Lonely Planet: Panama by Rosie Bell, Ryan ver Berkmoes, Alex Egerton, Jen Ruiz, Jesse Scott

The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU by Robert Mann [Author signed/LLA 2025]

You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the biography of a song by Robert Mann [Author signed/LLA 2025]

America Redux: Visual stories from our dymanic history by Ariel Agerg-Rigger [LRC selection 2025]

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck [in the Library of America edition]

A Bitter Wind A Billy Boyle World War II Mystery by James R. Benn ARC

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford [Work topic]

Killer Underwear Invasion: How to spot fake news, disinformation [,] + conspiracy theories by Elise Gravel [LYRC 2023 noninee]

Note that prior year reading lists are linked from this page:

https://michaelgolrick.blogspot.com/p/previously-read.html

Book Review: The Old Man and The Sea

 

 

I can't tell you how many times I have handed this book (with the earlier cover) to library patrons over the years. Yet, I had never read it! Not sure why.

It is a simple story covering less than a week, and focusing on a three-day battle between an old fisherman and a fish (shark). It includes a story of the interactions between the fisherman and a young man who spends time with him.

I am still parsing the meaning of the metaphor/analogy presented. I will need to think some more. 

Book Review: You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis & the biography of a song

One of the speakers at the Louisiana Library Association (LLA) Conference this year was Robert (Bob) Mann. He is a a professor emeritus of mass communication at Louisiana State University. He held the Manship Endowed Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU for 18 years. He is the author of ten books, including critically acclaimed political histories of the U.S. civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, American wartime dissent, Ronald Reagan, and the 1964 presidential election. {source: https://www.robertmannbooks.com/about-robert-mann} He worked as a journalist and then for several prominent Louisiana political figures.

This book is a combination of history of the song and its popularity, biography of Jimmie Davis, and commentary both on aspects of Louisiana politics and the societal issues from the 1920s to the present. It is exceedingly well written.

So many of us have sung or heard this song sung with no understanding of the origin story. I did not know very much about the two-time governor Jimmie Davis before I read this book. As I noted above, one of the foci of the book is his complicated story.

As part of the analysis of the song, Bob Mann includes discussion of the various "covers" of the song over time. Someone who is more musically astute than I could make a great web site linking to all the different versions which have been recorded over time. I would enjoy listening to some of these while reading the stories of how they came about.

It is a well researched work with 17 pages of footnotes (technically end notes), seven pages of bibliography, and an index. Anyone doing work on Jimmie Davis or the role of this song in the American pantheon would find this a seminal work. I am very glad that I read it!

P.S. I commend reading this article about his departure from LSU. It has some interesting, pointed perspectives including on the brain drain from the state: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/why-robert-mann-quit-lsu.html