MyFox Memphis does a nice job chronicling the story up to this point:

This time next week, time should be running right on schedule : )

http://oxfordeagle.com/2010/03/fire-rips-through-old-gin/

and hat tip to jpa514 for posting this vid on youtube:

.. Tyrone + “The Roof is on Fire” = Nostradamus..

I’m not even the kind who has earned this: a postmortum tribute, or Airships-induced autodidacticism. But I, too, am from Mississippi, lived in Oxford, and wasn’t always literary, if I dare boast of that now. I didn’t read Geronimo Rex until after I had a bachelor’s degree in English, and even then I didn’t know that it would be ok to say aloud that I favored any Mississippi author over Faulkner. But I did, and his name was Barry Hannah. I liked his sentences more, and the fact that not all of them were so. I wanted to be his student, despite his distaste for prying and investigating to get a story, something that goes against any journalist’s training.

I never sat in his class and my single interaction with him hinged on the exchange of a hello and nice to meet you at Thacker Mountain Radio last fall. It was this, what lies in Oxford that taught me how to love Mississippi, and I was always recalling a line from a book I read early in college that said sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. That what happens here, in a town where Barry Hannah walked, is that you’re suddenly sitting in an independent bookstore ventilated by open windows and readings by and among authors, a couple of blocks away from Faulkner’s headstone, a couple of seats away from the recipient of the National Book Award, a Pulitzer finalist. Giants are all around you and no one wants to leave.

Tomorrow Thacker Mountain will honor Hannah, whose work will be featured this week at the Conference of the Book. I hope the words they read are manic, metaphoric, dark and drunk. From Yonder Stands Your Orphan, “my word, it stirs the memory.”

thanks to Dr. Moreton for grabbing these…