There’s no greater horror than the grandmother’s realization that her son and his family are being marched away to their deaths — and that she’s next — in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. O’Connor’s gift for probing and prodding themes of grace and redemption in Roman Catholicism, without seeming to do so, made her not just one of the great Southern American short story writers but one of the great American writers.
Fifty years ago, at the height of her literary influence, O’Connor came to Lafayette to speak at USL (now UL Lafayette) about her faith and its influence on her art. Recently a recording of that speech, “The Catholic Writer in the Protestant South,” was discovered in an archive at UL and digitized by the Center for Louisiana Studies (hear a clip below), and on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 9-10, academics and admirers of O’Connor’s work will gather at UL to celebrate her work and to hear the rare recording.
The event kicks off Friday evening with an opening reception at the Alumni Center. Then, from 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Saturday a symposium featuring several O’Connor scholars will be held, followed by a themed dinner and movie later that evening. The symposium is $75 and there are additional charges for the other events. The whole shebang is sponsored by Ragin’ Cajun Catholics, Deep South Magazine, the UL English department and Friends of the Humanities. To find our more, log on to OurLadyOfWisdom.org.
In rendering his ruling, District Judge John Trahan all but called the real estate developer a liar for inconsistencies in his accounts of what prompted him to punch a school teacher unconscious.
Frank’s Casing Crew, now doing business as Frank’s International, will make its final appearance on ABiz’s list of the Top 50 Privately Held Companies in Acadiana this year, and once again it will likely be at the top with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The 75-year-old company specializing in tubular fabrication and installation services to the oil and gas industry plans to offer shares of its stock to the public for the first time.
The defeat, or rather highjacking of House Bill 420 in the final days of this year's Legislative Session, say Reps. Vincent Pierre and Terry Landry, is the result of the propaganda spread by one unidentified local media outlet and an unnamed former state Representative, but nothing to do with the original legislation's lack of checks, balances or details.
City-Parish Council Chairman Brandon Shelvin heaped steady doses of condescending ire on a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana executive while failing to reveal his financial ties to a BC/BS rival.
Abbeville native David Primeaux was a popular professor until his death late last year, and while he was successful at camouflaging a dark past, he couldn’t outlive it.
Tehmi Chassion’s failure to recuse himself in the school board’s selection of a group health benefits provider raises ‘serious questions’ on whether he violated state ethics law.
He’s a singer. A songwriter. A piano man. A family man. He’s even got his own Wikipedia entry. He’s David Egan. And he knows ancient secrets about the monolithic stones of Stonehenge that he’s not willing to share.
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