(Interestingly, in my experience even hardcore leftist anti-capitalist Millenials tend to be more ruthless about this kind of thing, starting with artistic expression and shamelessly taking whatever way will make money off it, and are generally encouraged in this by older and wiser Gen-X artists. He even expresses a fundamental Simpsons truth in its clearest terms so far: “There may be better things in life than seeing a man get hit in the groin by a football.” The bad guest stars of post-Golden Age Simpsons tend to just pop in, make some reference, and our characters say “Wow, it’s !”, but Jay has a reason to walk into Springfield and shakes up the status quo in an interesting way. I think it helps that he has his own worldview and sense of humour – his own references and experiences – and our characters respond to that in a way that feels logical for them. Obviously, it helps that The Critic was created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss, but Jay fits so snugly into Springfield that I could believe he was created just for this episode. But I think the final product is a repudiation of that idea in how not only is it one of the funniest episodes of the series, it’s a thoughtful combination of two shows. I can see where he’s coming from in terms of how this was conceived – classic cartoon crossovers were less about any artistic expression and more about corporate synergy and advertising one show on another, and Groening is your classic “never sell out!” Gen X-er that finds this kind of thing a gross violation of his values. Smith currently is serving as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and continues to live in New Orleans.This episode is the biggest example people use to say that Matt Groening isn’t necessarily right about everything Simpsons, because he famously hates this episode to the point of taking his name off it and refusing to do the commentary for it the way he has for every single episode of every other show he created. Each character must decide what it means to be good. The Everlasting spans two thousand years and follows four main characters: an early Christian child martyr, a medieval monk, a Medici princess, and a contemporary field biologist.
Eudora welty simpsons free#
Free Men tells the story of a three people being tracked down for murder–a slave, a white orphan and a Creek Indian. Her novel Free Menwas published in 2016, and her most recent novel The Everlasting was published in 2020. She says that reading the original material made her sensitive to the values of the time – “even things, like slaveholding, that look so plainly wrong from a contemporary vantage.” The novel follows three generations of families as it explores relationships, slavery, and loss.įor her dissertation, Smith read so many eighteenth century letters and diaries that the language of the period became part of the rhythm of her writing.
She describes finding a man who was buried standing up, saluting the queen, an entire shipwrecked crew buried together, and a girl whose epitaph read “Little Girl Buried in a Rum Keg.” The little girl is used in her novel The Story of Land and Sea.
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Smith found the town of Beaufort on a road trip down the coast of North Carolina where she found a cemetery full of untold stories. She was an adjunct professor at Tulane University, but the huge amount of money her first book garnered has permitted her to quit her teaching job and write full time. Smith grew up attending the public schools in Jackson, attended Mount Holyoke College, received a Ph D in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. One of the central characters in her novel is a young woman named Helen, who, like many women at that time, does not live to see her child.
The story is the result of her research as a doctoral historian on mothers in the South, published as We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South 1750-1835. The novel has the recurring theme of parent-child relationships through several generations around the time of the American Revolution along the North Carolina coast. It was sold in a bidding war among ten publishing houses that netted her almost one million dollars. Her debut novel, which began first as a short story that kept growing, is The Story of Land and Sea. She is an historian as well as a fiction writer.
Her parents were both professors at Millsaps in Jackson. Katy Simpson Smith was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1986.