Stranded in Canton (Level First)

Lady Russell, semi-famed semi-transvestite of late 20th-century (countercultural) Memphis and New Orleans, one evening, punchy on quaaludes, coined a phrase--"Stranded in Canton." A sort of self-conscious touchstone for the marginal, it became the title of William Eggleston's sole video piece, filmed in the Delta in 1973 and '74; Stranded in Canton has been beautifully edited (after years of wrangling with Egg and his "predilictions") by our friend Robert Gordon.

The meaning of the phrase/title (its mystical interior narrative?) is, for me, obvious and nourishing, in the manner of a found poem that, upon review, seems to be of your own hand. To live in Memphis is to be a citizen of a colonial outpost, across a wide Sargasso Sea, in the heart of darkness, etc. It is gauzy, hot, bourbon-ed, lazily wild, tortured and slow, jolie laide. It is, all at once, the burning, crazed sinking vessel and the settled, shimmering shipwreck. This over-verbose swill I'm casting out cannot properly describe what it is to be "Stranded in Canton." So here begins another of my cracked theoretical series of crystalizing image, song, and speechification---