Angel of mercy

I went down to Jackson with my parents to see the new Mississippi Museum of Art's debut show: Between God and Man: Angels in Italian Art. It was absolutely fantastic in a way that the somewhat overblown previous Jack Kyle extravaganzas never were. My favorite painting was by the relatively obscure Francesco Maffei. Entitled L'incatamento di Satana, its ambiguously almost featureless figures predate/prefigure Impressionism by 200 years. Much like Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle prefigures Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore or Tristram Shandy prefigures modernist and post-modernist metafictional authors like Flann O'Brien and Robert Antoni.








3 of Sterne's most Shandean pages

The other three shows at MMA were nice as well: String and Things (capitalizing on the Gee's Bend resurgence for quiltiing), Icons (especially the Georgia O'Keefe spooky oak "self-portrait") and the Mississippi Story (especially the Eudora Welty photos and the multimedia piece "Eudora" by a West Point native whose name escapes me).

We had a few nice meals in Jackson: old school lunch (large limeade, toasted pimento cheese sandwich, basket o' fries) Tuesday at Brent's Drugs Soda Fountain, dinner (ginger marinated maple leaf duck breast) Tuesday at Schimmel's, and lunch Wednesday at Walker's Drive-In, highlighted by a seat on the patio, their delicious unsweet tea, and an order of portobello fries with spicy comeback sauce.