Headline: A Ride Down Paradise Road

There is something in the writing of A Ride Down Paradise Road that manages to fill the pages with life in a few small pieces, manages to captures small essences of what it is like to be in Mississippi. Thompson arranges his article in segments that are occasionally demarcated with locations. He travels through Tunica, Amory, Starkville, Oxford and Clarksdale, but the geographical locations matter less than the lives that he moves through. It loosely binds it all together under sports, but I found the more binding of the piece was the truth of the piece. 

I think that one of the major things that works is the honesty of the piece. There isn’t a sense that the writer is trying to create a tourism ad for the whole state, but instead chronicling what actually exists. Yet there is something that also seems reliable in his voice. The reliability starts with the lists that begin in the Tunica section. The lists of the things of his youth. I think that he uses these lists more powerfully than at first glance. These series of short fragments create an environment that if one hasn’t seen then they can surely imagine, I think the fact that he also uses his youth to chronicle it creates an interesting effect. On one hand youth tends to have a haze of nostalgia but I think that it really works here to characterize how some people feel about Mississippi. I think these lists work so well at the beginning because of what follows behind it. The rest of the article describes what Mississippi is like especially in describing the duality of the state. “Mississippi is a hopelessly interwoven place,” the article says. I think that is what many people forget. Thompson talks about Oxford. He talks about James Vardaman and how the building named after him has been transformed to house the William Winter Institute. I think that is the thing that the article best conveys, the complexity of one place. 

I honestly don’t know what the story could have done better. Maybe it is because I am in a design mood, but I would have really liked to see it in a print magazine layout. I think that it would be interesting to see photos of the different places in Mississippi. I think that Mississippi is so different across the board that it would have been really nice to see it in photographs.