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Articles by Mark Mustian
7 Novels About Freakshows and the Price of Being Different
Reading Lists Step into the bigtop, where being different is both a spectacle and a survival strategy Human oddities compel and repulse us, even given the enlightenment we claim today. It’s the old car crash dilemma: we don’t really want to see it, yet we can’t help but stop and look. My interest in sideshows dates to the 1960s-era North Florida fair and to the first time I saw the 1932 Tod Browning movie “Freaks.” What were these folks’ lives really like?
Setting the Gothic Scene in the South
I’ve lived my whole life in the South. I was raised in north Florida (trust me, still the South), went to school and to work here. My yard has trees with Spanish moss, my kids say “ya’ll” and “fixin’ to.” I’m looking to buy a new pickup truck. (Creating a Sense of Place in Fiction.) It’s not that we in the South are necessarily obsessed with the grotesque, decay, and the supernatural, but there’s a reason “Southern Gothic” is defined in Wikipedia.
Word of South dips a toe into hip-hop | Opinion
OPINION Mark Mustian, Your Turn Published 5:00 a.m. ET April 10, 2019 Autoplay Show Thumbnails Show Captions Last SlideNext Slide Not long after we completed the second or third Word of South Festival of Literature and Music here in Tallahassee, someone said to me, “So, you’re doing a festival related to words and music, and you don’t feature any hip-hop?” She had a point. Hip-hop now outsells rock, and currently is the dominant music genre in America.
Mustian: Cascades Park development project good for the community
Having a thriving, vibrant “18-hour” downtown has been a goal of Tallahassee leaders for at least 50 years. We all know the stories: A bowling ball rolled down Monroe Street after 6 p.m. would hit nothing; for years you couldn’t buy a toothbrush within 10 blocks of the Capitol. One of our goals when we began Blueprint 2000 some 20 years ago was to foster interior development and limit urban sprawl.
Word of South is back for a second year
In 2015 Tallahassee launched an experiment, a festival of books and music at Cascades Park featuring authors who had written about music and musicians who had written books – some of them appearing together – and everything in between. No one was certain how it would play out, as most of those performing together had never done so before or even been asked to. And it rained, all weekend long.
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