By ELEANOR SHEEHAN

I spent most of my precocious adolescence resisting any association with the Southern city where I was born. I remember surreptitiously watching episodes of The O.C, thinking its characters and its representative “Newpsie” lifestyle were the epitome of cool. California, we were and continue to be sold, reigns as the world’s tastemaker — the progenitor of a laid back aesthetic now readily identifiable and often pejoratively referred to as the monoculture.

Of course the passage of time is always clarifying. I moved to the other side of the country and I saw that things down in the dirty were not so bad after all. I started to appreciate manners, the etiquette classes I was obliged to attend, and the presumption that I wanted ice in my water. I longed for the zany and unpredictable design choices of professional homemakers. I found charming what used to be irritating: the drawls, the nosiness, the slowness. I missed the smell of asphalt after a thunderstorm and the color of a chlorophyll-rich green.

These days it’s quite fashionable for a certain class of coastal elites to blame the South for all of America’s warts. It’s parochial, they'll say. Backwards, contemptible, simultaneously lawless and litigious, etc. Time is clarifying and other people’s opinions are unexpectedly antagonistic.

My knee-jerk reaction compels me to go on the defensive, to declare that we’ll gladly keep our hushpuppies, Cheerwine, butter beans, Roll Tide, pimento cheese, Bojangles, crawdads, haunted houses, gin fizzes, hoppin’ john, swamps, screen porches, wraparound porches, lady fingers, Lil Wayne, conniptions, sweet tea, monograms, honeysuckles, Piggly Wiggly, Hellman’s, SEC, fried green tomatoes, highfalutin hissy fits to our gosh darn selves. Instead I purse my lips, smile toothlessly, and quip, “Bless your heart.”

Itching to rove thick swells of humidity and wade through brackish bayous? Some entertainment to get you in the mood.

BOOKS

THE MOVIEGOER

By Walker Percy

Travel to N’awlins and let the good times roll at Mardi Gras with Binx Bolling, an iconic character and narrator of perhaps the most under-appreciated novel ever written. I wouldn’t deign to call myself an expert, but I do declare Walker Percy a genius, a master of the one-liner, and a true American author.

THE GOLD-BUG

By Edgar Allen Poe

Swat mosquitoes on Sullivan’s Island as you solve ciphers and follow the search for pirate treasure in Edgar Allen Poe’s prototypal detective tale. Haters will say it’s hogwash, a white man’s caricature. They’re missing out.

“GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE”

By Flannery O’Connor

Lurch and putter through Flannery O’Connor’s twisted short story, an unexpected inspection of the seductive, mendacious world of a woman who really, more than anything, wishes she wasn’t stuck on the farm.

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER

Burn down the barn watching this sultry classic, based on an amalgam of three stories by William Faulkner, starring Paul Newman and his future wife, Joanne Woodward.