Jack Pendarvis debuts a new column at the Oxford American with a doozy, about reading Woody Allen and Roy Blount, Jr., and about insiders and outsiders in art, and about being southern, and about how Steve Allen was a “slick, affected, old square.” It starts:

There’s a false notion that Woody Allen has never achieved widespread popularity among bumpkins like myself. Allen has encouraged the perception: “Some of my films have never played south of the Mason-Dixon line,” he told Roger Ebert just a few years back.

That may be true, but I saw all of them from Annie Hall through Husbands and Wives on the big screen in Mobile, Alabama (a forty-minute trip from my home in Bayou La Batre), and Manhattan Murder Mystery through Scoop in Atlanta.

I’ll admit the pace slacked off once I moved to Mississippi.

“I don’t like him,” said Miss Deanne, one of the women who drove us to school in the carpool when I was in the eighth grade, “but I know he’s a genius.”

She was reacting to my hard-won paperback of Without Feathers, one of Allen’s humor collections. The first time I took it up to the counter, the clerk said it was “too grown-up” for me and refused to sell it. So, of course, I skulked around until another clerk showed up, and bought it from her.

Read the whole thing.