Patton Oswalt seems to have had exceptionally good time wandering downtown Savannah — and tweeting about it along the way. With over two million Twitter followers, Oswalt gets responses to tweets immediately, and in large numbers. You can click on through any of the embedded tweets below to see his profile, of course.

Anne Rice relies heavily on Facebook — her tweets are automatically sent when she posts to her page, which you can also visit by clicking through the embedded media below.

Savannah is the southern version of Twin Peaks. Beautiful. Good coffee. Great pie. But there's a brooding twilight underneath it all.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 14, 2015

OH at the bar here at Paccis: "Savannah is Clean New Orleans." I, um…agree?

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 14, 2015

Only @pattonoswalt could get by with a heroin & a weed joke in a Lutheran Church in Savannah. #SavannahBookFestival pic.twitter.com/LIf5tN9E4d

— David (@RockNRollCPA) February 15, 2015

@pattonoswalt pic.twitter.com/9nYPY9wOT6

— jenny hawkes (@jenny5537) February 14, 2015

Welcome to Savannah, @tavissmiley! Thank you for joining us at the #Savannah Book Festival today! pic.twitter.com/4Och4ZksYp

— Visit Savannah (@VisitSavannah) February 14, 2015

Loving @SavBookFest #Savannah, my #Aretha #Respect talk sandwiched between @JohnWDean and @pattonoswalt.

— David Ritz (@davidritz) February 14, 2015

We are in Savannah….I've already glimpsed magnificent old Southern homes, glorious oak trees and Spanish Moss!… http://t.co/2BWqEmuvI2

— Anne Rice (@AnneRiceAuthor) February 13, 2015

Whoever suggested the Sentient Bean on Park? Thank you. #SavannahBookFestival pic.twitter.com/NRvCji17dT

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 13, 2015

Settled on Pacci. The Tuscan white bean soup is heavenly & the wine list is solid. #SavannahBookFestival pic.twitter.com/562I2GcSUb

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 14, 2015

What more would Flannery O’Connor have written if she had lived to the age of 89?

What would she not have written in her 20s and 30s absent the diagnosis of lupus — the same condition that killed her father?

As Brad Gooch suggested in his excellent biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, O’Connor lived her life under the gun, aware of the likelihood of early death. The Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was transformed in the moment before the Misfit shot her — her mind cleared and all the pettiness was stripped away. Fortunately for all of us, O’Connor didn’t have to wait for the last minute to see the urgency of art and life.

I am a past president of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah and have spent countless hours in the modest home where she lived about 1/3rd of her life. Many other O’Connor fans — often, worshippers — refer to her as “Flannery”, but I’ve never felt quite that close, quite that intimate, with her personality. I didn’t and don’t know Mary Flannery the person, and I envy those who did actually spend time with her (although I’ll confess that I wonder how well some of them really knew her).

But I do know Flannery O’Connor, the famed author whose work resonates more with each passing year. O’Connor’s stories, novels, and other writings seem in some respects even more shocking, more relevant, and more artful today than when they were first published.

O’Connor scholarship over the years has understandably and justifiably focused on her literary portrayal of Catholic doctrine, especially the hard concept of Grace, but there is so much more to be said about O’Connor’s work. One of these days I hope to make a few academic contributions to the ongoing legacy.

As Craig Amason (former director of Andalusia, the Milledgeville farm where O’Connor spent her later years) and others have explored, O’Connor’s work sometimes seems a commentary about post-WW II development in the South. The impact of the war itself on O’Connor’s work has certainly been insufficiently discussed. O’Connor’s delving into the psychology of religious fanaticism is obviously worth continued study, and so are the ways in which her work incorporates criminality — especially the threat of sexual assault.

Savannah Bishop Emeritus J. Kevin Boland is conducting a memorial mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist this morning, and there’s a reception immediately following at the Childhood Home across Lafayette Square. If you miss Bishop Boland’s remarks, check out this hourlong talk at Orlando Montoya’s new venture Savannah Podcast.

O’Connor’s Savannah home has become an important literary center, but Milledgeville remains the more important pilgrimage for O’Connor readers. I’ve made multiple trips to Andalusia over the last decade; it’s exciting to see the progress being made in preserving that magnificent landmark, which is now surrounded with ugly commercial sprawl. Walking where O’Connor did and seeing the vistas that spurred her imagination are awe-inspiring experiences. I even had the good fortune, thanks to the generosity of O’Connor cousin Louise Florencourt, to go upstairs in the house on Greene Street where O’Connor and her mother lived for a time after her father’s death.

But when I look out the windows of those homes, or wander along the same old boards that O’Connor did, I see a different world than she saw.

I may not share O’Connor’s religious beliefs, but I find inspiration in everything about O’Connor’s life and work.

Today is certainly a good day to reflect on O’Connor’s remarkable and always-evolving legacy, but I’m guessing that she herself would be cynical about such remembrances. It’s easy to honor the dead on days like this one — a 50th anniversary, even a Sunday.

It’s not quite so easy to keep O’Connor’s demanding beliefs and ideas in mind when our lives are more cluttered and the picayune demands of the world weigh on us.

His daughter Grace Leigh is involved with photography too — something I didn’t know until today when I saw a post on Facebook by Jack’s former colleague Susan Laney of Laney Contemporary.

Grace Leigh runs the experimental photo publication Mossless with her partner Romke Hoogwaerts, who founded the blog in 2009.

Together, Romke and Grace recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for their next project, MOSSLESS Issue Three: The United States (2003-2013). In the second minute of this video, Grace talks about Jack’s magnificent book The Land I’m Bound To.

An excerpt from the project description:

After a year of research, we spent five hard months producing Issue Three: The United States (2003-2013), an anthology of sorts, but rather a composition, of photographs of America from the last ten years. We encountered every photograph on the internet, on personal websites, or through Tumblrs, Flickr, and so on. We got hooked on the search, finding photographer after photographer with fascinating work about the lands and the people of this country. We have found among them photographers that rival the great American photographers of the past. But we wanted to publish the works all together to follow the changing atmosphere in photography.

As some of you know, I’m caught up in some aspects of the evolution of photography via social media and new media. I’m fascinated by this attempt to curate photographs that were first published via the web into a physical book. I’m donating for sure, and I hope some of Jack’s friends and fans will join me.

But I’ve been immersed to varying degrees in O’Connor’s life and work for I guess about a decade now, maybe longer. I’m still on the board of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah (please like the Home on Facebook) and was president of the board for three years just after a major restoration of the museum house on Lafayette Square. My personal thanks to Linda Bruckheimer, Rena Patton, and others who were critical in making that restoration happen.

While I was president, we also hired our first — and still only — employee, launched the Ursrey Memorial Lecture Series (Alan Gurganus, Michael Cunningham, Jaimy Gordon, and Robert Olen Butler have appeared), and helped with the local launch of Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery, which was published by Little Brown.

And I’ve routinely taught O’Connor’s stories in my intro lit classes at Armstrong and presented a paper on criminality in her stories at a literary conference here a couple of years ago. I’ve given at least a couple of talks at the Childhood Home in the ongoing series of free Sunday lectures.

I was also involved a couple of years ago in launching Southern Discomfort, an exhibition and silent auction of works — almost all by Savannah area artists — inspired by Flannery O’Connor. I wrote about that first exhibit here, and Southern Discomfort 2 is now hanging at ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St., just south of Ellis Square. The free reception and silent auction is Friday, Jan. 31 from 6 to 9 p.m. (silent auction ends at 8:30). Click here for the Facebook invitation.

I’ve worked on both Southern Discomfort shows with my Armstrong colleague Beth Howells, but the real work has been done by the artists. We’re offering all the invited artists a 50/50 split of the proceeds, by the way. That was something I insisted on from the very beginning; artists in Savannah are far too often asked to donate works in their entirety to nonprofit organizations, which can have the effect of devaluing the work.

But our offer to share the proceeds is only a small part of the reason that virtually everyone we ask decides to take part in the exhibit.

For many artists in this area, and around the world, O’Connor is a constant source of inspiration. Some find images in her short, intense life — her battle with lupus, the easy satire and irony of both her fiction and her early cartoons, the worlds of the farm and of the mind so fully chronicled in her letters, her love of peacocks and other fowl. Other artists turn to the stories themselves — the details of the hat in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, a particular line in “The River”, the eerie presence of the hogs in “Revelation”.

Still other artists consider their creations so influenced by O’Connor that they’ve submitted pieces that are part of ongoing bodies of work.

Have any of these dealings with O’Connor’s legacy brought me closer to O’Connor herself? I don’t know.

On the one hand, I’d have to say no. Given the complexities of her fiction and her mind, and the simple fact that she died before I was born, I can never be sure that I know anything about her definitively.

But part of me desires to say yes. And I find myself looking past the easy interpretations of her work that rely so heavily on the concept of grace. Increasingly, I find myself fascinated by some of the darkest elements in O’Connor’s fiction — the tension between spirituality and sexuality, the omnipresence of criminals and the looming threat of sexual violence, the abyss of nihilism that her characters are so often on verge of falling into.

Cheery stuff.

Of course, it is cheery stuff. There’s nothing that can brighten a day more than O’Connor’s incisive wit.

The works in Southern Discomfort 2 encompass all those elements. Here’s a sampling:

“Revelation” by Curtis Bartone:

“Habit of Being” by Jack Metcalf:

“Young Horse” by Marcus Kenney:

“The Meanest of Them Sparkled” by Christine Sajecki:

“Finding Flannery” by Katherine Sandoz:

“Seven dollar hat” by Melinda Borysevicz:

Kim Wade’s feature piece touches upon many aspects of the legacy of “The Book”, as it has been called by locals.

How much longer will it just be called “The Book”? Hard to say. It’s clear that many younger Savannahians have no direct connection to it all. Only a handful of my dozens of students at Armstrong have read it; many haven’t heard of it.

But Sunday’s coverage is a good reminder that the stories in Midnight are still rich in many ways. I especially like a portion of Kim’s piece that touches upon the experiences of Lady Chablis:

“It was the first time Savannah was thrown into the spotlight. Along with ‘Midnight,†which a lot of Savannahians didnâ€t care for, here comes this black, loud-mouthed, and as far as they are concerned, drag queen who was a big character in the book and was getting more popular.

“Savannah didnâ€t know how to deal with it, but they had to, so they had to learn.” […]

Chablis says she left Savannah after the book became popular. She feared for her safety and never moved back.

“Like for two years I became a recluse. If I had to fly somewhere, I would fly as ‘incog-negro†(Chablis†catch phrase) as possible so no one would recognize me. Finally I just had to own it.”

And this snippet about the late Jack Leigh, photographer of Midnight‘s iconic cover:

[Susan] Laney says Leigh was given the keys to the cemetery gate and permission to stay there for two days. On the second day, he wandered around until almost all the light was gone and happened upon the statue. […]

“He went into a dark room with the negative and enlarged it and worked with it for three days, working with different filters,” Laney says. “He used a method he was known for called burn and dodge technique.

“He did about a hundred passes of light. … Now you wouldnâ€t have to work so hard but at the end of 1993, it was not that way. He really created something that wasnâ€t in reality.”

And this from bookseller Esther Shaver:

“Nothing evokes Savannah like that book. I mean you feel it,” she says. “If you have never been here, you read it, and you feel it.”

There is a whole lot more in Wade’s piece and in that multimedia package — it’s all definitely worth a look, no matter what your interest in or appreciation of Berendt’s book.

I was working at the Borders bookstore in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood in Philadelphia when Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil came out.

The power of that cover was palpable. Shoppers wanted to hold it — and so did the employees. I’ll confess, though, that it took me a long time finally to decide to read it. For all the buzz about the book, I never heard that much talk about the story itself — the discussion was all about the mood, the atmosphere.

I finally read Midnight over the course of a couple of afternoons sitting in the sun in the backyard of my sprawling attic apartment in an old home in Fort Washington. I was struck by the guardedness of Berendt’s narrative voice, which reminded me so much of Nick in The Great Gatsby. He’s a witness to the passionate moments of others, but does he share them? People open up to him in a heartbeat, but does he open up to them? Do they even want him to?

I was struck, too, by the way the entire story is driven by the short life of Danny Hansford, who was shot to death at age 21 by Jim Williams. There’s a real tragedy at the heart of Midnight, and it’s worth noting that Hansford’s story remains largely untold. Had Hansford’s family gone public and talked to Berendt, we’d have a different text. Had he lived, Danny Hansford would be 54 this year.

My first reading of Midnight also confirmed for me that Savannah was as fascinating as I thought it was after a very brief visit in the late 1980s. I had been teaching fulltime before working at Borders for a while and doing some traveling; when I saw a job listing at Savannah Country Day School in 1995, it was a no-brainer to apply for the position even though I didn’t know anyone in Savannah. I applied for other positions up and down the East Coast at the same time, but I had a job offer from SCDS before I even interviewed anywhere else. I took it.

In his public remarks in 2008 at the Savannah Book Festival, Berendt referred to the “spiral effect of eccentricity” in Savannah. It’s a place of just the right size, with enough overlapping social connections, that oddness becomes prized. Without even really gossiping, those of us with rich public lives learn about other residents through so many avenues that we feel a part of their lives.

I hear a lot of Savannahians say that the world of Midnight is dead — that there’s too much money, too much technology, not enough dive bars, not enough space for artists, and on and on.

Sure, the city has changed radically since 1994, but I’m often struck by how much has remained the same. Many of those complaining about the changes in the city don’t seem to be reckoning with the simple fact that they themselves are 20 years older too. They haven’t been willing — or able — to be carried in new directions as the urban landscape has shifted. Just today, for example, my friend Allison Hersh has a fascinating column in the Savannah Morning News about another friend, theyoung photographer Emily Earl, a Savannah native whose latest body of work is “Late Night Polaroids”. From Allison’s piece:

Like Savannah itself, Earlâ€s photographs are mysterious, inviting, sensual and seductive. For this talented photographer, the camera serves as an ideal tool to document the cityâ€s offbeat nightlife scene.

“Thereâ€s so much great stuff going on here that doesnâ€t get enough attention,” she says. “Itâ€s important we embrace the different things happening in Savannahâ€s arts and music scene.”

“Art comes from the place where you dream.”

He was talking less about the dreams of sleep than the other dreams — the yearnings for something other than what is.

For Butler, yearning “is the deepest level of desire. That’s the thing that makes stories go.”

“Plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted.”

Both at Friday’s Ursrey lecture and the next morning at a workshop for area college and high school creative writing students held at the historic Carnegie Library, Butler said that good fiction writers do not write from the mind. They do not write from ideas.

Writing students do need to study technique, Butler argued, but they study technique so that they can forget it. He compared the process to a swimmer practicing the hand’s entry into the water; the swimmer practices that over and over, so that she can forget it — so that it becomes automatic. (I tell my students of nonfiction composition almost exactly the same thing about technique, practice, and forgetting.)

I took some photos of both the Ursrey Lecture, held at Trinity United Methodist Church on Telfair Square, and the Saturday workshop.

Many of us affiliated with the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home here in Savannah were lucky to get to know Brad when he was researching the book, and we hosted a major launch for it with a talk at Trinity United Methodist Church followed by a reception in the grand rotunda of the Telfair Academy.

Brad is now working on a book for Harper Collins about Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet.

The research has taken Brad to Asia on multiple occasions, and he’s just written this fascinating piece for Bloomberg: Modern Tajikistan Offers Persian, Pop Music, Wrestling.

An excerpt:

My cruising the â€stans over the past year had shown me how each of these former Soviet republics has struggled to segue into its new national identity. Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, is a freaky monument of conspicuous consumption, with scores of white Carrera marble buildings but few residents; a rarified ghost town.

Kazakhstan blurs in the imagination withSacha Baron Cohenâ€s Borat. Visas to Uzbekistan are hard to obtain but well worth the effort for its grand ancient cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

Yet Tajikistan has been uniquely successful in its transition and has found an enviable equipoise — with hijab optional for women — akin to Turkeyâ€s. A stroll along Dushanbeâ€s tree-lined main boulevard, Rudaki Avenue, feels like a lovely promenade in more cosmopolitan Prague or Vienna.

But I don’t often hear readers of Flannery O’Connor talk about what she might have written if she had not died at age 39 way back in 1964. I suspect that’s because we all know that her adult experiences, her religious beliefs, and her fiction were profoundly impacted by her illness. If she had not battled lupus for years, just as her father did, she might have been a very different writer. If she had not written with the knowledge that her life would likely be a short one, just like her father’s, could she have plumbed such awesome and strange spiritual depths?

So it’s hard even to imagine who Mary Flannery O’Connor would be if she were alive today — her 88th birthday.

And I have no idea what she would have thought of the birthday party we held for her on Saturday at her childhood home — now a house museum — here in Savannah.

The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home’s Homemade Parade and Garden Party included some music, some crafts, some absurd costumes, a peacock-calling contest, good food and community, and just enough surreal images to seem a little strange even in Savannah.

As Brad Gooch notes in his excellent biography, the weather was “unsettled” in Savannah on March 25, 1925. And it was unsettled on Saturday, with hard rains giving way suddenly — just before the parade began — to bright sun and blue skies.

I’ll embed a short video and a few of my pictures here, but if you want to see all the shots, please visit this album on the Childhood Home’s Facebook page.