From: Charles Travis <ctravisiv@yahoo.com>

Am currently based in Dublin and doing postgrad work in Cultural Geography. have looked at James Joyce's Finnegans wake and in the opening sentence of the novel Joyce creates a confluence between the somatic experience and the landscape:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Describes the River Liffey (also Anna Livia Plurabelle) as it runs through the cracked Georgian heart of Dublin to the soft mouth of the Irish sea. I could envision including in the film a strand that maps the Mississippi river through the lens of literature & native American oral culture, from Samuel Clemens, to Least Heat Moon, to the erotic gothic horror of New Orleans of Anne Rice the river that empties the bowels of America feeding from both halves of the American continental shelf, that winds and oscillates like an erotic vein from the Northern Plain headlands to the fertile pubis of the delta as it kisses the Gulf of Mexico. In other words as Joyce incorporated the Liffey landscape as both a somatography and a mapping of a postnational Irish organic identity, perhaps a similar angle on the Mississippi Mud Mother could incorporate approaches to alternate mappings of American history and identity.