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Opting for a big, green salad is my usual fare in both restaurants and at home, but the force of Arkansas roots in my genetic composition lured me to the Oyster Bar last night. My definition of getting wild is eating anything fried. So last night, I got rebellious and had dinner with a friend at the Oyster Bar on Markham Street in Little Rock. For all of you sophisticates reading this, musing, and wondering, "Well, yeah, we all know how good the Oyster Bar is, country girl, where the hell have you been all these years?" "New York City," I say. Why did it take me so long to go out to eat in Little Rock? Four years to be exact. I blame it on Manhattan cuisine, where you can get a tofu burger, sushi and sashimi at the corner deli, with an Italian espresso, and a German pastry, for a nominal fee. Snobby? Me? No. Just practical. I mean, like a good friend of mine once said, who quoted his dad, "Why eat hamburger, when you can eat steak." (This is possibly a mis...

There is a belief strongly held by both artists and the artists' audience; society, that one must suffer in order to produce great works of art. Tracing this belief is a complicated process. Have you every pulled weeds from your garden? As you dig more deeply to uncover the weed's root, one discover's more offshoots, growing horizontally, and vertically. And so on and so forth. The roots of the starving artist myth is shaped by cultural ideaology movements, economics, psychological positions, theology, and simple human nature. In Tom Wolfe's, The Painted Word , he says, "By 1900, the artist's arena-the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease, success-had shifted twice. In seventeenth-centurey Europe, the artist was literaly, also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and the royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court art were one in the same. In the eighteenth centurey the scene shifted to the ' salons' , in the homes of the wealthy ...