Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

Poet Nicole Cooley offers some thoughts on writing in New Orleans after Katrina (and the flood), in an online column at Poets&Writers.com (h/t to Ray Shea for this)

For creative writers in New Orleans, the questions raised by the storm remain. How do we approach the enormity of Katrina and its legacy in order to write about it? And how has the literary community of New Orleans changed since the hurricane? Fiction writer, translator, and playwright John Biguenet articulates this dilemma in an essay he wrote for Before During After, a collection edited by Elizabeth Kleinveld, forthcoming later this year from the University of New Orleans Press. “What conventions exist to depict something that has never happened before?” he writes. “What American novel traces the eradication of one of our cities, the exile of two hundred thousand citizens, the obliteration of a set of intertwined cultures centuries old?…We are only now just beginning to discover what it’s done to us.”

The trick of it, Ray pointed out in a private email exchange, will be to do what Haruki Murakami accomplished in After The Quake, his collection of stories inspired by and set just after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, but the one thing absent from all of it’s pages is the quake itself, its direct aftermath. Who will right the first book of this sort for New Orleans, and what shape will it take? I I knew the answer to that question I wouldn’t be typing on this blog.

A quick troll through the published listings shows not much going on, but there was so damn much last week that’s not surprising. It may be September but its still awfully hot and then there’s the opportunity for hurricanes, so we’re not exactly an attractive venue for traveling artists this time of year. I’m still disappointed to have missed Yusef Komunyakaa at Tulane’s Katrina commemorative poetry reading, but there was so damn much to do last week, not the least of which was getting my daughter moved into college.

A reminder: if you stumble into this because you find this sort of thing interesting, remember to send me your listings. If you don’t I have to rely on what I find in Gambit and the Times-Picayune, and neither is the best source of information on this sort of things anymore, which is the whole point of this blog post.

§ Sunday is an Open Mike at the Maple Leaf Bar Poetry Reading Series. Then on Sept. 12 Poet David Rowe reads from and signs his book, Unsolicited PoemsT, and on Sept. 19 our incredibly talented local poet Gina Ferrara, who was a contributor to A Howling in the Wires.

§ Nothing else. That’s it. Read a book. Join a book club if you need a book to read. How about this one. Or this one. I’m in the latter. I don’t plan to try to write reviews, but hope they will try for an online discussion of the sort the prose club has done.

A big “Thanks, Asshole” to whomever added a link here to freesexmovies.somegibberish.com. With all this fresh traffic maybe I should try to monetize. All I can think of is I’ve pissed someone off, because I can’t imagine what a spider would find here that would trigger this, so somebody must have added me to a list somewhere.

Swell. So, if you now can’t get here from work anymore I guess you won’t be able to read this posted typed up at 1:52 Universal Moloch Time. But then most of the people I read are blocked anyway, so I’m in good company.

“I’m going back to a place/Where I know who I am…”

[youtobe="http://www.youtube.com/v/5aN2GZSE9ss?fs=1&hl=en_US" ]

YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT MOMENT
WHERE YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM
— Samuel R. Delaney in City of a Thousand Suns

Trapped not as you might think, given the juxtaposition of the word doom; trapped instead in the complex web of postdiluvian New Orleans in the way light is said to be trapped by a cut and polished gem, refracted by the complex play of facets until made into a flashing thing of beauty: that is how I try to live with what was once the shadow of The Flood, the rafts of ghosts it unleashed.

[In] Delaney’s novella trilogy Fall of the Towers…[the characters must confront] the mass, simultaneous discovery by an entire society that a key assumption about their lives–that there was an enemy beyond the barrier; that they were at war–was a complex fiction constructed by their ruling class.

I am not certain how something terribly similar will play out here in New Orleans, among people who’s fundamental assumptions have been washed away: that the basic infrastructure of our lives is built well enough that we will not die of living upon it; that our government will rise up to protect and succor us at a moment of great peril; that if we pay our bills to the insurance company they will help make us whole. How do we live when all of the illusions that underpin life in modern America are suddenly swept away…

There is a certain beauty…[in] the insistent evidence of hope, with the irrational and irresistible persistence that is one of the hallmarks of life, prominently displayed here in New Orleans like flowers erupting on a cooled lava flow…

[Here on Toulouse Street] I try…to celebrate the found moments of odd or profound beauty that come out of All That: the moments of simple, quiet pleasure and ecstatic, public joy that mark life in postdiluvian New Orleans, the surest signs that what we are building here is indeed New Orleans, heedless of the violent transfiguration of our landscape, the vast swaths of ruin that still blanket Gentilly and the East, that mark the modern Land of Nod.

I cannot entirely surrender [my] anger, not while I have this public forum and a handful of readers I might influence. There is too much to be done to realize the potential that arises out of that bright moment when we learned our doom….

[T]here is still a life to be lived here. For all of the constant struggle and the occasional horror of that life there are still the moments that flash out like shinning from shook foil, as Gerald Manley Hopkins put it. Our world is charged with the grandeur not of God precisely but of who we are, of how we live: every bar of music and snatch of song that puts a lilt in our step I never saw on the streets of Washington or Fargo; every sloppy po-boy unrolled from its waxy wrapper like an Egyptian treasure, that sustains us as much by the thought of which neighborhood joint it came from and by the sight of it laying there like a woman in dishabille, as we are as by the smell and the taste of it; the peculiar site lines of a city built to conform to the zaftig geography of the river’s crescent and our slow descent into the ocean. All of these flash out of the cold, hard moment when we rediscovered who we are, flash out with a beauty that should settle the question once and for all: why do we choose to live here having learned our doom?…

The quote that eventually came to rest prominently at the top of [my Katrina blog] Wet Bank Guide was from the jazz and performance artist Sun Ran: Its After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet? For Sun Ra, it was a profound renunciation of the ugly history of what it meant to be Black in late 20th Century America…Sun Ra’s aphorism calls us to a celebration of the realization that we have been unshackled by the storm and flood from the conventional, from so much of our history and attachment. Perhaps I can help all those around me who still cling to the past, to the ugliest parts of the long story what makes us who we are; I hope I can push them to recognize that those shackles lie about their feet and no longer bind them, that they have been freed by that bright moment in which we knew our doom to become something at once old and new: not the city bequeathed to us like a curse by our ancestors who held or felt the lash but instead the city of memory and of dreams, the city that lives in our hearts.

Edit of a piece originally published about two years ago on Toulouse Street.

If the anniversary leads you to watch any video this week (and I include Spike Lee’s new film and the Wendell Pierce/Soledad Brian Pontchartrain Park show on CNN, which I hope repeats as I had to miss it last night), what this one first.

All others are optional.

Je me souviens. Remember 8-29.

or).

“Derringer”.

There is just something Odd about that word, the way it roles off the tong that’s hard to describe, something like the mouth feel of a wine percolating up through the brain of a vino-neophyte struggling to explain himself.

Just say it to yourself: derringer. Didn’t that feel good? Of course it did.

It reminds me for no other reason than that the purpose of this blog is two-fold: to capture something of New Orleans for posterity, and the Odd (Orleanian or otherwise) of in general, like standing near the bus stop one day lighting a cigarette after the massive influx of Latinos following 8-29 and hearing a woman on her cell phone say “Marrero”.

Marrero is a nondescript suburb that has seen better days. It’s shopping mall is gone, and the tide of white flight which flooded the area decades ago has been overwhelmed in part by what I think of as the brown exodus, people on the make looking for better schools, a bit of lawn, a piece of everything the television promises them.

When I heard this woman say it, drawling out the vowels and trilling her Rs as if she were running her tongue along her lover’s ear, it gave me shivers down my spine. Marrero, a tract of blocky houses and not much else too far from the city for my taste, suddenly had the ring of a gurgling Grenada fountains and the low notes of Gypsy guitar.

§ Maud Newton’s blog has long been in my own blog roll down the side of the page, and I have been known to crib an idea or two (though not as prolifically as I raid TheRumpus or HTMLGIANT, as if I were Roberto Bolano’s character Juan Garcia Madero, the book kleptomaniac from The Savage Detectives). I discovered today that someone had clicked onto Toulouse Street from her blog. I have apparently made her blog roll under Blogs: Books, Culture, & Politics. If you need a table at the Four Seasons, give me a week’s notice and I’ll see what I can do.

§ The book launch of New Orleans: What Cannot Be Lost 88 Stories and Traditions from the Sacred City will be launched Sunday Aug. 22 at d.b.a from 4-6 pm with music by the Free Agents Brass Band. Playing alongside the alluring photographs of Christopher Porche West, 88 New Orleans’ writers pay tribute to the city they call home. Edited by Lee Barclay/Photographs by Christopher Porche West. l

§ Since the song “I’m So Excited” popped into my head I’ve been searching for a ball peen hammer to knock it loose. While I do that, consider this: the book launch for A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writing from Postdiluvian New Orleans edited by Sam Jasper and myself, and published as the first work of our own small press, is next (not tonight, next) Thursday, Aug. 26 at Mimi’s in the Marigny. If you can’t maek it, rush to our website now to pre-order your copy.

§ Dave Brinks and Megan Burns are keeping 17 Poets! dark for our book launch (bless ‘em) but planning a big celebration of the fifth year of our recovery Sunday, Aug 29 at 5 pm at the Goldmine Saloon, called the All-Hands-On-Deck Poetry, Art, and Music Fundraiser. Featuring music by Rockin’ Dopsie, Jr and the Zydeco Twisters w/ special guest Cyril Neville, the Saintsations, poetry, multi-media performances and a silent auction including work by George Rodrigue. All Proceeds will benefit the nonprofit: Protectourcoastline.org $15.00 Donation at Door

§ Aug. 22 is an open mike at the Maple Leaf. I’m disappointed I didn’t get to see Dennis Formento jazz-backed reading last week, but I had an obligation I could not escape. Poet Paul Benton steps up to tempt fate by reading on the 29th I’m thinking of wearing shrimp boots in his honor.

§ Benton also mentions in a comment last week that the weekly reading on Wednesday at The Yellow Moon in the Bywater is no more, joining the Tuesday Dinky Tao and the occasional Sunday readings at Fair Grinds among to poetry ghosts haunting the listings sections of the Times-Picayune and Gambit. Don’t despair, 17 Poets! is just around the corner, the Latter Library continues to host occasional but wonderful events, and if you haven’t been to the Maple Leaf lately come on, downtown people, all you have to do is get on the street car. It’s not like you’re liable to get lost and end up on the westbank.

If you’re made it this far, here’s your reward. Damn that’s clever.

Updated 8/14/10:

Is poetry relevant? Is poetry dying or already dead? Or is it simply boring? That’s the question that started this train of thought, a blog post by Elisa Gabbert on The French Exit. Which leads me to ask: do we really have to have this conversation again? I mean, what about them Saints and is Tommy’s food really as good as Irene’s if he once cooked for her? Who wants another beer or glass of wine?

I always tested with a high aptitude for math and attended summer school between 8th and 9th grade to cram algebra so as to set me on the path toward calculus, the Grand Theory and Everything, a mountain I managed to slide down pretty quickly back into plain old if a train leaves at six math class. I only excelled in the class where our good Christian Brother teacher would frequently over or under dose himself on insulin and nod off, allowing us to make all tests open book.

I fell off the path to math stardom because math is boring. Don’t stop reading and go straight to the comments to correct me and tell me how Sister Mary Fibonacci changed your life and you were the first woman engineer hired by NASA or to reach full professor at Berkley or MIT. We are discussing matters of taste and proclivity, about and presentation, and context. Math may be no more boring for you than I discovered Symbolic Calculus to be in college. Logic without numbers was fascinating.

We are talking, however, about poetry, so don’t encourage my tendency to get off topic. I could spend 20 minutes on Google and present you a full menu of references on the topics of “ss poetry dead?”, “is poetry irrelevant” or “does poetry matter”? We’ve gone a long way from The Beats 1959 cover of Life magazine to a 2003 article in Newsweek announcing the details of poetry’s wake and internment. If you’re reading this far, you may disagree with these routine assessments.

Some of this is simply boil over from the amount of confessional poetry we’ve all read because there’s so damn much of it in the late 20th century list. Navel gazing angst, however well reasoned, is not original enough to advance you in the department or even to make much difference to people who would stop to read such thoughts. It can get, at times, pretty boring. Another problem is the tendency of some poetry to be intentionally obtuse and difficult, to structure itself in ways that grammatically and sometimes typographically resemble the sort of Odd formulae you can find by Googling “famous math problems” trying to remember trying to remember the name Fibonacci.

I read a fair amount of poetry, some of which is boring to me, because I want to understand what made it seem sensible to some publisher to put out a $25 hardback edition of a 120 page book or why a university would award it a prize. Like mathematics (or car mechanics or diagnosing computer problems, the last of which I did for a living for quite a few years) the challenge is to take it apart and understand what makes it tick.

If you read enough poetry, you will run across enough that takes the first instruction (“Sing, Goddess”) and with a one, and a two and a three takes you away to that place in the brain and soul where that other impractical art–music–tingles the spine and tightens the skin in ways simple evolution did not intend or at least did not require. No sonnet or saxophone solo ever put a wildebeest on the spit to feed the woman and children, but somewhere along the way we developed other needs as primal is food or sex.

I think poetry suffers, at least in part, from a bad image. Consider rap and hip-hop: even the nastiest gansta misogyny and murder stands clearly in the fish bone diagram of the history of poetry and the people writing this stuff are as famous as Whitman and Frost were once, are raking in the millions. I’m not suggesting you start referring to your colleagues down the hall as ho’s or wearing swaggering gold chains. Just that you consider that there are people listening to the words as much as they did in the days when Bob Dylan (or Dylan Thomas, for that matter) could claim radio air time.

Traditional poetry: the scene of readings and chapbooks, and the lucky bastards who have the time to put together a manuscript and get it noticed, is what is dying of boring irrelevance. And it need not, should not be. Some people lament that the world of Twitter and Facebook is sapping our attention span, making literature (or even the basic act of reading) difficult. Perhaps that is true to some extent. Many of us are never free from our social networks or, via our Blackberries, entirely untethered from work. I have two wonderful novels on my bedside I am trying to work through but I am struggling to find the time and attention they deserve. I don’t think I’ve rewired myself to make myself incapable of finishing Robert Coover’s amazing John’s Wife or to get through a critical read of Richard Katrova’s Mystic Pig for a “last book I loved” piece to submit to the Rumpus. Mostly is a matter of time. Between a soul sucking job that pays the mortgage that houses the family so that there are televisions everywhere and all the other appliances of modern life, I don’t have the time.

I do, however, manage to make time for poetry. It’s much easier to give serious attention to one or two on lunch break, or in the small windows of time between dinner, the bills and bedtime.

Consider this: for people who use those tools for purposes other than selecting tonight’s sushi restaurant, these media are also training our brains to look for satisfaction in the condensed. I think in a world where Facebook, SMS and Twitter intersect the explosive growth of Soduko there is place for poetry, or at least certain styles of poetry. There is so much kinetic energy in the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa or John Berryman, masters of taking simple English and charging the page with the crackling energy of a Tezla coil, each poem a wonderful puzzle for those who rip their newspapers open to tear into the crossword or Soduko page.

And there is probably a place for poetry that is not so much puzzle as the simple pleasure of a clever painting, an ordering of the universe in a constrained place that lights the pleasure centers like a line of coke. My idols Everette Maddox and Charles Bukowski come to mind. Much of their writing is incredibly accessible and yet has the ability to convey tremendous emotional complexity in a simple twist of irony or humor. Even the sometimes surreal shorter poems of Federico Garcia Lorca can be deceptive simple and powerful at once, making them at once accessible and at the same time great poetry.

William Carlos Williams also comes quickly to mind, back from a time when poetry was published in the columns of popular magazines outside of the New Yorker. My own writing tends toward the simple rather than the intentionally complex and my goal is simply to shake your tree once or twice until all the lights come on, and I admire writers who can do this. Poetry must speak not just to the reading scene regulars, buy-the-feature’s-book crowd but should speak–as Whitman would have us do–to that mythical Everyman (and woman).

I think if poetry wants to succeed and reclaim some space in the newspapers and public consciousness of literate America we all need to back away from the procryptic mimicry of M.F.A poetry, the sense of the difficult and formulaic I get when I fall behind on Poetry Daily and find myself catching up two weeks in Google Reader in one sitting. I just read the book of someone whose work I absolutely fell in love with when the author visited New Orleans and I purchased her first book. The new volume, however–the product of a major university prize and published in hardcover at $25 bucks by a major house–simply didn’t delight me in the way the first small press paperback did. Don’t get me wrong; its a wonderful book and I marvel at it the way I once did electrical schematics as a young boy, the intricate mapping I had trained myself to read and could wonder over for hours at how that careful draftsmanship represented a transistor radio. What the author’s second book did not accomplish was to invoke that sense of wonder you experience when you plug in the Christmas tree or at the first burst of fireworks. If poetry doesn’t want to be boring and irrelevant, it needs to recapture that.

Writers need to step back from what is ultimately the academic impulse to write for the seminar audience and peer-approved publication, to learn to listen like good story tellers to the voices at the bus stop and at the coffee pot for the line that sizzles and burns like a fuse and leads ultimately to that explosion in the brain that that can’t be contained by its casing. That doesn’t mean you won’t go back and revise, or reject some of your first impulses. I love Kerouac but struggle through some things. First thought, best thought is sometimes worthwhile but not a mathematical axiom. I only suggest that you start from the awen, the possession by the impulse to write whatever the trigger, and that you take as your model not the last book you read or seminar you attend but the millions of turns of phrase your mind has been storing away your entire life, that you work from the primitive impulse to build what you need from the materials at hand, the same impulse that allowed us the leisure our other primate cousins never managed, to sit around a fire under some simple shelter with full bellies and tell stories and sing songs.

If poetry (and literary fiction for that matter) were to consider these simple suggestions its irrelevance or whatever today’s worrisome word for it is us could be reversed. Whether your prefer the New York Times Sunday Crossword or the simpler pleasures of a well written song lyric, I think there is room between the Sokudo box and the crossword puzzle for a poem, that the colonization of places like Facebook by small (and often online-only) journals offer an opportunity to lure back an audience with work that stops you with its unexpected turn of phrase and makes you read it again trying to trap the magician in his trick, or simply for the same reason men turn to watch an attractive woman receding down the street.

§ Not much going on this week in the August heat, but the Maple Leaf features Poet Dennis Formento reading from his work backed by jazz musicians, followed by an open mike.

§ Since it’s a bit slow and I’m distracted by the very early hour of the morning and the sond et lumiere show of the tropical storm that wasn’t outside, we’ll pull a reverse Peabody and climb into the way forward machine and remind you of the book launch of A Howling in the Wires on Thursday, Aug. 26 at Mimi’s in the Marigny, a not entirely self serving thing to do since all net proceeds go to Hana Morris, widow of one of the contributors and mother of their three young children. Yes, if you don’t rush to our website now to pre-order your copy that guilt is just going to gnaw at you all day.

§ Dave Brinks and Megan Burns are keeping 17 Poets! dark for our book launch (bless ‘em) but planning a big celebration of the fifth year of our recovery Sunday, Aug 29 at 5 pm at the Goldmine Saloon, called the All-Hands-On-Deck Poetry, Art, and Music Fundraiser. Featuring music by Rockin’ Dopsie, Jr and the Zydeco Twisters , poetry, multi-media performances and a silent auction including work by George Rodrigue. All Proceeds will benefit the nonprofit: Protectourcoastline.org $15.00 Donation at Door

I’m going back out to watch the street fill by lightning flash. Try not to get your book wet, because with any luck when you get to work all the computers will be fried but the lobby coffee shop will miraculously have power. One can only hope.

“This is not the quiet tap of civilized literature; this is the loud raw truth of life.”
– Valentine Pierce

You thought I was going to forget to post, didn’t you. Sure you did. Hey, I’ve hardly posted anything but this listing for weeks but life has been busy, too busy for July in this city where you can almost see the swells passing through the humid air. The Counting House doubles as the Mad House, my mother is getting better but the last few weeks have been a nasty combination of roller coaster and carney fun house and I can feel the chilli dogs rising in my gorge at every twist and turn.

And just because You Can Never Have Too Much Fun I’ve been working with Sam Jasper on a book project. The announcement goes out this weekend so I won’t go into too much detail until next week. Just keep the night of Thursday, Aug. 26. It’s an exciting concept. People who have read the manuscript love it. And it’s a lot of fucking work, especially if you’re typesetting it yourself. Still, it will all be worth it in the end.

The project involves some very personal writing by 20 contributors. In reading some emotionally raw (but very well written) words from the months after 8-29, and in the back and forth with contributors, I have had a lot of occasion to think about nakedness in creative non-fiction and in poetry. I encouraged a contributor to stick with what was originally submitted instead of a much revised version because what we wanted was that immediacy, that nakedness. I worried if that was unfair in a way because I was asking her to reveal more than I do here. In the end we accepted the revision, and it’s good. Its not quite as visceral as the original but its good. Was it fair to push this person further than I push myself? Was I projecting my own desires onto their work? This is my first project as an editor and you find yourself asking a lot of question like this.

So, what are the limits? TheRumpus.Net isn’t just an excellent source of lazy links for worn out bloggers but concerns itself with this topic a great deal, as editor Stephen Elliot writes very nakedly about his personal life in his own work, and his contributors frequently return to this subject. What are the limits, I ask myself time and again. I agonized for almost a week before I posted Hospital. My mother was almost improving by the time I hit the publish button so perhaps it was even dishonest. Some people might think so but I don’t. Dishonesty is the mortal sin if you’re going to write from your own life. It was a snapshot of where I was in time a week and a half ago and a very personal one at that. Fortunately my mother doesn’t read things on the Internet, or she’d probably be mortified. (Think of another word. Quick. Can’t. Too tired. Never mind.)

There is an interesting quote in this piece (cribbed from The Rump; so sue me, its the Internet) but I’m not going to reproduce it here. If you haven’t wandered back to Google for whatever it was you were looking for in the first place, if you’re still reading this, then go read this. I think the money quote will jump out when you read it.

I am careful about what I post here, probably too careful. But I have a job, and unless you know me and I’ve told you where I work you probably can’t suss out what The Counting House is. I have a family, and I think sometimes my children read this although my wife doesn’t. There are limits once you’ve made certain life choices, limits that hold back what you can publish and what gets tucked away and what gets written in your head but never put down. You can’t be dishonest–I’ve said that–but sometimes you have to be disingenuous, to couch things carefully or work around omissions.

I’m a tremendous fan of Stephen Elliot and just devoured Jim Carroll’s Forced Entries twice through, and both men write about as nakedly out of their own life as anyone can. I can promise you I will never describe what happens if I have an abscess and it bursts not because it’s repulsive but because I may never be able to write about my mostly uninteresting life as powerfully as Carroll does about his in that book, may never make you care about the person behind this screen in the way Carroll does for himself, to make that grotesque moment perfect and cathartic for both the subject/author and the reader.

Some of my favorite books are to some extent about the author moving through the landscape. Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way comes to mind, in which case it is the author moving through the sea scape. Unless you’re a sailing nut or a serious student of environmental writing, you have probably not heard of Moitessier or his books. This one is about his participation in the first solo around-the-world race, a race he never finished. This isn’t the heroic literature of the sea or arctic exploration (topics that fascinate me) but a book about his experience of the ocean, of his own journey of self-discovery, a book that succeeds so compellingly that you are fascinated by his account of being becalmed and feeding sea birds.

And that’s what I do here, or try to. I started out trying to write about New Orleans (and sometimes succeed) but often end up writing about myself in the landscape. It is a formula that seems to work for me, to accomplish my goal because landscape without character and event is a subject for painters. It was probably inevitable that I would end up in these posts as much as the city does, because most of what I have written for the last five years, here and on Wet Bank Guide, was not about New Orleans in a sense that would sell to the National Geographic or Southern Living, but about the experience of New Orleans, specifically my experience.

The quote at the top of this post is from one of our contributors to the book, will in fact appear with the dedication if I can convince Sam of the idea before we go to press. I like that quote (which is all of the bio Pierce submitted) because it summarizes our book so well, and also what goes on here on Toulouse Street. “This is not the quiet tap of civilized literature; this is the loud raw truth of life.” It is not, however, the whole story. I am neither Moitessier nor Carroll. My life is not that fascinating, and there are limits. The subject need not be eccentric or a genius or otherwise exceptional for highly personal writing to be interesting. The secret, I believe, is to get the “loud raw truth of life out.” I don’t quite get there in this space. The secret to the whole story is hidden somewhere in that link above, and until and unless I cross that boundary this will never be the whole story.

And in the end it is, after all, just a blog. I’m shocked that you’ve read this far, really. Both of you.

It’s been a slow week for somebody if not for me, and the coming week promises more of the same as the listing are thin, but here’s what it is.

Join us for a night of local poetry focusing on conservation of our treasured Lousisiana widlife and wetlands during these troubling times.

*The Language of Conservation is an initiative of Poets House in partnership with the Audubon Nature Institute, the New Orleans Public Library and a consortium of zoos and libraries nationwide. It is made possible by a National Leadership Grant for the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

§ On Sunday August 1 at The Maple Leaf Poet Laurie Williams reads from her work, followed by an open mike.

§ Authors and photographers including Elizabeth Kleinveld, Tom Varisco and John Biguenet, sign the photo and essay book Before During After, at 6 p.m. Saturday July 31, Octavia Books, 513 Octavia St.

§ August 26th. Watch this space. Save the date. You won’t be disappointed.

Yes it’s summertime and the living is easy which is to say miserably hot and as my earlier one line post suggests, don’t out of the shade grasshopper unless there is cold beer involved. Sensible people, including writers, begin to dream of San Francisco or the coast of Maine. They don’t imagine hauling themselves down into the swampy funk of New Orleans, however writerly and romantic. So, what is there to do? Crib something from the Internet or pull out another dripping amber bottle and crawl back into the shade with a good book.

Or maybe a stack of them, as Doug Bruns writing over at The Millions did. (What did writers do when they couldn’t write, before the Internet gave us the cheap link trick? Go out and get drunk or laid or something. While I’m sitting here reading essays. Which leads us to Brun’s quote:)

I am a reader first. If I were an addict, I would get high and while high, presumably, worry about where I was to get my next fix. Reading is not all that different, I think. As a reader, I am always looking over the binding thinking about the next read, in some instances, longing for it. Some books, like some highs, are better than others. But even with not-so-good books–and there where two this past year I did not see to completion–I will come back to the drug, seeking the next high. I will always be a reader. Of this I am certain.

My colleague on a book project (watch this space) told me I should take last night off from edits and answering a contributor’s email. I replied by text message that unless there was a line a coke waiting for me inside there was no chance I would tackle either task. Bad, she quickly SMSed back. Yes, I told her, I would much rather nod. By which, of course, I meant collapse back onto the couch with a book.

§ How about some Emily Every Day? The internet is almost as strange in its interconnection as New Orleans. I found this via a local neighborhood group mailing list linking to a story in the local newspaper home and garden section, about a writer I didn’t know lived in the hood and her writing porch. Which I now covet, but would repaint.

§ At the Maple Leaf, poet Joseph Makkos reads from and signs new poetry chapbooks.

§ You don’t have to go to big box Metairie or a Sam’s Club or Books-a-Million to see Drew Brees and get a copy of the New Orleans Saints quarterback book Coming Back Stronger: Unleashing the Hidden Power of Adversity, but you will need an advanced ticket to see him in the intimate space of Octavia Books, 513 Octavia St., 1 p.m. Monday. Call quick: 899-7323.

§ I missed out on Macbeth, but I’m not going to miss The Tempest as part of the Tulane University summer theatre series. Details here.

The chemo claimed her hair months ago, but it was only tonight that I saw clearly how much my mother looks like her father, A.J. as I last remember him, in some nursing or hospital bed before he died, as if somewhere inside I lapsed into past tense, that even as she lay in the hospital bed I placed her among the passed. My aunt and older sisters tell me she looks like Aunt Tee at the end of her life, but I don’t remember Aunt Tee. When she was passing I was too young to be taken to visit the dying. I only remember my grandfather.

In my mother’s sepsis dementia she keeps raising her head from the pillow, looking at me and turning away, putting her head back on the pillow and closing her eyes. I leave my hat on so she might recognize me. The last truly lucid thing she said Saturday, as we stood in the ER hallway waiting for her papers, was: ‘I might need one of your hats to cover up my bald head…” and the rest was lost in the noise of the jostling nurses station and her increasing difficulty speaking. I don’t know if she turns away now because she recognizes me and does not wish to us to be here like this, or if she wakes every half minute and sees the hospital room and lays her head down hoping to see something else, or if she turns away from the ghost of her husband haunting my face, unready to go yet.

She cannot speak, so I cannot know.

She had a brief recovery on Tuesday, greeting her brother-in-law (but not her sister or my middle sister) when they all entered the room. Based on the positive reports of some improvement, I relented to my wife’s desire to let the children come see her. Although she had about worn herself out with visitors and was lapsing back into twilight when they arrived, she managed to tell the nurse, “these are my grandchildren.” I had resisted their visit, wanting them to keep their living memories of their grandmother/ I was glad they were able to see her while she was responsive and recognized them, while she could graciously accept a dutiful kiss on her bald head.

By the time I arrived that night, she was again unresponsive.

My sister thinks she does not recognize us when she opens her eyes but I think she does, or at least manages to recognize a familiar voice. The Dominican nun who lives across the hall in mother’s apartment building came by to visit the other night. My mother is a Dominican girl through and through, educated by Dominican’s her entire life: St. Anthony Grammar School, Dominican High School and College, and she spent her life an officer of her college alumnae association. She and her Dominican friends would visit the remaining sisters from the college in their retirement home across the lake. As Sister Jamie speaks to her, mother stretches herself as if to sit up and opens her eyes wide, but she cannot reply.

In her macular degeneration blindness compounded by dementia she likely cannot see well enough to recognize us except by voice. My eldest sister thinks she lifts her head and turns to look not at us but at the window, in her near blindness to look toward the one thing she can most likely see, the light she can just make out pouring in the window. And perhaps that is what she wants, what she is waiting for: the light.

I just noticed last Saturday morning that Books is no longer listed on the NOLA.COM site under More New Orleans Entertainment. There is, however, a link for MTV’s Real World New Orleans. Books is a listing on the Times-Picayune web site. However, the Books link under Living on the T-P home page brings you to an empty page. I feel a haiku coming on, so before that happens I think instead it may be time to remove the hyphen from my preferred acronym for the paper. If anyone can recommend a comprehensive site where I can subscribe to the Sunday funnies on line, let me know. It’s not like we have a lot of fish to wrap down here lately.

Oh, here is the listing for Events under Books.”Sky without color/the blank page a branch without/leaves. Write a haiku.: (OK, that sucked. Don’t make me read it twice). So if you want your listings out there you had best send them to me. Look what happened when I actually acknowledged in this space that there is a (chain, big box) bookstore in Metairie last week. If I had known he was bringing donuts, I would have led with him.

§ I was pleased last week when the second stop at my daughter’s Loyola University of New Orleans orientation was a table where she was handed a hardback copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, which is required reading for all incoming first year students. What can I say except: two Ignatii for the price of one, even if it’s costing me a thousand a page. So far she’s not entirely impressed with Ignatius Riley, whom she finds “annoying”. If I were a cute 18-year old coed from Generation Whatever-We’re-Up-To-Now (I think we’re out of letters) and Ignatius Riley came up to me on the street, I would probably put my hand on the pepper spray and cross the street.

§ The Black Flood. I’m not exactly inundated with contributors, which I guess is a good thing given my available time. I do need to get around to writing a couple of polite declines for submissions. This should be easy, as I am quite familiar with the genre, but it’s going to be hard to send the first one.

§ 17 Poets! is dark Thursday, and the Maple Leaf is an open mike. Last Sunday the Maple Leaf crowd had a visit from H.R. “Stoney” Stoneback and bought his fascinating Hurricane Hymn. Stoney is a songwriter, educator and poet who lived in Nashville for years, and his Hurricane Hymn mingles “Hymns,” some from the classical protestant cannon and some from Bob Dylan, The Band, Johnny Cash, etc. Another tells the story of his songwriter neighbor, who would frequently bother him for ideas. While studying for his PhD Orals he hold the guy to scat and “go read some Faulkner; go read some Fitzgerald” and the result was the song Delta Dawn. Hurricane Hymn is highly recommended for anyone who (like me) has been filling a book shelf with Katrina books. You can get it from Codhill Press.

§ OK, I’m not crazy about Chris Rose but this upcoming book (featured at the Octavia Book Store on Saturday, 7/16 at 6 p.m. caught my eye: ONE BLOCK: A New Orleans Neighborhood rebuilds – Photographer Dave Anderson (text by Chris Rose). And on Saturday 7/31 Octavia will host BEFORE DURING AFTER: Louisiana Photographers’ Visual Reactions to Hurricane Katrina. Both of these sound like coffee table sized (and priced) books, so I’m going to have to think hard about both, but I know I’m going to be picking these up and sorely tempted to leave with a copy of one or both.