Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

Thinking Man’s Spam May 17, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Fortin Street, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Fellini, La Dolce Vita, Spam
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Why, oh, why is this the most attractive post in five years for comment spammers?

Fellini’s beached monster November 16, 2007
Posted by Mark Folse in Debrisville, New Orelans, New Orleans, NOLA, Rebirth, Recovery, Remember, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Dante, Divine Comedy, Fellini, film, La Dolce Vita, New Orleans, NOLA

Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weighs on me. Peace frightens me. Perhaps I fear it most of all. I feel it’s only a facade, hiding the face of hell. I think of what’s in store for my children tomorrow; “The world will be wonderful”, they say; but from whose viewpoint? We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art; in a state of enchantment… detached. Detached.

— Divine Comedy The Certainty of Chance Lyrics
as a speech by Steiner in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita

No, I am not about to violently snap, like Steiner in La Dolce Vita. The speech always struck my differently, perhaps the way it struck Marcello in the film before the tragic murder-suicide, not as advice but as a framing for a life in a seemingly pointless universe. Isn’t that the way Marcello chooses to live in the end, almost in a state of suspended animation?

I have always found a strange sort of solace in what others might find depressing. I do not seek the peace which passeth understanding, except perhaps in despair as one might seek solace in drink or in death. Satori seems tempting, but strikes me as ultimately dehumanizing. I am not ready to surrender up my self and my suffering for an empty bliss. Instead I need to learn to survive in this world where the first noble truth is inscribed like scar tissue somewhere deep beneath the skin.

Here in the original land of misfit toys we call New Orleans we need to find the truth hidden in Dante’s speech as filtered through Fellini’s Steiner, not as Marcello did by embracing the emptiness but in our own way; not precisely in a state of suspended animation but instead isolated from the sterility of late American culture; by defining our own space, “like a work of art; in a state of enchantment…. detached”; defining our own fourth noble truth, our own Way of celebrating through the darkness that leads us to the light; leads us not to Fellini’s monster on the beach, but to the innocence of the girl on the strand.

We must not detach from our world, but from theirs, must insistently be ourselves at whatever cost.

Soul Survivor May 17, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Dalai Lama
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Today, whether you are listening to the Dali Lama or watching a live stream or you can’t or won’t or think you could care less, are a professed atheist, as a New Orleanian, as a citizen of a troubled country embroiled in killing fields at home and abroad, you must read Rodger Kamenetz amazing talk given at Temple Sinai in New Orleans on May 9, 2013.

The Crows Come Home May 16, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Crow, cryptic envelopment, Fortin Street, Toulouse Street.
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The crowds are long gone, and the end of the noisy disassembly of the tents is almost done. The neighborhood crows who roost somewhere back around Maurepas Street, are once again calling in the morning although I have not spotted one yet. You would think the garbage feast of Jazz Fest would be a prime time of year for the Fortin Street crows but every year they leave for some spot unknown. Perhaps it was not just the distraction and exhaustion of living across from carnival for two weeks but also their absence which has kept me from writing much, here or elsewhere.

Welcome home, brothers. I have stories for you.

“13 Crows”

13.
Black sinner that I am,
lay me out
naked as I came.
Let them feed
& I’ll fly away
laughing.

Odd Words May 16, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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& Gambit newspaper is hosting an Adult Spelling Bee Thursday May 16 at 7 p.m. at The Rusty Nail, hosted by Gus Kattengul, Gambit sports writer. $5 cover and 20% of the bar take will go to the winning charities. (Go Team English from UNO!).

& 17 Poets! features three readers this evening at 8 p.m.: Mel Coyle, Quo Vadis Breaux, and Asali DeVan followed by the open mic. Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine St. Coyle is from Chicago and other places where the corn grows. She co-edits the journal TENDE RLOIN and curates ColdCuts, a fabulous reading series in New Orleans. Some say she looks like an elf. The chapbook OPERA TRANS OPERA written with Jenn Marie Nunes is now available through aliceblue. Breaux has published poetry, essays and creative non-fiction in a number of anthologies. She is the Executive Director of the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal where she works with volunteers dedicated to recovering New Orleans. She and her husband live in New Orleans. They have four sons. Ecclesiastes is a mother, wife, daughter, educator, event producer, spoken word artist, and community servant. She has presented her brand of “activist poetry” on stages and in classrooms across the country, and is a highly sought speaker on community development issues. In addition to authoring the Essence Empowerment Seminars, she coordinates the Congo Square African Marketplace, has taught spoken word, social justice, and service learning at Tulane University, and co-founded the Akoben Words-In-Action Festival and is Executive Producer of the Tremé 200 Festival.

& Also on Thursday evening at 5:30 p.m. Garden District Book Shop features Jill McCorkle’s new novel Life After Life. McCorkle’s first novel in seventeen years is alive with the daily triumphs and challenges of the residents and staff of Pine Haven Estates, a retirement facility now home to a good many of Fulton, North Carolina’s older citizens.

& Tonight at the East Jefferson Parish Regional Library, author night hosts N. S. Patrick’s <em<The Mysteries of Jack the Ripper. Patrick is a native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He attended Albion College and obtained a BA in Business Administration. He served as an officer in the U. S. Navy from 1962 to 1969. He lives in Kenner, Louisiana.

& On Friday, May 17 Garden District presents Nell Dickerson’s Porch Dogs, with the LSPCA with adoptable dogs and a Doggy Kissing Booth. Porch Dogs combines fine-art portraits of man’s best friend with beautiful architectural documentation of the Southern porch. Dickerson fondly recalls childhood nights on the sleeping porch of her grandparents’ Mississippi Delta home the sounds of katydids, cicadas, and tree frogs, the merciful breeze from the overhead fan. But during the heat of the day, the family sought refuge indoors, leaving the dog to his lonely vigil. “I felt like he understood that the porch was the gateway between inside and outside and that it was his duty to keep sentry there in case someone wanted to pass,” she recalls.

& McKoewn’s Books and Difficult Music hosts An Evening of Art and Emerging Writers Saturday hosted by Thaddeus Conti and featuring Jamie Chiarello, Caroline Rash, Adam O’Connor, Jacob Dilson, Kerry Leigh and Jonathan Milan Walters. Drawings by Thaddeus Conti will be displayed in the manner of Tibetan prayer flags. 7 p.m.

& On Saturday Maple Street Book Shop Uptown hosts Science fiction writer Brandon Sanderson, author of A Memory of Light, the final book in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, will be signing (and numbering) his new young adult novel, The Rithmatist, on May 18th from 1 ‘til 3pm at our Uptown shop. The first 50 people in attendance will receive a Rithmatist bag complete with chalk and instructions for making Rithmatist chalkings!

& Celebrate Children’s Book Week with Octavia Books Saturday, May 18 at 11 a.m. when artist/author Alex Beard comes to tell stories from and sign his three wonderful books, CROCODILE’S TEARS, MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DRAW, and THE JUNGLE GRAPEVINE. CROCODILE’S TEARS tells the story of a rhino and a tickbird and the endangered animals they encounter on a journey to discover why crocodile is crying. This funny and cautionary tale has been heralded by Kirkus Review as, “…ecological storytelling at it’s finest!” MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DRAW tells the story of a troop of monkeys and an elephant who learn to paint and draw with their hands and feet in a tale about confronting fears and the discovery of creative expression. THE JUNGLE GRAPEVINE tells the story of eight African animals who learn about the dangers of rumors through an outrageous game of telephone. Octavia Books has been selected as an official event host site for the 94th annual celebration of Children’s Book Week, May 13-19 in 2013! The longest-running national literacy initiative, Children’s Book Week is celebrated yearly in schools, libraries, bookstores, and homes across the country.

& On Saturday the Old Metairie Branch of the Jefferson Parish Library hosts the Greater New Orleans Chapter of LA Poetry Society for a reading workshop from 2-4 p.m. in the meeting room

& Sunday May 19th at 2 p.m. Garden District Book Shops features Peggy Frankland with Susan Tucker and their book Women Pioneers of Louisiana Environmental Movement. This book provides a window into the passion and significance of thirty-eight committed individuals who led a grassroots movement in a socially conservative state. The book is comprised of oral history narratives in which women activists share their motivation, struggles, accomplishments, and hard-won wisdom. Additionally interviews with eight men, all leaders who worked with or against the women, provide more insight into this rich–and also gendered–history.

& Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Collumns Hotel Chris Champagne, author of The Yat Dictionary and a poetic and comedic satirist par excellence hosts his Ray Nagin Going Away Party. ” $15-info 504 330 9117

& The MelaNated Writers Collective hosts the last in their series of Sunday Shorts readings featuring MWC’s Danielle Gilyot and Pdeauxdungue Writers group’s Tad Bartlett. 8 p.m. at the Red Star Gallery on Bayou Road.

& The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. Spoken Word artists perform as a resident artists paints the crowd and performers. At 6 p.m. at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street. No longer at the Bayou Road location.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& Monday evening the East Bank Regional Library in Metairie hosts The Fiction Writers’ Group with featured guest author Tony Fennelly. This is a support group for serious writers of fiction. We do not focus on poetry, essays or nonfiction. Events consist of critique sessions from group members, author talks and writing exercises. Free of charge and open to the public. Registration is not required. 7-9 p.m.

& The New Orleans Haiku Society holds its monthly meeting at the Latter Memorial Library at 6 p.m.

& Susan Larson, the former book editor of the former Times-Picayune newspaper and member of the National Book Critics Circle hosts The Reading Life on WWNO (89.9 FM) on Tuesdays at 1:30 p.m. She features interviews with authors of local and national interest.

& At Cafe Istanbul poet, satirist and author of The Yat Dictionary Chris Champagne will unleash his poetical wit at 8 p.m., no cover but donations accepted. Satirical wit in poetry hasn’t been this much fun since Juvenal and Horace got in that nasty bar fight or, if you find that too obscured: If this were anywhere else than nominal democracy Champagne would be wasting away in a gulag where the leading cause of death would be hysterical laughter.

& Tuesday at Octavia Books at 6 p.m. Bill Loehfelm will be signing his newest novel, The Devil in Her Way, at our Healing Center shop at 6:30 p.m. When Maureen Coughlin first appeared in The Devil She Knows (2011), the New Orleans Times-Picayune called her “unforgettable” and “the character of the year.” Booklist named The Devil She Knows one of 2011’s ten best thrillers and declared Maureen “as compelling a character as this reviewer expects to see this year.” Now she’s back in Bill Loehfelm’s new thriller, The Devil in Her Way, and her life has changed in more ways than one: She’s starting over in New Orleans as a newly minted member of the police force.

& Every Tuesday at 6 p.m. the Barnes & Noble West Bank hosts Westbank Writers’ Group. Every is welcome, from novices to serious authors. Join us for inspiration, friendly critiques, or just to connect with other local writers.

& Starting this Tuesday the New Orleans Public Library Martin Luther King Branch hosts ReWrite: A Writing Workshop. ReWrite is a writing workshop led by Zuri McCormick for ages 18 and up. May 21, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Beginning in June, 1st Friday of each month, 2 – 4 p.m. and 3rd Tuesday of each month, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.

& Also from NOPL on Tuesday, the Hubbell Branch in Algiers hosts an author night with Poppy Tooker discusses Mme. Begue’s Recipes of Old New Orleans Creole Cookery at 6 p.m.

& Also on Tuesday the East Jefferson Regional Library hosts an Author Talk! with Ed Branley, Legendary Locals of New Orleans. Branley is a prolific chronicler of historic New Orleans, with prior titles on the history of K&B Drugstore, D.H. Holmes and other New Orleans institutions.

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m

Let It May 11, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Dancing Bear, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Beatles, rain
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Having established a stable orbit and allowing for the radio delay from Saturn, we resume our old habit of Radio Free Toulouse Street.

Odd Words May 9, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, Indie Book Shops, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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This week’s featured event is the first public reading of Jimmy Ross’s long-awaited collection Say What! by Lavendar Ink Press. The komusō-locked Crazy Uncle of the New Orleans literary family, who can pull an amazing tale from behind your year like a miraculous piece of favorite candy, will appear at a salon hosted Wednesday, May 15 by poet-hostess Jenna Mae. Ross is a story teller par excelence, Hotei poet, actor, baby-sitter of poor poets’ children and long-standing host of the open mic at 17 Poets! Details of time and place below in the listings.

Tomorrow is the last day for New Orleans students to enter the Latter Memorial Library’s Bad Poetry Contest. Prizes for the best of the worst entries include gift cards to local book stores and a new journal to fill with good poetry. There will be a public reading featuring the winners Thursday, May 16th at 6PM at Latter Library (5120 St. Charles Avenue). Refreshments and snacks will be served!

& Tonight (Thursday, May 9) Garden District Books features Jean Morgan Meaux: In Pursuit of Alaska: An Anthology of Travelers’ Tales 1879-1909 at 5:30 p.m. This collection of Alaskan adventures begins with a newspaper article written by John Muir during his first visit to Alaska in 1879, when the sole U.S. government representative in all the territory’s 586,412 square miles was a lone customs official in Sitka. It closes with accounts of the gold rush and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Jean Meaux has gathered a superb collection of articles and stories that captivated American readers when they were first published and that will continue to entertain us today. The authors range from Charles Hallock (the founder of Forest and Stream, a precursor of Field and Stream) to New York society woman Mary Hitchcock, who traveled with china, silver, and a 2,800 square foot tent. After explorer Henry Allen wore out his boots, he marched barefoot as he continued mapping the Tanana River, and Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck mushed by dog sled in Arctic winters across a territory encompassing 250,000 miles of the northern interior.

& Join Room 220 for a Happy Hour Salon featuring readings by three exciting and celebrated novelists—Rachel Kushner, Nathaniel Rich, and Zachary Lazar—from 6 – 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.). Kushner, who will be visiting from Los Angeles, and New Orleans-based Rich both have new novels out that have been greeted with great critical acclaim. Lazar, a Tulane professor and author, has recently finished a new novel, and we look forward to (hopefully) hearing an excerpt from it at the event. Maple Street Bookshop will be on hand with the authors’ books for sale.

& Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in The Lotus, will give a talk “What I Learned About Judaism from the Dalai Lama” in honor of the Dalai Lama’s upcoming visit to New Orleans. Event at Temple Sinai Reform Congregation, 6227 Saint Charles Ave, is free and open to the public.

& Tonight 17 Poets! features Chris Champagne and Bryan Spitzfaden . Champagne is a satirical poet, comedian and the author of The YAT Dictionary.

& Octavia Books hosts a startling new version of the children’s classic The Itsy Bitsy Spider by renowned children’s picture book author and illustrator Rebecca Emberley. “Here is a gorgeous retelling by Rebecca and her Caldacott Medal- winning father, Ed Emberley, of the classic tale of a spider climbing up the water-spout. Using their unique collage artwork, the Emberleys’ vision breathes new life and brilliant color into this toddler favorite. This is not your grandmother’s spider!” No indeed it is not. If this were a Miyazaki file I would have that uneasy feeling when the spider on this cover first appeared even though its jeweled body suggested goodness.

& Saturday’s Story Time with Miss Maureen at Garden District Books Uptown will feature Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion at 11:30 a.m.

& The Studio in the Woods will host its annual FORESTival featuring resident artists exhibitions and performance on Saturday from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm, 13401 Patterson Road (essentially the very end of the Algiers River Road). Artist presentations including: Sarah Quintana & Co. singing original compositions from The Delta Demitasse series Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots Choreographer Monique Moss will reprise Katrina Cranes Secondline with Nina Nichols‘ giant puppet and the Panorama Duo with Ben Schenck, clarinet, and Boyanna Trayanova, snare drum Adventures in clay with Jane Hill Triple B’s: Berhman Brass Band Tshirts designed by Pippin Frisbie-Calder and silkscreened live with Ben Fox-McCord from Press Street/Antenna Gallery Jewelry for sale by Georgette Fortino Art activities in the Kids’ Creative Corner Tours of the woods with botanist David Baker Food and drink for purchase Tours of the founders’ home with Joe & Lucianne Carmichael

& On Saturday Garden District Book Shop Hosts Jackson Galaxy’s Cat Daddy: What the World’s Most Incorrigible Cat Taught Me About Life, Love, and Coming Clean at 2 p.m. In this book, Galaxy tells the poignant story of his thirteen-year relationship with a petite gray-and-white short-haired cat named Benny, and gives singular advice for living with, caring for, and loving the feline in your home. When Benny arrived in his life, Galaxy was a down-and-out rock musician with not too much more going on than a part-time job at an animal shelter and a drug problem. Benny’s previous owner brought the cat to the shelter in a cardboard box to give him up. Benny had seen better days —- his pelvis had just been shattered by the wheels of a car — and his owner insisted he’d been “unbondable” from day one. Nothing could have been further from the truth. An inspiring account of two broken beings who fixed each other, Cat Daddy is laced throughout with Galaxy’s amazing “Cat Mojo” advice for understanding what cats need most from us humans in order to live happier, healthier lives.

& The Peauxdunque Writers Alliance continues its Sunday Shorts reading series, this week featuring Terri Stoor along with Jeri Hilt! Doors open at the Red Star Galerie (2513 Bayou Road) at 8 p.m., with readings starting at 8:30.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& Monday evening the East Bank Regional Library in Metairie hosts The Fiction Writers’ Group. This is a support group for serious writers of fiction. We do not focus on poetry, essays or nonfiction. Events consist of critique sessions from group members, author talks and writing exercises. Free of charge and open to the public. Registration is not required. 7-9 p.m.

& Tuesday at Maple Street Book Shop at The Healing Center Bill Loehfelm will be signing his newest novel, The Devil in Her Way, at our Healing Center shop at 6:30 p.m. When Maureen Coughlin first appeared in The Devil She Knows (2011), the New Orleans Times-Picayune called her “unforgettable” and “the character of the year.” Booklist named The Devil She Knows one of 2011’s ten best thrillers and declared Maureen “as compelling a character as this reviewer expects to see this year.” Now she’s back in Bill Loehfelm’s new thriller, The Devil in Her Way, and her life has changed in more ways than one: She’s starting over in New Orleans as a newly minted member of the police force.

& Tuesday evening brings Don Paul’s Poetry Ball 5 at the Cafe Istanbul at 8 p.m., featuring Asam Devan Ecclesiastes, Asia Raniey, Daniel Remhold, and special guest Lee Grue, followed by an open mic.

& Garden District will feature the UNO Press edition of Black and White on the Rocks by Rick Barton, the Creative Writing Workshop’s beloved director at 5:30 p.m. Black and White on the Rocks is a captivating tale set in the charming architecture of New Orleans. Michael Barnett drives the turns of this novel through greed ruled corruption, racial prejudice, friendship, and convoluted schemes. Barton has wrapped this story of bribery and redemption within the warmth of a loving marriage, offering sweet reprieve when life reveals its troublesome secrets that boil for release.

Fredrick Barton is the author of the novels The El Cholo Feeling Passes, Courting Pandemonium, Rowing to Sweden, and A House Divided, which won the William Faulkner Prize in fiction.

& Wednesday, May 15 Jenna Mae will host a salon at 7:30 p.m. celebrating the release of Jimmy Ross’ new collection from Lavender Ink: Say What! (http://www.lavenderink.org/content/link-titles/161) The thin, dreadlocked Ross–story teller par excelence, komusō poet, actor, baby-sitter of poor poets’ children and long-standing host of the open mic at 17 Poets! is ter beloved Crazy Uncle of the New Orleans literary family, who can pull an amazing tale from behind your year like a miraculous piece of favorite candy. The evening will feature readings by Megan Burns, Desiree Dallagiacomo, and signing and reading by Jimmy Ross. Art by Jim Tascio and Ozone. Jimmy Ross’ famous baklava and other goodies. BYOB or by donation.

& On Wednesday the NOPL will present An Evening of Codes, Symbols, and Secrets. The #1 international bestselling author Dan Brown will be streamed live and shown at the Algiers Regional Branch at 6:30 p.m. as he speaks about his new novel Inferno plus a range of topics including science, religion, codes, book publishing, movie making, and a few surprise topics. This will be Dan Brown’s only public U.S. appearance. Streamed Live from Lincoln Center.

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m

Next Thursday May 16 at 7 p.m. come support UNO’s Team English in Gambit Weekly’s Adult Spelling Contest at The Rusty Nail, hosted by Gus Kattengul, Gambit sports writer. Competing for student scholarships for the UNO English Department, MA Rich Goode will try and best 19 other spelling bee contestants. Prizes will not only go to the winner of the contest, but also to the speller who brings the most supporters, so it’s important that Team English turns out. Please feel free to invite your friends to this event! $5 cover and 20% of the bar take will go to the winning charities.

W.A.S.T.E May 8, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Odd, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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P.I.P

Odd Words May 2, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, reading, signings, Toulouse Street.
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Singer and author Patti Smith’s book signing at the Jazz Fest Book Tent today is cancelled, changed to a one-hour signing appearance at Garden District Book Shop from 2-3 p.m. The notice from The New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers says the event prior to her appearance at the book tent prior to her performance at the festival today was “has been cancelled by Jazz Fest.” Calls to the Festival headquarters were routed to voicemail. Smith was originally scheduled to sign her book about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe Just Kids. If you see this before you get to the festival, please don’t complain to the volunteers who staff the book tent, which benefits children’s literacy programs.

Thankfully, with Jazz Fest going full swing and authors all at the Book Tent, this will be a short list. That means I get set up my Blues Tent-front stoop, fill the coffee mug and just start to watch the world go by.

& so onto the other listings…

Local romance author Farrah Rochon is giving away a Kindle to celebrate her birthday and the release of her newest book Delectable Desire. You just have to like her page through this link to enter.

& Here is the rest of Thursday’s line up at the Jazz Fest Book Tent: Ron Thibodeaux, 12-1PM, Uell or High Water: How Cajun Fortitude Withstood Hurricans Rita and Ike; John Swenson, 1-2PM, New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans; Ben Sandmel, 2-3PM, Ernie K-Doe; Lorin Gaudin, 3-4PM, New Orleans Chef’s Table; Jay Mazza, 5:30-6PM, Up Front and Center.

& Tonight 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series presents an evening celebrating the works of artists, writers and poets from publications of Trembling Pillow Press; readings by poets John Sinclair, Lee Meitzen Grue, Valentine Pierce, Herbert Kearney, Geoff Munsterman, Bill Lavender, Dave Brinks et al @ Goldmine Saloon (701 Dauphine Street in the French Quarter) at 7:30p.m. Featured program followed directly by Open Mic hosted by Jimmy Ross. There is no way I could squeeze the vitae of this amazing line up into a single column and there is not separate post with all the details. Let’s just say this is a night not to be missed featuring the very best of New Orleans poetry.

& Octavia Books will host a children’s book event at 4:30 p.m. today featuring Tad Hills’ GOOSE NEEDS A HUG and HOW ROCKET LEARNED TO READ.

& Every Thursday the Norman Meyer Branch Library hosts a teen writing workshop led by teens upstairs in the teen area. Encouraging creative arts exploration through reading, engaging discussions, and group activities. Youth ages 12-17 are invited! Group limited to 15 participants. Call the Branch to reserve a space.

& Friday evening at 6:30 p.m. Octavia books presents an evening with Augusten Burroughs, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Running With Scissors, to present and sign THIS IS HOW, his groundbreaking book that explores how to survive what you think you can’t. I think this ought to launch some fascinating conversations with Katrina survivors.

& Here is the rest of the Jazz Fest Book Tent author line up:

On Friday: Chris Champagne, 12-1PM, Yat Dictionary; Cornell Landry, 1-2PM, The Adventures of a Mardi Gras Bead Dog; Bill Loehfelm, 3-4PM, Devil in Her Way.

On Saturday: Ken Foster, 1-2PM. I’m A Good Dog; Tom Piazza, 2-3PM, Southern Journey Of Alan Lomax; Keith Spera, 3-4PM, Groove Interrupted; Elianna Casa, 4-5PM, Cool Kids Cook; Diane de Las Casas, 5-6PM, The Little “Read” Hen.

On Sunday: Kevin Bozant, 1-2PM, Quaint Essential New Orleans; David Spielman, 2-3PM, When Not Performing; WWOZ, 4-5PM, That Sounds Good; Earl Hampton, 5-6PM, Streetcar Guide to New Orleans.

And then you can stop and buy a copy of Coloring Book for the Criminally Insane, A Howling in the Wires or Carry Me Home at the Fortin Street Stage, 3000 block of Fortin between the Sauvage and Mystery Street gates. All proceeds from these sales go toward help some folks start a new small press.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& Monday the Black Widows Salon at Crescent City Books welcomes Lawrence Powell and Rich Campanella. The Tulane historian and the geographer, both award winning, will be discussing their work and New Orleans. This is not a lecture but a salon in which attendees are invited to participate. 7-9 p.m. Seating is limited, so we suggest you email books@crescentcitybooks.com to reserve.

& On Tuesday at 6:30 pm Octavia hosts a discussion and book signing with Wenonah Hauter featuring her provocative new book, FOODOPOLY: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, an exposé of how agribusiness and food corporations are undermining a healthy food system—and how voting with your fork will not solve the problem.

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m.

Th-th-th-that’s all folks. If I make it to Garden District I’ll let you know what the crowds are like and get a snap of Odd Words with Ms. Smith if it kills me.

At five in the afternoon May 1, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Beckett, Godot
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Spectator: “He’s not coming.”
Toni: “What?”
Spectator: “The man. He’s not coming.”
— from the Godot episode of Treme

Yes it’s a Beckett sort of afternoon: the gray threat of rain, the interminable diesels idling across the street, my best chance of distraction a call from a lawyer. Where would the savor of happiness or pleasure be without their absence?

Odd Words April 25, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, reading, signings, Toulouse Street.
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The Gulf South Booksellers Assocation once again hosts the Jazz Fest Book Tent, so here’s the first weekend’s lineup of visiting writers signing their books. The Book Tent is a project of the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association (NOGSBA). NOGSBA is comprised of the local independent book stores and publishers. NOGSBA has run the book tent for 25+ years, with all proceeds benefiting local children’s literacy. Here’s one impulse purchase you know you’re going to make anyway (well, and that one in the music tent, and probably that metal wall hanging you’re going to wish you’d had shipped by the last set of the day).

Friday:
Phil Sandusky 12-1PM New Orleans: Impressionist Cityscapes
Elsa Hahne 2-3PM The Gravy
Denise McConduit 3-4PM DJ Books

Saturday

Sally Newhart 12-1PM Original Tuxedo Jazz Band
Tom Piazza 1-2PM Southern Journey of Alan Lomax
David Spielman 2-3PM When Not Performing
Poppy Tooker 3-4PM Mme. Begue’s Recipes of Old New Orleans Creole Cookery
Christi Rice & Megan Nolan 4-5PM When The Lights Went Out In The City
Edward Branley 5-6PM Legendary Locals of New Orleans

Sunday
Allison Vines-Rushing & Slade Rushing 12-1PM Southern Comfort Cookbook
Deb Shriver 1-2PM In the Spirit of New Orleans
Johnette Downing 2-3PM How to Dress a Po-Boy
John McCusker 3-4PM Creole Trombone
Neighborhood Story Project 5-6PM Straight Outta Swampton

Next Thursday
Ron Thibodeaux 12-1PM Hell or High Water: How Cajun Fortitude Withstood Hurricanes Rita and Ike
John Swenson 1-2PM New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans
Ben Sandmel 2-3PM Ernie K-Doe
Lorin Gaudin 3-4PM New Orleans Chef’s Table
Jay Mazza 5:30-6PM Up Front and Center

& Thursday evening the Alvar Library hosts the first in a series of spring poetry readings at 7 p.m. featuring Nik DeDominic, Brett Evans, Gina Ferrara, and Kay Murphy. Thursday is always a busy day for the NOPL, so check out the full calendar of events here.

& 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series presents two extraordinary poets this Thursday, BILL ZAVATSKY and MICHAEL TOD EDGERTON, at Gold Mine Saloon in New Orleans, 701 Dauphine Street in the French Quarter, on Thursday, April 25 @ 7:30. Open Mic hosted by Jimmy Ross follows the featured program. Born in 1943 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Zavatsky worked as a pianist from the age of fifteen to twenty-five and studied music at the New School. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Columbia University.With Zack Rogow, he co-translated Earthlight: Poems of André Breton (Sun & Moon Press, 1993), which won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Zavatsky also co-translated The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth, by Valery Larbaud, with Ron Padgett. He is the author of Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose Press, 2006); For Steve Royal and Other Poems (Coalition of Publishers for Employment, 1985); Theories of Rain and Other Poems (1975). Edgerton’s newest collection from Lavender Ink is Vitreous Hide. His poems have been published in the Boston Review, Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Sonora Review, Word For/Word, and other journals.

& Also this evening Wil Tustin will be signing Ambushed at Maple Street Book Shops’s Healing Center shop at 6:30 p.m. Ambushed is his first novel and is a culmination of over twenty years of research and teaching. It is historical fiction and a first person account of Paul the Apostle’s life.

& The Jefferson Parish East Bank Regional Library will host Poetry Event! An Evening with Melinda Palacio this evening at 7 p.m. Palacio grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans. She also writes a Friday column for La Bloga.com. She is a 2007 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellow and has published a novel and a book of poetry.

& Saturday’s Story Time with Miss Maureen will feature The Magic Rabbit by Annette LeBlanc Cate for the stroller roller set.

& Saturday the Barnes & Noble in Metairie will hosts Todd-Michael St. Pierre w signing his local cookbook, Taste of Treme, at 1 p.m.

&The Melanated Writers Collective new The Sunday Shorts Reading Series starts this Sunday, April 28, at Red Star Galerie at 2513 Bayou Road. MelaNated Writing Collective member L. Kasimu Harris kicks off the series with his fine new short story work, and the opening session of the series will be capped off by the hypnotic fiction of Sabrina Canfield.) . Doors open at 8, readings start promptly at 8:30, and will include Q&A with the authors following each reading

& Sunday Xavier University presents The Poetic Vision Tour is a national traveling concert tour that features spiritually infused, inspired music. The PVT believes that music as an art form should not merely instruct but should inspire, not merely educate, but express. The Spring Tour of 2013 features a special musical journey through 800 years of spiritual poetic music, from 13th century Morocco & the tradition of Qasidas to the Qawalli music of Mughal India & modern Pakistan, & finally to the folk music of the United States in the 1050s-1970s & urban hip hop from 1980-present. The event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 in the James and Caroline Duff Banquet Center at Cintas on Xavier’s campus.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& Barnes & Noble in Metairie hosts award-winning actress Diane Ladd for a discussion and signing of her new book, A Bad Afternoon for a Piece of Cake: A Collection of Ten Short Stories Sunday at 2 p.m.

& Meet the Authors Tuesday beginning at 5:30 p. m. at the Cabildo, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society and the Louisiana State Museum join hands to celebrate publication of five new books by New Orleans authors. The event is free and open to the public and, as we are offering free refreshments, we request an advance rsvp to Faulkhouse@aol.com so that we can adequately
prepare. Authors being honored are Debra Shriver, Brenda Marie Osbey, Judy Conner, Sanem Ozdural, and N. S. Patrick.

& This Tuesday Octavia Books hosts the release of New Orleans historian Emily Clark’s new book, ;THE STRANGE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN QUADROON: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World at 6 p.m. Clark’s book, drawing on the rich archives of New Orleans, tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans’s free women of color

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m.

Odd Words April 18, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Toulouse Street.
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World Book Night, the international program of free book distribution to encourage people to read, is next Tuesday, April 23 and Odd Words is again a participant. The problem is, I haven’t figured out the where and how yet. Odd Word’s title is The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Goodreads says “Told in a series of vignettes stunning for their eloquence, this memoir (?) is Sandra Cisneros’s greatly admired story of a young girl’s growing up in the Latino section of Chicago.” And I haven’t read it yet. I’m going to pluck one off the top of the box when I get it Thursday night. If all else fails me, I’ll put my table up on Frenchman Street just outside the Apple Barrel again, which worked well last year.

Today is Bob Kaufman‘s birthday. Go check some poems on PoetryFoundation.org. (Poets.org lists no poems.)

& so to this listings…

& Thursday is a busy day for The New Orleans Public Library. You can view the full week’s events here:

NOPL continues its El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) program with a story time for toddlers featuring Asia at the Hubbell Branch, 10:30-11:30 a.m. This program is a celebration every day of children, families, and reading that culminates yearly on April 30. The celebration emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

NOPL also hosts Create Black Out Poetry at the Latter Branch at 4 p.m. This is a teen poetry/craft celebrating National Poetry Month. We will be reading poetry, making poetry, listening to music, light refreshments and giveaways.
At 5:30 pm the Norman Mayer Branch of NOPL hosts Writing Workshops Led by Youths upstairs in the teen area. Encouraging creative arts exploration through reading, engaging discussions, and group activities. Youth ages 12-17 are invited! Group limited to 15 participants.
At 6:30 p.m. NOPL’s Algiers Branch continues its series Pass the Word Poetry Workshop. “Stand Up, Look Up, Speak Up: How to Present Your Work in Public” presented by Valentine Pierce. Sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc.

Tonight at 6 p.m. Octavia Books hosts a presentation and booksigning with Mary Ann Sternberg celebrating the release of her new book, RIVER ROAD RAMBLER: A Curious Traveler along Louisiana’ s Historic Byway, and the the new edition of her much celebrated ALONG THE RIVER ROAD: Past and Present on Louisiana’s Historic Byway. Sternberg has spent over two decades exploring this historic corridor, uncovering its intriguing and often – under-appreciated places. In River Road Rambler, she presents fifteen sketches about sites along this scenic route. From familiar stops, such as the National Hansen’s Disease Center Museum at Carville and the perique tobacco area of St. James Parish to lesser – known attractions such as Our Lady of Lourdes grotto in the town of Convent and the Colonial Sugars Historic District,

& Thursay at 7:30 p.m. 17 Poets! is in temporary quarters at 828 Lesseps St. in the Bywater this Thursday due to sewage and water construction in the building. Featured are y Kelly Davio, Kit Robinson and Freddi Evans followed by the open mic. Davio is Managing Editor of The Los Angeles Review, Associate Editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal, and a reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. She is a Pushcart nominee whose work has been honored in Best New Poets. Robinson is the author of The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976–2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009), Train I Ride (BookThug, 2009), The Crave (Atelos, 2002) and 16 other books of poetry. Williams Evans is an alumna of Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Mississippi where, as a music major, she began studying traditional African music on a study-travel to the University of Ghana at Accra. Evans is the award-winning author of three historically-based children’s books: A Bus of Our Own (2001), The Battle of New Orleans: the Drummer’s Story (2005), and Hush Harbor:Praying in Secret (2008). Evans latest book, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans, received the 2012 Humanities Book of the Year Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

& Tonight at 9 p.m. at the Shadowbox Theater there will be a whole “Lot o’ Shakespeare”!, the New Orleans Premiere of Tim Mooney’s hit one-man show. One monologue from every Shakespeare play performed entirely at random based on the spin of a Bingo cage! Prizes! Prizes! Prizes! This will be Mooney’s first ever New Orleans appearance… (Not counting the Cat’s Meow!) Four performances, Thurs, 4/18-Sun, 4/21.

& Friday at 5:30 p.m. Rod Dreher discusses and signs her book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming at the Garden District Book Shop. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie’s death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie’s funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher.

Friday night at 6 p.m. Maple Street Book Shop Bayou St. John presents the next installment of The Diane Tapes features [Field][White][Burns] reading from their work. Jared White was born in Boston and lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of the chapbook YELLOWCAKE, published as part of the Narwhal anthology from Cannibal Books in 2009. His recent poems have appeared in Sink Review, Esque, Coconut, Harp & Altar, We Are So Happy To Know Something, and in audiovisual format on the Flying Object web site. He is the co-owner of Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop and the co-curator of Yardmeter Editions. Farrah Field is the author of Rising(Four Way Books, 2009) and the chapbook Parents (Immaculate Disciples Press, 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared in many publications including Sixth Finch, Ploughshares, Harp & Altar, Lit, Typo, La Petite Zine, and Drunken Boat. Two of her poems were selected by Kevin Young for The Best American Poetry 2011. Megan Burns edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has four chapbooks, Frida Kahlo: I am the poem and Framing a Song (Trembling Pillow Press),irrational knowledge (Fell Swoop press) and a city/ bottle boned (Dancing Girl Press).

& Saturday morning for Story Time at Maple Street Book Shop’s Uptown location Miss Maureen will read The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen, retold by Cynthia Rylant, and illustrated by Jen Corace. 11:30 am.

& Saturday at Garden District Book Shop at 1 p.m. Kerry Dunn discusses and signs his book, Joe Peace. Twenty years ago, Joe Peace was an ace homicide investigator for the Austin Police Department, until his penchant for cocaine and a disastrous affair with his partner Cassie buries him at the bottom of the APD’s burnout brigade. When the psychotic founder of the most powerful drug cartel convinces Joe the cash is greener on the other side of the fence, Joe becomes a player in the drug scene, buys a mansion, and collects beautiful coeds like butterflies, but the party ends when new details of Cassie’s death surface, opening wounds long scarred over.

Saturday at Maple Street Book Shop’s Bayou St. John location Christopher Schaberg, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and Critical Theory at Loyola, will be reading and signing his book, The Textual Life of Airports at 6 p.m. . This is a book about airport stories. It is about common narratives of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports—the strange or hidden narratives that do not always fit into standard ideas of these in-between places. Tales of near disaster, endless delays, dramatic weather shifts, a lost bag that suddenly appears-such stories are familiar accounts of a place that seems to thrive on and recycle its own mythologies. You can read an interview with Schaberg at Press Street’s Room 220 blog.

& Sunday from 3-6 p.m. Garden District Book Shop hosts Judy Conner discussing and signing her book, Southern Fried Divorce: The After Party. The shop’s website mentions “free booze and nabs” and I’m not certain what nabs are at a divorce celebration party. No mention if they’ll put the plywood on the pool table for dancing. Her new books brings more true stories of outrageous everyday life in the Big Easy from Judy Conner’s, author of the much-loved bestseller Southern Fried Divorce (which actor John Goodman called “more fun than a box of glue-huffing monkeys on St. Peter and Bourbon”). I might just have to stop by for a nab but watch out for glue-huffing monkeys.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& The Lunch ‘n’ Lit Book Club will meet at the Rosa Keller Library Tuesday, April 23rd, at 12:30 pm to discuss How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations that Made Them by Daniel Wolff.

& Sarah Carr will be discussing and signing her book Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children Wednesday at 6 pm. at Maple Street Book Shop’s Uptown location. Hope Against Hope takes place in a New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, but even more important in journalist Sarah Carr’s story is a highly unnatural disaster: American poverty. Carr’s book takes an intimate look at the real people—students, principals, teachers—affected by “school reform,” a slippery term that means privatization, a weakening of teachers’ unions and elected school boards, and an increasing dependence on testing data.

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m.

& Wednesday night at UNO Elana Bell will read her poetry 8 p.m. at the UNO Fine Arts Gallery (on Harwood Drive, across from the Liberal Arts Building). The reading will be followed by a booksigning and wine and cheese reception. This event is free and open to the public. Elana’s first collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones (LSU Press 2012) is the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets

Sorting Out The Horrors April 16, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Odd, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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don’t come round but if you do . . .

yeah, sure, I’ll be in unless I’m out
don’t know if the lights are out
or you hear voices or then
I might be reading Proust
if someone slips Proust under my door
or one of his bones for my stew,
and I can’t loan money
or the phone
or what’s left of my car
though you can have yesterday’s newspaper
an older shirt or a bologna sandwich
or sleep on the couch
if you don’t scream at night
and you can talk about yourself
that’s only normal;
only I am not trying to raise a family
to send through Harvard
or buy hunting land,
I am not aiming high
I am only trying to keep myself alive
just a little longer,
so if you sometimes knock
and I don’t answer
and there isn’t a woman in here
maybe i have broken my jaw
and am looking for wire
or I am chasing the butterflies in
my wallpaper,
I mean if I don’t answer
I don’t answer, and the reason is
that I am not yet ready to kill you
or love you, or even accept you,
it means I don’t want to talk
i am busy, i am mad, i am glad
or maybe I am stringing up a rope;
so even if the lights are on
and you hear sound
like breathing or praying or singing
a radio or the roll of dice
or typing –
go away, it is not the day
the night, the hour;
it is not the ignorance of impoliteness,
I wish to hurt nothing, not even a bug
but sometimes I gather evidence of a kind
that takes some sorting,
and your blue eyes, be they blue
and your hair, if you have some
or your mind — they cannot enter
until the rope is cut or knotted
or until I have shaven into
new mirrors, until the world is
stopped or opened
forever.

– Charles Bukowski

Over the Horizon April 13, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, quotes, Toulouse Street.
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“Of all the islands he’d visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.”
— Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives

Believe in your work. Launch the raft. Trust the currents. Find your own island.

Odd Words April 11, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, Indie Book Shops, Internet Publishing, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, reading, Toulouse Street.
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Every Thursday Odd Words provides NOLA’s most comprehensive listing of literary, book and library events. Facebook followers please Like! the Odd Words page and hover over the Liked! button and select receive notifications to make sure you don’t miss daily updates. Also, follow @odd_words on Twitter for daily event reminders.

& The New Orleans Public Library is sponsoring El Día de los Niños/El Día de Los Libros (Children’s Day/Book Day), a month of programs that celebrate children, families, and reading and emphasize the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. I missed last Tuesday’s event, but the next is today at 10:30 a.m. at the Hubbell Library, a story time for toddlers featuring European stories. A list of all of the events can be found here.

& Thursday from 5:30 to 6:30 pm the Norman Meyer Branch library in Gentilly hosts Writing Workshops Led By Youths. Upstairs in the teen area. Encouraging creative arts exploration through reading, engaging discussions, and group activities. Youth ages 12-17 are invited! Group limited to 15 participants.

& Tonight, April 11 17 Poets! features poet Gina Myers and songwriter Nasimiyu perform April 11, 8PM at the 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series (www.17poets.com) followed by the open mic. Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009), and several chapbooks, including False Spring (Spooky Girlfriend, 2012). Her second full-length book, Hold It Down, will be published by Coconut Books in 2013. New Orleans-based songwriter Nasimiyu wields a colorful and eclectic Indie/Folk/Retro-pop sound, embodying a new, socially conscious movement that is bright and uplifting as the revolutionary generation that inspired it. Captivating audiences with her lyrically charged songs, Nasimiyu has been touted as the “New Age Nina Simone,” by Snarky Puppy’s Mike League and as “2012′s artist to watch,” in Gambit Magazine.

& Also on Thursday Octavia Books hosts a special evening with former Poet Laureate of Louisiana Brenda Marie Osbey who will read from and sign her new collection. This is Osbey’s fifth collection and her first since the publication of ALL SAINTS: New & Selected Poems, a recipient of the 1998 American Book Award. HISTORY AND OTHER POEMS takes as its task nothing less than an examination and mapping of the never-ending evil of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the still-palpable effects of European and American colonialism some seven centuries after the making of the New World.

& Tonight the Algiers Library continues its month-long, national celebration of poetry established by the Academy of American Poets since 1996. In celebration of National Poetry Month, Algiers Regional will host Pass The Word poetry workshops presented by local authors. This week features Asia Rainey.

& And the Jefferson Parish East Bank Regional Library hosts an Author Event! at 7 pm featuring J.W. Mallard and his book Lines of a Circle. Julia Isbell has been afforded a good life by her parents who give her everything she needs, including love. But when her mother Viola is dying, she reveals one truth about Julia’s identity that will change her life forever—she is not a true Isbell. Who and where are her parents? Mallard has had multiple careers in his lifetime, one that involved the U. S. Marine Corps and the one he holds as a computer programmer. This is his first book.

& Saturday’s Story Time with Miss Maureen will instead feature Johnette Downing singing and signing her latest book, How to Dress a Po’Boy, at Maple Street Book Shop’s Uptown location 11:30 am to 1 pm. There will be snack-sized po’boys, juice boxes, and cookies.

& Saturday at Garden District Books at 1 p.m. Cecily White discusses and signs her book, Prophecy Girl Prophecy Girl is part of a debut series that follows a girl who is the center of a prophecy that states she is destined to kill everyone she loves. Guardians, immortals, demons, a foreboding prophecy, and forbidden love make the series ideal for YA and adult audiences.

& Also on Saturday the new East Near Orleans Regional Library celebrates its first anniversary with a day-long program including presentations on available programs, activities for small children and teens, and a raffle. And cake. Did I mention there will be cake? From 10:30 am to 3 pm at 5641 Read Blvd.

& The Dickens Fellowship of New Orleans meets Saturday at 2 pm at Metairie Park/County Day School’s Bright Library, with guest LSU Professor of English Elsie B. Michie speaking on “Dickens and Desire.”

& Saturday poet Megan Burns will perform at the 1239 Congress 2nd Saturday Art Show. Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com) and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com). She has two books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008) and Sound and Basin (2013) published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: irrational knowledge (Fell Swoop press, 2012) and a city/ bottle boned (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her chapbook Dollbaby is forthcoming from Horseless Press. She has been making dolls that incorporate poems and performing regularly with them since December, 2012. This is the first time all the dollbabies will be assembled for an art show.

& Books and food: this can’t miss. National Library Week Food Truck Roundup on Monday, April 15 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.t the Main Library in the CBD 219 Loyola Ave. Come eat on Monday with Taceaux Loceaux, La Cocinita, Empanada Intifada, NOLA Girl Food Truck & Catering, LLC, Foodie Call New Orleans Needs More Food Trucks.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& Monday at 5:30 at Garden District Books William Kent Krueger discusses and signs his book, Ordinary Grace.. From “New York Times “bestselling author William Kent Krueger comes a brilliant new novel about a young man, a small town, and murder in the summer of 1961. View the book trailer here.

& Monday is also the weekly meeting of the New Orleans Haiku Society at the Latter Memorial Library, 6 pm to 7:30 pm.

& Also on Tuesday the NOPL hosts its next El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) program at the Children’s Resource Center featuring a story and activities about Ethiopia.

& Wednesday, April 17 The Spring 2013 issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas celebrates with its contributors and readers at The Louisiana Humanities Center, 938 Lafayette St. This month’s party features artists Louviere + Vanessa, plus author/photographer John McCusker and writer Ellen Blue. Abita beer and Zapp’s chips will be provided. Doors open at 6pm.

& Come celebrate Dorado 2, the newest release from Verna Press at McKeown’s Difficult Music and Books. Poets Joseph Bienvenue, Thaddeus Conti and Gina Ferrara will be reading in the redesigned space of McKeown’s Books at 4737 Tchoupitoulas Street. Verna is a New Orleans press operated by the printer and poet, Peter Anderson. Dorado 2 is the latest ripple in the ongoing stream of excellent letterpress chapbooks and broadsides.

& Also on Wednesday Octavia Books hosts a reading and signing with New York Times bestselling author Stuart Woods when he returns to Octavia Books to present his sensational new Stone Barrington thriller, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. Woods is the author of fifty-two novels, including the New York Times–bestselling Stone Barrington and Holly Barker series. He is a native of Georgia and began his writing career in the advertising industry. Chiefs, his debut in 1981, won the Edgar Award.

& Wednesday at the Algiers library El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) continues with Tastes of the World providing drinks from various countries – Ages 12-17, starting at 4 p.m.

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m.

& Wednesday Maple Street Book Shop’s Downtown Book Club, now called the St. Claude Avenue Book Club, led by Ken Foster, will be meeting at 7 pm at Fatoush in the Healing Center to discuss The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Am am a full-on, J-Pop, fan-boy fool for Murakami. Damn I want to do this but another book to (re)read by Wednesday?

The Foreman April 8, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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His voice is a holler, or better spelled a hollah: the flat, chesty, uninflected trumpet that carries between mountains and across battlefields. The attack is moderately steep, allowing each word or phrase to build to the correct crescendo to carry over the sounds of front loaders dumping metal girders in a crash and to reach the roustabouts perched atop the framework leading guide ropes to pull up the tent tops. Long before the first sound check of Jazz Fest the sound is idling and roaring diesels, the back-up warning and crash of cargo, the hollering of men over their machines to orchestrate the erection of the tents. They work with the urgency of a crew of SeaBees erecting a desperate bridge. I imagine one could hold this job with a megaphone, but I think it would diminish the foreman’s authority as king of the roustabouts. Like a drill sergeant or a lion tamer, a good set of lungs is an essential job requirement, the ability to command by tone and volume.

Daydream Believer April 8, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in A Fiction, Shield of Beauty, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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The tragic, formulaic sitcom of my life, as viewed with excessive empathy which renders too much of comedy painful. [I watched Synechdoche, N.Y. several times before someone pointed out it was a dark comedy.] Swallowing the draft of poison every day until I become invincible. Possible side effects include madness and sharing too much in writing.

“You give me a reason to live
You give me a reason to live
You give me a reason to live…”
– “You Can Keep Your Hat On”
Randy Newman

Hypnotic Progression Therapy April 7, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, je me souviens, Memory, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: helical stairs, John Clarence Laughlin, spiral staircase
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The Magnificent Spiral No. 3 -- J. C. Laughlin

The Magnificent Spiral No. 3
John Clarence Laughlin

An icon of childhood memory, I cannot describe that spiral staircase in the gallery behind my great-aunts’ Royal Street apartment with any certainly. Is it as grand as I think it was, or simply amplified by the dimensions of my own smallness and the fog of memory? What remains is an ideal of the spiral or helical staircase; really the latter, with an opening instead of a newel pole. It is the view up that central shaft that gives such staircases the dizzying illusion of a gateway into the third dimension, neither the limit of a ceiling nor the infinite distance of the sky; not the abstract geometry of a tree for climbing but the precise spiral diminishing in perspective that lends a sense of motion toward a destination usually reserved for loose balloons.

ἀπορɛία April 6, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
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I am thinking of having this word, aporia, tattooed on the back of my neck. As I leave whatever has transacted—an evening of emptying beers and filling ashtrays, the exchange of money and objects most likely books, an unexpected kiss walking to the car—you will be left to wonder as I do if we are merely acting out the roles we believe we have created for ourselves or if something genuine yet invisible, the play within the play, palpable as static electricity, has just occurred. Or will someone, not necessarily ourselves, wake from this dream and forget it all before the coffee is ready?

Originally posted at Alternative Roundezvouz Tango.

Odd Words April 4, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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& Tonight 17 Poets hosts a sneak peek at Bret Evans’ new collection from Trembling Pillow Press: I Love This American Life (a limited number will be on sale and we’ll be taking orders if those sell out). Also poet Mary Elizabeth Perez from Florida followed by the open mic. Evans’ work has been featured in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry,Another South:Experimental Writing in the South, and Poets for Living Waters.It also appears in the biography Ernie K-Doe: the R & B Emperor of New Orleans. Perez, a native of Tampa, FL and former USF poetry student and a grandmother of twelve, has been haunted by poetry for the last twenty years. She won the USFZbar Award (1995) and Hillsborough County Emerging Artist Award (1996) and also studied at the Iowa Workshop Summer Writers Program (1998).

& Thursday evening at 6 p.m. Garden District Books hosts Nathaniel Rich and his novel. Odds Against Tomorrow. A novel about fear of the future–and the future of fear New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of an empty office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe–ecological collapse, war games, natural disasters–he becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine. Then, just as Mitchell’s predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realizes he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost? At once an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow poses the ultimate questions of imagination and civilization. The future is not quite what it used to be.

& Thursday at 6 p.m. Octavia Books hosts reading and signing with author Wiley Cash featuring his phenomenal debut novel, A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME, a mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small North Carolina town. Wiley Cash displays a remarkable talent for lyrical, powerfully emotional storytelling. Octavia calls the book “a modern masterwork of Southern fiction, reminiscent of the writings of John Hart (Down River), Tom Franklin (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter), Ron Rash (Serena), and Pete Dexter (Paris Trout)” and Ernest J. Gaines says “Wiley Cash is a talented and disciplined young writer, and his first novel proves it. I think this could be the beginning of a long, fruitful career.”

& The New Orleans Public Library offers two programs among many others this Thusday: 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM, Writing Workshops Led by Youths – Norman Mayer Branch and 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM, Pass the Word: Poetry Workshop – Algiers Regional Branch. In celebration of National Poetry Month, Algiers Regional will host poetry workshops presented by local authors. This week Asia Raney is featured.

& Friday upstairs at Mimi’s in the Marigny, author Mark LaFlaur hosts a book launch party for this new novel Elysian Fields. A New York writer and editor, LaFlaur is best known in New Orleans for his activism via Levees Not War. His first novel is the tale of young would-be poet is torn between his long-held dream of being a great artist and obligations to his aged, ailing mother and his emotionally volatile brother, the all-demanding Bartholomew. Will someone in his family have to die before he can get to California? And how might that be arranged? Moira Crone calls it “evocative, poignant, complex and well paced . . . full of delights.” He will also give a reading at Garden District Book Shop May 7.

& Friday night at Antenna Gallery Room 220 hosts the season’s second Happy Hour Salon with authors Ottessa Moshfegh and Carlus Henderson from 6 – 8 p.m. on Friday, April 5, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.). As always, this event is free and open to the public, and complimentary libations will be on hand (though we strongly encourage donations). Moshfegh, though yet to publish a book, is one of the country’s best young short story writers. David McLendon says her stories “maybe cause a bit of discomfort.” But Moshfegh presents her characters’ pitiful hopelessness so artfully a reader can’t help but be filled with gratitude for the small bits of bliss and victory available in a generally horrendous world. Her fiction has appeared in many of the nation’s best journals (and others that are at least respectable), including the Paris Review, NOON, Guernica, the Columbia Review, Unsaid, Sleepingfish, Fence, and Vice. She has won a slew of fancy awards and lives in Los Angeles. Henderson is a Zell Fellow in the MFA program at the University of Michigan who splits his time between Detroit and New Orleans. He has also won a number of fancy awards, and has been a high school teacher in New Orleans, a cheese salesman in Vermont, and a dockworker along the Eastern seaboard. Moshfegh’s visit is generously supported by grants from the SouthArts Foundation and Poets & Writers.

& Saturday at 11:30 a.m. Story Time with Miss Maureen returns to the Maple Street Book Shop Uptown location with Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel.

& Saturday at 1:30 p.m. Garden District Books brings Helana Brigman and. Fresh Table: Cooking in Louisiana All Year Round. Louisiana’s identity is inextricably tied to its famous foods; gumbo, red beans and rice, jambalaya, and étouffée are among the delicious dishes that locals cherish and visitors remember. But Louisiana’s traditional cuisine has undergone a recent revision, incorporating more local ingredients and focusing on healthier cooking styles. In The Fresh Table, locavore and native New Orleanian Helana Brigman shares over one hundred recipes that reflect these changes while taking advantage of the state’s year-round growing season.

& Saturday at the Latter Memorial Library Gina Ferrara hosts the Poetry Buffet at 2 p.m. featuring “Poets Reading Poets” in which local poets read works by their favorite authors.

& Sunday night at 7 p.m. Slam New Orleans hosts a reading on the theme of Team SNO (the 2013 version) has been decided. The Poetry Olympics are in the books. Now it’s time to kick off the new slam season and celebrate a year’s worth of Slam New Orleans shows at the Shadowbox Theatre. The theme of the night is “New $#%&.” Poets, in celebration of National Poetry Month and a brand spanking new slam season, we urge you to let those freshly inked poems out of their college-ruled prisons and spit us some of your new hotness. Team SNO (the 2013 version) has been decided.”

& This Sunday’s reading at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series features poet and mistress of ceremonies at the south’s oldest continuous poetry reading Nancy Harris reading from and signing her new book, Beauty Eating Beauty (Portals Press)

& If you miss LaFlaur’s Friday book lunch, Sunday at 2 p.m. Garden District Books presents LaFlaur and his novel Elysian Fields. “Life in the Weems family of 1999 New Orleans is anything but Elysian in this engrossing Southern Gothic snapshot.”

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& Monday at 6:30 p.m. Octavia Books features Pam Houston and CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED, “a tale so vivid, intricate, and intimate that it puts high-def TV to shame” (Elle). Houston’s latest takes us from one breathtaking precipice to the next as we unravel the story of Pam (a character not unlike the author), a fearless traveler aiming to leave her metaphorical baggage behind as she seeks a comfort zone in the air. She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan

& Tuesday evening at the Columns Hotel Pam Houston will be 1718 Society’s featured reader. 1718 is a student-run literary organization of Tulane, Loyola, and UNO students, hosts their reading series the first Tuesday of every month at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. Readings start at 7 p.m. and are open to the public. Houston will be reading from her book Contents May Have Shifted. Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m.

& Wednesday also bring another installment of Don Paul’s Poetry Ball at the Cafe Istanbul, starting at 8 p.m. and featuring Chuck Perkins, James Nolan, Megan Burns, and special guest Kalamu ya Salaam. Free admission, cash bar. Open mic following the featured performers.

What Not To Read April 2, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, Odd Words, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street, Writing.
Tags: Maud Newton, Quarterly.co, The Colossus of New York
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Dear Maud:

I anxiously opened the latest package from Quarterly with your most recent book selection because it was unexpected, my debit card gone lost on Carnival day and the number the company had no longer valid. I will read the enclosures later today. I know Roxanne Gay’s work through The Rumpus, but first I had to pick up the book. I hefted The Colossus of New York, weighing the “A tour de force” from the Times Book Review between the title and the author’s name. I wasn’t far into the opening, “City Limits” when I laid it down again, worried this book could be The One, except she’s already married. It could be the book of New Orleans I’ve been writing by fits-and-starts, in private and on my blogs, for the last seven years. It is the book I have to write or I’ve run my life all to hell for nothing. And it will have been done already, by another writer for another city.

The jacket copy alone should have been enough to warn me but I had to go ahead and open it, read through the blurbs (Danger, Will Robinson) and into the first chapter and I know New York isn’t the only place one where the initiated live in the memory of what’s gone. I just read Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat, the excellent essay on the sportscaster Myron Cope and that piece basically could just as well have been about New Orleans’ own Hap Glaudi and the essay says exactly the same damn thing as “City Limits”. Whether its New York or Pittsburgh or New Orleans the old souls carry that geography of used to be in their heads. It’s not unique to Colson Whitehead or New York. Still, I’m afraid this is the book that would ruin me to write the book I should, afraid it might swallow my own voice like a haunted box or I will find my own plans laid out before me, my ship taken and me left to rot on a waterless rock, that it might leave me feeling incapable of the task, might rob me of the right idea of how to organize my own love letter cum ode and all of the other fine words of the reviewers on the back Whitehead’s.

But I’m going to keep it. I guess I’ll have to pay Quarterly who just dinged me again after trying to bill my old debit card, just when I was about to drop the subscription along with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club because when you are down to rolling your own cigarettes even some necessities have to go. I’m going to wrap this book up in Christmas paper and put it in the box where I keep my measly Christmas things, a drug-store Charlie Brown tree and the Marilyn Monroe skirt-girl ornament that hangs from it, that wicker basket cone with the red berries I wore as a hat to the Brew du Vieux holiday party with a bicycle flasher on top and the doorman wrote “Blinky” on my taster cup and “Sparklie” on my date’s and we took one look at our cups and could have danced all night, and still have begged for more—there I go, off on a tangent again but that is not just me, or a conscious, writerly voice: it is this city. If you are not ADHD when you arrive in New Orleans you will be when you leave because Look a tuba! Our squirrels carry parasols and saxophones and dance at funerals and peek out from the carpet as bits of glitter you still find 40 days after Mardi Gras and you can’t help but stop and look.

So, I’ll put this book in away in that box wrapped in dollar store Santa paper and leave it until then, until I have a manuscript. No, I haven’t been writing much of that sort on the blog lately, those odd bits of New Orleans. I walk down the street and instead of finding those perfect bits of New Orleans—Leopold Bloom crossing Bourbon Street—instead I find myself looking for a good place to put out my cigarette. And I need to snap out of it. I know it’s a curse to say My Book aloud and in public when you don’t have one but I think of it as a geis, a particular sort of Celtic curse the universe lays on you that will either lead to tragedy or triumph and it is all on you to live within its bounds. And when I unwrap this book at the end of the year, I’ll write you again—perhaps privately, this time—and say, ah, Maud, you shouldn’t have. I didn’t even send a card.

Sincerely,

Mark Folse

Doleful Mysteries March 30, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Easter
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I prefer the old-fashioned Maundy Thursday to keep Batman and Robin out of it. Good Friday is Golgotha and I was in no mood for skulls, and have yet to find anyone to enlist in my proposed pilgrimage to find nine bar doors in New Orleans from which you can view a church. And then there is that vision of the Stations of the Cross. Yes, He suffered just as we do, and more they said in catechism. I checked the work calendar, the to-do list and the checking account balance and suddenly flashed on myself under Alex DeLarge’s scourge in A Clockwork Orange. Here it is Holy Saturday (Batman!) and I am deep into a purgatory of laundry for the sin of sloth. I am curious to see who might be in Holy Rosary keeping vigil on one of the two days of the year in which the consecrated host is removed from Catholic tabernacle, the sumptuous gold box at the back of the altar. Most people know that one doesn’t put the baby in the crèche until Christmas morning, but I wonder who outside of the Altar Society realize that relic of mystic flesh is taken out on Good Friday. And then what do they do with it?

Santa Claus Eve and Easter Bunny Day are problematic for an apostate like myself who is none the less deeply imprinted with a Catholic upbringing, a near equivalent of the secular Jew: steeped in the culture by a complete indoctrination in guilt and exceptionalism that no therapy could hope to erase. It doesn’t help to notice in your son’s catechism classroom that the colors of the Church calendar are purple, green and gold, to ride on the bus home and watch a Latino woman cross herself at each church passed and be reminded of an old girlfriend, to look at the St. Expedite candle on my bedroom mantle. I could easily complete some of the more gruesome qualifications for excommunication from an institution I abhor but it would make no difference. Fish on Friday still seems as right as red beans on Monday or meatballs on Wednesday even if the last time I had my throat blessed was in grammar school.

What to do on Jelly Bean Sunday? I think I still have the plaid shirt I used to wear to church on Easter Sunday when I was raising my children, as solemnly promised, as Catholics, one that looks like a horrible accident at the Paaz factory but I really have nowhere to go in it. I often buy a new straw hat Holy Week but after vacuuming all of the change out of the couch, I’ve decided to just steam the ones I have back into shape and try to scrub the sweat stains out with some Oxyclean and a toothbrush. Still, when the ~~Goddess Diana~~ Ecclesiastical Calender conspires with the weather to bring us ~~Ishtar~~ Easter at Spring, some observance is required. I will probably do what I usually do come that Sunday in honor of Jesus the Teacher and in contravention of the dictates of Peter’s church. I will listen to Pharoah Sander’s Love is Everywhere, a song that to me is the bell-blessed communion chant of the church of all mankind, and read Wallace Steven’s Sunday Morning.

Lazarus March 29, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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Resurrection is a neat trick
but Lazarus wasn’t particularly impressed
the second time around.

A walking parable,
he stood alone on Golgotha
in mute testament, watching
the chosen disciples
debase themselves in grief.

On the third day, more or less,
Lazarus sat
contemplating the great stone
standing in grave monument
beside the hollow tomb,
relishing the serene emptiness
of the deserted cemetery.

– Mark Folse

Odd Words March 28, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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It’s a short list this week in Odd Words but we’re right in between Tennessee Williams Fest and Easter. Remember a children’s book, chocolate smears and all, will last long after the jellybeans are gone.

& Starting today at 7 p.m. the Alvar Public Library, 913 Alvar St., will launch a reading series on the Fourth Thursday of March, April, and May, featuring a series of local poets reading their original work. This week features Ellen Allen, Delia Tomino Nakayama and Catilin Creek Shroyer.

& Tonight at 17 Poets! at 8 p.m. featured are Katarina Boudreaux and Maurice Carlos Ruffin followed by the open mic. Katarina Boudreaux has been published in Poetry Motel, Oak Bend Review, Texas Poetry Journal and by the Ottawa Valley Writer’s Guild. Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a third-year MFA student at the University of New Orleans. He’s also a member of several writing collectives, including the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance and the Melanated Writers of New Orleans. Maurice’s work has been published in the Apalachee Review, the South Carolina Review and his story “The Pie Man” received the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop’s 2011 Ernest Svenson Fiction Award, and an earlier version was first runner-up in the short story category at the 2010 William Faulkner-Wisdom Competition

& Thursdays the Norman Meyer Branch Library hosts a Writing Workshop lead by youth upstairs in the teen area, Encouraging creative arts exploration through reading, engaging discussions, and group activities. Youth ages 12-17 are invited. Group limited to 15 participants. Call the branch for details. 596-3100

& Also tonight the Norman Meyer branch hosts a book discussion for The Big Read, sponsored Xavier University of Louisiana, in partnership with New Orleans Public Library. The book selected for The Big Read is A Lesson Before Dying by Louisiana native Ernest Gaines.

& Saturday Maple Leaf Book Shop’s Uptown location will feature the following authors in lieu of Story Time with Miss Maureen. Dianne de las Casas and her daughter, Kid Chef Eliana, will be signing at 11:30-1 p.m. Dianne will be signing her book, The Little Read Hen, while Kid Chef Eliana will be signing Cool Kids Cook Louisiana. About Dianne’s book: The Little Read Hen is a literary spin on a beloved folk tale, perfect for aspiring young writers interested in learning how their own fledgling ideas can hatch into a polished story. Holly Stone-Barker’s vibrant cut-paper illustrations add riotous fun to each page. About Eliana’s book: For kids who want to cook Louisiana-style, Kid Chef Eliana keeps the good times rolling in this kid-friendly cookbook of Louisiana cuisine. For a peek at what Chef Eliana does, watch her make jambalaya and pralines on the Wendy Williams Show!

& Saturday at Garden District Books join Latoya Easter signing her book Can’t Cry at 1 p.m.. “Lela Crimsome is a young, beautiful, independent, successful entertainment lawyer who’s never willing to give an inch of trust to anybody; let alone a man. Quinton Jacobs is a rugged, seductively handsome, blue-collar father with a low self-esteem and a ghetto fabulous baby mama. He’s a loving father, who sacrifices everything for his son; even if it means sabotaging his own life. But, can he truly say he’s the baby’s daddy?”

& Saturday at the Latter Memorial Library Gina Ferrara hosts the Poetry Buffet at 2 p.m. I’ll post a list of readers as soon as I get it.

& This Sunday’s reading at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series is Open Mic at 3:30 pm in the rear courtyard.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

&Tuesday evening the Maple Street Book Shop’s First Tuesday Book Club will be meeting at 5:45 p.m. at our Uptown location to discuss <en<Paris to the Past: Traveling Through French History by Train by Ina Caro.

& Wednesday there is a weekly poetry reading hosted at Weekly Poetry Reading the Neutral Ground Coffee House at 9 p.m.

Assaying the State of the Essay March 24, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: creative non-fiction, Elena Passarello, Essay, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Tennessee Williams Festival, Thomas Beller
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Sunday’s panel on Creative Non-Fiction at the Tennessee Williams festival spent much time answering Adam Kirch’s infamous (well, to some of us) essay in the New Republic, “The New Essayists, or the Decline of a Form? The essay as reality television.” Novelist and Tulane professor Thomas Beller, the author of a series of personal essays titled How To Be A Man suggested that the readers and writers of the current explosion of personal essays have mixed motivations. Essayists look to be “a legitimate [interior] voice speaking to the outside world” but that too many writers suffer from what Dorothy Parker called “the frankies”, the desire to share beyond their own best interest and that of the reader.” Readers, he said, were often “looking for somebody to make a fool of themselves.”

Panelist John Jeremiah Sullivan was one of Kirsh’s first targets: “A talented writer such as John Jeremiah Sullivan might, fifty years ago, have tried to explore his complicated feelings about the South, and about race and class in America, by writing fiction, following in the footsteps of Walker Percy and Eudora Welty. Instead he produced a book of essays, called Pulphead, on the same themes; and the book was received with the kind of serious attention and critical acclaim that were once reserved for novels.” The Southern Editor of the Paris Review and contributor to GQ, Harper’s Magazine and Oxford American took exception to the idea that essayists, especially those who write for magazines are somehow beneath literary notice. He called it “cultural eugenics’ and a reject of 300 years of English literary history to attack magazine writers or suggest the essay was dead. “Lamb, Hazlitt, de Quincy were all writing for magazines” but are presented now cleaned up and anthologized.

Beller said that too many essays today are predictable. “Too many essays even in the best magazines, from the first two paragraphs you know where they’re going.” He praised Sullivan’s work for its twists and turns. comparing them to early Paul McCartny songs. “They are like three or four songs all strung together.” Panelist Elena Passarello, author of Let Me Clear My Throat and a contributor to Creative Nonfiction, Oxford American and Slate, turned to writing and essays in particular after a career in acting. says she tries to creative performative moments on the page. “The essays that fire on all cylinders show the workings of a human mind, [the author's] or another’s.” Beller, who suggested something similar earlier (see above) said the form also allows writers to take “their eccentricities out into the world,” which lead to a discussion of his own contribution to the New York Times Food section on the peanut butter and pickle sandwich.

Exotic Romancing March 24, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Kim Marie Vaz, Nathaniel Rich, Richard Campanella, Tennessee Williams Festival, Thomas Beller
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Is New Orleans truly the most exotic locale in the United States, or just the victim of good press? Panel moderator David Johnson started out the Tennessee Williams Festival panel on Writing New Orleans: The Most “Exotic” Place in America with a famous quote by Williams: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”

Noted geographer and author Richard Campanella was quick to challenge the prevailing notion. Buying into the exoticism “privileges for the picturesque” when the residents of the city do not spend 365 days a year at Carnival or second lines or watching Mardi Gras Indians. He traced the notion of the city’s reputation as the initial collision of newly arrived Americans with the original Creole settlers and the Spanish Administration, and writers of that initial period set the stage for those who would follow and set the exotic tag firmly in place: Grace King, Lafcadio Hearn and Lyle Saxon. “They romanticized it and it was picked up by the city’s industrialized tourist industry.”

Kim Marie Vaz stood up for the city’s exotic reputation. “We generate our own exoticism because our culture is unique,” the author of a recent work on the carnival Baby Dolls asserted. Writer Nathaniel Rich suggested the city preserves its exotic aspects because it is “the most self-referential city in American. It doesn’t care what’s going on outside” which he said was the source of the city’s “wonder and problems.” New Yorker Thomas Beller, now a Tulane professor, said when he first moved to New Orleans he was trying to impose his own internal geography onto the city, and came to recognize the city’s troubled side as “the New York I grew up in the 1970s.” He found the city’s character was created in part by a disposition to holding onto things and investing objects with an emotional value.”

Campanella said much of the current influx of new residents to the city can be traced to its exotic reputation. Beller said the influx of new residents more inclined to progress and preservation “provokes kind of allergic reaction” among many New Orleanians. “They really are upset about the erasure that goes along with that. And I’m a bit more inclined to favor the holding onto things. New Orleans is very good for that.” Asked about the city’s continuing ability to absorb new residents into the existing culture without erasure, Campanella said “it’s not the end of history. It’s the next chapter.” Vaz said the culture would continue to change and grow. “You have a lot of people who are working 365 days a year to preserve the culture.”

Vaz and Campanella traced much of the city’s exotic reputation to early writers like Heard and King, but called out Lyle Saxon of the famous WPA Guide to New Orleans and Robert Talent, author of several books promoting the city’s exotic legend. “My work is a reaction of the exoticism of Talent and Saxon,” Vaz said of her work on the Baby Dolls, an old carnival tradition that grew out of the city’s segregated prostitution district as a marching krewe of Black sex workers. “People are surprised that [much of the culture] came out of intense segregation.” Campanella agreed that academic writers are questioning the past focus on the “exoticism and exceptionalism.”

Thomas Beller is the author of two works of fiction, Seduction Theory and The Sleep-Over Artist, and a collection of personal essays How To Be A Man. Richard Campanella is a geographer with the Tulanue University School of Architecture and the author of six critically acclaimed books, including Bienville’s Dilema: A Historical Geography of New Orleans. Nathaniel Rich is the author of two novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. Kim Marie Vaz is an associate dean and professor at Xavier University and author of The BABY DOLLS: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition.

The Geography of Pleasure March 23, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, NOLA, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Alecia Long, Baby Dolls, Bohimia, Bohmeia, French Quarter, John Shelton Reed, Kim Marie Vaz, Storyville, Tennessee Williams Festival
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That was the money quote at Friday’s panel on New Orleans in the 1920s: Bohemia, Baby Dolls and Storyville, from panelist Alecia Long, author of The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race and Respectability in New Orleans, 1965-1920, along with fellow panelist John Shelton Read’s pun about serious works of non-fiction suffering from colon:itis. Delving as far as an hour and a half allowed into the world of prostitution and the original Baby Dolls–all sex workers who broke the convention against woman masking at the time–it was Read’s somewhat drier but headline fresh description of the birth, brief flowering and decay of New Orleans as a bohemian center to rival Greenwich Village that was headline fresh for Orleanians watching the struggle over gentrification along the river.

Read described the cohort of young artists and writers who came to New Orleans to create in the French Quarter “a vest pocket Greenwich Village [where] living was cheap and the neighbors tolerant. Writers such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Oliver Lafarge, Sherwood Anderson and a young William Faulkner were among those who settled for a spell into the then run-down Quarter, and Anderson entertained visitors including Theodore Dreiser, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and Bertrand Russell. What fascinated about his presentation was his almost anthropological dissection of the rise and fall of Bohemias, from the first artists who arrive in search of local color and cheap living, the Beatnik-like hangers-on and slumming Uptowners who soon follow until the French Quarter in particular was an attraction for “Uptown ladies and tourists” and one writers’ description of the neighborhood at the end of Bohemia’s blossoming would sound familiar to today’s visitors: “stale beer, garbage, drunks and tourists.” The tea shops established by the original Bohemians for their own pleasure became popular with visitors, Le Petite Salon brought book-club ladies from Uptown and Le Petite Theatre was founded the original writers and artist found themselves being pushed out by rising rents and less congenial neighbors. Read details all of this in his book Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s.

The pre-1920s French Quarter would surprise local residents but not the bohemian settlers of the period. Bourbon Street was a family block filled with working class people, largely Italian, and the remnants of old Creole families. Royal Street was the center of licentiousness, lined with clubs and served as bars, gambling dens and houses of prostitution combined, and even the now staid-Hotel Monteleone serviced the trade that brought to the quarter. New Orleans after the turn of the 19th century was changing, with new high rise buildings going up across Canal Street and a new sense of boosterism sought not only to drive sin out of the quarter, but even threatened to demolish much of it for a new civic center, the only remnant of which is the old Municipal Auditorium. Storyville, Long tells us, was a compromise. There was too much money to be made off of the “below the neck pleasure business”, as much if not more from alcohol sales as from prostitution, and much of that found its way into the pockets of the city and its employees down to the cops lucky enough to draw that beat. Relocating the vice industry into a single district a bit further away from downtown was the solution, although Long reminds us the district stood directly behind the old Krauss and not two blocks from the Maison Blanche department stores, and would have abutted right up to the planned civic center running from Treme Street all the way to Royal.

Storyville finally fell victim to the ultra-conservative war-time Federal government which decreed that no troops could be stationed in a city with a sanctioned red light district. Not that the business went away entirely–”you can make prostitution illegal but you can’t make it unpopular,” Long quotes an unnamed politicians–it simply moved into other parts of town. The famed district met its final end when most of it was demolished for the Iberville Housing Project.

There are vestiges of the old sex workers still alive in New Orleans culture today, thanks to the revival of the traditional of the Baby Dolls by Antoinette K-Doe. The original Baby Dolls according to Kim Marie Vaz, author of “BABY DOLLS”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition, the original Baby Dolls were black sex workers of the era who marched with their “sporting gentlemen” (pimps) in contravention of the understanding that women did not mask in the streets, and in stark contrast to the more formal Black carnival krewes that survive today with their elaborate and exclusive balls Invitations to those events were as sought after and hard to get as invitations to Rex in the white community, and the organizations were quite conservative. Today’s Young Men’s Illinois Club emerged as a break away from the original group after the scandal of a married man escorting a young woman not his wife into the ball, much as today’s Krewe d’Etat grew out of a desire to parade among the younger generation of Momus who rejected the old krewe’s decision to refuse to parade rather than integrate.

The original Dolls used none of the props seen today, no baby bottles or suckers. Instead they dressed in the finest clothes they could manage and paraded shamelessly through the streets, drinking and dancing all the way, escorted by their sporting gentlemen often attired as police. The latter is rather funny if you consider the relationship to the sex workers who were the original Dolls to the law. The revival of the Baby Dolls contributes another facet to New Orleans Black carnival of fancy dress balls and Mardi Gras Indians.

All of the panelists books are available in the Festival Book Shop located in the Hotel Monteleone.

Tennessee’s First Flower Blooms at the Allways Lounge Theater March 23, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, Odd Words, Review, Theater, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Allways Lounge Theater, Battle of Angles, Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams Festival
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While the smart set at the the Tennessee Williams Festival is settling into watch the third part of John Biguenet’s Katrina Trilogy, Mold in a small bar room/theater Off-Off-Royal Street Tennessee Williams’ first produced play–A Battle of Angels–is given a compelling production at the Allways Lounge Theater. The Allways has become the Southern Rep of the St. Claude and Bywater set, and director Glenn Meche’s production keeps up the high standards the theater has set for its small space. The tale which most of the world knows from its much re-written version as Orpheus Descending and the film The Fugitive Kind is still riveting theater in the Circle Repertory revival version presented by the Allways.

From the moment the excellent Nicole Gruter as Beulah Cartwright and Lillian Claire Dodenhoff as Dolly Bland burst gossiping into the mercantile store the audience is swept back in time and up to the Mississippi Delta. A more perfect pair of haughty southern matrons could hardly be wished for. As soon as Diana Shortez sweeps into the room as the flawed and fallen Cassandra Whiteside the hammer is cocked and ready for the volley of familiar Williams themes of sex, death and redemption to follow. Shortez, with her commanding physicality and chameleon abilities is perfectly cast as the the loose-moralled scapegoat and by the last act the play’s one-woman chorus.

At the end of the first act one wishes Eli Grove as snake-skinned Val Xavier had some of the animal magnetism of Shortez, but he brings his best duck-tailed Cool Hand Luke to the table and as the complexities of his character are revealed through the remainder of the play he wins the viewer over with a brooding Kerouacian charm. The strong cast of women delivers the reflection of the character’s reptilian charm in their own performances. He is convincing as the (one part Tennessee) thoughtful drifter with a head full of ideas running from a troubled past. The delight of the night is Veronica Russell as Myra Torrance. Her slow transformation from a bitter shopkeeper with a loveless marriage and a dying husband as reptilian as Xavier’s jacket into the lovelorn victim of Xavier’s charm is at the center of the plot and she carries the spotlight with a quiet but powerful performance. Years seem to melt from her face as she moves backwards in time from pinch-faced shopkeeper to the charmingly coquettish victim of Xavier’s promise of escape.

Rebecca Myers as the deeply religious Vee Talbot wears the character’s convictions well and does a fine job of carrying the difficult task of tying together the almost Old Testament bombastic imagery–from Xavier’s snakeskin jacket to the frightening cane-of-God Doug Mundy wields mostly off-stage–in this tale of temptation and fall set at Easter Week with the wild Whiteside making whoopee up at the town’s Golgotha. The text is freighted with symbolism almost past the Plimsoll mark but Myers and the rest of the supporting cast manage to keep the bowl of apples off the table and give Russell and Grove the space to play out their doomed romance. There is not a weak performance in the ensemble which also includes Barry Bradford as a genuinely threatening Sheriff Talbott and Patrica Raw and Rebecca Rae as the comic spinster sisters. Director Glenn Meche has shaped a fine cast into a compelling night of drama.

The Allways’ small proscenium theater is turned sideways as it was for last year’s The Future is a Fancy Land Place and while you might find yourself rubbing your neck at the end of the night, it gives the actors room to move and the feeling the audience is in a much larger space without the loss of intimacy. While far from the center of the Tennessee Williams weekend at the The Hotel Monteleone, festival goers would do well to find their way down to St. Claude Avenue and the rest of us have until April 6 to see the root of Tennessee’s genius in its first blossom.

Odd Words March 21, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Toulouse Street.
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& The Tennessee Williams Festival kicks into high gear today, March 21 through Sunday, March 24, and includes master classes by notable writers, panels discussions on all things literary including Tennessee Williams, theater and music performances, and of course the annual Stella hollering contest. Panels will include highlights comprise more than two dozen literary panel discussions on a wide range of topics including Creole Women; Free People of Color; the South: Exile, Refuge and Return; New Orleans in the 1920s; courage in journalism; and reading in the digital age, along with the 18th Annual Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference, celebrity readings of three TW one-acts and several Williams-related panels including “I Remember Tennessee.” You can get all the details at www.tennesseewilliams.net. And watch ToulouseStreet.net and follow @odd_words for event write ups and flash updates and more all during the event.

& Tonight at 17 Poets! Rodger Kamenetz and JS Makkos read from their work followed by the open mic. Kamenetz is an award-winning poet, author and teacher. Kamenetz’s five books of poetry include The Lowercase Jew. He has been called “the most formidable of the Jewish-American poets.” Joseph s. Makkos as a poet primarily focuses on visual & performance work. He is author of When She Goes Down (Hobby Horse, 2010) and a book length collection of visual work, Paper Trumpet (Lavender Ink, forthcoming). J.S. is an art book designer and publisher (Language Foundry), whose projects heavily focus on outré media.

& Also Thursday night it is time for another Poetry Brothel at the Allways Lounge at 9 p.m. $10 cover. “Seeking absolution? Or just absinthe? Trade your sackcloth and ashes for a corset and cocktail at The New Orleans Poetry Brothel. Your Maître d’, Francis Shadfly (Jordan Soyka), and Madam Pearl du Mal (Izzy Oneiric), are hosting an evening of perverse poesy and decadent diversion. Purchase a private reading from one of our poetry whores, and listen as they confess, profess, and digress. Perform penance with our lapsed priest (one couplet per venial sin). And take in depraved performances from our coterie of acrobats, buskers, and burlesque dancers.”

& Tonight also offers another chance to catch Sarah Carr signing Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children Thursday, March 21st at 6:30PM at the Maple Street Book Shop Healing Center location. In this powerful narrative non-fiction debut, the lives of a student, a new teacher, and a principal in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina provide readers with a vivid and sobering portrait of education in 21st-century America.

& Also on Thursday join “quirky author and composer” Michael Hearst at Octavia Books at 6 pm to present and sign his recent book, UNUSUAL CREATURES: A Mostly Accurate Account of Some of Earth’s Strangest Animals, and companion CD, Songs for Unusual Creatures. From the Australian bilby to the deep-sea magnapinna squid, to the microscopic tardigrade. And in case learning about hagfish slime isn’t enough to pique your interest, Hearst will also perform a few songs inspired by the animals on such odd-ball instruments as the theremin and the stylophone

& Friday at 6 p.m. the Maple Street flagship shop hosts Susan Puckett signing her book, Eat Drink Delta: a Hungry Traveler’s Journey Through the Soul of the South (as featured in Saveur magazine) at 6PM. Part travel guide, part cookbook, and part photo essay, Eat Drink Delta by veteran food journalist Susan Puckett (with photographs by Delta resident Langdon Clay) reveals a region shaped by slavery, civil rights, amazing wealth, abject deprivation, the Civil War, a flood of biblical proportions, an—above all—an overarching urge to get down and party with a full table and an open bar.

& The Melanated Writers Collective will host a Literary Jook Joint in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams Festival Friday at 8 p.m. at the M. Francis Gallery, 604 Julia St. Admission is $15. Among the members reading are Kelly Harris DeBerry, Dr. G. Love, Maurice Ruffin, Gian Smith and Mary Webb.

& Miss Maureen has Saturday morning off at Maple Street Books Shop but at 11 a.m. children’s author Katy Kelly will be signing her Melonhead and Lucy Rose series at the Uptown location. Lucy Rose and Adam “Melonhead” Melon are adventuresome neighbors growing up in Washington D.C. They’ve each got their own set of stories, and they’re both sure to make you laugh! Please join us for the signing. In lieu of the usual activities there’ll be juice and cookies for the hiding in the stacks set so they don’t riot like a bunch of Who fans stomping their feet and chanting “Miss Maureen! Miss Maureen!”

& Saturday at Octavia books bring your young readers at 1:30 pm for the release party for THE LITTLE “READ” HEN with favorite children’s picture books author Dianne de Las Cassas and illustrator Holly Stone-Barker. It is a fun literary spin on a beloved folktale that is perfect for aspiring young writers interested in learning how their own fledgling ideascan hatch into a polished story.

& This Sunday’s reading at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series is Open Mic at 3:30 pm in the rear courtyard.

& On the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of each month, Jenna Mae hosts poets and spoken-word readers at 8:00 p.m. at the Fair Grinds Coffee House on 3133 Ponce de Leon St.

& Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. at Octavia books join professional photographer and wanderer, Theron Humphrey and Maddie the coonhound, known for their wildly popular Instagram and Tumblr, come to Octavia Books for a presentation and signing featuring their debut book, MADDIE ON THINGS. In 2011 Theron Humphrey examined his life and, like many people, felt he wasn’t living up to his personal and creative potential. He decided to take a trip across America to meet, photograph and tell the story of one person each day. For company, he brought along his sweet-natured rescue Coonhound, Maddie. “I figured if Steinbeck had Charley by his side on his American travels, I needed a good dog next to me in my truck,” he said.

Traveling with the Dead March 19, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Crime, cryptic envelopment, je me souviens, Murder, New Orleans, Remember, Toulouse Street.
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This comment posted day before yesterday explains why I haven’t been posting but instead trying, in my limited time to blog, to finish my list of the dead of 2012.

“My Love, My Soulmate, My Hubby….
*Arthur Jackson* 05/08/78-07/01/07

It’s been 5yrs and it feels like yesterday…some days are better than others, but the pain remains…I’ve know this man since 1st grade, we attended elementary & high school together….He was my friend,soulmate,my LIFE…Our kids miss him so much, I wish he was here to mentor,guide, his boys(2) or see his daughter as she blossoms into a beautiful,bright,intelligent, young lady….although he died during his 2nd surgery it was still a result of gun violence…this type of savagery has claimed the ives of so many of Nola’s fathers, my youngest son’s kindergarten class had 6 kids including my son whose dad was killed…my really goes out to the kids, because they’re the ones whose really suffering….this has to STOP, just the thought of some poor child being told they’re dad is DEAD, gone foever and haing to endure the pain on their face, (as I recall my kids experience) breaks my heart….PEACE*”

Odd Words March 14, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Toulouse Street.
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& Next week begins the Tennessee Williams Festival running Wednesday, March 20 through Sunday, March 24, and includes master classes by notable writers, panels discussions on all things literary including Tennessee Williams, theater and music performances, and of course the annual Stella hollering contest. Panels will include highlights comprise more than two dozen literary panel discussions on a wide range of topics including Creole Women; Free People of Color; the South: Exile, Refuge and Return; New Orleans in the 1920s; courage in journalism; and reading in the digital age, along with the 18th Annual Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference, celebrity readings of three TW one-acts and several Williams-related panels including “I Remember Tennessee.” You can get all the details at www.tennesseewilliams.net. Notable participants this year include:

Michael Cunningham, the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and his latest work, By Nightfall. He will judge the Festival’s 5th Annual Short Fiction Contest;
Don Murray, who made his Broadway debut in 1951 opposite Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, and is perhaps best known for his role in the 1956 film Bus Stop with Marilyn Monroe;
John Patrick Shanley, multiple award-winning playwright/screenwriter/director (Doubt, Moonstruck), who wowed Festival audiences in 2010 with his poignant and powerful tribute to Tennessee Williams;
Leonard Pitts, best-selling author, columnist and 2004 Pulitzer Prize recipient for Commentary;
Douglas Brinkley, prolific non-fiction author and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, whose most recent book, Cronkite, traces Walter Cronkite’s story, drawing on unprecedented access to the esteemed broadcast journalist’s private papers as well as interviews with his family and friends;
John Shelton Reed, acclaimed Southern sociologist whose 19th book, Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s, takes readers to the heart of the place that inspired a host of literary legends and other creative souls;
Maureen Corrigan, a book critic for the Peabody Award-winning NPR program “Fresh Air;” author of a memoir, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading; and currently at work on a book about the enduring greatness of The Great Gatsby;
Silas House, bestselling author and playwright, whose work, which deals mostly with the plight of the rural place and its people, has been published in The New York Times, Newsday, and Oxford American, and his commentary regularly featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered;”
John Jeremiah Sullivan, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. He writes for GQ, Harper’s Magazine, and Oxford American and is the author of Blood Horses and the much-heralded new work, Pulphead;
Dwight Garner, a senior writer and book critic for The New York Times, whose essays and journalism have also appeared in Slate, Harper’s and Oxford American, among other places. He is at work on a biography of James Agee;
Zachary Lazar, novelist (Sway) and memoirist (Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder), whose writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, BOMB, among others; and
Ayana Mathis, whose debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was recently selected by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club 2.0.

& Thursday, March 14 at 5 p.m. Tulane’s Political Science department hosts a talk by Micheal Lin, author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of The United States in Herbert Hall 201, open to the Tulane community and alumni.

& Thursday, March 14 at 6:30 p.m. Rodger Kamenetz will be signing his book The Jew in the Lotus at Maple Leaf Book Shop’s Healing Center Location. While accompanying eight high-spirited Jewish delegates to Dharamsala, India, for a historic Buddhist-Jewish dialogue with the Dalai Lama, poet Rodger Kamenetz comes to understand the convergence of Buddhist and Jewish thought. Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists.

& Thursday at 8 p.m. 17 Poets! presents readings and musical performances by Hillary Gravendyk, Anis Shivan and Peter Orr followed by the open mic. Gravendyk is an Assistant Professor of English and Poetry at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. She is the recent winner of the Lana Turner poetry prize. Shivani is a fiction writer, poet, and critic, based in Houston, Texas. He is the author of the short story collection, Anatolia and Other Stories, published by Black Lawrence Press. Booklist describes the collection as “extraordinary” and “caustically funny.” The collection was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award and one of the stories–”Dubai”–was awarded Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize. Singer, songer writer and novelist Peter Orr will be performing his music.. “Simply put, Peter Orr is a hands-down, flat-out superb performer.” –David Cuthbert, New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 19, 2001

Friday March 15 at 7 p.m. Gallatin & Toulouse Press will celebrate the launch of their next title–an art book, comic book or coloring book as the reader prefers (crayons include)–Coloring Book for the Criminally Insane, featuring 28 drawings of local poet and artist Thaddeus Conti. The book launch will be at the St. Roch Tavern 7-9 p.m. “Poet, artist and raconteur Thaddeus Conti’s art explores the precarious margins of sanity, crawling right up to The Edge and peering deep into the darkness that lies inside that well. He is a bard for the modern age, willing to taste just enough of the poison of modern life to bring back visions & poems that draw us all closer to the fire & away from the darkness.”

& Saturday morning March 16 at 11:30 a.m. brings Story Time with Miss Maureen to Maple Street Book Shop Uptown. In early celebration of St. Patrick’s day, she’ll read Jamie O’Rourke and the Big Potato by Tomie dePaola.

& Saturday at 1:30 p.m. Octavia Books will host a booksiging with Kid Chef Eliana celebrating the launch of her new book, COOL KIDS COOK. Kid Chef Eliana keeps the good times rolling in this kid-friendly cookbook celebrating our Louisiana cuisine. With nearly thirty exciting recipes you can follow, from Jambalaya to Maque Choux to Boudin Balls to Pralines, Eliana guides you on a culinary journey through Louisiana. No matter your age, she shows you how to safely prepare some most delicious dishes that will excite the taste buds of family and friends.

& Saturday March 16 Earl W. Hampton, Jr. will be signing The Streetcar Guide to New Orleans (written by Hampton, Jr., Louis Costa, Andre Neff, and Peter Raarup) at Maple Street Book Shop’s Uptown location from 1 to 3 p.m.

& Saturday evening Tom Andes will be reading his story “The Hit” from The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 at the Maple Street Book Shop at Bayou St. John at 6 pm. There will be copies of the anthology for sale and wine and cheese for refreshments.

& Saturday night at the Contemporary Arts Center, check out Literally Speaking: Poetry and Purpose with Dave Brinks; Lee Meitzen Grue; Asia Rainey; & Kalamu ya Salaam and Kelly Harris-DeBerry, Moderator. Refreshments & Book Signing After Reading

& Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. Staple Goods Gallery Presents the Neutral Ground Quarterly Reading Series 6 X 15 (Six writers/performers, fifteen minutes each) Featuring performer Bremner Duthie, poet Kelly Harris, prose writer Yuri Herrera, prose writer Ruthie Landry, poet & playwright Dalt Wonk, and prose writer Michael Allen Zell. Actor, singer, and performer of award-winning one man shows, Bremner Duthie; Poet, educator, founder of The Literary Lab, and MelaNated collective member, Kelly Harris; Internationally known and award-winning novelist and short story writer, Yuri Herrera; NOCCA student and 2011 Words & Music Festival High School Short Story Winner, Ruthie Landry; Decades-strong poet, playwright, illustrator, and critic, Dalt Wonk; and, Novelist and short story writer, Michael Allen Zell

& This Sunday’s reading at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series is Open Mic at 3:30 pm in the rear courtyard.

& Every Monday, 9 p.m. Writer’s Block, usually held on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square. Check the Facebook page for details.

& Tuesday, March 26 Garden District Bookshop hosts Sally Newhart’s book The Original Tuxedo Jazz Band. In 1910, The Tuxedo Jazz Band played its first show at the Tuxedo Dance Hall in Storyville, under Oscar Celestin. The popular ensemble went on to play all over New Orleans, as well as across the South and the nation. In 1953, it became the first jazz band to play the White House. The band has punctuated Jazz history and produced some of the most memorable musicians of the past century: Bob French, Albert French, William Ridgley, Octave Crosby, Louis Armstrong and more. Author Sally Newhart has written a definitive and captivating history of the band from inception to present, including oral histories, archival photos, discography and a previously unpublished complete list of members since 1910

& Wednesday, March 20 brings Robert M. Ferris and FLOOD OF CONFLICT: The New Orleans Free School Story to Octavia Books. In 1971, he helped start The New Orleans Free School, which became a public school in 1973. He taught seventh and eighth grade and participated in communal governance of the school until 1980. Then the school system bureaucracy engaged the school in a bitter fight to take over leadership of the school. This struggle ended with Bob being appointed principal in 1982. However, this battle was not an isolated onslaught. It was a precursor to a human flood of conflicts in which the bureaucracy attempted to drown the Free School over issues about staff, size of enrollment, educational practices, teachers, building conditions, neglect of duty and location of school. Ferris concludes this book with passionate and well-informed arguments about educational issues confounding our country, including charter schools, the achievement gap, high-stakes testing, poverty, fair and equitable spending, early childhood eduction and quality education.

Odd Words March 7, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, memoir, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street, Writing.
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Gallatin & Toulouse press returns with a unique and startling coloring book by artist and poet Thaddeus Conti, Coloring Book for the Criminally Insane: Session 0. The book will be available pre-launch this Saturday, March 9 at an art show at the 1239 Congress Gallery of the same address featuring Conti. A formal launch of the book and re-launch of G&T Press, established in 2010 by editors Sam Jasper and Mark Folse with the publication of A Howling in the Wires: Selected Writers from Postdiluvian New Orleans, will be celebrated at the St. Roch Tavern later this month. G&T Press took an unavoidable hiatus after the publication of Howling, but plans to return in 2013 with a focus on works featuring New Orleans and its authors, poets and artists. Facebook users, please visit and “Like” the Gallatin & Toulouse Press page to keep up with events and books.

Local writer Ari Braverman was recently selected as the winner of the 2012 James Knudsen Prize in Fiction, awarded by Bayou Magazine and the University of New Orleans. More details on the Room 220 literary blog.

& so to the listings…

& Tonight, March 7 at 6 p.m. Octavia books hosts Elsa Hahne, author of shop favorite You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans, will be reading and signing her new cookbook, The Gravy: In the Kitchen with New Orleans Musicians, at our Bayou St. John location, Sunday, March 3rd at 2PM. It’s 192 pages, featuring 44 musicians, 45 recipes, and more than 200 color photographs, with an introduction by Dr. John.

& Tonight at 7:30 pm 17 Literary & Performance Series’ at Gold Mine Saloon features Book Signings & featured performances with poets Bernadette Mayer and Phillip Good. Mayer was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including: Ethics of Sleep (Trembling Pillow press, 2011) Poetry State Forest (New Directions, 2008), Scarlet Tanager (2005), Two Haloed Mourners: Poems (1998), Proper Name and Other Stories (1996), The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), The Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), Sonnets (1989), Midwinter Day (1982), The Golden Book of Words (1978), and Ceremony Latin (1964). She has a new collection forthcoming from New Directions: The Helens of Troy, NY. Good is a graduate of The School of Visual Arts. He co-edited with Bill Denoyelles, the last of the mimeograph poetry magazines, Blue Smoke. He has given poetry readings all across America and abroad. He now lives in a former shtetl next to the Tsatsawassa and Kinderhook creeks. His book Untitled Writing from a Member of the Blank Generation was released in 2011 by Trembling Pillow Press.

& Nationally renowned poet, author, and actor Roosevelt “Hero 44″ Wright III will be instructing a spoken word course at Special Tea Cafe Thursdays at 6:30. This is a great opportunity to learn from one of the most innovated spoken word artist in the country.

& Friday, March 8 at 4 pm Tulane University will present a lecture featuring Timothy Hampton, University of California-Berkley “Tangled Generation: Dylan, Kerouac, Petrarch and the Poetry of Escape”. Hampton will sketch out an approach to the problem of the “generation” as a category of literary historical understanding. His focus will be Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, which is both a milestone in his career and a complex meditation on the relationship between poetry, politics, and history. It is also the only place in his long career in which Dylan writes songs about the “1960s Generation”–that social group of which he was understood to be the “voice” or spokesman.Prof. Hampton will explore the ways in which Dylan deploys earlier traditions of writing about “generational” experience, from Dante and Petrarch to Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac, as a way of marking a break with his own earlier work.

& This weekend brings the sixth annual Jane Austen Festival in Mandeville, featuring the signature costume contest in which contestants compete in their best Mr. Darcy and Jane Austin threads, along with a Love Letter Writing Contest. Activities will begin Saturday, March 9, at the Mandeville Trailhead Cultural Interpretive Center’s Depot Room at 9 a.m. and continue at at 2:30 pm at the North Star at Girod and Madison streets, three blocks south of the Trailhead. Saturday’s events are free and open to the public. Sunday, March 10 the festival moves to the second floor of The Lakehouse, restaurant, 2025 Lakeshore Drive from noon to 6 pm . Admission is $35 or $25 for students and teachers with picture ID and includes a brunch, finale cake and champagne reception and several events during the afternoon. A complete schedule of activities is on the event’s web site, JaneAustenFestival.org.

& Saturday, March 9 at 11:30 am Miss Maureen will read A Birthday for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban at Maple Street Books Uptown’s weekly Story Time with Miss Maureen.

& Saturday, March 9 at 1 p.m. Garden District Books hosts C. S. Harris and his novel What Darkness Brings. “The death of a notorious London diamond merchant draws aristocratic investigator Sebastian St. Cyr and his new wife Hero into a sordid world of greed, desperation, and the occult, when the husband of Sebastian’s former lover Kat Boleyn is accused of the murder.”

& Don’t forget the pre-launch debut of Coloring Book for the Criminally Insane at the 1239 Congress Gallery from 6:30 – 10 p.m. The gallery’s name is it’s address.

& This Sunday’s reading at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series will feature poets Dave Brinks, Rev. Goat Carson and John Sinclair perform their work. 3:30 pm in the rear courtyard.

& The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. Poets perform as a resident artists paints the crowd and performers. At 6 p.m. at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street. No longer at the Bayou Road location.

& Every Monday, 9 p.m. Writer’s Block, usually held on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square. Check the Facebook page for details.

& Tuesday, March 12 at 5:30 p.m. Garden District Books features Paul Dorrell’s Living the Artist’s Life. “Dorrell opened [the Leopold Gallery in Kansas City, MO] in 1991 and has been advancing artists’ careers on a national level ever since. This is an updated edition of his original book, covering critical subjects that he didn’t before and expanding on others, written in the same honest tone. With clients such as Warner Brothers and H&R Block, Dorrell knows how to land the big deals, as well as how to win the trust of private collectors.”

& Tuesday 6 pm Octavia hosts a reading and book signing with Aimee Agresti featuring her gripping new novel, INFATUATE in which angels in training face evil in New Orleans. From Bourbon Street to St. Louis Number One to the LaLaurie Mansion—our city really serves as an additional character in the book. This sequel to ILLUMINATE has all the hallmarks of a great YA read: romance, action, paranormal elements, and mystery.

& Also on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m., Maple Street Bookstore at the Healing Center hosts Gael Thompson and The Dream of the Turquoise Bee by Dianne Aigaki. Thompson appears on behalf of the author. The book is a mystery set in Tibet revolving around the disappearance of the protagonists husband during the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and her return 30 years later to China hoping to uncovered his murderers.

& Wednesday nights from 7-10 it is Lyrics and Laughs, bridging comedy and poetry by featuring performers from both genres at Special Tea, 4337 Banks St.

If your event doesn’t appear here, please email odd.words.nola@gmail.com. I do my best to scrape the internet for everything of interest, but it helps if you send me your listings direction.

Odd Words February 28, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, memoir, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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Any book of journalism with a blurb from David Simon will make Odd Words sit up and take notice, so I want to call out the appearances of reporter Sarah Carr featuring her new book, HOPE AGAINST HOPE, a moving portrait of school reform in New Orleans told through the eyes of a family, a teacher, and a principal. She appears tonight at Garden District Book and next week on Wednesday at Octavia. The appearance at Garden District will be filmed by C-SPAN for BookTV. I have my own strong feelings about the anarcho-centrifugal Balkanization of the New Orleans school system, and can’t wait to read this.

& so to the listings…

& Sarah Carr appears at Garden District Books at 6 p.m. in a reading/discussion that will be filmed by C-SPAN for BookTV. “It’s work like this that makes journalism truly matter, that makes clear that reportage is not merely about fact and argument and theory, but about human lives in the balance. In Hope Against Hope, Sarah Carr has taken an open mind and a careful eye to the delicate, complicated issue of public education and the fading American commitment to equality of opportunity. She does so not by embracing ideological cant or political banter, but by following people through the schools of New Orleans, a city that is trying desperately to reconstitute and better itself after a near-death experience. Don’t embarrass yourself by speaking further on American education without first reading this.” — David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of The Wire and Treme

& 17 Poets! will host visiting poets Barbara Henning and Jamey Jones followed by the open mic. Henning is the author of seven collections of poetry and three novels. Her most recent books are a collection of poetry and prose, Cities & Memory (Chax), a novel, Thirty Miles from Rosebud, and a chapbook, A Slow Process (Monkey Puzzle). A Swift Passage is forthcoming this year from Quale Press. She is also the author/editor of a book of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna), and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (Blazevox). Barbara grew up in Detroit and has lived in New York City since 1983, except for a few years in Tucson. She teaches for Naropa University, as well as Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is Professor Emerita. Jones is from Pensacola, Florida, where he has long been an active proponent of all things poetry. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University in 2010. His most recent chapbooks are the notebook troubled the sleep door (brown boke press, 2008) and Twelve Windows (brown boke press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Yawp, The Mundane Egg, Brooklyn Paramount, The Tsatsawassins, With + Stand, and other various journals.

& Please join Room 220 as we celebrate the release of the newest Press Street publication, We’re Pregnant, with a Happy Hour Salon from 6 – 9 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 28, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.). We’re Pregnant is a chapbook of short fiction by Room 220’s esteemed editor, Nathan C. Martin, along with photography by Akasha Rabut, Sophie T. Lvoff, and Grissel Giuliano. The book contains three of Martin’s short stories—which explore in morbid fashion anxieties related to sex, disease, marriage, and childbirth—with images inspired by the stories from each of the photographers. The result is a slim, elegant volume containing three dark couplets of photography and text.

& The Poetry Society of America and Tulane University present 1 THE NEW SALON: READING AND CONVERSATIONS Jericho Brown, with Peter Cooley at 7 p.m. in the Stone Auditorium, Woldenburg Art Center. Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His first book, Please (New Issues), won the American Book Award.

& Tonight at Maple Street Book Shop Uptown hosts a reading and signing with Chris Wiltz who will be promoting her new book, Shoot the Money, at 6 p.m. From Mamou to Miami to New Orleans, money and friendship are at the heart of Shoot the Money as it explores women’s desires for big bucks, and they see what money does to those who have it, lose it, pursue it, or steal it. And what happens when they try a little revenge on their rapid chase toward a better life.

& Thursday Octavia Books hosts a presentation and book signing with journalist Daniel Brook celebrating the release of his new book, A HISTORY OF FUTURE CITIES, a pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Brook is the author of The Trap and a journalist whose work has appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Nation, and Slate. A New York native, Brook lives in New Orleans

& Also on Thursday night the Black Student Union of Loyola University will be hosting a Spoken Word Showcase on Loyola’s campus in the Audubon Room located on the second floor of the Danna Student Center. The event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 7pm and the show starts at 8pm. The event will feature 3 opening performances from students followed by sets from local poets including Hero 44, John L, Tony Wilson, Indie Writes and Smutdapoet.

& Friday Maple Street Book Shop’s Healing Center location hosts a reading with John McCusker at our Healing Center location, Thursday, February 28th, 6:30-8PM. He’ll be signing his book, Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz. Edward “Kid” Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader. Drawing on oral history and Ory’s unpublished autobiography, “Creole Trombone” is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. McCusker is a photographer for The Times-Picayune. He was part of the the team that shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism for covering Hurricane Katrina.

& Friday night Garden District Books hosts Deirdre Gogarty with Darrelyn Saloom and the book My Call to the Ring: A Memoir of a Girl Who Yearns to Box. Although in the late 1980′s boxing is socially frowned upon and illegal for women in Ireland, a young women named Deirdre Gogarty has one dream: to be the first world champion. Unable to fit in at school and in the midst of her parents’ unraveling marriage, she plans her suicide. Death hovers in the back of her mind, but boxing beckons as Gogarty defies the odds and finds a gym and coach who is willing to train her. Her fierce determination leads to underground bouts in Ireland and Britain. But how can a shy, young misfit become a professional boxer in a country that bans women from the sport? Gogarty follows her calling to compete and journeys from the Irish Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, from outcast to center ring, from the depths of depression to the championship fight of her life.

& The first Saturday of the month brings the Poetry Buffet at the Latter Memorial Library at 2 p. hosted by Gina Ferrara. Featured this month are Delia Tomino Nakayama, Melinda Palacio and Genaro Ky Ly Smith.

& Miss Maureen of Maple Street Books Uptown announces that at this week’s Story Time: “We’ll read Henri’s Walk to Paris by Leonore Klein and talk about all the places we could walk to.” 11:30 a.m.

& Octavia Books will be at this Saturday’s Crescent City Farmers Market for a joint booksigning featuring Lorin Gaudin – NEW ORLEANS CHEF’S TABLE – and Elsa Hahne – THE GRAVY: In the Kitchen with New Orleans Musicians. Gaudin’s book explores the culinary traditions in our fair city, amidst the dining evolution taking place, with recipes for the home cook from 50 of the city’s most celebrated restaurants, while Hahne’s digs into the deep connections between New Orleans music and food with forty-four first-person accounts from musicians and more than two hundred photographs.

& Also on Saturday from 1-3 p.m. at the Garden District Book Shop Gayle Nolan discusses and signs her book, What Love Can Do: Recollected Stories of Slavery and Freedom in New Orleans and the Surrounding Area. Arthur Mitchell was born in Irontown, Louisiana, on August 24, 1915. During his early childhood, he moved with his family to the French Quarter of New Orleans. There, he and his siblings sat around a coal or wood stove at night, listening to family stories about the descendents of a beautiful young slave girl from East Central Africa sold in 1810 to a French farmer in the New Orleans area. Later, Mitchell realized that the stories so precious to him needed to be preserved after his death, and he began writing them down in fifteen-minute segments during his work breaks at the Cabildo in New Orleans. His original 150-page, hand-written memoir was lost in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, when the levee broke just two miles from his house in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. Fortunately, one copy was preserved by Gayle Nolan, who has edited and prepared the manuscript for publication.

& Also on Saturday the Rising Tide 7.5 presents a forum on creative New Orleans. The afternoon program features a segment beginning at noon by Moira Crone, author of The Not Yet, a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2121 on the Isles of Orleans. Part Fantasy, part social commentary, Ms. Crone’s novel will sure to provide plenty of interesting topic of conversation. She’ll talk about the book itself and also about the real world issues that inspired her. This event is free and open to the public and we encourage anyone interested in the future of New Orleans’ creative art scene come by to learn more about how they can help protect and foster it.

& Sunday at Maple Street Books Bayou St. John location Elsa Hahne, author of shop favorite You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans, will be reading and signing her new cookbook, The Gravy: In the Kitchen with New Orleans Musicians, at our Bayou St. John location, Sunday, March 3rd at 2PM. It’s 192 pages, featuring 44 musicians, 45 recipes, and more than 200 color photographs, with an introduction by Dr. John.

& Sunday’s reading at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series is an open mic. Next week, March 10, will feature poets Dave Brinks, Rev. Goat Carson and John Sinclair perform their work.

& Sunday The Shadowbox Theater hosts the Slam Poetry Olympics, in which four teams square off in a test of poetry prowess. Events include timed poems, forms ranging from haiku to limerick, and a few surprises. Hosted by A Scribed Called Quess. 7 p.m. at 2400 St. Claude Ave.

& Monday, March 4th at 7 p.m. the Black Widow Salon at Crescent City Books welcomes Liz Williams, the founder and director of SOFAB (Southern Food and Beverage Museum) and author of the new New Orleans: A Food Biography; and Sara Roahen, author of the acclaimed Gumbo Tales and former restaurant critic for Gambit Weekly, who has been published in Food & Wine, Oxford American, Wine & Spirits, Gourmet, Tin House, Garden & Gun.

& Monday, March 4 The Tulane School of Architecture Master’s of Preservation Studies program invites you to hear award-winning journalist and urban critic Roberta Brandes Gratz speak on historic preservation and post-Katrina disaster recovery in New Orleans this upcoming Monday, March 4 from 1-2:30 p.m. in Richardson Memorial Hall room 305. Gratz is author of The Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs and two other books, and a regular contributor to online news sites such as Citiwire.

& Also on Monday Garden District Book Shop features Veronica Kavass: Artists in Love: From Picasso & Gilot to Christo & Jeanne-Claude, A Century of Creative and Romantic Partnerships at 5 p.m. For centuries, great artists have been drawn together in friendship and in love. In her gorgeously designed book, curator and writer Veronica Kavass delves into the passionate and creative underpinnings of the art world’s most provocative romances. From Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Kavass’ intimate and daring text provides a generous glimpse into the inspiring and sometimes tempestuous relationships between celebrated artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries

& Every Monday, 9 p.m. Writer’s Block, usually held on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square. Check the Facebook page for details.

& Maple Street Uptown’s First Tuesday Book Club will bmeet March 5th at 5:45pm to discuss Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

& Tuesday evening The 1718 Society, a student-run literary organization of Tulane, Loyola, and UNO students, hosts their reading 7 p.m. featuring curator and writer Veronica Kavass will read in March. She’ll be reading from her book, Artists in Love: From Picasso & Gilet to Christo and Jean-Claude, A Century of Creative and Romantic Partnerships, in which she discusses 29 20th- and 21st-century artist-couples—among them Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe; Josef and Anni Albers; Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg-exploring “the way they, as partners, collaborated, influenced one another, or guarded their art from a lover’s influence, or how they used muse-manipulation to come into their own, or sacrificed their art for the other’s.”

&Octavia Books hosts a presentation and book signing with reporter Sarah Carr featuring her new book, HOPE AGAINST HOPE, a moving portrait of school reform in New Orleans told through the eyes of a family, a teacher, and a principal. .

& Wednesday nights from 7-10 it is Lyrics and Laughs, bridging comedy and poetry by featuring performers from both genres at Special Tea, 4337 Banks St.

It hardly rains in Eureka, California February 25, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Bayou St. John, Crow, cryptic envelopment, Fortin Street, Louisiana, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: California, crows, Eureka, Oregon, rain, Washington
1 comment so far

Certainly it’s rainy west of the Cascades: Oregon, Washington, Northern California; all those dreary grey days, redwoods and ferns, heroin and grunge. Portland and Seattle are the sentimental favorites. Along the Hurricane Coast it rains buckets, pissing pythons my girlfriend’s text message said the other night. It’s February 24th and we have had twenty cloudy days and thirteen of rain, including Mardi Gras Day. January we had twenty-six cloudy days, thirteen of rain. December: twenty cloudy days and eleven of rain. You get the idea. A rain of frogs would be an interesting relief.

Winter here makes you long for summer when the unrelenting heat and humidity are relieved by the afternoon monsoons, the fairly regular afternoon thunderstorms, watching the inbound cumulonimbus crowning over the coastal wetlands and the lake, the dense tropical splendor of the cooling downdrafts and downpours. One night not long after the flood I was stopped on a dark Marconi Avenue (the lights not yet restored) by a parade of ducks crossing the road to see what the raucous chorus of frogs were singing about in the small wetland that lies between the road and the levee. I rolled down the window and stopped the engine in the middle of the then-deserted road and simply listened in the cool aftermath, watched the egrets high-stepping through this cypress-studded niche eco-system.

The black sky is just turning gray as I write this but I can already hear the crows calling the laggards over the breakfast at the racetrack stables. When it’s this wet the seagulls will be with them, and I can stand just inside my door with a cigarette and watch their chessboard battle over the soggy infield and the best bits left by the horses. If I were a true naturalist masochist I could grab my hurricane slicker and an umbrella and walk the blocks to the park and watch the pelicans over the bayou but I have an inexplicable love of crows, love to watch the stark battle of black versus white against the gray sky. I don’t understand the attraction for the seagulls with the bayou a half-dozen blocks over. I understand the attraction to me, to stand with the heat of the house pouring out behind me just under shelter from the next downpour watching the crows loud party. We are rather fond of large and animated dinners down here.

Odd Words February 21, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, Indie Book Shops, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
2 comments

The Big Read comes to Xavier University of Louisiana with a busy program in celebration of Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying, beginning with a keynote event Saturday, Feb. 23, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the University Center Ballroom. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. Xavier, along with its partner, the New Orleans Public Library, was one of only 78 not-for-profits awarded a grant to host a Big Read project between September 2011 and June 2012. The Big Read in New Orleans focuses on A Lesson Before Dying by Louisiana native Ernest J. Gaines. The Feb. 23 kick-off event will feature an appearance by the author – a Louisiana native – who will be interviewed about his life and his work on stage by Fox 8 News Anchor Nancy Parker. Other events will be hosted at bookstores and other venues around down over the next month.

Also, March is almost upon us and the box office is open for the annual Tennessee Williams Festival. You can view the online schedule here and even make a personal list of events. You can buy your tickets and passes here online.

& Bayou Magazine, the literary journal of the University of New Orleans English Department, will launch their latest issue tonight, Feb. 21 at the Allways Lounge at 9:30 pm. with readings and music by the Natural Light All-Stars. This is Issue 58 of this biennial, which is a depressing number for those of us who remember the Ellipsis but an outstanding achievement for the UNO English Department staff and students who make it possible.

Andrei Codrescu

& Tonight 17 Poets! features the founders of the original Institute for the Imagination Andrei Codrescu and Dave Brinks, reading from their latest work: Codrescu’s So Recently Rent a World and Brink’s The Secret Brain: Selected Poems 1995-2012. When these two share the mike it is like the high-speed collision of elementary particles, a subtle but profound fireworks are certain to ripple through the space-time continuum at The Gold Mine. Open mic to follow hosted by Jimmy Ross, Proud Veteran of the U.S. Navy and other, sundry and interesting things. Codrescu is a towering figure not only in the New Orleans literary landscape but through his adventures in poetry, radio and film he is a cult icon of international stature. Brinks is founder and co-host of 17 Poets whose own most recent book was launched at City Lights Books in San Francisco and in Paris. [Interrupts the listings to read Charles Olson's "The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs".]

& Also on Thursday UNO Press invites you to a reading from two of their authors together for just one night! Come for the reading and stay for a Q&A session and book signing. Featured are MOIRA CRONE, author of The Not Yet, a science fiction novel that takes place in New Orleans in the year 2121. Find out why this fascinating novel was selected as one of the Best Books of 2012 by the influential blog Sans Serif, by NOLA.com as one of the “Top 10 Books of 2012,” and is one of seven Philip K. Dick Award nominees, one of the most prestigious science fiction awards in the nation. MARK STATMAN will read from Black Tulips, his translation of selected poems by José María Hinojosa. Black Tulips, released in October 2012, is swiftly becoming a mainstream in translation and has also been receiving some great press. In December, “Possibly Elegy” was featured as the poem of the day on Poetry Daily (poems.com), and New Pages named the translation a “New & Noteworthy” book of 2012.

& Finally, Garden District Book Shop hosts Margot Berwin and her book Scent of Darkness tonight at 5:30 p.m. “From the best-selling author of Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, a magical, seductive novel about the power of scent–and what happens when a perfume renders a young woman irresistible to everyone around her.”

& Friday, Feb 22. The Maple Street Book Shop Bayou location continues The Diane Tapes reading series featuring Maia Elgin, Melissa Dickey, and Nik De Dominic at 6 p.m.

& Also on Friday at 6 p.m., Garden District features Sharisse Coulte book Rock My World and Lee Coulter’s CD Mr. Positivity. The writer/song-writer duo a husband & wife creative team for the past 9 years, are embarking on a 6 month 55 city tour of the U.S. with their 4 year old son to share their respective passions.

& Miss Maureen says, “We’ll read Mossy by Jan Brett and talk about turtles”! at Saturday’s Story Time with Miss Maureen at Maple Street’s Uptown location at 11:30 a.m.

& A reminder that Saturday is Xavier University of Louisiana’s kick off event for The Big Read, featuring Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying, beginning with an appearance by the author – a Louisiana native – who will be interviewed about his life and his work on stage by Fox 8 News Anchor Nancy Parker, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the University Center Ballroom.

& Saturday night from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., as part of “Crescent City Books After Hours,” the denizens of The New Orleans Poetry Brothel invite you to a clandestine evening of intimate literature. Our poetry whores will be offering private readings in the cloistered, candlelit stacks of Crescent City Books. For a $10 cover, you can take in as many readings as you desire. Our busker will syncopate the atmosphere with sultry violin and light libations will be available. All proceeds will go towards the next Poetry Brothel event, this March.

& Also on Saturday night the Ashe Cultural Center, 1712 Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, hosts Redd Linen Night, a Visual Arts Fundraiser with a Twist featuring An Extraordinary Night of Art, Music, Poetry and Incredible Performances. 6 – 10 p.m.

& Sunday’s scheduled Southern Fried Divorce After Party, sponsored by Garden District Books, is cancelled due to a fire at the scheduled venue.

Monday, Feb. 25th Octavia books features a reading, presentation and book signing with translator/poet Mark Statman featuring BLACK TULIPS: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa.

& A Studio in the Woods is proud to present a joint poetry reading by Melissa Dickey and former resident Benjamin Morris. On February 25, 2013, at 7 p.m. Morris and Dickey will read from their works and take questions from the audience. A brief book signing will follow the reading. The reading will take place from 7-8pm in the common room of Cudd Hall on Tulane’s campus, located on Gibson Quad.

& Every Monday, 9 p.m. Writer’s Block, usually held on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square. Check the Facebook page for details.

& Tuesday, Feb. 26 it is time for another Don Paul Poetry Ball at Cafe Istanbul featuring Gina Ferrara, Niyi Osundare, Goeff Munsterman John Sinclair, with music by Katarina Boudreaux and Jonathan Warren. Open mic follows. 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. with cash bar.

& Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. Garden District Book Shop hosts Elsa Hahne’s The Gravy: In the Kitchen with New Orleans Musicians. “Based on the much-loved OffBeat magazine series with the same name, The Gravy—In the Kitchen with New Orleans Musicians will fill your ears and your belly, whether you choose breakfast with Mystikal, or lunch with Irma Thomas and her Macaroni and Cheese, or Creole Squash for supper at Big Al Carson’s house with a side of Antoinette K-Doe’s Cornbread.”

& Wednesday, Feb. 27 Maple Street Book Shop Uptown will host a discussion of Xavier University’s selection for The Big Read, Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying at 6 p.m.

& Also on Wednesday The Maple Street Book Shop’s downtown bookclub will be reading Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman for their next meeting at 7PM in the Healing Center.

Odd Words February 14, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
3 comments

The Black Widow Salon at Crescent City Books gets some virtual ink from the Times Picayune/NOLA.com, which seems to be making some rudimentary moves toward realizing that people who read newspapers read books. They have a listings editor that pays attention to books, and entertainment writer Chris Waddington has two bookish articles in his NOLA.com homepage (among likelier fare). One of his stories I missed (and so you may have too) was the announcement that the University of New Orleans has hired Abram Himelstein, the New Orleans publisher who led the Neighborhood Story Project to national prominence, as editor-in-chief of UNO Press.

& 17 Poets! celebrates 10 years when it returns tonight, Feb. 14. at 8 p.m. with an anthology reading from Lavender Ink’s new collection, FUCK poems, edited by VIncent Cellucci. Also, John Sinclair will perform his annual post-Mardi Gras show. As always, the open mic awaits and is our main attraction. So join us and read with us http://www.17poets.com, Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine St.

& Late Addition Friday night Antenna Gallery hosts a Optical Saturday Slide Show: A Performative Comic Book Reading featuring Otto Splotch, Ceazar Meadows, Kira Mardikes & Amelie Ray, and D.G.W. Hedges. 7:30 p.m. at the new Gallery location 3718 St. Claude Ave. between Independence and Pauline Streets.

& Saturday’s Story Time with Miss Maureen at Maple Street Bookshop Uptown this Saturday features Lucky Duckings: A True Rescue Story by Eva Moore, illustrated by Nancy Carpente. 11:30 am.

& Saturday at Maple Street Bookshop Uptown Virginia Barkley will be signing her book Clutterbusting for Busy Women: How to Create a C.A.L.M Life to Have More Time and Energy from 1 – 3 pm. This appear ripe for a literary snob snarky remark, like, um, does she do consulting? No, I am not getting rid of any books.

& Sunday at Garden District Books you are invited to tea with romance authors Julia Quinn, Eloisa James, and Connie Brockway discussing and signing their joint project, The Lady Most Willing: A Novel in Three Parts.

& On Sunday at 3 p.m. the Maple Leaf Poetry Reading Series, the oldest continuous series in the south, will host poets Valentine Pierce and Radamir Luza in the back patio (weather permitting) or the back room.

& The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. At 6 p.m. poets perform as our resident artists paints the crowd and performers. Also at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street. No longer at the Bayou Road location.

& Monday begins the spring series at the Black Widow Salon at Crescent City Books, with 5 X 20. Five emerging writers, twenty minutes each of reading and discussion w/ Michael Jeffrey Lee, Geoff Munsterman, Justin Nobel, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Kat Stromquist. Starts promptly at 7 p.m. upstairs, with refreshments and limited seating.

& Every Monday, 9 p.m. Writer’s Block, usually held on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square. Check the Facebook page for details.

& Tuesday at 5:30 pm Garden District Bookshop hosts Ruta Sepetys discussing and signing her book, Out of the Easy. Join us for the conversation between Chris Wiltz, New Orleans author of The Last Madam: A Life in the New Olreans Underworld and Ruta Sepetys.

& Wednesday at Garden DistrictlLocal actress Laura Cayouette, of the Academy Award Nominated film Django Unchained joins us to discuss her recently released first book, Know Small Parts: An Actor’s Guide to Turning Minutes into Moments and Moments into a Career.

& Metta Sama will read her poetry on Wednesday, February 20, at 8 p.m., at the UNO Sandbar (on Founders Road, across from the Engineering Building, inside the Cove). This event is free and open to the public

& Wednesday nights from 7-10 Lyrics and Laughs bridges comedy and poetry featuring performers from both genres at Special Tea, 4337 Banks St.

& This Wednesday, Feb. 20 Octavia Books hosts Cory Doctorow featuring his new book, HOMELAND, the sequel to the New York Times bestselling YA title LITTLE BROTHER. I don’t often post blurbs, but it’s Neil Gaiman. Someone’s decided it’s a YA title but that doesn’t mean this doesn’t make me curious: “A wonderful, important book . . . I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year” — Neil Gaiman on Little Brother

Adiu paure Carnaval February 13, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Carnival, cryptic envelopment, literature, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
1 comment so far

At the conclusion of Carnival in Nice, France, an effigy of Monsieur Carnaval is burned, the ancient story of the burning man, the sacrifice in fire. As told by Mama Lisa’s World Blog, in that rite Monsieur Carnaval “is responsible for all the wrongdoing people do throughout the year. At Carnival time in France, Monsieur Carnaval is judged for his behavior throughout the preceding year. Usually he’s found guilty and an effigy of him is burned.”

Accompanying the ritual is a song, and I offer the lyrics collected by Mama Lisa below, both in Occitan (the language of the Troubadors) and in English. I suggest you click the link to open in a new tab or window so you can follow along as far as the MP3 goes.

And so, from New Orleans, Adiu Paure Carnaval.

Adiu paure Carnaval
(Occitan)

Adiu paure, adiu paure,
adiu paure Carnaval
Tu te’n vas e ieu demòri
Adiu paure Carnaval
Tu t’en vas e ieu demòri
Per manjar la sopa a l’alh
Per manjar la sopa a l’òli
Per manjar la sopa a l’alh
Adiu paure, adiu paure,
adiu paure Carnaval

La joinessa fa la fèsta
Per saludar Carnaval
La Maria fa de còcas
Amb la farina de l’ostal

Lo buòu dança, l’ase canta
Lo moton ditz sa leiçon
La galina canta lo Credo
E lo cat ditz lo Pater

Farewell, Poor Carnival
(English)

Farewell, farewell,
Farewell, poor Carnival
You are leaving, and I am staying
Farewell, poor Carnival
You are leaving, and I am staying
To eat garlic soup
To eat oil soup
To eat garlic soup
Farewell, farewell,
Farewell, poor Carnival.

The young ones are having a wild time
To greet Carnival
Mary is baking cakes
With flour from her home.

The ox is dancing, the donkey’s singing
The sheep is saying its lesson
The hen is singing the Credo
And the cat is saying the Pater.

Splish Splash February 11, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Faubourg St. John, Fortin Street, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Splish Splash, washeteria
2 comments

There is something about the laundromat, a plastic electric resonance it shares with the two-tap-and-a-tv dive bar and the bus terminal which makes these places as familiar to their likeliest visitors as the parade of names at the mall is to the people they most likely work for. I love the fluorescent shabbiness, the incessant televisions, the chairs designed for some proximate species but we’re not here for the ambiance, exactly. The comfort in these places is the instant camaraderie of people who are there by necessity. It doesn’t matter if you are Charity-born poor or fell into it by way of that degree in art which led to a career in tattoo, once you walk in you’re one of us.

I live on the sketchy edge of the fashionable Faubourg St., John just over the renters-insurance redline and facing the track. Just up the block the owners of the grand homes beneath the oaks have their own front-loading washers and dryers. Smack in the middle of this atmosphere of elegance sits the Splish Splash, next to the now closed neighborhood drugstore and the abandoned, half-renovated Circle K, a reminder that all around the stately homes of Esplanade and Ursulines lies a neighborhood of once working class shotgun doubles. Inside the stucco-faced washeteria there is nothing faubourg about it: a vinyl floor, clean enough early in the morning but past all point of mopping, rows of large and small washers and dryers rolling along except the one half disassembled for months with the parts inside the drum. The only place to sit inside is in front of the television, and there is never enough table space and no sitting on tables allowed. The crowd is about equally divided between those who pick up a coffee at Fairgrinds or a single beer from somewhere or an orange drink from the vending machine. The last are the Latino workers from the back of the track. The women stay inside and chat and laugh while their children run about. Their men or the single men tend to congregate on the bench outside and talk about trabajo and futbol as best I can make out when I step out for a cigarette.

The Splish Splash is not some chic urban cruising laundromat but there is always a certain amount of side-eyed appraisal between the singles of the coffee variety. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anyone striking up a conversation with a stranger for more than a few sentences. Laundry is a chore and double if you have to haul it down to the corner and fight for a dryer. The Latina women always seem to come in pairs, with or without their men, and their endless and gay conversation is a soothing relief from the chattering television and the endless thump-thump-whop of the machines. (We will, we will, dry you, dry you). Many patrons come and go between wash and dry, coming back with a fresh coffee or groceries from Cansecos. It is that kind of corner, with two neighborhood groceries and until deBlancs closed, a drugstore. Easy enough to get all your errands in if you drive over and park in the deBlancs lot

It’s easy to live in this city and never see past your unconscious blinders what sort of city this is. Many people like to compare New Orleans to San Francisco but in reality this city is much closer to the blue-collar bricks and sticks of Baltimore than to tony Frisco. It’s a working man and woman’s city with most of the real money–outside of the faubourgs with their Lloyd’s real estate signs and hired police patrols–long fled to the outskirts. Those who cling to the lakefront often take Orleans Avenue on the other sketchy edge of my neighborhood, one only real estate agents would call Bayou St John. They travel that road to and from work every day and I wonder if they see the old men in straw hats laughing in the shade on the neutral ground, the beers from the corner store their fountain of eternally recalled youth, or that elderly couple sitting on their porch, silent, their bent metal clam chairs angled apart as if what was between them were a repulsive anti-pole, a force they could only overcome together but can’t or won’t.

Back on Esplanade the Splish Splash never rises to discussion on the neighborhood mailing list, although every other local business does. Unless someone pulls a gun or the place burns to the ground in a flash fire of neglected lint it is invisible, a little puddle in the gutter of elegant Esplanade Avenue, lacking the bohemian charm of the bicycle clutter outside of Fairgrinds. Inside we know it is as warm and friendly as Liuzza by the Track, with its own crowd of first name or nodding acquaintance regulars as familiar as the check-out girls at Cansecos, as much a part of why some of us live here as Cafe Degas.

The Kingdom of God Is A Hand. February 9, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in 504, Carnival, Central City, New Orleans, NOLA, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Dr.Martin Luther King Charter Schol, Hope, Ruby Bridges
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The evening begins with Ruby Bridges and ends with this picture of two young men in the Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School Marching Band. I wonder how many in the crowd remember who Bridges is, the small girl sent by parents as obedient as Abraham through the spit and vitriol walk to Golgotha past the Ku Klux mothers, into the segregated 1960 William Frantz Elementary School in the Ninth Ward. This evening she rides a float of honor in a Carnival parade staged by women the eldest of whom were likely raised like myself in Catholic and suburban schools as white as 1960 William Frantz and everyone in the crowd and on the floats likes to think we are far past all that.

The two unnamed young men attend a Ninth Ward school named for the famous civil rights leader, a school as uniformly black as William Frantz was white in 1959, a new school in the charter anarchy unleashed after the Federal Flood in the name of free-market reform. I wonder if their parents, likely raised in the Bantustan New Orleans Public School System and turned loose after their allotted sentence with half an education, carefully reviewed the dozens of new schools before selecting this one, or if they chose it because of Dr. King’s name, because it opened in the mostly de-peopled Ninth Ward, its name and location a symbol of a struggle that began in 1960 but which has never really ended.

The pair stopped right in front of me on St. Charles Avenue and 2nd Street during a stop in the parade, the older keeping up the parade rest beat while verbally schooling the younger one who struggled to keep up. I study the picture for some resemblance, perhaps they are brothers, but I don’t find any and think a wise band director chose to place the novice next to the older one, someone willing to take the younger under his wing and teach him the ropes. The seriousness of his face before I raise my phone camera as he speaks to the younger, all the while keeping up the rigorous tattoo, the way the younger one tries hard to match the drum strokes, shows the older to be someone with the innate authority to lead by example. He will make a fine teacher or preacher or military officer someday, in one of the few openings in America where the color of character really matters.

When I raise my camera the young men are both suddenly eyes-front and Marine Band erect, representing at their best. In a city where too many young men his age mistake fear for respect, he has mine immediately, both as teacher of the tradition and as the clearly proud person picture who wears his uniform patches as if they were a Nike swoosh drawn by the hand of God. It’s not fair to judge their school or the entire charter school movement by one young man but I have to think that the Dr. King school is doing something right. His pride and discipline shine like the best military band or ROTC unit you will see this carnival. His willingness to take responsibility for the younger drummer while never missing a beat, the way he snaps to attention and the young one follows his lead, is a badge of character as clear as the letters on his jacket, stands out from the crowd like the white plum on his hat.

I can’t help but think of how the most successful charter schools cherry pick students, of all the kids left behind in the Orleans Parish and Recovery School Districts, the ones unlucky enough to land in a corporate McDonald’s charter to be processed like so much meat, those who wind up bleeding out on someone’s porch over slights real or imagined. The teacher Jesus did not set out to save the whole world. Translations later he is said to proclaim that the kingdom of God is at hand but I have to wonder if he meant his own hand; take this, he said, and be lifted up. Someone has lifted this young man up and he extends his to the younger and even as I type up this years list of the murdered I find in the middle of a Carnival parade not a moment of escape but a moment of hope.

Sin. Repent. Repeat. February 7, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Carnival, cryptic envelopment, Dancing Bear, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.
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Cartoon moonjam madam meet Sir Sluralot on Chartres by noon or you’re on your own with the feather men & rum demon lizard stampede squeezing through Bourbon Street toward some bar-hell bathroom line where someone wearing that very feather (you’re sure of it) you lost at MoMs offers you to cut in line with a smile and a slip of his tipsy cup. This is just when Sir Sluralot and his calypso courtiers appear singing Indian and you turn around and the feather’s gone and so are you leaving that crew to call you tomorrow wondering where you went but your phone is dead beside the feather bed you found on Frenchman following the drums.

Odd Words February 7, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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Well, it’s Carnival time and everybody’s having too much fun to get to bookstore events, but here is a short rundown of regularly scheduled events. I have queries out to Spoken Word New Orleans and the Writer’s Block to make sure they are keeping their schedule. Watch the Facebook and Twitter accounts for updates.

As there is not much going on, here’s a list of books you could be reading if you are stranded far away and want something to read that really ought to have a gumbo stain somewhere on the pages:

Mystic Pig, by Richard Katrovis, the great undiscovered New Orleans novel that always tops my list.
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Usually this is the top of most lists and for good reason. I’m just a great fan of No. 1
Higher Ground, by James Nolan. Yes, it’s a Hurricane Katrina novel but its the one you need to read for comic relief from the rest.
Mimi’s First Mardi Gras by Alice Couvillon and Elizabeth Moore. This is the illustrated children’s book I always read to my children over and over from Twelfth Night until Mardi Gras Day when they were living in the far north.
New Orleans, Mon Amour by Andrei Codrescu. No one takes you deeper into the spirit world of the city that erupts every Mardi Gras Day than Codrescu.

Just around the corner after Carnival is the annual Tennessee Williams Festival, and the program has just been published and the box office is open for ticket sales. You can get all of the details here on this year’s program. Odd Words will be there again this year covering the best of the fest, and I’ll have some previews of speakers and programs in the weeks to come.

& On Sunday at 3 p.m. the Maple Leaf Poetry Reading Series, the oldest continuous series in the south, will host a Mardi Gras open Mike. Next week, Feb. 17 poets Valentine Pierce and Radamir Luza will be featured

& The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. Poets perform as our resident artists paints the crowd and performers. Also at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street. No longer at the Bayou Road location..

& Every Monday, 9 p.m. Writer’s Block, usually held on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square. Check the Facebook page for details.

& UPDATE: No Wednesday show at Special Tea due to Carnival. ~~Wednesday nights from 7-10 Lyrics and Laughs bridges comedy and poetry featuring performers from both genres at Special Tea, 4337 Banks St.~~

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Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

Thinking Man’s Spam May 17, 2013

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Odd Words May 16, 2013

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Over the Horizon April 13, 2013

Odd Words April 11, 2013

The Foreman April 8, 2013

Daydream Believer April 8, 2013

Hypnotic Progression Therapy April 7, 2013

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Doleful Mysteries March 30, 2013

Lazarus March 29, 2013

Odd Words March 28, 2013

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Exotic Romancing March 24, 2013

The Geography of Pleasure March 23, 2013

Tennessee’s First Flower Blooms at the Allways Lounge Theater March 23, 2013

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Odd Words March 7, 2013

Odd Words February 28, 2013

It hardly rains in Eureka, California February 25, 2013

Odd Words February 21, 2013

Odd Words February 14, 2013

Adiu paure Carnaval February 13, 2013

Splish Splash February 11, 2013

The Kingdom of God Is A Hand. February 9, 2013

Sin. Repent. Repeat. February 7, 2013

Odd Words February 7, 2013

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