NOLA | Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

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.

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

Posted by Mark Folse in Toulouse Street, New Orleans, NOLA, Carnival, 504, Central City.
Tags: Hope, Ruby Bridges, Dr.Martin Luther King Charter Schol
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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.

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.

& 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.

& 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.~~

Odd Words Update January 13, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in 504, art, literature, Mid-City, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, publishing.
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A correction & an addition: Special Tea at 4337 Banks Street is now the home of Spoken Word New Orleans’ Sunday event. They also host another event on Wednesdays:

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

If you host events be sure to keep odd.words.nola@gmail.com in he loop.

Odd Words January 10, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, NOLA, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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A quick, belated congratulations to the Times-Picayune/NOLA.COM Top 10 books for 2012 list for fans of New Orleans- and Louisiana-set tales.

& Saturday, Jan. 12 at 1 p.m. Garden District books hosts Nancy Sharon Collins’ The Complete Engraver: Monograms, Crests, Ciphers, Seals, and the Etiquette of Social Stationery. “n this age of emails, texts, and instant messages, receiving a letter has become a rare treat. Engraved stationery can make a piece of correspondence, whether a short note, formal letter, or business card, even more special. Once an integral part of social life, the use of engraved stationery has become a lost art. In The Complete Engraver, author Nancy Sharon Collins brings this venerable craft to life-from the history and etiquette of engraved social stationery in America to its revival and promise of new visual possibilities. “

& Saturday evening at 7 p.m. the Shadowbox Theater will host The top finishers from our monthly poetry slams will compete for a chance to advance to the Team SNO finals and represent New Orleans at the 2013 Southern Fried Poetry Slam and defend Team SNO’s title at the National Poetry Slam in Boston, MA. Hosted by Pass It On co-founder, HBO Treme-featured poet, and MelaNated Writers Collective member, Gian Francisco Smith. 7 p.m. $5 admission.

& Sundays at 3 p.m. the soutt’s oldest continuous reading series at The Maple Leaf Bar meets in the back patio with featured readers followed by an open mike. The January list is not out yet but watch the Odd Words Facebook page and Twitter feed for updates before Sunday. This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from Poets & Writers, Inc. New Orleans.

& On Sunday evening at 7 p.m. Spoken Word New Orleans presents Speak Easy Sundays Poetry at the Club Caribbean 2441 Bayou Road. Cover. Visit their website for updates on other spoken word events and visiting artists all around town. Saturday, Dec. 29 at 3 p.m.

& Monday, Jan 14th at 4 p.m. Garden District Book Shops features Miles Arceneaux’s new novel Thin Slice of Life, the latest in a series of mysteries penned under the “nom de plume” Miles Arceneaux by Texas-based writers Brent Douglass, John T. Davis and James R. Dennis, who began the novel as a lark–a daisy-chain manuscript with participants writing chapters in turn. Critical encouragement, a Best Mystery Manuscript award, and friends’ enthusiasm for the book combined to encourage the trio to finish it. Miles is currently working on the third novel in the series introduced by “Thin Slice of Life.”

& Every Monday at 9 p.m. on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square it’s the outdoor open mic Writer’s Block. No rule, no mic, no rules, just right. Bringing cookies is an excellent introduction, and stay for the weekly finale, a rousing sing-a-long of Mercedes-Benz led by organizer Kate Smash.

& Tuesday, Jan. 15 at 5:30 p.m. Garden District Book Shop presents William Rau’s “quintessential resource of 19th-Century European Painting” From Barbizon to La Belle Époque, Ninteenth-Century European Painting.”Touted by scholars for its unparalleled approach in 19th-century art history scholarship, this limited, first edition is expected to generate high demand.”

This scholarly yet approachable book by William Rau sheds new light on the history of 19th-century European painting by examining the works of over 200 masters, covering dozens of movements from Romanticism to Impressionism, and everything in between. Masters of 19th-century art, including Corot, Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, Godward, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Pissarro, Mönsted, Grimshaw, Dawson, Elsley, Vibert, Soulacroix, Herring, Sr., Delacroix, Courbet, Lewis, and Gerome are examined.

& Tuesday Jan. 15 at 6 p.m. Octavia Books hosts presentation and book signing with Tulane Law School’s Vernon Palmer featuring his new book, THROUGH THE CODES DARKLY, an examination of the history of Louisiana’s “Code Noir” or slave laws.

& A week from today on Thursday, January 17 at 6 p.m. “New Orleans Food Goddess” Lorin Gaudin and photographer Romney Caruso celebrating the launch of their new book, NEW ORLEANS CHEF’S TABLE: Extraordinary Recipes from the French Quarter to the Garden District. With a Bachelor’s degree in Theater from Loyola University of New Orleans, and a culinary diploma from The Ritz-Escoffier in Paris, she parlayed her education to become a Food Editor/Reporter for national, regional and local publications as well as local television and radio stations. Lorin is a contributing editor/writer for The New York Post, Culinary Concierge, Where Magazine New Orleans and Where Y’at Magazine.

Odd Words December 27, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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It’s hard to wrap my brain around cleaning and rearranging the house from stem to stern as I contemplate the couch and my holiday book look: So Recently Rent a World by Andrei Codrescu, The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas and a copy of All The Thinks Men in hardback from the library book sale in Leavenworth, KS sent by my sister. The number of fantastic titles I have picked up from Alibris and Abe that are boldly stamped WITHDRAWN or DISCARD simply amazes me. I don’t understand why a library would want to get rid of books.

Its a quiet week, perfect for settling into the couch with your holiday book.

& There’s only one bookstore event this week. Maple Street Bookstore’s Healing Center location hosts a book reading and signing with Melinda Palacio and Lucrecia Guerrero. Palacio’s newest poetry collection, How Fire is a Story, Waiting creates images that are at once heartbreaking and humorous. She tackles elemental subjects of family and childhood with the same depth and grace as that of myth making and death. Divided into four sections, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, Palacio tempers heartbreak, violence, and disappointment with the antidote of humor, beauty, and an appreciation for life. In Guererro’s book, Tree of Sighs, a young girl, Altagracia, faces an uncertain future with a bitter and secretive grandmother after the sudden death of her parents. After the two sink into poverty, Altagracia ends up with a woman who takes her to the United States, changes her name to Grace, and puts her to work as a full-time domestic servant. Tree of Sighs is the story of Grace’s journey to uncover her past as she straddles two cultures in the search for her own identity.

& Saturday night at 9 p.m. Cafe Istanbul hosts the Southern Friend Fundraiser to support New Orleans’ hosting the Southern Fried Poetry Slam in June, 2013. The cover will be $10 and free for the first 10 poets to make the the list. This show will be sponsored by the good poets at WordPlay N.O.

& Sundays at 3 p.m. the south’s oldest continuous reading series at The Maple Leaf Bar meets in the back patio with featured readers followed by an open mike. On Dec. 30 poet Melinda Palacio reads from and signs her new book, How Fire Is A Story Waiting. This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from Poets & Writers, Inc. New Orleans.

& Usually Every Monday at 9 p.m. on the amphitheater steps on Decatur Street across from Jackson Square it’s the outdoor open mic Writer’s Block. No rule, no mic, no rules, just right. Bringing cookies is an excellent introduction, and stay for the weekly finale, a rousing sing-a-long of Mercedes-Benz led by organizer Kate Smash.

The Not-So-Black Death November 2, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Federal Flood, Fortin Street, Murder, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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I open the folder that spent the last seven years in the Toulouse Street shed, and you can smell the light dusting of black mold. I go through it page by page, toss a few on the scanner, and tuck the most precious into gallon zip lock bags but my sinuses are on fire. I imagine the almost microscopic spores settling into the carpet and couch. I should have done this in the kitchen but it’s too late now. I will have to vacuum the front within an inch of its life. I never gutted a house like Ray, never faced the decision of my friend Eric to lose the respirator because working in a Type III in August in New Orleans is a choice between strangulation quick or slow. I remember the workers back in ’06 in the convenience store, grabbing a large, milky coffee and a Mexican sweet roll to start the day, bandannas bandito-style around their necks, the only protection they would have against the gypsum dust and mold.

You gotta die of something I think as I step out onto my stoop for a cigarette. The air is laced with hydrocarbons from the upriver refineries and my coffee is brewed with water from the sewer of mid-America. The other night I saw a man I haven’t run into in a while whose daughter suffered from dangerous levels of lead when first tested, an educated man and wife living in a carefully renovated house, not your idea of a tenement with peeling yellow paint, children stuffing flakes in their curious mouths but in parts of this city the dirt is thick with lead and arsenic. Their daughter is fine now but how many other children are playing in a packed-dirt rental backyard right now?

You gotta die of something, and that fried oyster po-boy might kill you in ways your clucking doctor might not imagine as she renews your cholesterol medicine. R.I.P., Mr. Folse, the shrimp boat captain said on Facebook when I told her I would continue eating wild caught Louisiana seafood. The planes had been out that day, she said, spraying Corexit on the latest sheen from British Petroleum’s Deep Water Horizon wellhead. For now those initials stand for Reel In Po-Boys, and who can blame her for still fishing when I-10 is lined with smiling chefs telling us to Eat Louisiana Seafood? What happens to Corexit when you dump it into a deep fryer? Who knows? Nothing to see here. Move on. What do you say to people who came home to complete ruin that would deter them living here? What would keep the people suffering today in New York away from a steady diet of diesel exhaust, Jersey VOCs and stress? What would take the farmers off the land, the ones who wrestle 50-gallon drums of poison without which they couldn’t make the bank note? What could keep that shrimp boat captain off the water? Short of Chernobyl and soldiers loading people onto trucks, nothing.

You gotta die of something, and if I put down the cigarettes what other diabolical entertainment might my grandfather’s ghost reach up from his alcoholic’s grave to suggest? If I were forced to stop eating seafood you can put me on suicide watch right away. The water is as clean as the Sewerage & Water Board can manage, and wins taste tests, but I know from a local brewer that Dixie used its own purified well water because the city’s Ph was skewed because there are still antique lead pipes in the system. They just don’t know where. I once found a slug beneath my patio chair one New Year’s Day, the hole where it went through the webbing. So it goes. You pick your place and take your chances. You are more likely to be killed or seriously injured by a car while walking in New York City than you are to be shot in New Orleans. After the flooding from the second hurricane in two years to strike New York you start to ask the question you answered a thousand times yourself: why do people live there.?

I am not worried about how I die so much as where, and that is the one decision about death most of us get to make. I was born here in New Orleans in a hospital on Perdido Street. I will die here and invite anyone who wishes to dispute that point to join me. I want to die where my diet is a cheap and easy contributing factor, where a wake is an occasion to shame the Irish, where a band is more essential than a minister. No bouquets for me. Just bury me when the sweet autumn clematis are in bloom, on a cool October day with someone cooking with the windows open, and the sound of the band carrying to the next ward on the apple-crisp air. Just put a pack of smokes and my Zippo in the box to get me through the day.

Yakumo Fee Nah Ney October 21, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in City Park, cryptic envelopment, Mardi Gras Indians, music, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, The Odd, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Bon Koizumi, Iko Iko, Japan Fest, Lafcadio Hearn, NOMA, Sugar Boy Crawford, Three Mountains of Dewa, Yakumo Japanese Garden, Yakumo Loizumi, Yakumo Nihon Teien
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We go in the Wisteria Gate because the crowd is so large and the Japanese Garden in New Orleans is so small. We end up at the back of the crowd as the tour guide makes his spiel, and as everyone finally moves into the garden my friend pulls me back toward the plaque in front so she can read it.

She thinks the name Yakumo Japanese Garden is funny. I’m trying to explain to a gentleman with foreign-accented English why the name Yakumo Nihon Teien (Yakumo Japanese Garden) is funny to a New Orleanian. There’s no quick way to explain Jocomo fee nah nay except to say it’s a Mardi Gras Indian chant rooted in Creole and leave it at that. While we are talking a Japanese gentleman comes up and begins to earnestly read the plaque at the entrance. “And Yakamein,” my friend reminds me, “don’t forget to tell him about yakamein.” The Japanese man bends neatly at the waist to read to the bottom with the practiced habit of bowing rather than hunching over as I did. He comes up from reading the bottom of the plaque and stands admiring it. A woman behind me says something in Japanese, and the man turns to pose beside the plaque. “That’s Yakumo’s great-grandson,” she says in English over her camera, and I frantically dig for the phone. He is Bon Koizumi, a professor at the University of Shimane, Junior College and Adviser to the Lafacadio Hearn Memorial Museum in Matsue, I learn when I exchange my embarrassingly cheap and a bit tattered business card for his elegant one, trying to bow just a bit deeper as much for the embarrassing card as the honor. without getting into a contest that leads me to tip over, feinting like a lineman trying to draw an offsides so that I bow just a bit lower and come up last without provoking a second bow. It is not just an exchange of cards. It is a special moment, Yakumo’s great-grandson in the garden named for him on the day of Japan Fest.

Bon Koizumi, great-grandson of Yokumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn), in the Yakumo Japanese Garden in New Orleans.

This is an above average Japan Fest for me. After an early set by Kaminari Taiko I manage to watch the entire tea ceremony. In the past it was done in a small room and the doors were closed once it began, but this year it has been moved to the atrium. Once I’m done snapping pictures, I try to sit on my heels with my feet folded under and realize if I want to be invited to participate, I’m going to need a year of stretching and practice before I could sit in that position for 30 minutes. I catch most of the Kendo demonstration, and decide to take their offer to go up on stage and give one of them a few good whacks on the helmet. I take a card. (Another thing to do? Really?). I find the Haiku Society and enter the one I wrote the night before. I don’t know the man behind the table but he recognizes my name as last year’s winner, and we make arrangements to get my book prize. Always nice to make an impression. I once again stump the women who will write your name in calligraphy on a book mark with my annual request for Dancing Bear in traditional characters. The younger woman who draws mine resorts to voice searching some site on her iPhone but manages to make me another temple bell pendant for this year. I wander through the Go room and pick up a pen made from recycled paper at the City of Matasue table. Matasue is a sister city to New Orleans, based in part on Hearn’s residence in their city and our’s. I grabbed some lunch from Ninja sushi, and manage to chop-stick up the last few grains of rice from my plate one by one.

I’m having a fantastic time, and I haven’t met Bon Koizumi yet.

My particular friend and my son text me within minutes of each other. Both have decided to come. Awkward, the little sing-song voice in my head telsl me but it turns out fine. Later they sat and chatted naturally as I went to buy us waters, another fortuitous moment in the day. I buy them wristbands and my son is off to the anime room upstairs but I notice the ikebana table is already torn down. It is four o’clock and I forgot that the times had been shifted to work around the 5k race this morning. It is all over except for the final taiko set. She and I wander back into the hall full of vending tables and I go back to see if the porcelain plate, a fluted rectangle with a high-gloss tropical ocean blue finish in one triangular patch, and the other rough clay with fine striations like the rakings of a karesansui garden. Miraculously it is still there. I’m dead broke and trying not to buy anything but I desperately want one of the miniature net floats, the glass balls bound in a net of rope that I have seen before in Quarter shops long ago. I had a long conversation with the couple behind the table when I first stopped there earlier in the day about the full-sized float, telling them they used to wash up on Grand Isle and such places. They didn’t know they were found in the Gulf. We discuss the wide-ranging Japanese fishing fleet and ocean currents while I occasionally pick up and admire the plate, then wander off empty-handed.

When I come back, they remember me. We’re about to close up, he says, I’ll make you a deal on anything on the table. I pick up the plate. Ten dollars, he says. I smile and reach for the last miniature float and my wallet. As we turn to go I notice something I did not see before, or which was not on the table. It’s a clearly used walking stick inscribed with three Kanji characters. I love walking sticks and can’t resist picking it up, holding it in two open hands and staring after hefting it. The characters mean I have walked the three mountains, he tells me, explaining that pilgrims who visit the Three Mountains and climb to the Shinto temple at the summit of each have their walking sticks stamped with these characters. I think I manage a wow while nodding in appreciation and stand holding the stick out before me at forearms length in my open palms like a an altar boy holding the cloth for the priest at the consecration.

I will never know why, perhaps something about the way and length of time I hold the stick that way, my head moving slightly to take it in from handle to foot, stopping each time to rest on the three characters. Take it, he says.

What? I answer. Take it, he says. It’s yours.

I hardly know what to say. The couple are American enthusiasts. This is not the stereotypical story of admiring an Asian man’s watch too long or too enthusiastically.

Seriously? I ask again, impolitely I realize. I’m just dumbstruck by his offer.

Absolutely, he says with no further explanation,smiling, arms folded to end the discussion.

I don’t know what else to do but return the stick to is customary stance resting on the ground, and shake his hand and thank him.

Earlier I spoke with the architect who designed the Japanese garden, offering my admiration and hearing about his two summers studying in Japan. I offer to volunteer, to pick litter from the dry stream bed that wanders through the garden, the nod of karesansui in the small space, anxious to learn some of the secrets. I feel an invisible poke in the ribs through the corner of the eye from my friend. (Another thing to do? Really? When do you plan to sleep?). I tell him of the gardens I have seen in the U.S., and my dream of a pilgrimage to Japan to visit the gardens. We exchange cards; no bowing this time.

I have always spoken of my hope to visit the Prefecture of Kyoto in Japan and see the gardens as a pilgrimage. Now I stand in my house holding a pilgrim’s stick with its unearned, at least by me, inscription. Yamagata Prefecture is not near to Kyoto. Perhaps I will never climb the Three Mountains of Dewa if I go to Japan, but holding this object I think about the relationship between this gift and geis, the ancient Celtic curse of obligation. I know visiting the gardens of Kyoto is not just a bucket list dream of a man working paycheck to paycheck with no prospect of retirement beyond Social Security. It has always been more than just that but as I place the stick against the wall next to the front room bookshelves I know that I will go, that I must go. There was a reason for the gift neither I nor the gentleman who gave it to me understood at the time, an unspoken communication between the stones of the Shinto temples of Mount Haguro, Mount Gassan and Mount Yudono and those of the gardens of Kyoto and the American gardens I have seen, the stones I have seen today, a reminder of a dreamy, romanticized desire straight from the pages of Yakumo Koizumi become now an obligation of pilgrimage, no longer a possible indulgence of a man with time and money to spare but an ordained act of grace.

Postscript: Most readers will glance past the title and think it just a clever turn of phrase from a former headline writer, but there is something a bit deeper. The chants written down by Sugar Boy Crawford half a century ago and which became the song “Iko Iko” are phonetic appropriations from Creole, warped either by time or Sugar Boy’s phonetic transcription. Jocomo fi nou wa na né is one researchers assertion, meaning Jocomo caused our king to be born. Jocomo fi na né is approximately “Jocomo made it so”, and I think Yokamo did.

Odd Words October 18, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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New Orleans has more independent new-and-used bookstores per capital than any other major city except Manhattan in New York, which is a dead tie, according to Micheal Zell of Crescent City Books. More on all this later when I get through my notes on yesterday’s forum on New Orleans Literary Life at the University of New Orleans’ English Department’s 3rd Wednesday speaker series.

Against the Day Update/Kindle Update: Page 1085/100%. I sort of missing doing this the last few weeks, but I finished the book 10 days ago and hated the Kindle experience so much that I immediately downloaded Tom DeLillo’s the Angel Esmerelda and Matt Johnson’s Pym: A Novel on a recommendation by Maud Newton [sigh]. I am currently reading Louis’ Maistro’s New Orleans Stories: New Orleans Stories which is I should mention free. Why wouldn’t you want to go out and download that? My offer still stands to purchase my copy of Against The Day to fill that gaping hole in my Pynchon shelf from the first Indie book store owner to offer up a blurb for Odd Words.

& so to the listings…

& Tonight, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. 17 Poets! hosts novelist LOUIS MAISTROS and poet JOSEPH MAKKOS followed by OPEN MIC hosted by Jimmy Ross. Maistros is a longtime resident of the New Orleans 8th Ward neighborhood, is the author of The Sound of Building Coffins and Anti-requiem: New Orleans Stories. His work has appeared in publications such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Relix Magazine, the Baltimore City Paper, Entrepot, and many others. He is also an accomplished art photographer, and has been called “a wizard with light, shadows, and colors” by Louisiana Poet Laureate Julie Kane. Makkos is also a resident of New Orleans, serves as a full-time faculty member in the English department at Delgado Community College. He also operates an independent letterpress studio & publishing house, where he serves as editor-in-chief. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans.

& Cynthia LeJeune Nobles will present and sign her fascinating historical book The Delta Queen Cookbook, a combination history and cookbook on the world’s last authentic overnight wooden steamboat and the food that was served on boardtTonight at 6 p.m. at Octavia Books The Delta Queen Cookbook brings the Delta Queen’s story to life with an engaging historical narrative and over 125 recipes prepared by the steamboat’s former chefs during their tenures in the “cookhouse.”

& Imagine growing up in New Orleans and developing a food allergy. (Try finding a place to eat dinner with someone with a violent allergy to anything that swims. This is hard.) Imagine growing up with a father known for his rich, Creole-style cooking, who instilled a love and appreciation of food from the very start. Now imagine not being able to eat most of his dishes anymore. That’s what happened to Jilly and Jessie Lagasse when they were diagnosed with gluten allergies in 2001 and 2004, respectively. So they learned to adjust, changing the ways they cooked, ate, and used ingredients. THE GLUTEN-FREE TABLE provides a well-balanced base of recipes that can add flavor and enjoyment to the menus of even the most demanding gluten-free eaters. Tonight, Oct. 17 at 5:30 p.m. at Garden District Book Shop.

& Tonight at Tulane City of Matsue, the official friendship city of New Orleans will host a Special Lecture on Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn, Book and Art Exhibition at the Freeman Auditorium at 6 p.m. Professor Bon Koizumi (Hearn’s great-grandson) will give a special lecture on Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Koizui Yakumo) lived in New Orleans for ten years from 1877 to 1887 working as a journalist. For Hearn who was accustomed to buying one way tickets and travelling the world, this was one of his most lengthy stops. ‘The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans’ will display approximately 24 pieces from the 2010 exhibition in Matsue Castle; 2 pieces from the American College of Greece; 3 of his favorite items from the Matsue Hearn Memorial Museum; 26 of first editions of the books mainly from his time in New Orleans (Rare Book Collection, Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library,*2 Tulane University).

& Michael Allen Zell will be signing his book Errata at Maple Street Book’s Bayou St. John location on Friday, Oct. 19 at 6 p.m. “In Zell’s debut novel, a young New Orleans cabbie named Raymond Russell has been dramatically shocked by the intensity of a crime and is blocked such that he cannot write about it directly. He lets elements leak out associatively so as to prime the engine of his obsessive mind for what he must reveal. Picture a neo-noir Nabokov using Stern-like disgressions directed by Joycean movements of the mind. This book, with its sultry darkness of city and soul, teaches the reader how to uniquely read it. Zell has an inventive and engaging voice, positioning him as an inheritor of the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortazar, Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundra, and Bruno Schulz.”

& Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series is an open mic. Next week Oct. 28 Michael Allen Zell reads from and signs his novel, Errata.

& Also this Sunday you get another bite at the Lagasse girl’s The Gluten Free Table at Maple Street Book Shop’s Healing Center Location at St. Claude. No time listed. Call for details: (504)304-7115.

& I have no idea what Duck Commander is about, but I pulled the cable plug a while back. For fans on the curious (me) Willie and Korie Robertson, stars of the A&E hit series “Duck Dynasty,” will be at the Maple Street Book Shop Uptown location signing their book, The Duck Commander Family: How Faith, Family, and Ducks Built a Dynasty, Sunday, October 21st, 2-4PM. “Part redneck logic, part humorous stories of our family, combined with faith, business tips and a little history- this book is the inside sneak-peek for everything you wanted to know about growing up a Robertson and what it is like to be a part of this family,” says Willie.

& On Monday night Press Street’s Room 220 will host Adam Parfrey reading Ritual America and Joseph Scott Morgan will be reading Blood Beneath My Feet at 735 St. Ferdinand Street at 7 p.m. (This is a private residence, not the Antenna Gallery). Pafrey, described by the Seattle Times as “one of the nation’s most provocative publishers”, has published a book that peels back the curtains on America’s secret societies. Ritual America reveals the biggest secret of them all: that the influence of fraternal brotherhoods on this country is vast, fundamental, and hidden in plain view. In the early twentieth century, as many as one-third of America belonged to a secret society. And though fezzes and tiny car parades are almost a thing of the past, the Gnostic beliefs of Masonic orders are now so much a part of the American mind that the surrounding pomp and circumstance has become faintly unnecessary. Have you ever been locked in a cooler with piles of decomposing humans for so long that you had to shave all the hair off your body in order to get rid of the smell? Joseph Scott Morgan did. Have you ever lit a Marlboro from the ignited gas of a bloated dead man’s belly? Joseph Scott Morgan has. Morgan became a death investigator with the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office in suburban New Orleans in 1987. At the time of his hire, he was estimated to have been the youngest medicolegal death investigator in the country working in a major metropolitan area. Over the course of his career he was required to work in the morgue during the day and subsequently work as an investigator for the coroner at night. Maple Street Book Shop (Healing Center) will be on-site to sell books.

& 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. repeating Sundays at Noon. She features interviews with authors of local and national interest.

& On Tuesday, Oct. 23 Octavia Books hosts a presentation and book signing with Tonja Koob Marking & Jennifer Snape celebrating their new book of historical photos LOUISIANA’S OIL HERITAGE from Arcadia Publishing, whose books on K&B, Maison Blanche and other local topics you may have seen checking out of Walgreen’s with their historical plaque title boxes and sepia covers.. This book covers the history of Louisiana’s oil patch from the discovery of oil in 1901 through 2001.

& Thomas Joseph Perez will be signing his novel Katrina Lashes Arabia at Maple Street Book’s Healing Center location at 6:30 p.m. A New Orleans ex-pat working as a nurse in Saudi Arabia looses her temper at a Saudi man in the marketplace shortly after the hurricane of the same name strikes her home and finds herself taking refuge from the authorities in the place of a Saudi Prince which interesting sexual tastes who is working on biological weapons on the side. The picture of a sexually submissive Saudi prince gives new meaning to the word spellbinding, and I think we can chalk this up as the Katrina Novel No One Could Have Predicted.

Next Week: Robert Olin Butler at Octavia Books.

Waiting for Godot on the Road Home October 17, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Back of Town, Gentilly, je me souviens, New Orleans, NOLA, Treme.
Tags: Waiting for Godot
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A new post up at the Treme blog Back of Town, on the scene from Waiting for Godot and my own experience of the play.

I thought it was my house. A left-side double with a carport on the right attached to the next door neighbor’s single-level ranch. My stomach knotted convulsively. The panic bands tightened around my chest. A wave of Permanent Traumatic Stress Disorder, the tension of being transported into a scene I didn’t quite remember, being among the hundreds turned away every night from the Gentilly production of Waiting for Godot in 2007 but I knew the play, knew the text, knew the essential and painful rightness of it like a necessary amputation. I had only been there in spirit but had gone home the last night and after dispirited drinks at the Circle Bar I wrote in the small hours of the morning my reaction to a play I had just not seen.

That could be my house.

Happy Birthday Everette Maddox October 9, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Everette Maddox, Lines on this Thirtieth Birthday
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Join us tonight in the back patio of the Maple Leaf Bar to read some ‘Rette and celebrate. Until then, courtesy of 13Possums:

LINES ON HIS THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY

On a hill high above
the mild October day
I stand, heroic, hands
clasped behind my back,
as the last musket’s
crack fades
and the smoke drifts away
from the place where the famous
battle of my youth was fought.
Who won? Who lost?
Who knows? My speech,
which I seem to have misplaced,
tells. Oh well:
myself and loves and grey
uniform were not among
the casualties, quite; though
a gold button dangles.
Now we’ll bind the wounds,
free the slaves, and set up
(oh shrewdly!) a national shrine
in the decaying mansion
of my body: post cards,
stuffed possums, and (out back)
whiskey to be sold
such emissaries
from the glacial future
as have coin to spend

Odd Words September 27, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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A plague of blessings, that’s been the story for the last several weeks when I type up all the conflicting listings for the busiest nights. Two weeks ago it was the choice between Carolyn Hembee’s poetry book launch and the season opener for 17 Poets! Fortunately I wasn’t forced to make a choice between NOLA poet spirit warrior Jenna Mae and Jimmy Ross’ birthday at 17 Poets! and something else, but tonight it is either John Sinclair at 17 Poets! or a fabulous line up of international prose stars hosted by Room 220 at Melvin’s. I’ve seen Sinclair several times before, and I can almost smell the tamales. I haven’t been good about keeping my the Odd Words’ public Google Calendar but I would if I thought groups would take advantage of it to try to spread the word love out across the week. Keeping up both would turn this into a part-time job paying, um, well All Access passes to the local literary shindigs with a Total Cash Value of Over $1,000! (Applause sign. A drop of sweat rolls out from beneath Bob Barker’s mask, flashes like a tiny spark of life in the stage lights. ) Still, I think I’ll have to start keeping up the calendar and emailing reminders to organizers to try to make it possible for people to do more rather than force them to choose.

No Against the Day/Kindle update again this week. Work is the curse of the reading and writing class, and I’m too old and have too many self-inflicted responsibilities to do the cold-water walk-up poet thing. Foot loose and fancy free for me means not paying attention except to worries and tripping on the sidewalk.

There are only five days left to sign up for the writer’s workshops at the annual Tennessee Williams Festival, so you better get on the stick. Workshop facilitators include: Catherine Frank: YA and Children’s Lit; Zachary Lazar: Literary Fiction; Bev Marshall: Contemporary Fiction; Chris Wiltz: Fiction: All Genres and Creative Non-Fiction. Spaces are filling up fast and classes are limited to 10 people, so register now to reserve your seat!

& J.K. Rowling’s Casual Vacancy goes on sale today. I missed posting up Maple Street Book Shop’s launch party breakfast. This is Rowling’s first novel for adults and her first since ending the Harry Potter series.[COPY DESK NOTE: ADULT NOVEL? REALLY?] Do you really want to run out to Metairie for this? Of course you don’t, not with all of the indie stores here in New Orleans.

& Tonight at the Goldmine Saloon 17 Poets! presents the return of John Sinclair to New Orleans at 8 pm. Hailed as “The Hardest Working Poet in Show Business” (Ben Edmonds, San Francisco Chronicle) and “The Last of the Beatnik Warrior Poets” (Mick Farren, Los Angeles Weekly), John Sinclair is likewise a music journalist widely recognized as one of America’s leading authorities on blues and modern jazz. Famous for his role as DJ and a forced behind the MC5 during his days in Detroit, Sinclair moved to New Orleans in 1991 and joined the volunteer staff of WWOZ radio, winning OffBeat magazine’s reader’s poll as the city’s most popular DJ five years in a row (1999-2003). In 1992 he formed his band, the Blues Scholars (founded in Detroit ten years earlier), recorded his first CD in 1994 and began to tour the United States as a performance artist backed by jazz, blues and rock ensembles. He has collaborated with musicians from Little Milton and Jimbo Mathus to the New Orleans Jazz Vipers, Ras Moshe, the Kudzu Kings, Afrissippi, the Pinkeye Orchestra and the Dutch rappers Lange Frans & Baas B. Sinclair has published several collections of his poetry along with his major work in verse, Fattening Frogs For Snakes: Delta Sound Suite, an investigation in verse of the Delta blues and the world that produced it. His latest collection SONG OF PRAISE Homage to John Coltrane was published in 2011 with Trembling Pillow Press and is accompanied by a CD with the same title. It is also available as an Ereader through Kindle.

& Tonight at Garden District Book Shop at 5:30 pm John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920′s. In the years following World War I, the New Orleans’s French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived Bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane, were among the “artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter,” as they styled themselves. In Dixie Bohemia Reed introduces Faulkner s circle of friends ranging from the distinguished writer Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer, from Tulane s president to one of its cheerleaders and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the jazz age.

& Tonight at Melvin’s on St. Claude at 7 pm Room 220 presents the first installation of this fall’s LIVE PROSE reading series with T. Geronimo Johnson, Khaled al-Berry, and Lucy Fricke at 7 p.m. at Melvin’s. Fricke is one of 14 residents in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP) who have made a pilgrimage to New Orleans this fall—the program’s sixth annual visit—bringing writers from around the world to the Crescent City for a week of readings, tours, and classroom visits. Fricke and al-Berry are both distinguished writers of nonfiction as well as prose, and they have been the recipients of accolades and acknowledgements both here and abroad. Egyptian-born al-Berry, who currently works as a journalist in London, has written for numerous publications, including the BBC, and is a columnist for the Tahrir Newspaper. He is the author of the autobiography Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise, and his 2010 novel An Oriental Dance was shortlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize. Fricke is the author of two novels (in German). She has also worked as an organizer for such events as the Berlin International Poetry Festival and is the current director of the HAM.LIT festival in Hamburg. They are joined by New Orleans native and University of Iowa MFA graduate T. Geronimo Johnson.

& Friday night at Octavia Books hosts what sounds like a fascinating book, John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920′s. In the years following World War I, the New Orleans’s French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived Bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane, were among the “artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter,” as they styled themselves. In Dixie Bohemia Reed introduces Faulkner s circle of friends ranging from the distinguished writer Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer, from Tulane s president to one of its cheerleaders and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the jazz age.

& Saturday at 3 p.m. organizer Dennis Formento will host the New Orleans venue for 100,000 Poets for Change, the second anual world-wide event, at Cafe Istanbul at 3 pm. The event is free and open to the public with a focus on The crisis in public education and the American obsession with violence

& Saturday at 5 p.m. Simpatico Press poets Megan Burns, Gina Ferrara and Jonathan Kline will read at the Creole Gardens Bed and Breakfast Hotel,1415 Prytania Street. Simpatico Press is making chapbooks for this reading with work from all 3 poets, so come by and get a special chap.

& Saturday at 6 pm the Garden District Book Shop Bayou St. John Location T. Geronimo Jackson will be signing his book, Hold It ‘til It Hurts, at our Bayou St. John location. T. Geronimo Johnson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His fiction and poetry have appeared in “Best New American Voices,” “Indiana Review,” “Los Angeles Review of Books,” and “Illuminations,” among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Johnson teaches writing at the University of California-Berkeley. Hold It ‘Til It Hurts is his first book.

& 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. repeating Sundays at Noon. She features interviews with authors of local and national interest.

& Also on Tuesday at 5:45 pm Maple Street Book Shop’s First Tuesday Book Club meets at 5:45 to discuss Sara Gran’s book, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Newcomers always welcome. In the first of a new mystery series featuring quirky private investigator Claire DeWitt, Claire investigates the disappearance of a top prosecutor in post-Katrina New Orleans.

& Tuesday night at 7 pm the 1718 Reading Series hosted by students in the English departments of Loyola, UNO and Tulane will feature poet Andy Stallings on Oct. 2 at their usual venue, The Columns. I’ve got nothing bad to say about the Goldmine or the Maple Leaf, but there are only certain places you can relish a proper Sazerac with your poetry. Hopefully this does not disqualify me from any future Pirate Shots at You Know Where.

& Also on Tuesday night at 7 pm, the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop hosts its first night of Poetry at the Sandbar. Visiting poets Alison Pelegrin and Joseph Wood will read from their collections. The reading will be followed by a brief Q&A and book signing. Please find bios and sample poems below. Also, check out our Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/events/468920439796753/

A plague of blessings. 1718 is a group of students including UNO. What can I say?

The Glory That Was Home September 23, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Federal Flood, Fortin Street, FYYFF, Memory, New Orleans, NOLA, postdiluvian, Rebirth, Recovery, The Narrative, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK.
Tags: Rising Tide 7, Rising Tide NOLA, Rising Tide VII
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I thought I would share an email reply I wrote this morning, to answer anyone who asked after me yesterday at Rising Tide VII:

Thank you for the pictures and write-up. My absence from Rising Tide 7 is sadly more than a case of overbooking, but I won’t spread troubles except to wish them bon voyage. The NOLA Bloggers Movement, born out of a mailing list started by some guy in North Dakota of all places, baptized on an Ash Wednesday evening at a bar in the French Quarter, and which birthed the first Rising Tide was one of those bright shining moments of solidarity like the crime march or the first anniversary (who were those two young Black women at the 17th Street Canal bridge between Bucktown and lily-white Lakeview? I dared not ask that day) that is behind us. The rag-tag assemblage has, like so many things down here postdiluvian, reverted to form: the latent conflicts of purpose and personality reasserting themselves, paths parting, new projects taking precedence.

It is a parade I no longer ride, but sometimes finger the old doubloons thoughtfully when I come across them

Malfaubourlgia September 22, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Faubourg St. John, Fortin Street, Gentilly, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, The Odd, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Detroit Lakes, Hell, houses
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There is a discount outlet of Hell in my attic. I’m convinced. The rule is never to turn off the ceilings fans in my son’s room and the back kitchen, and more importantly not to turn them on late afternoon if you’ve forgotten and turned them off. Switching on the kitchen fan at three, even when the window unit is set to 72 degrees and you don’t break a sweat doing two sinks of dishes, is like turning on the oven.

There are more reasonable explanations for this if you insist. The house is old. I think the landlord said sometime in the 1920s, and I wasn’t sure if that was pride in its sturdiness or an excuse for its shortcomings. It seems solid enough in the main, and shook no more in the worst gusts of Hurricane Issaac than it does for a next-door, kettle-drum peal of thunder. The claw footed tub is charming, but the lack of a shower is not. The floor beneath the bathroom is giving way, the bathroom tiles fracturing for a second time in a year, and I moved the refrigerator from the small back room into the small kitchen when it began to list dangerously to port. The fourteen foot ceilings are a blessing when it’s warm, at least until you forgetfully turn on the fan you should not have turned off in the first place. Thespiders are quite safe in their high corners, although the flies from the track prefer to keep company with the groundlings and never venture up to spider height. Behind those 14 foot ceilings is an attic only accessible by the small vents at each end, and I am quite sure that what ever material once passed for insulation, horsehair perhaps, has turned to dust. The house faces north-south and as the long run of the roof captures the afternoon heat it’s attention Hell-Mart shoppers, special on boiling pitch just over the kitchen.

The flies are another clue to the Beezelbublian nature of the place. It could be the race track: all that horseflesh digesting all that fodder into horseshit that draws the crows in great droves when the tractor rakes the dirt, but there’s no point in letting rational explanations get in the way of those that go best with cold beer on dark, warm nights. It’s an old habit of mine. Long ago I told my children’s mother that the thunk she heard every night around 10 pm in my basement apartment on Massachusetts Avenue N.E. in Washington, D.C. was the ghost of the tenant who hung himself upstairs at just that time. Don’t tell me about the settling of an old row house as the last of the afternoon Potomac heat escapes. Give me a good ghost story instead. I never got much more out of that story than a look I found charming 20 years ago, but then she was raised from German-Irish stock in North Dakota where over the generations imagination became reserved for private worry over whether the corn and potatoes would last until spring, and suspension of disbelief was reserved for church.

I lived in a house of similar vintage in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, a beautiful old Craftsman style that would look right at home in New Orleans. It was The Norby House, once the family home of the owners of the local department store. I used to tell the children that the fertility of that shady place in back where plants grew rampant was because old Mr. Norby was buried there, even if I knew it had probably once been the privy. The windows in that houes were original, handmade glass with the ripples and bubbles of their forging. Everything was original including the cloth wiring, which hung from glass insulators attached to the floor rafters in the basement. One run ran up a pipe to a wall sconce my my daughter’s room, a line that I think was not conduit but perhaps had once been a gas line. seller’s The fresh coat of paint on that house peeled the first winter, as the heat leaching out of the house met the below-zero air outside. You could feel it along the walls: whatever had once insulated them floor to ceiling had crumbled to dust in the bottom third of the wall. The house came with not one but two oil tanks in the basement which together would make a proper locomotive boiler, and I still wonder how we managed to afford to fill them. I would do nothing about the gorgeous original windows except to drag out a 24-foot extension ladder twice a year, and haul up and down the original wood-frame storm windows, each about 20 pounds of wood and glass. They hung from hooks at the top, and I had to lean back away from the house with feet and knees interlocked to the ladder to get them on the hooks, realizing that the best I could hope for is that the ladder would follow me down and knock me unconscious so I wouldn’t feel the pain of my other injuries.

You have to have at thing about old houses approaching the clinically disturbing to stand at the top of a fully extended ladder and do that.

This is not a bad old house. There’s that stain on the kitchen floor that is traceable either to human sacrifice or someone rebuilding a motorcycle engine on the linoleum. The brown carpet would do any U.S. route motel proud, and the color hides most stains pretty well except coffee, the thing I spill the most. The windows are cheap aluminum which I discovered in my first week here can be jimmied with a screw driver using less effort than opening a jar of pickles. (I though I had perhaps left it unlocked, until I went to close it after the police left and noticed the latch was closed, and the small dimple in the frame.) Then again there are fans beneath those high ceilings in every room, and that claw foot tub I can actually submerge myself in. I passed on several places with the brutally-industrial, wall-mounted gas space heaters but when I heard the rent for something here on the Gentilly frontier of the fashionable Faubourgh St. John, I resigned myself to them. I have lived in enough old New Orleans houses to find the singing of the gas on a winter’s night soothing, even if I’d rather have the tremendously less efficient and more dangerous ceramic and iron grate sitting inside the bricked up fireplace. The flies are a bother but I would rather sit on my stoop and watch the horses at their morning exercise than than sit in a sterile granite kitchen staring out the window at a holiday-swallowing lawn. The mantles may just be mantles but the scrap of Krewe du Vieux-salvaged plywood hell fire that sits under the one in front is as much of a fire place as needed in New Orleans and goes well with the infernal commerce upstairs, where I like to imagine there are demonic bats in their hundreds waiting for evening, mosquitoes and a chance to get tangled in your hair.

Countdown to Treme Season Three September 21, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, NOLA, Toulouse Street, Treme.
Tags: Back of Town, David Simon, HBO, Treme
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Don’t forget Back of Town for all you need to know about the show. OK, you’ll probably go read Dave Walker first and you probably should but BoT rolling come Sunday night.

Odd Words September 13, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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A busy Thursday, a busy boy. I’ll save you my ramblings and just get this out so you can plan your evening.

&Tonight, Thursday Sept. 13 Room 220 presents the book launch for Carolyn Hembree’s Skinny, a collection of her poetry published by Kore Press, at 7 p.m. at Lipstick & Lingerie Boutique in Arabi (7011 St. Claude Ave). Copies of the book will be on sale and complimentary libations will be available. Donations are accepted. Carolyn Hembree is a poet and beloved teacher of English and creative writing at the University of New Orleans. Her work has appeared in a variety of respected publications, including DIAGRAM, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, jubilat, and Witness. Skinny, her first book, is the result of nearly a decade of work. It follows its protagonist from the Deep South to New York City, where she encounters a variety of horrors that Hembree vividly depicts in myriad poetic forms: ekphrastic works, prose poems, dramatic monologues, odes, elegies, a pastoral, and a word problem, among other free verse experiments. The publication of such an ambitious work is as much a testament to the resiliency of independent press as it is a welcome introduction to Hembree’s startling, shining voice. Read an essay on Hembree by Taylor Murrow at Room 220: http://press-street.com/fever-ribbons/ Read an interview with Hembree by Room 220 contributor Erik Vande Stouwe at NolaVie: http://nolavie.com/2012/06/an-interview-with-carolyn-hembree-67352.html

& 17 Poets! tonight at 7:30 p.m. presents Jamie Bernstein and Bill Lavender. Bernstein is the author of the story and song Black Santa. He first became visible in the New Orleans entertainment scene as a spoken word poet performing throughout the city before the turn of the century. In 2009, Jamie released his first album Songs from the Tree of Life. He released his 2nd album Very Same Dream in January 2011. Lavender is a poet, editor, publisher, and teacher. He grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas but has spent most of his adult life in New Orleans. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including I of the Storm, which includes passages on the Katrina disaster, and an innovative book of short poems, While Sleeping. He also edited the ground-breaking anthology, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, from University of Alabama Press. His poems and stories have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, and his essays and theoretical writings have been published in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others. His latest book is Memory Wing from Black Widow Press.

& Also tonight. Sept. 13 at 6:00 p.m. David Lummis celebrates the long-awaited publication of The Last Beacour, Part Two of The Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans at Octavia Books. “Here is a guy who can paint accurately while he suffers—a talented bohemian, in other words. A worthy addition to your growing New Orleans shelf.” —Andrei Codrescu Garden District Books hosts

& Thursday is a busy night: At 5:30 p.m. Garden District Books features William Barnwell’s Lead Me On, Let Me Stand: A Clergyman’s Story in White and Black, “a moving, passionate memoir of a life of ministry by a dedicated preacher striving to bring together things that tend to pull apart–the church and the world, women and men, old and young, straights and gays, works and faith, the Deep South and the Far North, blacks and whites, a quest for the love described by philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard, “Love is the unity of hostile elements.”

& Sunday at 3 p.m. is an open mic at the Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series.

& 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. repeating Sundays at Noon. She features interviews with authors of local and national interest.

Monsoon Afternoon September 2, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Fortin Street, geo-memoir, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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Taken in part from an old post to Wet Bank Guide on July 7, 2006.

The power is out again. As the storm pours down around me and the fan sulks quietly in the corner, I think: gin-and-tonic, no ice (best not to open the fridge, old boy). Time to take up the white man’s cocktail and succumb to the climate here on my comfortable mini-veranda. No, I correct myself. Just because I’m sitting on a porch in New Orleans in shorts and sandals in the cool of the downpour, I am not on vacation. This is my home. Inside is my office. The power will come back, and I will have to take up the burden again, to make the world a better place through the automation of banking.

I pad into the house, leaving the front door open to let in the storm cooled air, and make my way back for more iced tea. Taking the advice of my inner nabob, I gab an umbrella and head to the back shed to take some ice from the outside fridge. Nothing out there but ice trays, nothing to spoil should the power stay out. As I open the back door to the house, the rain-chilled air rushes in, reminding me that the shotgun floorplan was not built for easy target practice. The design allows, among other things, for the circulation of air through the house, front to back. It is an accommodation to the climate from the days when light came from lamps and ice was a rare treat this far South.

Europeans and their African slaves lived here for centuries before the widespread introduction of air conditioning, or even the simple relief of an electric fan or an ice-cooled drink. They built lives and houses and customs that made it livable. I had learned to live in this antique climate before I left, to make the same accommodations. My partner of some years was allergic to the nasty critters that make their homes in the damp of air conditioner condensers, and are blown out with the frigid air in search of sinuses to aggravate, and so I lived for several years here mostly without air conditioning, choosing old houses built before even electric fans were common place, running up the water bill instead of the light bill with more frequent showers. I chose my clothes in the same, sensible way. When left back in 1986, I arrived in Washington, D.C. with a suitcase full of Haspel suits and short-sleeved Oxford cloth dress shirts, a straw hat perched on my head.
I was quickly corrected against such a quirky if practical wardrobe. Here in America, with ubiquitous air conditioning and in-the-door chilled water and ice dispensers, where Ready Kilowatt had spit atom and electricity would someday be too cheap to meter, my wash-and-wear suits and short-sleeved shirts were a silly anachronism, an affectation inappropriate to the serious halls of Congress. Never mind that the climate of Washington is the same as New Orleans, simply a few less weeks of it. I succumbed and bought a new wardrobe.

When I came home to New Orleans and became a full-time telecommuter, I had promised myself I would dress every day in collared shirt (perhaps a polo, I allowed myself), with chinos, shoes and socks. I would dress as if I were headed in to the casual-every-day Midwestern office I had left behind, the company logo pin we are all encouraged to wear clipped just beneath my collar. It would be, I told myself, an important psychological aspect of becoming a full-time home worker.

Yesterday I wore socks for the second time since I abandoned this resolution. The last time I dug through my sock drawer was for dinner at Galatoire’s, and that seemed a worthwhile reason to clap myself from neck to ankle in tropical wool (dreaming of my long lost seersuckers), and pull on a pair of the lightest socks I could find. Today even the business casual polos are gone: sleeveless shirts, shorts and sandals are my daily work dress. This way, I reason, I can keep the air turned up and the fan turning and likely manage to both eat and pay the utility bill. It’s not slovenliness or affectation to dress this way. It’s just how to live in a country where the air is as thick as rain even on a sunny day, where thunderstorms are as routine as the passage of the mailman every afternoon, and the storms can sometimes steal away your modern lifestyle, and leave you sitting on the porch with a glass of tea, debating whether to open the freezer to steal some more ice.

The mailman (who unknowingly prompted this entire train of thought) makes his way through the curtain of rain under a blue poncho, the top held off his face by the bill of his ball cap. I wonder when the local mail carriers stopped wearing pith helmets, something you rarely see anymore. People increasingly retreat into their energy-efficient homes and forget how to live here. It’s not just simple matters of dress or habits. For most the marsh is something that occasionally smolders in the East, a place as remote as the farm that supplies the meat in the case next to the seafood counter. The back of town swamps are now simply the places we avoid driving through when the rain is measured in inches an hour. Slab houses flood because of the corruption of politicians, not as a fact of forgotten geography.

When the storm passes and the convection from the thunderhead is gone, the heat will come back like the wave of a tsunami. I’ll get up and close the doors to the house, and trap the storm cooled air inside. I won’t save the arctic ice pack, or even that much on my light bill, but I will have reclaimed some of what we have all lost over the last generation. I will recapture another small piece of how to live in a place called New Orleans.

Remember August 29, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Federal Flood, Fortin Street, Hurricane Katrina, je me souviens, New Orleans, NOLA, Remember, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK.
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Requiem

Odd Words June 22, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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Matisse illustrated Ulysses? Dali illustrated Alice in Wonderland? Who knew? I steal stuff straight off of sites like The Rumpus. Nah, can’t believe that. I’m thinking the last one would make a cool tat, but it would require a belief in conventional time as opposed to orthogonal alternate universes, especially the one in which Pauley Parrette assists me in providing a critical bodily fluid sample that proves she was not the perp and out of gratitude ties me to one of those stainless steel tables and ….

Um, yes; books.

& Spoken Word New Orleans’ open mike (which I’ve forgotten to list for a while) has moved to Sunday Night at the Club Caribbean 2441 Bayou Road. Doors at 7, show at 8 with a $5 admission. This Week’s Featured Artists are Tank & The Black Star Bangas. Sunday, June 18.

& Leonard Pitts, nationally-syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, discusses and signs his new novel Freeman at Garden District Bookshop. In the months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Sam–a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army–sets out on foot to return to the war-torn South. He is compelled to find his wife, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the farm to which they all “belonged.”s Thursday, June 21 at 5:30 p.m.

&Garden District hosts Geoff Wyss amnd his new book How0. If every story is born of a question”–”How did we get here? How do you make your arm do that?–the stories in Geoff Wyss’s “How “search for answers to the mysteries of an astonishing range of characters. The narrator of “How I Come to Be Here at the GasFast” explains why he hasn’t left a truck stop in the two days since he scratched a winning lottery ticket. In “How to Be a Winner,” a sports consultant browbeats a high school football team with his theory of history and a justification of his failed coaching career. Lost in the mazes they’ve made of themselves, Wyss’s characters search for exits on ground that shifts dizzyingly from humor to pathos, from cynicism to earnestness, from comedy to tragedy, often within the same sentence. Although propelled by a razor-sharp, contemporary voice, Wyss’s stories–many set in a New Orleans unknown to television and tourists–have more in common with Chekhov and O’Connor than with “Treme”. Saturdayu June 23 at 1 p.m.

& On Saturday June 23 & Sunday June 24, our Bayou St. John location will be donating 10% of our total sales to Re-Bridge – the Bayou St. John Bridge Restoration Project. Help out a great project by buying a book and check out the rest the Fairgrinds and Swirl while you’re down here. And maybe grab some stuffed pork chops as Terraanova’s. Man, I love this hood.

&Octavia Books features R. J. Smith’s THE ONE: The Life and Music of James Brown, the “definitive biography of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, with fascinating findings on his life as a Civil Rights activist, an entrepreneur, and the most innovative musician of our time. So Get Up Off Of That Thing and head over to Octavia on Tuesday, June 26 at 6:00 pm [I need those funky horns and a copy of this book. Come on, give me them horns!)

& Next week Octavia Books delves into the history of the first degree-granting coordinate college with the release of Susan Tucker and Beth Willinge, NEWCOMB COLLEGE, 1886-2006: Higher Education for Women in New Orleans. Touching on three centuries, the book concludes in 2006 when Tulane University closed Newcomb College and Paul Tulane College, the arts and sciences college for men, and united the two as Newcomb-Tulane College. This absorbing collection offers both a scholarly history and an affectionate tribute to a Newcomb education. Thursday, June 28 at 6 p.m

& Hey, Faubourg Marigny Art & Books on Frenchman Street has a website! No announcements there but go sign up for emails. I just signed up odd.words.nola@gmail.com and I’ll get them up here as well.

The Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series features a reading by qwriter and professor Ruth Salvaggio reads from her new book from LSU Press, Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward. Several poets featured in the book will also read. Sunday at 3 p.m. if I’m late, I’m still waiting at the beer for a bar.

Which reminds me it’s probably time for my somesortofenia reminder to send your events to odd.words.nola@gmail.com if you want to see them here and Facebook and Twitter. OK, I’ve been falling down on the Twitter and Facebook announcements but then I’ve been falling down a lot and I’m going to see the doctor about that. Oh, and I just ate a meatloaf sandwich from the meatloaf I made, um, I think last Saturday. And I’m eating some chocolate covered strawberries that usually get thrown out at the end of the day at the candy shop where she works “because they don’t keep.” Please make donations to the Tennessee Williams Festival in lieu of flowers. Of you can stop by and see if I answer the door, in which case I have a bunch of white chocolate ones left.

& Just around the corner is a local festival to get you out of the crowds at the Essence Fest author events and reach out to local writers while you’re in town. The second annual Bayou Soul Writers and Readers Conference is a home grown literary festival that runs Essence Week. You can check them out here. There will be a Women Writer’s Awards Luncheon iIn Honor of Zora Neale Hurston anc z Our Distinguished Gentlemen of Literature Awards Breakfast in Honor of James Baldwin. Featured appearances include: Omar Tyree, Victoria Christopher Murray, Mary Monroe, Julie Kane, RM Johnson, ReShonda Tate Billingsley, Keith Boykins, Kiki Swinson, Pamela Davis-Noland, James Earl Hardy , Ronlyn Dominigue, Jed Horne , Yvette Hayward,Troy Johnson, Nicole Porche, Jumata Emill Jones, M.W. Moore, Pamela Davis Noland, Victor LaValle, Karen E. Quinones Miller, Naleighna Kai, Tamika Newhouse, Victor McGlothin, Regina Brooks, LaTosha Johnson, Walter “Trifelon” Johnson, Ashley Hebert, Avery Washington, Monique Mensah, Allison Hobbs, Dr. Maxine Thompson, Ronald M. Gauthier, Lee Hayes, J. L. Woodson, Trevor Baldwin, Pamela P. Reed, Francis Ray, Renee Daniel Flagler, Tiffany L Warren, Sadeqa Johnson, TaNisha Webb, and Victoria Turner. July 5th and 6th at the New Orleans Public Library and the Downtown Holiday Inn. More details here.

Odd Words — Mea Maxima Culpa June 17, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
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Yes, no Odd Words in two weeks. (Strikes breast three time but can’t remember the proper Catlick Latin so MMC will have to do.

Why I didn’t post is a long and boring story I won’t impose on you. Oh, and Tiresias says hi.

If you hurry over to the Irish House hopefully they will skip ahead to the naughty bits. And if you don’t: “. . . I was a Flower of the mountain yes where I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used to or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask agai nyes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like made and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Please submit 500 words from a Feminist or Post-Colonial critical view by next Wednesday. Or help me remember which Firesign Theater album ends with this.

&The Maple Street Bar Poetry Reading Series features performance poet LEX presenting his work, followed by an open mic. Sunday, June 17 at 3 p.m., or pretty close to that after everyone gets a drink at the bar. 17 Poets! is sadly finished for the year but will be back in September.

& Get your funk on and meet me at the Eastern Market next Saturday for some Rare Essence but then the market burned down years ago and I have no idea if that band from the 80s is stil around and sadest of all, Chuck Brown–the father of Go-Go music which is to DC what the original Funky Meters line up is to New Orleans — just passed away. But you can get a chuck of funk at the Maple Street Book Shop’s Healing Center location for a reading and signing by Natalie Hopkinson, author of Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City. If you were listening to Soul Sister the weekend after he passed you know what I mean. Remind me if I show up that I CAN’T AFFORD TO BUY ANY MORE BOOKS for a while but please loan me yours when you’re done. Tuesday, June 19th, 6:30-8pm.

& Wwe all knew it was coming for years now but here’s another Katrina-tinged book also over at Octavia this week, Rosalyn Story’s Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans Thursday, June 21st, at 6:30pm. There is a chef living in Treme who stays and his son the trumpeter who rushes home to find his father and finds his old girlfriend instead. I normally don’t get much of a thrill out of formulaic but it is beach reading season and it is an Essence Book Club selection.Thursday, June 21st, at 6:30p at the Healing Center And who knew Essence had a Book Club? Maybe that’s why Oprah is bringing her’s back what with Essence getting all up in her shit.

And the Maple Street Book Shop Healing Center location is in St Claude (and the Bayou one is just four blocks over), Maple Stret location which is of courses on St. Claude which is not confusing at all people in New Orleans who know where Bayou Road, Kelerec, North Dorgenois and Bell Street all cross in one crazy ass intersection. With no stop signs. Fortunately Bayou Road is one of the last of the brick paved stretches of street in this town so you tend to go slow.

& And with Essence just around the corner I’ll give an early shout out to a home grown literary festival that runs Essence Week, the Bayou Soul Writers and Readers conference. You can check them out here. And I’ll by cutting and pasting like crazy is a couple of weeks listing all the authors at Essence but whether you’re a visitor or from just around the corner, show this local festival of writers some love during Essence week.

& Octavia Books hosts Ruth Salvaggio’s books Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward. Author Event While sifting through trash in her flooded New Orleans home, Ruth Salvaggio discovered an old volume of Sappho’s poetry stained with muck and mold. In her efforts to restore the book, Salvaggio realized that the process reflected how Sappho’s own words were unearthed from the refuse of the ancient world. Undertaking such a task in New Orleans, she sets out to recover the city’s rich poetic heritage while searching through its flooded debris. Hearing Sappho in New Orleans is at once a meditation on this poetic city, its many languages and cultures, and a history of its forgotten poetry. Using Sappho’s fragments as a guide, Salvaggio roams the streets and neighborhoods of the city as she explores the migrations of lyric poetry from ancient Greece through the African slave trade to indigenous America and ultimately to New Orleans. NOT BUYING ANY BOOKS. REMEMBER? But you just missed my birthday. Thursday June at 6:00 p.m.

OK, I’m getting all out of chronological order here but if you’ve gotten this far down you can figure this out. Or you can ask your high school aged kid who has a $39 calculator that exceeds the entire computing power of the Apollo mission command modules. Which is almost as amazing as the Space Pen, or the fact that people still buy them. Silly Russians, they didn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a zero gravity pen. They used pencils.

& In a city that tried to shut down some of the best Latino cooking we ever had just because the restaurants had wheels, Garden District Books brings us John T. Edge, The Truck Food Cookbook. The book delivers 150 recipes from America’s best restaurants on wheels, from L.A. and New York to the truck food scenes in Portland, Austin, Minneapolis, and more.John T. Edge shares the recipes, special tips, and techniques. And what a menu-board: Tamarind-Glazed Fried Chicken Drummettes. Kalbi Beef Sliders. Porchetta. The lily-gilding Grilled Cheese Cheeseburger. And in case you sadly miss the food truck that used to park on Frenchman you know the guy that ran it cooks in the back of Cafe Negril and makes the most awesome Central American tamales you will ever eat.

Not To Do List June 2, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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Saturdays are peculiar. No work and a long list of things to do. Where I live there is a triangle park across from the Laundromat. A short walk around the corner there is also a wine store, two groceries and a book shop. People think us lazy and shiftless, always for pleasure, which is why they buy tickets and come here in droves. It is your civic duty not to disappointment even if duty is not the order of the day.

All of the trees in that park have names, some botanical and one of them your’s.

You could run to the dollar store and buy more underwear but that verges dangerously close to on a chore. Your filing system consists of various, carefully organized piles of paper on the floor from which you could pluck anything you need in a moment, and your laundry basket overflows on top of the plastic filing bin. Consider the chaos stacking those piles of paper into one so you could vacuum would cause.

Some poor sod is out there delivering pizza or Chinese but one day this week will be his Saturday. Your tip could pay for a bottle of wine and a book.

Pour another cup of coffee and sit on your stoop talking to your chatty neighbor. Admire the colorful birds and pity their restlessness. After some indeterminate time assess what is in your drawers and in your closet. Dump the dirty clothes into a pile and sort them into the necessary and what can wait. Somewhere it is probably early to open a bottle of beer while the laundry tumbles but you don’t live there. Think how it will facilitate a nap later.

Don’t forget to bring a book.

Odd Words May 17, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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Holy Moly, is it Thursday again already.

& Tonight at 17 Poets! Dave Brinks announces “CLARK COOLIDGE, Poet Uberist of Golden Realms, has secretly arrived in NOLA to give a poetry reading for The Ages!In fact this will be Clark Coolidge’s first sojourn to Our Lady of Swamplandia!” Thursday, May 17 at 7:30 pm

& Tayari Jones will be at Maple Street’s Healing Center location presenting her new book Silver Sparrows, “a breathtaking story about a man*s deception, a family*s complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle” Thursday May 17, 6:00 pm

& Martin Behrman Charter School will celebrate its second “Poetry on the Avenue”, an evening of art, spoken word poetry, and live music.. The event will feature performances by student performers from Behrman Charter School, several local poets and musical artists, and nationally renowned feature poets Sunni Patterson, an HBO Def Poet and Team SNO, New Orleans’ first national slam poetry championship winning team. The event will be hosted by New Orleans’s own Gian Smith of Treme and Alphonse “Bobby” Smith and will take place on the school’s front lawn from 3pm to 6pm. The school is located at 715 Opelousas Avenue, New Orleans, LA, located in New Orleans’s historic Algiers Point. Saturday, May 19 from 3 pm to 6 pm.

& On May 19th The New Orleans Secular Humanist Society is hosting an event with Lawrence Powell in the Dominion Learning Center at Audubon Zoo. It its open to the public. Dr. Powell will be discussing and signing his new book, Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Saturday May 19, at 4:30 pm

& Octavia Books hosts a booksigning with photographer West Freeman featuring his recently published work, THE GARDEN DISTRICT OF NEW ORLEANS. The Garden District of New Orleans has enthralled residents and visitors alike since it arose in the 1830′s with its stately white-columned Greek Revival mansions and double-galleried Italianate houses decorated with lacy cast iron. Photographer West Freeman evokes the romance of this elegant neighborhood with lovely images of private homes, dazzling gardens, and public structures. Saturday, May 19 at 2 p.m.

& Sunday the Maple Leaf Bar reading series will feature a SOLAR ECLIPSE/VERNAL EQUINOX OPEN MIC! These powerful forces and drawing you to come. Do not resist.

& Ron Tanner will be at Maple Street’s Uptown location on to sign and discuss his book, From Animal House to Our House. A story for inspiration-seekers, old house lovers, DIYers, and American dreamers, From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story shows how Ron and Jill learned the hard way — about love and life and saving precious things from ruin. Monday, May 21 at 6 pm.

& Octavia Books will host Carolyn Turgeon featuring her new middle-grades novel, THE NEXT FULL MOON, a “horoughly compelling, gorgeously told tale.” Tuesday, May 22 at 6 pm.

I’m sure I’ve missed something but I’ve been up since 3:45 a.m. for a work conference call and no amount of coffee is going to make that right, it seems. I think I need a six pack of Mexican Coke to get my blood sugar up. If you know where I live, I will pay you handsomely to drop some buy. And a bag of donuts.

Odd Words: Drips and Drabs Edition April 3, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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This is what, my third post this week? Now that the crazy is behind me, I need to finish off this week’s events and start writing up next week’s before I sign up some other sort of crazy. It’s spring break which gives me today and Thursday off, but there are a lot of things I haven’t gotten around too between school and work, and I’ve got papers I should be working on.

& First, a reminder that ruth weiss (no, she doesn’t capitalize her name), one of the last of the Beat generation poets, is in town this week for a strong of events. Tonight she will be the guest of The Black Widow Salon at Crescent City Books at 7 p.m. It’s a cozy space upstairs with very limited seating so you need to email the store at books@crescentcitybooks.com to see if there are any seats left.

On Wednesday, April 4 there will be an Avant Film Fest at Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center featuring weiss at 7 p.m. On Thursday weiss, noted for her jazz poetry, will be featured at 17 Poets! with the Poet of New Orleans Brass Band at 7 p.m. Take note that’s an earlier that usual start

& This evening Garden District Bookshop features Wayne Pacelle and his book The Bond: Our Kinship With Animals, Our Call to Defend Them. Pacelle explores the many ways animals contribute to our happiness and well-being, and he reveals scientists’ newfound understanding of their remarkable emotional and cognitive capacities. Pacelle also takes on animal cruelty in its many varieties, as well as stubborn opponents of animal protection–from multinational agribusiness corporations to the National Rifle Association and even our own government. Tonight, April 3 at 5:30 p.m.

& Also this evening at the Maple Street Book Shop’s uptown location its the First Tuesday Book Club discussing Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter at 6:00 p.m. That’s kind of late notice, but at least you know there’s a First Tuesday book club, and you can check their website for the next book (while I try to get them to give me some early notice of upcoming books.

& On Thursday McKeown’s Books and Difficult Music hosts their non-fiction book club discussion. It’s a different sort of book club, where members bring their own recent or favorite non-fiction books and the discussion goes from there. Thursday, April 5 at 4737 Tchoupitoulas starting at 7 p.m.

& Also on Thursday the Maple Leaf Book Shop Healing Center location on St. Claude welcomes Pamela Davis-Noland discussing, reading, and signing her book Coffee Colored Dreams, described as “a beautiful and engaging story. It speaks to the part of the human soul that wants to love and be loved. This book had so many messages and mantras entwined within it’s pages. Self-respect,self-esteem, self-love,holding out for love. Healing our hearts,following our hearts,and giving our hearts. Listening to our elders and respecting them.” Thursday, April 5 at 6 p.m.

Another Thursday event: Octavia Books will present Lawrence N. Powell and his book THE ACCIDENTAL CITY: Improvising New Orleans, “the story of a city that shouldn’t exist”. His book covers the period from settlement through 1812, the time of “intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world.” Thursday, April 5 at 6 p.m.

I’ll hopefully catch up on Thursday (starting with Friday’s events) by, um, Thursday.

Missing Ditches April 3, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Fortin Street, New Orleans, NOLA, Toulouse Street.
Tags: ditches, Fortin Street, Mystery Street, S. Lopez Street, Sewage & Water Board
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I religiously keep the lid shut on my garbage can because I can’t imagine how I would deal with maggots without a nearby storm drain, and if you live this far south if you over stuff the can you know the flies are going to get in there and leave you with an unpleasant wriggling mess. Would I dump the remains of the little bastards after their bath in Clorox into the middle of the street? I’m afraid I might poison the wild parrots that live in the tree outside my house. My last can lost its lid in a windy storm while I was out of town, and I went to get a new one before I unpacked my bags. I got a newer, larger can now that my son is at my house every other week because two men generate a lot more garbage than one, especially with his teenage taste for Hot Pockets, and his insistence that bottled water tastes better than good old New Orleans tap through a Brita filter. The new can has a lid so tight I curse and drop the garbage onto the ground to get it off but that’s probably for the best.

Fortin Street is one of the last in New Orleans I know of without storm drains and lacks even the ditches I remember in much of the old Lakeview of my youth. I wonder how long this gentrifying edge of the fashionable Faubourg St. John will accept living this way, but I’ve never heard a neighbor complain. Complaining about the condition of New Orleans streets if a waste of breath better saved for important topics like the weather. I’m just glad not to have a water main leak like the one that’s been gurgling on South Lopez for so long I can’t remember, even if I’m sometimes jealous of the drain that swallows up the steady spring. At some point the leak is going to wash the dirt out from under the pavement and who knows how long it will take the Sewerage and Water Board and the city to figure out who’s responsible for the gaping hole where the street used to be. I called the city’s 3-1-1 line once to complain and after a long wait was dumped into a recorded message queue, and I dutifully gave them the location and condition. I think that was about a year ago, and since then the water has worn itself in channel down an expansion joint. Mule excursions into the resulting canyon will be the next step. Still, its almost a comforting feature of the neighborhood at his point, like having a fountain in your garden. On a hot day the sound of running water is a relief.

A good, steady rain is another matter.. The black-top on Fortin stands a good two inches above the surrounding ground, which is a rocky gravel and glass mosaic that can’t support enough grass to slow the runoff. If you want to walk to Canseco’s Grocery or to see Dr. Bob the pharmacist at De Blanc’s you need to walk down the street if you want to keep out of the puddles and mud. You can tell the neighbors (they wave) from people bound from the track (they glower and sometimes honk) just by walking down the street, which you mostly do anyway as sidewalks are a now-and-then thing on my street. Once you turn the corner onto South Lopez or Mystery you find good old storm drains, the kind you need at least two men with a very long pry bar and steel-toed boots to clean out, and given the amount of plant detritus from our extensive sub-tropical greenery and the ingrained New Orleans habit of tossing Coke cans and chicken bones out the window, you want to clean your storm drains unless you plan on practicing your Eskimo roll in the street.

In South Louisiana nature has its own opinions about such things, and thankfully provides a nice sag in the sidewalk between the doors of my double as a ponding area for the run-off, keeping it away from the doors. Its a little closer to my side that Jimmy’s but not close enough to puddle up in front of my stoop. If you let your car hang out into the street just enough to annoy those track-bound gamblers (again), you can step out onto the rocky shoulder, bypass the puddling and make your way down to the bit of struggling grass that manages just at the bounds of the puddle and make it to my house without too much mud on your shoes, just enough to make sure you have a good jute and rubber door mat. I imagine just about everyone on my street must have such a mat, which in a better paved neighborhood would be mostly decorative. Jimmy insists we should keep the mud that sloughs into our sidewalk under control and promises to take care of it if I could loan him a shovel. I told him I have one, but he’s never asked to borrow it. He’s about as likely to use that shovel on the sidewalk as I am to dig up the weedatorium in the flower beds in back and put in tomatoes. It’s not that much mud anyway, and people favor walking down the street even on dry days. The dog walkers either head straight for the middle of the pavement, as in early morning of evening the Fairground folks are mostly gone. Some dogs favor the slightly grassier strip on the Fairground side. I guess those are more particular about where they crap, preferring the spring-time fresh greenery the way people in newer houses than mine prefer a bathroom with an exhaust fan.

Maybe I’ll just take the shovel to it myself this time, even though Jimmy’s on disability and probably looks for things to do like furiously sweeping the sidewalk. Then again, trying to keep that sidewalk free of mud is like worrying about the leak around the corner. When South Lopez collapses into a gurgling crater I should still be able to walk around it on my excursions to the store. I can take the car down Mystery to get to Fortin. Mystery Street is well paved concrete (with drains) as Fortin is kept neatly blacktopped, I imagine for the benefit of tourists walking from their buses on Esplanade to Jazz Fest. You wouldn’t want to give them the wrong impression, having them turn an ankle crossing the heaves and crevasses of your typical New Orleans street, which is sliding roughly toward the Gulf of Mexico like a Greenland glacier headed for the sea. The tourists don’t care that Fortin lacks drains or ditches. They walk down the middle of the street like they were natives.

Ashley Morris: 1963-2008 April 2, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in FYYFF, je me souviens, New Orleans, NOLA, Remember, Sinn Fein, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Ashley Morris
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By Dylan Thomas
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Ghost Hotel March 20, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Edgewater Hotel, Mississippi Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, satellite kite
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Today’s poem from Poetry Daily, Looking for The Gulf Motel, reminds me why I have avoided the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It is bad enough to go to Florida, to note the absence of the old aquamarine cinder block motels of my childhood, restaurants without a hint of Jimmy Buffet about them, to remember the vendors all down Highway 90 selling satellite kites. I could probably whistle if not sing every words to the jingle for the Friendship House restaurant, can still see the lobster chef sign outside greeting customers.

After I read the poem I remembered my grandfather taking us to the coast for the day to swim in the Edgewater Hotel pool. I sensed something was wrong as we dressed in the pool-side bathrooms but this was before the day of electronic key guarded gates. I stayed there once, the year my sister was getting married and between the cost and the time it was consuming my parents opted for a week at the Edgewater. In the late 1960s there was no in-room movies or DVD players. We ate a dinner of fish we had caught from the pier and delivered to the kitchen, the went to play bingo. I won, and my father insisted I treat everyone to ice cream.

A few years later, the hotel was imploded to make way for a Sears for the adjacent shopping center.

And so it goes.

At the risk of sounding all hurricane maudlin after all these years, the Mississippi coast is particularly painful. My cousins lived in Waveland until they were washed out for the second time in living memory. The oldest I hear is back, practicing law but he’s so much older than I am that I barely know him. No one is quite sure where Tucker, the one closest to my age, might be. He hated law and was dealing in the casinos last anyone heard. My father’s brother Phillip is long gone.

I have vague memories of Bay St. Louis after Camille, the stone bank building downtown gone and the safe–which must outweigh a brace of locomotives–shifted across the empty slab. My more recent memories are much more graphic: returning from Florida and deciding at the last minute to get off on the winding two lane to Pass Christian and emerging at the Mississippi Sound into nothing, the faux antebellum beach homes of the wealthy reduced to steps as certainly as the houses of the Ninth Ward. Then there was the visit to Waveland itself a year later, to the trailer a friend had purchased to replace a beach cottage. It stood in an unlighted field of slabs as far as the eye can see.

I have some friends I have promised to visit in Waveland. It would be nice to see Tucker, to reintroduce myself to the eldest of my aunt’s children. Letting go is as inevitable a part of the future as releasing your grip on the bars at the top of the high board and stepping off into the pool’s blue sky bottom.

When I go I will drive as far as I have to until I find a satellite kite, will drive in an endless circuit to Pascagoula and back to Pass Christian if I must until I have traveled so far and so fast that time will slip just enough for me to reach back and snatch the bright cardboard kite my father never let me stop to buy.

Songs of Freedom March 17, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in 504ever, music, New Orleans, NOLA, Toulouse Street.
Tags: St. Joseph's Day, St. Patrick's Day, The Chieftains, Ziggy Marley
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Now at the annual collision of our African, Celtic and Sicilian culture, in this town where the African’s ripped from their villages and put into bondage were too valuable a property to waste risk so the hungry Irish were set to work and die digging the New Basin Canal, the spoil banks littered with their bones, the Mardi Gras Indians will come out even as the Irish and Italians stage their parades and the green beer and red wine will flow, and the streets will be line with pork chop sandwiches and loose feathers, a celebration in the way only our entirely Creolized culture knows how to do best. Free from slavery, free from hunger and poverty, and in this one place God set aside like Nod for the rejects of Anglo culture and in which we have established (with a wink and a blind eye from God) all that the propaganda of the north promised in their lies, the true melting pot. It is time to to sing Redemption Songs.

A Beige Day March 10, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Moloch, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, Toulouse Street.
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It’s impossible to talk on a cell phone in the lobby over the roar of the fountain but they try anyway, bellowing to invisible parties, wandering the floor hollering and looking for a quieter spot as if this were the lounge of a madhouse just before medication time. I pass the utilitarian dry cleaners and UPS store, both open for early business, and admire the display lamp radiance of the jewelry store, which is not open but serves as a gleaming reminder of forgotten birthdays and anniversaries. I’ve been here perhaps twenty seconds and already I want another cigarette but I head for the elevators instead, business casual among the intent lawyers discussing cases as if we were not all there to hear them, their attractive secretaries in modestly revealing dresses, heels and hose. Eighty-thirty is a good time to arrive, as the fourteenth floor express turns into a cross-town local at eight and again at nine, stopping at every other floor to collect riders from the garage. I am not in a particular hurry to return to work after four months off but I want coffee, waiting for me on eighteen.

I would stop on the fourteenth floor if I could if there were coffee and wireless (and O! ashtrays), sink into the moderately soft but utilitarian transit furniture and spend the day there on my computer. Noise is suitably intermittent, not much worse than the office, and there is a view. I once could watch the pigeons in the adjoining building (and not much else) until they moved my cube for the third time in six months, leaving me windowless at a busy corner near a shared conference room and the copier. I wonder at the cause of that past punishment but then the entire environment of a cubicle-filled office seems some waiting station, not exactly purgatory but an uncomfortable place for the expiation of bills.

On the fourteenth floor the terrazzo is cool and bound in soothing shades of cream and vermilion. If I select a chair instead of a couch I have my choices of views of the river. The best looks southeast toward the Algiers bend, the city stretching away into the distant frosting of humidity, the periodic excitement of a down-bound ship navigating the treacherous turn, engines furiously churning the water as the vesslrel bides into alignment with the river’s eastward course past Chalmette, recovering momentum just in time to miss the Esplanade Avenue wharf. On this side, however, you have the concierge, a vaguely attractive woman dressed in business sexual but her voice is a screech, and too many of the buildings other workers stop by to chat. If I stop I would choose the southwest view, although the prospect toward Gretna’s working waterfront, not wharves but a collection of tank farms and barge moorings is less attractive, and partially obscured by the adjacent building, but it is quiet.

I don’t stop.

I am being paid by the hour as a contractor and the sooner I get started the sooner the money tap will flow. I had enough cash to finish the semester as a full-time student, and relished the idea of a sabbatical from the corporate grind, but the offer was too generous, too tempting, the chance to stretch my severance out perhaps until next winter or beyond if they keep me, allowing me to stay in school at least part time. Doing both will be hard, but at least I’m not waitressing well into the night like the woman next to me in Writing American Nature. The downside is I must do more than remember orders but engage my brain three days a week in the service of Moloch Bank, N.A., puzzling out the arrangement of what is wanted and what is possible in the matter of software, not writing ambles through anywhere such as this but instead atomic nuggets of specific deliverables, in a clear prose both a code monkey and an approving executive can understand.

On the 18th floor the same painting still hangs in the elevator lobby, a vague landscape suggesting not so much an exterior as a waiting room redolent of antiseptic. Four tree-like smudges stand on a muddy red foreground against a sky of beige close to the color of the interior office carpet and cube wall fabric, as if they meant us to think that at our metal desks we were somewhere else, somewhere under the sky. I found my old cube the same disheveled, disinterested mess of an exit mentality I left it, down to the pencil. Someone had taken the adapter cord required for my monitor but I wasn’t surprised. The looting had started before I left, after the first big wave of relocations to Richmond. I had to remove my old wall postings to make room for the new. They still haven’t turned on the white noise they promised when we moved into Place Sans Charm. I go out onto the internet to find the sound file I had on my prior computer, my own pink noise loop (pink closer to the sound of an untuned AM radio and thought superior to the white), and I find that Moloch, N.A. has blocked the website where I once found it.

Welcome back to work.

Odd Words March 2, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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Yes, it’s Friday and I’m sitting down to write Odd Words. I have to do something to get this back on a regular schedule but the collision of midterms, a return to work and the simple necessities of life (sleep is nice; so is food) is making a mess of every plan I come up with. Somehow this week’s listings is sandwiched between bringing my son to school, the UNO Library, a trip to the bookstore, and downtown to get a new security badge for work. No, not sandwiched, which implies two blocking parts, but rather sliced, diced and shredded into the salad of my days.

& First, Friday’s routines:spokenwordnola.com’s weekly event at the Red Star Gallery on Bayou Road at 9 pm and the No Love Lost Poetry Reading at the Love Lost Lounge at 5:30 pm. Take you pick, or take two for the same price, as NLLP doesn’t charge a cover.

& On Saturday, the Milton H. Latter Memorial Library on St. Charles Avenue hosts the monthly Poetry Buffet, featuring Joseph Bienvenue under the able direction of poet hostess Gina Ferrara. Saturday, March 3 at 2 p.m.

& Also on Saturday, Miss Maureen conducts her regular children’s Story Time at 10:00 A.M. in our Healing Center location and at 11:30 A.M. in the flagship store Uptown. This weekend features The Lorax. We all love us some Dr. Suess.

& Two words: praline bacon. Garden District Books will host Kit Wohl (who promises to bring food) to discuss her new book NEW ORLEANS CLASSIC BRUNCHES while we all brush the crumbs off of our shirts. Her book examines the New Orleans tradition of elaborate, mid-morning (and sometimes hungover and hungry) meals with this collection of fifty classic brunch recipes from legendary restaurants such as Brennan’s, Dooky Chase’s, and Antoine’s. Oh, and Elizabeth’s. (Did I mention praline bacon? Can I have some now?) From beignets with cafe au lait to grits and grillades, these recipes sparkle for any occasion. Tips, techniques, and inside secrets accompany each lusciously photographed. recipe. Tuesday, March 6 at 6 p.m.

& Have I mentioned that Maple Street Bookshop has a First Tuesday Book Club at the Uptown location? I haven’t? Sorry guys. Well, here is the next entry with a discussion date less than two weeks away so if it sounds interesting you had best get over to one of their three locations and get a copy before a week from this Tuesday. the next meeting is March 6 at 6:00 P.M.: Gather with the club to discuss Tea Obrecht*s book, THE TIGER’S WIFE. ‘Stunning . . . a richly textured and searing novel.’ Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, and who am I to disagree. The book club meets at the Uptown location Tuesday, March 6 at 6 p.m., so you’ve still got enough time to get a copy and plow through it this weekend.

& If you’ve missed it elsewhere, there is no better place to appreciate Constance Adler’s MY BAYOU, NEW ORLEANS THROUGH THE EYES OF A LOVER than at at Bayou St. John teams up with Swirl, which I sure hope means wine. It’s not clear which room it will be in but they’re next to each other so it won’t be hard to find. And I assume there will be wine, so the confluence of geography and alcohol is just irresistible. Thursday March 8, 2012, 6:00 P.M

& At Maple Street’s Uptown location Professor John Klingman, the Richard Koch chair at the Tulane School of Architecture, is stopping by to discuss and sign his book, New in New Orleans Architecture. Thursday, March 8 at 6 p.m.

& This coming Thursday 17 Poets! will feature Professor ARTURO (aka Arthur Pfister), a poet and fiction writer from New Orleans, Spoken Word artist, educator, performer, editor, speechwriter one of the original Broadside poets of the 1960s together with poet and performance artist Valentine Pierce. In its review of the “From a Bend In the River” anthology, which included Pierce’s, “Rivers of My Soul,” the Times-Picayune called her one of the stalwarts of the New Orleans poetry scene. Thursday, March 8 at 7:30 pm.

Back to the Future February 25, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in je me souviens, New Orleans, NOLA, Remember, The Narrative, Toulouse Street.
Tags: University of New Orleans, UNO
2 comments

The campus toward Leon C. Simon was a vast meadow, covered in a cotton blanket of ground fog in which we left a wake as we walk home. As we passed the utility plant known as Stonehenge for the wall of interrupted standing concrete monoliths that surround it The Mad Scotsman would come out. We have no way of knowing if was actually Scottish. That’s just what we called him. We only know that on nights after our class in Twentieth Century poetry, perhaps after a night class of his own, he would play his bagpipes somewhere toward the building that houses the music department.

The meadow of 1978 is now a parking lot to serve the gleaming tower of the new Engineering Building and the campus of Ben Franklin High School. The walk south from the Liberal Arts Building toward St. Anthony Street is a maze of curving sidewalks, concrete plazas and a confusion of new buildings. Some of the sidewalks trace the goat paths students once wore into the grass, while other paths of memory are blocked by berms meant to discourage shortcuts.

I thought the greatest difference in going back to school after thirty years would be the age difference between the other students and myself. When they notice me at all, the conversations are not much different than they might have been decades ago. No one asks me why I am back in school. They bum a cigarette, complain about a disinterested professor, ask after a generic liberal arts class what my major is. In the mirror of their eyes I am as they are, just another student.

The sidewalks are no more full than I remember them but there must be more students or who is populating all of these new buildings? Perhaps they all scurry off to their cars and go somewhere else between classes. I notice the young woman with the interesting tattoos I sit next to in History of New Orleans sometimes scurries off toward her car after class, but I see her later in the new canyon between Liberal Arts and the new Mathematics Building. It has always been a commuter campus but other than the mobs in the lunch lines in the University Center I don’t know where they all are between classes.

The students and professors mostly accept me. I am not the only older student in the room. I am most unsettled by the new geography and I find myself spending time between classes in familiar haunts: the second floor of the UC, the patio in the center of the LA building, the library. The cafe I knew as The Cove is now The Sandbar, and the angular concrete walls that once flanked the entrance are gone, remembered only in a small display in the library lobby. I look for myself or someone I knew in the photographs but don’t find them.

The entry to The Sandbar is now a plaza with fountains and gas-fueled, lava-rock braziers amid the metal cafe tables. I avoid the building, mostly because I can’t stand to eat my homemade sandwich in a room filled with people eating Popeye’s Friend Chicking, one of the half-dozen fast food outlets that have moved on campus to complete with the cafeteria and the original Sandbar the counter service that was once the only choices.

I think about those long gone concrete walls at The Sandbar, and the concrete monoliths of the physical plant. I recently learned that Curtis and Davis, the architectural firm where my father spent most of his career, laid out the original plan for the campus in the early 1960s when it was opened. In the long-gone, berm-flanked concrete walls that gave to us–the second generation after The Bomb–the sensation of entering a fallout shelter, and in the monoliths as the center of campus, I see a touch of functional Brutalism that marked the work of Curtis and Davis. None of the people going in and out of the cafe or toward their cars remember the Rivergate or the other studies in undulating cement and sand in their french curve glory that marked the work my father did.

Do these children even know what a French curve is, or how to operate a slide rule? Everyone seems to have a tablet computer or a tiny netbook computer, and their backpacks are small. My messenger bag straings my back as I groan under the weight of the Riverside Chaucer and another class’ thick stack of tabbed printouts that fill a once inch binder. I have tried both the pack pack and shoulder slung arrangements and neither spares my back. So much paper, unless we have lately slung a case of copier paper we forget how much it weighs until you fill your bag with a ream of it. My son mocks me because I dutifully fill in three-by-five cards before a biology test. Why don’t you use Quizlet online, he asks? I tell him writing for me is a mnemonic aid, even while every professor posts Power Point slides of their lectures on the Moodle website I could just as easily study from.

Amid all this technology (and I have worked in IT. I am no luddite) I think I find comfort in a stack of blue-lined cards, a prop to help me adjust. Scantrons, the little sheets of circles to be colored in with a brace of No. 2 pencils, I remember only from scholastic aptitude tests, not classes. I find some comfort to see the stacks of blue books in the book store, and wonder if I can still manage to fill one legibly with my bad handwriting, a task that thirty years ago required a concerted effort but which in retrospect I think required me to slow down and focus on what I was writing.

I no longer walk out of my last class of the day in a direct line toward Leon C. Simon and St. Anthony. I could not if I wished to, but would have to thread the maze of new buildings. I left my car in that direction, not far from my old apartment at 6219 Wadsworth Street, but my son has taken it to NOCCA. Thirty years go I parked for free in the lot of the abandoned Pontchartrain Beach amusement park, but that is also gone, replaced by a university-affiliated technology park. I head instead for the familiar brick bus shelter across the empty approximation of a quadrangle north of the library to catch my bus home, glad to sling my messenger bag full of books (how can the onion skin of the thick Chaucer weigh so much?) onto the concrete benches.

I will probably drop my one night class when I return to work part-time. Moloch regrets their decision, and wants me back to help. I wish I could keep that class. I know the Mad Scotsman is long gone, but I often hear music students practicing in the new amphitheater behind the bus top. I long to walk some night through the swirling ground fog to meet my ride home, to the strains of some powerful instrument–a tenor saxophone perhaps–to sing me home through the dark.

Odd Words February 23, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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You know you are the old fart in your Chaucer class when the words “Procol Harum” and “Whiter Shade of Pale” evoke blank stares from the assembled sixteen vestal virgins and their cohort of future high priests in the temple of literature. I have to assume they are graduate trackers. You’d have to be insane to take Chaucer if you’re only in English to go to law school.

(What? Really? It’s “As the Miller told his tale” in the chorus. Oh, just go listen).

It looks like I’m going to be working full-time on Fridays shortly, and what with 17 Poets back in session and a full day of classes Thursday, I don’t know when I’m going to get this column written, but I do know I will probably be eating something or performing some other useful function if I’m going to keep up with all this. Typing on the bus in New Orleans is definitely out of the question.

Enough with the kvetching already and go write up the listings why don’t you?

& I won’t get this out in time for tonight’s Octavia book event (listed last week) but just in time to remind you that tonight 17 Poets hosts a triple header featuring JOHN SINCLAIR, PIERRE JORIS and NICOLE PEYRAFITTE at the Goldmine on Thursday, Feb 23, 7:30pm). If Sinclair is not enough of a don’t miss show on his own, I caught Nicole Peyrafitt at the Goldmine last year and her performance poetry is also a must see. You’ve got an hour to get down there and park, so come back and read the rest of this later.

&Friday McKeown’s Books and Difficult Music will host a reading with author, David Wesley Baldwin. He is the recipient of the 2009 Outstanding Fiction Award from Out Magazine and will be reading from several of his works. Wine/cheese will be served.

& Fridays also brings spokenwordnola.com’s weekly event at the Red Star Gallery on Bayou Road at 9 pm and the No Love Lost Poetry Reading at the Love Lost Lounge at 5:30 pm. Take you pick, or take two for the same price, as NLLP doesn’t charge a cover.

& On Sunday, Feb. 26 the Maple Leaf Reading series features poet and musician Jonathan Warren reads from his work and play his Native American flutes. His music is an ethereal wonder and you have to get a close looks at his flutes, which are amazing works of art themselves. All that and fine poetry, too. And beer or whatever. Well scotch is highly appropriate but not recommended if you have to work Monday.

& Monday of course brings The Writer’s Block to the amphitheater steps across from Jackson Square, unless of course Kate says it’s not. And everyone listens to Kate, except maybe Richard Burton.

& On Tuesday Octavia Books presents a reading and signing with Constance Adler featuring her just released memoir of life along Bayou St. John, MY BAYOU: New Orleans through the Eyes of a Lover. Octavia (or maybe the jacket copy) suggest “a vividly described and intensely personal memoir, My Bayou charts a personal and spiritual transformation along the fabled banks of Bayou Saint John in New Orleans.” This sounds like a book I would love. This sounds like a book I could get around to reading if I started buying Yerba Matte infused energy drinks by the case, but that does’t mean you should miss it. Ms. Adler will also be at Maple Street Books in Faubourg St. John on March 8 but that’s next week’s column.

& Next Thursday Octavia Books features historians Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard presenting and signing their new book, FREEDOM PAPERS: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. FREEDOM PAPERS sets the saga of a Senegambia and her descendants against the background of three great anti-racist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. Senegambia was the primary source of slaves to French (and Spanish) Louisiana, and their homogeneous culture is one of the reasons we have our rich Creole culture. (Show off.) (Yes, I’m taking History of New Orleans.)

& Have I mentioned that Maple Street Bookshop has a First Tuesday Book Club at the Uptown location? I haven’t? Sorry guys. Well, here is the next entry with a discussion date less than two weeks away so if it sounds interesting you had best get over to one of their three locations and get a copy before a week from this Tuesday. the next meeting is March 6 at 6:00 P.M.: Gather with the club to discuss Tea Obrecht*s book, The Tiger’s Wife. ‘Stunning . . . a richly textured and searing novel.’ Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.

& Just so you don’t think Garden District Books was ransacked by a crowd of drunken Bacchanalians, they will get back into the swing the week of March 6 with Kit Wohl, Suzanne Peron and C.S. Harris, but that’s next week’s column. And an opportunity to discuss the Oxford Comma in the comments section.

I’m afraid I’m missing something hurrying through this, but send me an email at odd.words.nola@gmail.com if I did and you can have your very own “Oops, I screwed up (again)” announcement. Please try to send them to me in advance so we both look smart. I can use every advantage to impress my professors I can possibly muster.

Krewe of Aeolus February 18, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Carnival, Mid-City, New Orleans, NOLA, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Krewe of Endymion
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I’ve never been that fond of Endymion, which on the stretch nearest my house is a festival of boorish suburban drunkenness and animal territoriality. I’m taking a class in anthropology and have to keep a journal and I’m pretty sure what the next entry will be about, but I’m not going out in this foul weather to refresh my memory. The spray paint marking vast swaths of the public neutral ground as private property began to appear Thursday night, followed by the rebar and caution tape. The tents and locked porta-potties came next.

If you want to see American culture at its basest selfish and aquisitorial level, the complete collapse of social comity one might expect in the Zombie Apocalypse, there is no better place than the Orleans Avenue section of the route. Hell, in most of the zombie films the survivors show more cooperation and camaraderie, which would I guess make the neutral ground hordes the zombies. The chief of police promised to enforce the ordinances against this behavior but if you believe that I have an imaginary prime stake on the Carrollton Avenue street car line I want to sell you.

The gods, it seems, are not pleased with this behavior. Drenching rain, howling winds, frequent lightening and the prospect of tornadoes is likely to dampen some of the enthusiasm of the villaging hordes. The only downside to this will be if Endymion is moved to Sunday night behind Bacchus, which will mean many of these same people will try to crowd themselves onto Napoleon Avenue tomorrow night.

Odd Words February 17, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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OK, I really should be at the library doing research since my Chaucer professor just reminded the entire class yesterday our final term paper abstract is due in three weeks. I really need to get over there before people start checking things out. I seem to be riding into uncharted territory which will make it harder than it ought to be, but I think I’m on to something and I can’t resist. Why go back to school at my age if not to challenge oneself? It’s not just the severance with retraining, to to try to find a place in my small apartment to hang a bit of framed sheep’s skin or wear some silly ring. The whole idea is to challenge my writing mind into new directions, which is why I’m also taking Writing American Nature, a Special Topics course one third of the students of which are graduate students. (The same is true of my Chaucer course).

The professor teaching the Special Topics course asked us to send him an email explaining why we chose the course. I gave him two reasons. The first was to understand the techniques of nature writing as I might employ them in my own writing about the urban environment. I sent him a few blog pieces and he said he enjoyed them very much, so there’s that. Then there is a desire to understand the American mind as separate from the Creole, Pan-Caribbean mindset of New Orleans. (I think I might have mentioned something about approaching the latter from the the point of view of a “die-hard New Orleans exceptionalist, with every bit of Gallic chavinism I can muster). At least he like the essays from here and Wet Bank Guide.

That said, onto the listings.

We are into parade listings and the bookstores mostly have their Carnival schedules posted and nothing coming up this week. I did a book signing at Maple Street Book Shop a few years back on the first weekend of Carnival and got a decent turnout, but this is the Big Weekend.

Friday night is the regular Red Star Gallery spoken word event, but you might want to check their web site later today just to be sure. On Bayou Road, doors open at nine with a cover.

Friday should also feature the regular No Love Lost poetry reading at the Love Lost Lounge starting at 5:30. Again, things may change because of Carnival but hey, it’s Jazz Happy Hour in front and he plays a lot of Thelonious Monk, so why not go check it out either way?

Miss Maureen of Maple Street will be doing her regular Saturday kid lit gig at 10:00 A.M. at the Healing Center location and at 11:00 A.M. at Fight the Stupids Central on Maple Street. I don’t normal do kids lit but its a slow week and you may have small children and not know about this regular Saturday morning event. If so, check the details here.

Update: Nope, there’s no meeting of the Haiku Society this week. I’m trying to find out if the New Orleans Haiku Society will be having their regular meeting on Lundi Gras and will update this listing if I found out they’re not. (The Latter Memorial Library is right on the parade route so my guess is probably not). If they’ve rescheduled, look for it here at the home of Odd Words.

I suspect that the Writer’s Block will go ahead Monday night at 9 p.m. on the amphitheater steps across from Jackson Square. If you show up and no one else does, don’t be afraid to declaim to the passing tourists, but watching for flying beads.

Octavia Books will get right back into the game next Thursday with a presentation and book signing with CNN weather anchor Bonnie Schneider featuring her new book, EXTREME WEATHER: A Guide to Surviving Flash Floods, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Snowstorms, Tsunamis and Other Natural Disasters. Which reminds me its time to start eating through my hurricane survival box or at least make sure the sort of dehydrated stuff in there doesn’t expire for a few years. (Yum).

Garden District Books is only a few blocks from the parade route and lying low until March, when they will really kick the chocks out so look for a lot of listings starting in a week or so.

Next Thursday 17 Poets hosts a triple header featuring JOHN SINCLAIR, PIERRE JORIS and NICOLE PEYRAFITTE at the Goldmine on Thursday, Feb 23, 7:30pm). Sinclair is always great to see but I caught Nicole Peyrafitt at the Goldmine last year and her performance poetry is not to be missed.

That’s it. I’m off to the darkest recesses of the Earl K. Long Library where the books on medieval drama and literature are kept. I probably should pop a Claritan before I venture into all that dust and spider web. I will keep this quote in mind to sooth and encourage me.

I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.
THE LIBRARY OF BABEL
Jorge Luis Borges

The Octo-poca-lips February 4, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, NOLA, The Odd, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Krewe du Vieux, Octo-poca-lips, Seeds of Decline
3 comments

Mankind has paid for its Crimes Against Nature (leaving us at least the fun ones).

The Octopocalypse is upon us as the ancient calendar foretold.

We shall be among the survivors

It is eat or be eaten (or both which is particular fun).

Come with food or fuel or take your chances in the Go Down Under Dome for our perverse entertainment.

We are the Seeds of Decline which shall sprout in the wasteland, watered by the Holy Distillates

Float Eight. Don’t be late.

Octo-Hey-poca-wey.

6 6 6 9

And so it goes. January 30, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in NOLA, The Narrative, Toulouse Street.
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There are a million stories in the crooked city and this is one of them.

While I was out working on our Krewe du Vieux float someone jimmied a window on the back side and broke into my apartment. Waiting with the initial police responding for the Crime Scene unit, I found out they wouldn’t be coming because they had been called out to a homicide uptown.

And so it goes.

Odd Words January 26, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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&Lacking any clever lead in this week: 17 Poets! returns in Feburary, and here is the lineup for the spring:

February 9: Bill Lavender signs and reads from his new book Memory Wing (Black Widow Press, 2011)
February 16th: Musical and Performance tribute for flautist and New Orleans music historian Eluard Burt celebrating his life and continued legacy with performances and readings by Kichea Burt, Lee Grue, Dave Brinks, Felice Guimont, Eric Burt, and more.
February 23: John Sinclair performs with his Blues Scholars, Performance by Albany poets Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte
March 1: Poet Rodger Kamenetz
March 8: Poets Arturo Pfister and Valentine Pierce
March 15th: NYC Poet Bill Zavatsky and Poet Dr. Jerry Ward, Jr.
March 22: TBA
March 29: Fiction Writer Moira Crone reads and signs her new book from UNO Press, The Not Yet
April 5: Jazz Beat poet Ruth Weiss
April 12: Bruce Andrews
April 19th: Baton Rouge Poet Chris Shipman reads and signs his new book
April 26: Maxine Cassin Tribute

& On Thursday, Jan. 26 Octavia Books will host Ellen Weiss – ROBERT R. TAYLOR AND TUSKEGEE: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington. Architectural Historian Weiss interweaves the life of the first academically trained African American architect with his life’s work—the campus of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.

& SIFT—which stands for “Sequence, Image, Form, Text—–is an organization rooted in the intersection of book arts and fine arts, of image and text. Book arts have traditionally been marginalized in both the publishing and art worlds. . SIFT’s inaugural event, “Bound in Japan,” will take place at the Antenna Gallery on January 26 from 6 – 8 p.m. Part of the Antenna Gallery’s Happy Hour Salon series, “Bound in Japan” is a presentation by artist Thien-Kieu Lam, a Louisiana native who lived in Japan for many years.

& Friday nights the No Love Lost Poetry Reading continues at the Love Lost Lounge, starting at 5:30 p.m. during the bar’s jazz happy hour hosted by Joseph Bienvenue.

& Also on Friday the Red Star Gallery hosts its weekly spoken word event. Doors at 9, admission $5 with a college ID, $7 without.

& Sunday, Jan. 30 is an open mike at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series, in the back patio (weather permitting) at 3ish.

& On Monday, Jan 30. Octavia features Nevada Barr and the fifth book in her series on park ranger Anna Pigeon, THE ROPE. Pigeon has crossed America facing down the vicious predators, animal and human, that haunt the country’s wild places in what sounds from the announcement rather like Tony Hillerman, one of the few mystery writers I have gotten around to reading. (So many books, so little time).

& Also on Monday The Writer’s Block meets on the steps of the amphitheater across from Jackson Square open to all writers and performers in any art. Once I get my Chaucerian pronunciation down, I’ll be there juggle chain saws and reciting. OK, maybe not juggling. Maybe I could manage to stand on one foot. For a while.

& On Tuesday, Jan. 30 River Writers presents poets DAVE BRINKS and MEGAN BURNS of 17 Poets! at 8pm on Tuesday January 31st at Boudreaux and Thibodeaux’s downtown Baton Rouge. Poetry, children, it’s just an hour away, it’s just an hour away…

& On Wednesday, Feb. 1 Octavia books presents New York Times bestseller Joshilyn Jackson’s and her new novel A GROWN-UP KIND OF PRETTY, a generational women’s saga.

Garden District Books and Maple Street books don’t kick off their featured author spring season for a few weeks yet.

Odd Words January 12, 2012

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

Long time readers of my blogs e know I am fond of long sentences. Hemingway led one generation of writers toward the telegraphic imperative, John Carver another. I was schooled as a journalist in which the desire for a broad audience required we write in the religiously strict structure of inverted triangle and the eighth grade sentence. Somewhere along the way I became an apostate, succumbing to the Comma Heresy, preferring something approximating the rhythms of speech and not just any speech but the breathless accumulation of detail of a good story teller well into the whiskey, his porch audience rapt and respectfully silent as detail is piled upon detail, characters drawn and narratives slowly woven. This can all be done in simple, declarative sentences but you lose the sense of the speaker and the setting, the comfortable chair that puts the teller at the center of the room as if lit by an Old Master surrounded by an audience leaning in attentively, the sense that breaths the only real stops, the only other punctuation a pause for another drink.

So of course I’m going to have to post up a link to the Los Angeles Times article The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence:

“…many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or.

Pico Iyer does not mention Faulker, who mixed of the laconic waterfall of Southern oral storytelling with steam of consciousness but my beloved Thomas Pynchon is mentioned along with Phillip Roth. Writing in a long sentence form differs from popular styles of writing (if i might repeat myself) as Old Masters differ from Modern Art, say, Mondrian. The long sentence layers the paint on thickly, with the disregard for convention in the service of the image of a dozen men around a table, each one’s expression and detail of costume, the use of light and shadow not seen again until film moved out of the daylight and into the sound stage. Such sentences are cinematic, not in the dry geometry of Robbe-Grillet (through whom we have all suffered at one point because someone said it was Important) or in the quick cut jitter of MTV that foreshadows Twitter but rather in the manner of the Sergio Leone’s lengthy shots of Clint Eastwood in the street, closwing in from the establishing shot that places us in the iconic weathered western street to the closer clues of posture that establish the Man with no Name’s essential character, the slouch as tense as the runner at the blocks, the gun on his hip jutting out just a bit, the flexing of his hand until we close in on a shoulder shot, every drop of sweat an establishing shot of the desert, Eastwood’s shark eyes over the slow baseball chaw of a Wee Williams No. 2, all in contrast to his fidgety, squinting opponent whose every bead of sweat speaks not of the desert but of the desperation of a cornered criminal. Oddly enough, if you go to Wikipedia to make sure you remember shot, scene and sequence in the proper order you read this:

A frame is a single still image. It is analogous to a letter.

A shot is a single continuous recording made by a camera. It is analogous to a word.

A scene is a series of related shots. It is analogous to a sentence. The study of transitions between scenes is described in film punctuation.

A sequence is a series of scenes which together tell a major part of an entire story, such as that contained in a complete movie. It is analogous to a paragraph.

But I go on. Read the article. Here are the listings.

& The week opens at Garden District Books this Friday the 13th (!) when Kresley Cole arrives to discuss and sign her new book book, Lothaire. Paul Marron, the LOTHAIRE cover model, will be accompanying Kresley to all events. I’m not sure if Fabio ever went on tour with the mostly anonymous authors of romance novels, but as a former publicist I can’t fault the idea of bringing along your hunky cover boy given the young, female demographic of vampire fiction.

& On Sunday the Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series features Poet Ron Primack reads from his work followed by an open mic.

& Monday the 16th brings John Barry of Rising Tide fame to Octavia books at 6 p.m. with his latest ROGER WILLIAMS AND THE CREATION OF THE AMERICAN SOUL: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, “A revelatory look at how Roger Williams shaped the nature of religion, political power, and individual rights in America.” I know if you live in New Orleans you have probably read Rising Tide. When you finish this new book (as you should) you really ought to go back to The Great Influenza, which is at once a fantastic detective story, a narrative of the foibles of human nature confronted with the unknown, and a real life tale of the near fascistic home front of World War I as chilling as Orwell. If you have read both (but in my opinion specifically Influenza), this is an author who is going to deliver history and philosophy with style and poise and compelling narrative.

There I go again. For extra points, please diagram that last sentence.

& Every Monday, you can join the hardy souls who gather on the steps com amphitheater across from Jackson Square for The Writer’s Block, an open reading and performance gathering with no microphone, no list, with long pauses of whispered conversations and occasional banter between each reader as the audience of performers waits for the next speaker to climb down and speak his piece. It is a different experience from any other reading you will find in town.

& Tuesday bring us Susan Larson’s The Reading Life at 6:30 pm on WWNO-FM, which some of us anticipate as we do Garrison Keillor’s morning antidote to too much coffee The Writer’s Almanac. We haven’t quite worked out getting her guests into this column on Thursdays so you may want to follow Susan on Facebook so you know who is coming, not that you should need a particular reason to listen.

& Tuesday night at 7 p.m. also opens the student-sponsored 1718 Reading Series at the Columns Hotel with poet Kristen Sanders recently completed an MFA at LSU. Her work has appeared in Octopus Magazine and the forthcoming in New York Quarterly.

& On Wednesday the 16th at 6 p.m. Octavia will host lease join us for an exciting evening with bestselling author John Green presenting his new novel, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. John will be accompanied by his well-known brother, Hank Green, and together they will give an interactive presentation including words and music followed by a book signing. The who affair takes place at Temple Sinai and advance tickets, which include a copy of the book, are required.

Sins of Omission December 28, 2011

Posted by Mark Folse in A Fiction, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, Toulouse Street, Writing.
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“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years! And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce.”
– From The Priest’s Monologue in the film Synecdoche, N.Y.

One word at a time. That is how it is done, how it is figured out, the million little strings. Words become sentences, sentences paragraphs. From the building blocks come a narrative, a character– call him The Typist–who is and is not the author, a composite of who I am, who I dream of becoming, who I might have been only if. If I come to understand him as every writer must to successfully create character, then I come closer to understanding myself.

Life is more complicated than you think. For example, what do I publish here, and what do I omit. I know what the divorce lawyer would say. I take into consideration whether my children read it (they say they do not), and who else might read it looking with a rigidly literal mind. Life is an adversarial competition. Everything is negotiation at best, furtive plotting at worst. If you think there is no one plotting against you then you must lead a very sheltered life. It is not what first comes to the readers mind when I say paranoia. It is something greater, a confluence of negative forces real and imagined you must understand and decode.

“…paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination — not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, perhaps a route In for those… who are held at the edge….”
– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

The Typist understands this corollary to the priest’s speech, must navigate the treacherous relations that constitute his life. A job lost and potential employers Googling, divorce and all that entails. I have of late imposed limits on what I write here, but increasingly I realize how counterproductive that is. What I write here is not an unraveling like divorce but the assembly of a quilt from bits of the real, the imagined and the desired. These highly personal pieces are not a solid thing but a phase transition, the evaporation by fire of who I was, the condensation of distillation, the transformation of one thing into another.

It is a story I am compelled to tell and not just scribble into a journal. I am not alone. Consider Sarah Fran Wisby.

A word. A sentence. A paragraph. If only it were as simple as I laid it out in the thesis above. It is the arrangement, the omission or inclusion, which makes it an act of personal transformation and ideally a transformative art. There are artful omissions, and cowardly if not paranoid sins omissions. I sat down to write something about this morning, about my son, about the realignment of our lives, but wrote this instead. By the time I reached that last sentence I began to wonder if this was a conscious omission, or a simple avoidance of action and consequences. I understand there are consequences: the poem by Wallace Stevens post about this time last year that resulted in a ranting phone call and which morphed into a peculiar present. I am too far down this road to allow for either, have said too much already, made what I write here to central to becoming.

A friend stopped public writing all together during his divorce. My lawyer would no doubt advise the same if I asked. I cannot. These words, this assembly of pieces, is too much a part of myself: past, present and future. To hold back is to omit a critical part of the formula, to fail to produce the desired result in the alembic, another failed attempt at the Philosopher’s Stone with only myself to blame.

If I stop now, I have risked everything and will gain nothing.

« older posts

Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

Assaying the State of the Essay March 24, 2013

Exotic Romancing March 24, 2013

The Geography of Pleasure March 23, 2013

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

Odd Words February 7, 2013

Odd Words Update January 13, 2013

Odd Words January 10, 2013

Odd Words December 27, 2012

The Not-So-Black Death November 2, 2012

Yakumo Fee Nah Ney October 21, 2012

Odd Words October 18, 2012

Waiting for Godot on the Road Home October 17, 2012

Happy Birthday Everette Maddox October 9, 2012

Odd Words September 27, 2012

The Glory That Was Home September 23, 2012

Malfaubourlgia September 22, 2012

Countdown to Treme Season Three September 21, 2012

Odd Words September 13, 2012

Monsoon Afternoon September 2, 2012

Remember August 29, 2012

Odd Words June 22, 2012

Odd Words — Mea Maxima Culpa June 17, 2012

Not To Do List June 2, 2012

Odd Words May 17, 2012

Odd Words: Drips and Drabs Edition April 3, 2012

Missing Ditches April 3, 2012

Ashley Morris: 1963-2008 April 2, 2012

Ghost Hotel March 20, 2012

Songs of Freedom March 17, 2012

A Beige Day March 10, 2012

Odd Words March 2, 2012

Back to the Future February 25, 2012

Odd Words February 23, 2012

Krewe of Aeolus February 18, 2012

Odd Words February 17, 2012

The Octo-poca-lips February 4, 2012

And so it goes. January 30, 2012

Odd Words January 26, 2012

Odd Words January 12, 2012

Sins of Omission December 28, 2011

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