Odd Words | Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

Odd Words May 16, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words May 9, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words May 2, 2013

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

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

& so onto the other listings…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words April 25, 2013

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

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

Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words April 11, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ἀπορɛία April 6, 2013

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

Originally posted at Alternative Roundezvouz Tango.

Odd Words April 4, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Not To Read April 2, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Mark Folse

Doleful Mysteries March 30, 2013

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

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

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

Odd Words March 28, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assaying the State of the Essay March 24, 2013

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

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

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

Exotic Romancing March 24, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Geography of Pleasure March 23, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words March 7, 2013

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

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

& so to the listings…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words February 28, 2013

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

& so to the listings…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words February 21, 2013

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

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

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

Andrei Codrescu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words February 14, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words February 7, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd Words January 23, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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Here are the literary listings for New Olreans for Jan. 24-30, brought to you weekly on Thursdays by Odd Words on ToulouseStreet.net.

& Thursday, Jan. 25 at 6 p.m. Octavia Books features a presentation and booksigning with New Orleans-based journalist Keith O’Brien featuring his new book, OUTSIDE SHOT: Big Dreams, Hard Times, and One County’s Quest for Basketball Greatness. ““If you have ever wanted a look into the broken but still beating heart of high school sports, into a world where a young man’s future—and a town’s slipping pride–can hang on an in-bounds pass or one more foul, then Keith O’Brien has a book for you.” —Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of All Over But the Shoutin’.”

& Also on Thursday Garden District Book Shop features Prytania Movie Theater owner, Rene Brunet, and Historian Jack Stewart at ther Uptown location for a discussion and signing of their book There’s One in Your Neighborhood: The Lost Movie Theaters of New Orleans, Thursday, January 24th, at 6 pm. There’s One In Your Neighborhood is an encyclopedic, photo-filled coffee-table book chronicling the history of the city’s neighborhood theaters. Organized by neighborhood — with another section devoted to drive-ins — it includes histories and photographs of more than 100 local theaters collected over the years by Brunet, as well as contributions from local movie experts including Rose Kern, Michael Hurley and A.J. Roquevert. In the process, it offers a fascinatingly detailed snapshot of a bygone era.

& On Saturday, Jan. 26 Octavia Books hosts a children’s book event featuring Favorite local children’t picture book author Cornell Landry (GOODNIGHT NOLA) is returning to Octavia Books just in time to put you in that Mardi Gras spirit with a story time reading and signing of his shinny new book, THE AMAZING ADVENTURE OF MARDI GRAS BEAD DOG, the irresistible tale of a boy, his bead dog, and what ensues.

& Also on Saturday, Storytime with Miss Maureen at Maple Street Books Uptown location features The Other Side of Town by Jon Agee at 11:30 a.m.

¿ I wonder where bead dogs come from? We didn’t make them when I was a kid, and it was one of the first skills my son picked up after moving to New Orleans.

₪ Saturday, Jan. 26 also marks the day 21 years ago I learned you do not tell the cab company your wife is in labor if you expect them to show up. Happy Birthday Ms. Killian Folse (and yes, sweetie, I did scads of research to establish that the patronym Killian is frequently given as a girl’s name in the U.S., if not in Ireland. And patronyms as given names are a well established tradition in the South). Sometimes I still miss reading Good Night, Moon.

& 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.

¿ On Tuesday, Jan. 29 at 6 p.m. Garden District Book Shop will host Jen Lancaster and her second novel Here I Go Again. The second novel from the “New York Times”-bestselling author of “If You Were Here” takes readers back to the hair metal 80′s. Bring some ‘tude, an awesome concert t-shirt you can never part with and your BIC lighter.

& On Tuesday, Jan. 29 the Lunch ‘n’ Lit group will be meeting at the Keller Library Community Center Loft at 12 pm (every fourth Tuesday. Participants should bring their lunch. For their January meeting, they’ll be reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West, which details the parallel discrimination patterns of Jim Crow Laws and those levied against convicted criminals today. And don’t forget, whatever book club you’re in, book club books are always 10% off at Maple Street Book Shop.

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

& A week from today on Thursday, Jan 31. Octavia Books hosts a presentation and book signing by Ed Branley celebrating his new book, LEGENDARY LOCALS OF NEW ORLEANS.

Odd Words January 17, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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& The creative writing programs of New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and Lusher Charter School are honored to present distinguished essayist, novelist, and acclaimed film critic Phillip Lopate as part of the 2013 New Orleans New Writers Literary Festival Thursday, Jan. 17 at 7 p.m. in the Reily Recital Hall at NOCCA, 2800 Chartres Street. Reception to follow. Free and open to the public. Lopate has served as visiting writer for both programs. He considered one of the foremost American essayists and a central figure in the recent revival of interest in memoir writing and is best known for his supple and surprising essays. Lopate is the author of three essay collections, Bachelorhood (Little, Brown & Co., 1981); Against Joie de Vivre(Simon & Schuster, 1989); and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996). A new collection, Portrait Inside My Head, is forthcoming in 2013 (Simon & Schuster). He has also published two novellas in the book entitled Two Marriages (Other Press, 2008); two novels, Confessions of Summer(Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); three poetry collections, At the End of the Day: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2009), The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972), and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); and a memoir of his teaching experiences,Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975). An instructive book, To Show and Tell: the Craft of Literary Nonfiction will be published in 2013 (Simon & Schuster).

& The UNO Creative Writing Workshop and the UNO Fine Arts Department will host a poetry reading on Thursday, January 24, at 7 p.m. at the UNO Fine Arts Campus Gallery. Poet Megan Burns, whose most recent collection is out from Dancing Girl Press, will read from her “Dollbaby poems” and the “Poetic of Nicki Minaj.” Poet Kristin Sanders, whose poetry chapbook Orthorexia is also out from Dancing Girl Press, will read and sing her newest series, “I Learned To Be A Woman From A Nineties Country Song.” A wine and cheese reception and book signing will follow the reading.

& Also tonight Octavia Books hosts a presentation and booksigning with “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 recipes for the home cook from over 50 of the city’s most celebrated restaurants and showcasing 100 beautiful full-color photos.

& Saturday’s Story Time with Miss Maureen at Garden District Book Shop Uptown at 11:30 a.m. features Epossumondas Saves the Day by Coleen Salley.

& Saturday at 5 p.m. Garden District Book Shop’s Bayou St. John location hosts a reading and signing of with author Lauren Belski. Whatever Used to Grow Around Here is a collection of nine short stories that consider the experiences that resonate in the lives of American youth who strive to live meaningfully during times threatening to negate and dissolve.

& Friday evening Brett Evans, Christopher Shipman, Chris Brunt, & Michael Yusko read at the Art Salon on Magazine Friday evening at 6:45.

& Faubourg Marigny Art & Books will be hosting Krewe du Vieux signings Saturday from 1 p.m to 11 p.m. featuring John Swenson’s New Atlantis , Michael Patrick Welch’s Y’all’s Problem and New Orleans: Underground Guide.

& On Sunday, Jan. 17 You are invited to An Afternoon Tea at 1 p.m. at Garden District Books with Romance Authors: Julia Quinn, Eloisa James, and Connie Brockway discussing and signing their book The Lady Most Willing: A Novel in Three Parts co-authored by the trio.

& Maple Street’s Bayou St. John location will be host a discussion and signing with Juliet Linderman, editor of Refugee Hotel, Sunday, Jan. 13 at 5 p.m. Refugee Hotel is a groundbreaking collection of photography and oral histories that documents the experiences of refugees in the United States. Linderman is the River Parishes reporter for The Times-Picayune and NOLA.com. Formerly the editor of a small community newspaper in Brooklyn, she has written for many publications including The New York Times and Village Voice.

& Sunday at 5 p.m. at Cafe Istanbul in the Healing Center Michael Tod Edgerton returns to New Orleans to read from his just-released book of poetry, VITREOUS HIDE (Lavender Ink 2013), and from his current, participatory writing and art project, WHAT MOST VIVIDLY, which will be accompanied by a dance performance from special guest Claudia Copeland. As it’s Tod’s birthday, it’ll be a bit of a birthday bash as well, so come celebrate with us at Cafe Istanbul (http://cafeistanbulnola.com/) in the Healing Center!

& This Monday, Jan. 14 is the monthly meeting of the New Orleans Haiku Society at the Milton Latter Memorial Library at 6 p.m.

& On Tuesday, Jan. 22 Kim Marie Vaz presents and signs her new book, THE “BABY DOLLS”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition at Octavia Books at 6 p.m. One of the first women’s organizations to mask and perform during Mardi Gras, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls redefined the New Orleans carnival tradition.

&Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Garden District Book Shop NOLA Food Goddess Lorin Gaudin with photographer, Romney Caruso discuss and sign their book, New Orleans Chef’s Table: Extraordinary Recipes from the French Quarter to the Garden District. Join Lorin and Romney with a number of local chefs who prepare and serve their tasty treats.

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

Mark Notes January 14, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
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After a quick read of the Spark Notes to refresh my memory (noting, kiddies, the editorial errors I think they leave in these on purpose) and an hours-long, wide-ranging conversations on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to help my son hammer out his paper for AP English, I have arrived at the following summary.

Section I: What is this shit?

Section II: This shit is fucked. This Kurtz guy is crazy.

Section III: This shit is fucked beyond the ability of your bourgeois, home office-minds to comprehend. All you people are crazy.

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.”

& 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 Update January 5, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, Fortin Street, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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~~Two~~ Three stellar events didn’t make it into this week’s column, mostly the fault of your host’s death struggle with a mutant uber-rhino virus for over a week now.

& Saturday its Poetry Buffet at the Latter Memorial Library, hosted by Gina Ferrara, at 2 p.m. Featured this months are poets Dave Brinks, Carolyn Hembree and Brad Richard. All three have new books for sale which I’m sure you can pick up a copy of here. I have not read Richard’s, the subject of the review mentioned above, but I can personally vouch for Hembree’s and Brink’s. And if you haven’t seen Hembree performing from her work Skinny don’t miss this opportunity.

& The Black Widow Salon kicks off its second year on Monday, Jan. 7th from 7-9 p.m. with Pandora Gastelum and Ratty Scurvics reading and discussing fairy tales, puppetry, performance, and more. Upstairs at Crescent City Books, 230 Chartres St. Hosted by Michael Allen Zell No cost, complimentary wine/beer/water. Gastelum is the driving force behind The Black Forest Fancies and Mudlark Theatre. Scurvics is the catalyst for Black Market Butchers. Both appeared in the recent production of “Sweeney Todd” at the Allways Lounge Theater.

& On Wednesday, Jan. 9 at 7 p.m. Multi-media artist jenna mae will host Secrets for Lucky 13 at her home/salon space, 1501 St. Roch Avenue, featuring readings by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Jenna Mae, Kristina K. Robinson and Michelle Embree. Ruffin} has published work in Apalachee Review, South Carolina Review, and Regarding Arts & Letters. His short story, “The Pie Man,” received the 2011 Ernest Svenson Award, a prize given by the University of New Orleans for excellence in fiction. Maurice will probably read in English. mae is a mixed media healing artist. She practices poems in both hand and heart genres. She dreams of publishing a full-length manuscript, and keeps a lucky arrowhead in her coin purse. Robinson is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of New Orleans where she is working on a collection of stories focused on race, class and the war on drugs and publishes the blog Life In High Times where she muses on race, all things Hip-Hop, love, and sexual politics. Embree is the author of Manstealing For Fat Girls, a young adult novel nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2006. She is an award winning playwright and sometimes even a pretty lovely person. She will be reading from her memoir in progress, By The Skin of These Words. jenna says bring your favorite cookies and byob.

Odd Words January 3, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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In March the New Orleans Institute for the Imagination returns for the first time since 2005. Founded over a decade ago by poets Dave Brinks and Andrei Codrescu, the March event will offer workshops by John Sinclair, Cyril Neville, Katarina Boudreaux, Kichea Burt, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, The Rev. Goat Carson, Roger Kamenetz, Felice Guimont, Louis Maistros, Valentine Pierce and Joseph Maikos.

Room 220 continues its series of reviews and interviews with Brad Richard’s Butcher’s Sugar. You can catch the review here.

& so to the listings…

& 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. 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 Tuesday, Jan. 8 The 1718 Society, a student-run literary organization of Tulane, Loyola, and UNO students, continues their reading series with poet Metta Sama reading. 1718 meets the first Tuesday of every month at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue at 7 p.m. Open to the public, 1718’s reading series provides an opportunity to experience writers (primarily local poets, but also fiction writers both local and national), while giving students a forum to present their own work to their peers and the community.

&Also on Tuesday the Maple Leaf Book Shop’s First Tuesday Book Club will be meeting January 8th at 5:45pm at the Uptown location to discuss A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness.

& Wednesday, Jan. 9 at 8 p.m. Don Paul’s Poetry Ball at Cafe Istanbul featuring singer/songwriter Nasimiyu, poet Dave Brinks accompanied by saxophonist Earle Brown, poet Carolyn Hembree and poet Niyi Osundare. Open Mic to follow features!

& Also on Wednesday at 7 p.m. Multi-media artist jenna mae will host Secrets for Lucky 13 at her home/salon space, 1501 St. Roch Avenue, featuring readings by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Jenna Mae, Kristina K. Robinson and Michelle Embree. Ruffin} has published work in Apalachee Review, South Carolina Review, and Regarding Arts & Letters. His short story, “The Pie Man,” received the 2011 Ernest Svenson Award, a prize given by the University of New Orleans for excellence in fiction. Maurice will probably read in English. mae is a mixed media healing artist. She practices poems in both hand and heart genres. She dreams of publishing a full-length manuscript, and keeps a lucky arrowhead in her coin purse. Robinson is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of New Orleans where she is working on a collection of stories focused on race, class and the war on drugs and publishes the blog Life In High Times where she muses on race, all things Hip-Hop, love, and sexual politics. Embree is the author of Manstealing For Fat Girls, a young adult novel nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2006. She is an award winning playwright and sometimes even a pretty lovely person. She will be reading from her memoir in progress, By The Skin of These Words. jenna says bring your favorite cookies and byob.

Matthew 25:40 December 25, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: A Junky's Xmas, Christmas, William Burroughs
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Our text today is Matthew 25:40 “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The Haiku Lesson December 18, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
Tags: haiku, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Wordsworth
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Haiku Lesson No. 1: Daffodils

Cloud-lonely journey.
A sudden daffodil host
banishes all gloom.

Haiku Lesson No. 2: The Waste Land

Tomb-builders erect
concrete monuments. We are
all hollow with death.

Haiku Lesson No. 3: Anecdote of the Jar

In Tennessee I
placed a jar upon a hill,
subduing mountains.

Odd Words December 13, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, Fortin Street, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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Odd Words is on the road this week so this will be brief. I do hope to slip away from Moloch’s clutches long enough to visit the jazz jam session at HR-57 in D.C., where last time poets were welcome to come up along with musicians. But for now, its Breakfast with the Executives and something called a “deep dive” in which we all sit around a table intently hiding last night’s hangovers while “drilling down” into the topic at hand.

& Tonight is the final installment of the fall series at 17 Poets! featuring Laura Semilian and Julian Semilian. All the details are on the 17 Poets! web site and all I can add is that I’m damned sad I’m going to miss their annual visit.

& Tonight Octavia Books hosts a reading and booksigning with New Orleans writer and poet Malinda Palacio celebrating her just released book of poetry, HOW FIRE IS A STORY, WAITING. Palacio’s newest poetry collection 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 deathThursday, Dec. 13 at 6 p.m.

& New Orleans author Moira Crone will present a reading of her new novel, The Not Yet, which takes place in the near future, in a post-apocalyptic Mississippi Delta in which resources are slim, society is radically stratified, the elites are hellbent on living forever, and one young hero is left to piece together a life in a world that likely resembles our own future. AT PRESS STREET, 3718 ST. CLAUDE Avenue, ‎7 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 13. There is an interview with Crone on the Room 220 web site.

& Also this evening, Emily Ford presents The Jews of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta at Garden District Books. The early days of Louisiana settlement brought with them a clandestine group of Jewish pioneers. Isaac Monsanto and other traders spited the rarely enforced Code Noir banning their occupancy, but it wasn’t until the Louisiana Purchase that larger numbers colonized the area. Immigrants like the Sartorius brothers and Samuel Zemurray made their way from Central and Eastern Europe to settle the bayou country along the Mississippi. They made their homes in and around New Orleans and the Mississippi River delta, establishing congregations like that of Tememe Derech and B’Nai Israel, with the mighty river serving as a mode of transportation and communication, connecting the communities on both sides of the riverbank. Dec. 13 at 5:30 p.m.

&Friday at the Martin Luther King Branch of the New Orleans Public Library there will be a poetry workshop for adults funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it received from Poets & Writers, Inc. New Orleans. For more information call the Martin Luther King Branch 596-2695. From 3-5 p.m. Dec. 14.

& Friday Maple Street Books Bayou St. John continues its The Diane Tapes reading series, featuring: Christopher Lirette, from Chauvin, Louisiana, lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work appears in The Southern Review, Hayden’s Ferry, PANK, and other places; Mel Coyle is from Chicago and other places where the corn grows. She co-edits the poetry journal TENDE RLOIN; and, Metta Sama, author of Nocturne Trio and South of Here. Dec 14 at 6 p.m.

& Saturday is Story Time with Miss Maureen, this week featuring Shall I Knit You a Hat: A Christmas Yarn by Kate Klise, Illustrated by M. Sarah Klise. Kids will make paper snowflakes and eat carrot cake, like rabbits do when it’s winter. Dec. 15 at 11 a.m.

& Saturday New Orleans artist Phil Sandusky comes to Octavia Books to sign NEW ORLEANS IMPRESSIONIST CITYSCAPES: The Alure of the Image. More than 130 plein air paintings created between late 2006 and early 2012 portray the many angles of New Orleans, from intimate scenes to magnificent vistas. Dec. 15. at 2 p.m.

& The New Orleans Haiku Society’s monthly meeting is Monday at 6 p.m. at the Milton Latter Memorial Library. 5-7-5ers welcome.

& Wednesday poets Allan Peterson and Ben Kopel will appear at Maple Street’s Uptown location at 6 p.m. Peterson’s fourth book, Fragile Acts, is the second title in the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. His prior books are: As Much As (Salmon Press, 2011); All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize, Univ. of Massachusetts), Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Prize 2001) and six chapbooks, notably Omnivore, winner of the 2009 Boom Prize from Bateau Press. Local poet Kopel, author of poetry collection, Victory, will be joining Peterson.

I’m in such a hurry I’m afraid I must have missed something, but I’ll get it updated this afternoon.

Odd Words December 6, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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This week’s standout event is Next Wednesday: The Hard Times Blues Tour 2012 comes at Fairgrinds (next to Maple Street Book Shop’s Bayou St. John location) with Elwin Cotman, Ben Passmore, & Luka Miro presenting their comics, fiction, poetry, and music, and to hear debut readings from their newest works. Poet Ben Kopel will also be reading. Cotman is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010) (the updated third edition of which will be on hand), and of the upcoming collection Hard Times Blues. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP is a collection of fabulist stories, many based out of American folklore. Cotman is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010) (the updated third edition of which will be on hand), and of the upcoming collection Hard Times Blues. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP is a collection of fabulist stories, many based out of American folklore Miro will be sharing poetry from their most recent collection, Cane Break. Kopel, poet, is the author of Victory (H_NGM_N press). He currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he teaches creative writing and English literature to high school students. He also curates the Diane Tapes Reading Series at Maple Street Book Shop in the Bayou St. John neighborhood. Wednesday, Dec. 12 at 8 p.m.

& Tonight don’t miss a reading and signing by the United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey at the New Orleans Main Library at 7 p.m. A Gulf Coast Native, Trethewey is a Pulitizer Prize winner, and the 19th Poet Laureate. She is the author of Thrall, Native Guard, Bellcqc’s Ophelia, Domestic Work and Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Thursday, Dec. 6 at 7 p.m.

& This evening Octavia Books presents Photographer David G. Spielman’s WHEN NOT PERFORMING: New Orleans Musicians, revealing portraits of New Orleans’ performers which provides a provocative and intimate glimpse into the musical pulse of the city. Spielman followed these talented artists through neighborhoods, backstreets, and bars, using little more than a Leica camera. Printed as duotones, the emotional images speak without shouting. These revealing portraits of New Orleans’ performers provide a provocative and intimate glimpse into the musical pulse of the city.Thursday, Dec. 6 at 6 p.m.

& Also on Thursday Maple Street Book Shop hosts Tom Varisco, Will Crocker, Jackson Hill, and John Biguenet will be signing Jackson Squared, at their Uptown location. Tom’s book documents the French Quarter’s Jackson Square, the heart of the quarter, with funny, surprising and sometimes shocking pictures by Tom and photographers Will Crocker and Jackson Hill and essays by John Biguenet, John Carr, Nicole Biguenet Pedersen and Susan Sarver. Even the statue of Old Hickory weighs in with some colorful art criticism and an ode to the Who Dat nation. The book is an irreverent celebration of one of America’s most famous destinations. Thursday, December 6th at 6PM.

& This Thursday 17 Poets! present Michael Allen Zell and Jenn Marie Nunes. Zell will be reading and signing his new book Errata from
Lavender Ink. He was a finalist for the 2011 Calvino Prize, finalist for the 2010 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition, and was nominated for the 2012 Best American Short Stories. Nunes is a poet and writer living whose echapbook, STRIP, is available online through [PANK] Magazine, July 2011. She is co-founding editor of TENDE RLOIN, an online gallery for poetry. Thursday, Dec. 6 at 8 p.m. Sign up for open mic to follow beings at 7:30 p.m.

& On Friday Octavia Books features a presentation and signing of Mary Mann Hamilton’s TRIALS OF THE EARTH featuring Kerry Hamilton and Sheilah Hamilton Pantin, heirs of Mary Mann Hamilton, who have made her celebrated autobiography available in a 20th anniversary edition with a new introduction by Morgan Freeman after being out of print for many years. From a manuscript that surfaced intact more than 50 years after it was composed, we gain illuminating insight into a pioneering world previously unknown. Mary Hamilton writes of searing hardships, wild joys and the unthinkable work it took to survive in her day in the wilderness of the primitive Mississippi Delta. Friday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m.

& This Saturday’s Story Time with Miss Maureen at Maple Street Book Shop Uptown features Light the Lights! by Margaret Moorman. Kids will make paper snowflakes and drink hot chocolate. Saturday, Dec. 8 at 11:30 a.m.

& After Story Time, Maple Street features Cornell Landry signing his latest children’s book, The Amazing Adventure of Mardi Gras Bead Dog, at our Uptown location Saturday, December 8th, 1 p.m.

& Saturday Octavia Books hosts award-winning children’s picture book author and musician Johnette Downing presents and signs her wonderful new book, WHY THE POSSUM HAS A LARGE GRIN. An adaptation of a traditional Choctaw tale told in the rhythmic verse reminiscent of the classic Br’er Rabbit tales. Saturday, Dec. 8 at 2 p.m.

& The December meeting of the The Dickens Fellowship of New Orleans will feature a group read-a-loud of A Christmas Carol at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 8. at Metairie Park Country Day School’s Bright Library.

& There will be no reading at the Maple Leaf Poetry Series due to the late Saint’s game, as there will be no place to read in case of inclement weather.

& Tuesday Octavia Books hosts Ken Foster, author of THE DOGS WHO FOUND ME, returns to Octavia Books to give a reading and sign his new book, I’M A GOOD DOG: : Pit Bulls, America’s Most Beautiful (and Misunderstood) Pet. Filled with inspiring stories and photographs, this heartfelt tribute to the pit bull celebrates one of America’s most popular yet misunderstood dogs. Tuesday, Dec. 11 at 6 p.m.

& On Wednesday The Hard Times Blues Tour 2012 comes to Fairgrinds (next to Maple Street Book Shop’s Bayou St. John location) for Elwin Cotman, Ben Passmore, & Luka Miro presenting their comics, fiction, poetry, and music, and to hear debut readings from their newest works. Poet Ben Kopel will also be reading. Cotman is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010) (the updated third edition of which will be on hand), and of the upcoming collection Hard Times Blues. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP is a collection of fabulist stories, many based out of American folklore. Cotman is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010) (the updated third edition of which will be on hand), and of the upcoming collection Hard Times Blues. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP is a collection of fabulist stories, many based out of American folklore Miro will be sharing poetry from their most recent collection, Cane Break. Kopel, poet, is the author of Victory (H_NGM_N press). He currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he teaches creative writing and English literature to high school students. He also curates the Diane Tapes Reading Series at Maple Street Book Shop in the Bayou St. John neighborhood. Wednesday, Dec. 12 at 8 p.m.

Death Will Tremble to Take Us December 5, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Charles Bukowski
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O-o-o-oh, Romeo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o… December 3, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, Odd Words, Theater, Toulouse Street.
Tags: New Orleans Museum of Art, NOMA, review, Romeo and Juliet, The NOLA Project, William Shakespeare
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If you were thinking of going to see the well acted and thoughtfully staged The NOLA Project production of Romeo and Juliet and NOMA: don’t. The acoustics and sight lines are horrible in the foyer of NOMA and render a great part of the dialogue, including the balcony scene, unintelligible to the audience on stage right. Only a handful of the actors–A.J. Allegro as Mercutio, Natalie Boyd as the Nurse, James Yeargain as Friar John and experienced Shakespeareans Martin Covert and Jim Wright as Montague and Capulet, managed to modulate their voices to minimize the echoes and so be intelligible and demonstrate their talent. Even the best of the actors sometimes were placed in the space so that one despairs of understanding them. Good use was made of the four entrances and stairway to generate an energetic tension in the scenes of conflict between the young men of the two families, but the scenes of Juliet on the staircase and balcony, while dramatically staged, placed her dead in the center of the echo chamber. Kristin Witterschein was a fresh and charming Juliet What can be seen from an obstructed view and what could be understood was well done, but I’m judging much of her performance from tone of voice and a few brief glimpses, as if I were watching a foreign film behind a tall man in a tall hat. I would love to see this company perform this in another place.

If you already have your tickets, be sure to arrive by 6:00 for the 7:30 curtain and run don’t walk to a seat in front stage left, where I think you would at least be able to understand the balcony scene and have unobstructed sight lines. Or else be sure to read the play before you come so you can at least play it in part in your own head. If you insist on going, buy an obstructed sight line ticket and save some money because there was no effort made to actually segregate the seating, and our full price tickets placed us squarely between two pillars and we arrived at 6:30.

Odd Words November 29, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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If I were pedaling any faster I’d leave contrails at elbows and feet. Somewhere in the gut where coffee is processed into output a mad Scotsman is screaming up at the brain that it can’t take much more of this. My email and instant message alert sound on the work laptop is a WWII electro-mechanical submarine klaxon and this is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill.

This will be an abbreviated and to the point Odd Words.

& Tonight, Nov. 29 at the Maple Street Bookstore Healing Center location on St. Claude Jon O’Dell will be signing his book, The Healing at 6:30 p.m.

& Also tonight at 6 p.m. at Maple Street’s flagship location Moira Crone will be reading from and discussing The Not Yet at our Uptown location, Thursday, November 29th at 6PM. She’ll be joined by Michael Allen Zell who will be reading from and signing his debut novel, Errata.

& Tonight at the Goldmine Saloon 17 Poets! features book signings and featured readings by poets CAROLYN HEMBREE and KRISTINA ROBINSON. 8 p.m., with sign-up for open mike to follow starting at 7:30 pm.

& Tonight at 9 p.m. the Allways Loungs hosts the Poetry Brothel. Come wearing your finest burlesque, Victorian, or steampunk ensemble and receive a token for a free reading. Your hosts will be the Maître d’, Francis Shadfly (Jordan Soyka), and Madam Scarlett O’Heresy (Kim Vodicka). Featured reading is Vincent Cellucci, editor of Lavender Ink’s FUCK https://wordpress.com/#!/settings/poems, music, burlesque, people on stilts and more.

& Friday, Nov. 30 and Saturday, Dec. 30 brings a Poetry Exchange Symposium organized by Andy Stallings and Zach Savich

Friday, Nov. 30

10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m: PXP Student Presentations (Tulane, Stone Auditorium, Woldenburg Art Center, Rm. 210)
1:15 p.m. – 4:45 p.m: Panel Conversations (Tulane, Norman Mayer Hall, Rm. 200B)
1:15-2:00: Publishing and Editing Contemporary Poetry — moderated by Zach Savich, featuring Nik De Dominic, Carolyn Hembree, Caryl Pagel, Dan Rosenberg, Mark Yakich
2:15-3:00: Community Building in Poetry — moderated by Brad Richard, featuring Megan Burns, Kelly Harris, Daniel Khalastchi, Kiki Petrosino
3:15-4:30: All-New Orleans Student Reading — featuring student poets from universities and high schools across the city
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m: Keynote Reading (Tulane, Robert C. Cudd Hall) — featuring Daniel Khalastchi, Blueberry Morningsnow, Kiki Petrosino, Michelle Taransky

Saturday, Dec. 1

12:00 p.m: Poetry Walk & Picnic — b.y.o. food and poetry (City Park, near intersection of Wisner Blvd. & Filmore Ave., at kiosk across from driving range)
3:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m: Hunter Deely Memorial Poetry Reading — (Mid-City, 623 N. Rendon St.) — featuring Megan Burns, Peter Cooley, Nik De Dominic, Melissa Dickey, Carolyn Hembree, Maggie Jackson, Paul Killebrew, Ben Kopel, Alicia Rebecca Myers, Caryl Pagel, Hilary Plum, Brad Richard, Dan Rosenberg, Mark Yakich, and Zach Savich
8:00 p.m: Closing Celebration — (Marigny/St. Claude, 2433 St. Claude Ave., at Music St.) — entrance on Music St., b.y.o.b.

& Saturday, Dec. 1 at 10 a.m. Octavia Books hosts a pajama party celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dr. Suess’s Sleep Book. Recommended ages 4-7.

& Maple Street Books will host Quattlebaum as the Book Buccaneer for Pirate vs. Pirate: The Terrific Tale of a Big, Blustery Maritime Match, followed by snacks and then another story: The Hungry Ghost of Rue Orleans Saturday at 11:30 a.m.

& Also on Saturday is the monthly Poetry Buffet at the Milton Latter Memorial Library hosted by Gina Ferrara. 2 p.m. Featuring Jarvis DeBerry, Gina Ferrara, and Lee Gru.

& Ken Foster brings his book on the misunderstood pit bull I’m A Good Dog to Garden District Books on Saturday at 3 p.m.

& Sunday, Dec. 2 brings Join the MelaNated Writers Collective for an afternoon of verse featuring the award-winning artist Thomas Sayers Ellis on Sunday, December 2 from 3 to 5 p.m. at Cafe Treme (1501 St. Philip St.)

& Also on Sunday Staple Goods Gallery, 1340 St. Roch Ave. will feature a reading with Micheal Zell, Niyi Osundare, Carroll Beauvais, Geoff Munsterman, Nasimiyu, and Maurice Ruffin at 2 p.m.

& Sunday afternoon also features a Chess Simultaneous Exhibition and Book Signing with International Chess Master Marc Esserman, author of Mayhem in the Morra! at the Maple Street Healing Center location. The booksigning is to follow exhibition play. Admission to the event is free. If you’d like to play in the simultaneous exhibition match, the price is $20.00 for adults and $10.00 for students

& This month’s Black Widow Salon at Crescent City Books features poet Dave Brinks Monday, Dec. 3. Brinks will discuss his new book “The Secret Brain,” as well as many other subjects. 7 p.m.

&Also on Monday at 5 p.m. Garden District Books features Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires, the story of a disgraced knight and a young girl orphaned by the Black Plague who unite to fight the demonic forces behind the dread disease.

& Also, 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.

& On Tuesday, Dec. 4 the Maple Street Book Shop First Tuesday Book Club will be meeting at 5:45pm at the Uptown location to discuss The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.

& Tuesday evening brings Benjamin Morris to the 1718 Society, a student-run literary organization of Tulane, Loyola, and UNO students, continues their reading series, meeting the first Tuesday of every month at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. Readings start at 7 p.m.. Open to the public, they provide an opportunity to experience writers (primarily local poets, but also fiction writers both local and national), while giving students a forum to present their own work to their peers and the community

&Kit Wohl’s New Orleans Classic Cocktails is featured Tuesday at 5 p.m. at Garden District Books. In this brilliantly photographed book, Kit Wohlhas compiled more than sixty luscious beverage recipes, both traditional and eccentric, from the city’s legendary and quirky establishments. Sadly, no samples are promised.

& Wednesday, Oct. 5 Octavia Books hosts a discussion and booksigning with historian Christopher R. Browning featuring his book, ORDINARY MEN, originally published in 1992. ORDINARY MEN is the story of a German reserve police unit made up of men neither committed Nazis responsible for the deaths of 83,000 Jews in Poland.

Wow, that’s a cheerful note to end on. Makes all those work deliverables, school papers and finals just vanish into the Black Nothingness hovering just a few feet away from my desk. Fortunately, I can make my way to the coffee blindfolded. Just remember that the light at the end of the tunnel may be a train, keep your towel handy and Don’t Panic.

Odd Words November 23, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, reading, Toulouse Street.
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It’s Black Friday and so far there are no reports of tramplings, stabbings or arrests at your local independent bookstores so if you are ready to start your Christmas shopping why not go somewhere safe? If you feel you must venture into Barnes & Noble today (but why, really?) just remember no one made you drive down Veterans Highway today. Have Fun Storming the Castle.

& On Saturday, Nov. 24 author Michael Tisserand signs My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop. In My Bookstore, you’ll read some of our greatest authors’ stories about the pleasure, guidance, and support that their favorite bookstores and booksellers have given them over the years.

Starting Saturday: To say Thanks for Shopping Indie Octavia Books is offering in-store shopping bonuses on an impressive array of 66 favorite independent bookstore titles selected from the 2012 Indie Next picks – inspired recommendations from independent bookstore booksellers everywhere. We’ll be highlighting this thoughtful collection of independent bookstore favorites beginning on Small Business Saturday and running through the following Saturday, Dec. 1.

& Also on Saturday, Todd-Michael St. Pierre will be signing his cookbook, Taste of Treme, Saturday at 12 non at Maple Street Book Shops Healing Center location. He’ll also be signing at the Uptown store at 6 p.m..

& Ken Foster will be signing his book, I’m A Good Dog, at Maple Street Book Shop’s Uptown location at 1 p.m. Filled with inspiring stories and photographs, this heartfelt tribute to the pit bull celebrates one of America’s most popular yet misunderstood dogs.

& Every Saturday at Maple Street Book Shop Uptown its Story Time with Miss Maureen. This week: Black Dog by Levi Pinfold. Kids wil make paper snowflakes and drink hot chocolate.

& There will be no reading at the Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series this Sunday due to collision with the Saint’s game in the front bar. The following Sunday Nov. 2 John Gery’s UNO MFA Poets will present a group reading. If you’ve ever watched a game at the Maple Leaf you will recall that their state-of-the-art sound system creates the only place on earth louder than the inside of the Superdome.

& On Monday, Nov. Alex Hitz presents My Beverly Hills Kitchen: Classic Southern Cooking With a French Twist at Garden District Book Shop at 6 p.m. n this cookbook of more than 175 recipes, Alex Hitz blends the home cooking of his mother’s Atlanta kitchen with lessons he learned in France to come up with food anyone can cook and we all want to eat.

& Maple Street Book Shop’s the Lunch ‘n’ Lit group will be meets this Tuesday at the Keller Library Community Center Loft at 12 p.m. (and every fourth Tuesday). November’s meeting will be a discussion of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Participants should bring their lunch. Newcomers are welcome!

Tuesday evening Garden District Book Shops hosts Donald Palmisano and The Little Red Book of Leadership Lessons. Dr. Donald J. Palmisano explores the vital qualities that every American should look for in a leader by gleaning lessons from great figures throughout history. Foreword by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. To avoid a Tourette’s-like outburst resulting in a possible exorcism intervention by our Dear Leader, Odd Words will refrain from comment on the selection of the foreword author or the choice of “Little Red Book” for the title except to note that the latter explains a lot of things about our current political climate.

& On Wednesday, Nov. 28 Octavia Books hosts a book signing with writer Timothy Jay Smith featuring his new novel, Cooper’s Promise, a thriller set against the backdrop of civil war plagued Africa. Army sharpshooter and deserter Cooper Chance is trapped. Recruited from Iraq to fight in an African country ravaged by a chronic civil war, Cooper wants nothing more than to go home. Unfortunately, the only thing awaiting him in America is jail

Odd Words November 15, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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This weekend is the annual NOLA Bookfair with a full day of readings and over 50 book and other vendors, relocated to 725 Magazine St. in the CBD. The location is across from the Farmers Market at Magazine & Girod. It’s sad our once culturally minded mayor has chased this event off Frenchman Street but that’s the way he rolls. Come out and support your local authors and small presses, which are going to be well-represented if you check the vendor list. You can get all the details on the NOLA Bookfair website.

It is so Odd that shortly after I published my idea for a 40 Over 40 list of regional writers who first published later in life, a friend should stumble across Bloom, a website dedicated to that very idea. I am still soliciting nominations for regional writers, with New Orleans as the center, who first published in hard copy after age 40. It can be a first publication, or a first book-length publication of someone published in journals before that age. Send them to odd.words.nola@gmail.com.

Due to issues with their online payment system, The Tennessee Williams Festival Fiction Contest has extended its deadline to Monday, Nov. 19 so it’s not too late to get your Great American Short Story in front of the judges.

& so to the listings…

& Tonight, Nov. 15 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series presents featured readings with poets Deborah POE, Matvei YANKELVICH and Clare MARTIN. The features will be followed by OPEN MIC hosted by Jimmy Ross (Sign-up for Open Mic begins at 7:30pm, limit 14 readers). Poe is the author of the poetry collections the last will be stone, too, Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). In addition, Deborah is co-editor of BetweenWorlds: An Anthology of Fiction and Criticism (Peter Lang). She is also co-editing a collection of Hudson Valley innovative poetry provisionally titled In/Filtration (Station Hill Press). Yanklevich is the author of the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), and several chapbooks. His translations of Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Ardis). He edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse. Martin is a graduate of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and lifelong Louisiana resident. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies.

& The University of New Orleans Women’s Center will host Is That You on the Cover?, a conversation with Carolyn Hembree about her first book, Skinny; the publisher, Kore Press; and resources for women writers Thursday, Nov. 15, at 12:30 pm in Liberal Arts Building 197.

& Also on Thursday Maple Street Book Shop’s Bayou St. John location hosts Suzanne Johnson, author of a new urban fantasy series, who will be reading from and signing her latest book, River Road, at 6 m. Johnson , a longtime New Orleans resident now living in Auburn, Alabama, is a veteran journalist with more than fifty national awards in writing and editing nonfiction. She is a graduate of the University of Alabama, and a native of Winfield, Alabama. River Road is the follow-up to Suzanne’s first title, Royal Street, both of which are put out by Tor, and will be available at the signing.

& Garden District Book Shop features Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, at 5:30 p.m. Thursday. “This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a “book club” that brings them together as her life comes to a close. Over the next two years, Will and Mary Anne carry on conversations that are both wide-ranging and deeply personal, prompted by an eclectic array of books and a shared passion for reading.”

& This Friday, Nov. 16 at 5:30 p.m. Octavia Books, along with Tales of the Cocktail and Old New Orleans Rum, to celebrate the release of Kit Wohl’s beautiful new book, NEW ORLEANS CLASSIC COCKTAILS: Spirited Recipes. Kit will present and sign copies. And, there will be some refreshing sips too. Since it’s a Friday afternoon, the event is starting a half hour earlier than the usual time. Wohl is a writer, photographer, graphics designer and artist. Following completion Arnaud’s Restaurant Cookbook in 2005, she designed, photographed, researched and wrote the first five volumes of her New Orleans Classic restaurant series, each covering a different aspect of the city’s traditional and mainstream cuisines.

& Friday night at Maple Street Book Shop’s Bayou St. John location The Diane Tapes reading series continues with Maia Elgin, Elizabeth Gross and Jenn Marie Nunes at 6 p.m.

& This Saturday the Octavia Book Club meets to discuss The Octavia Book Club Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son at 10:30 am. The club meets every third Saturday.

& Every Saturday at 11:30 a.m. it is Story Time with Miss Maureen at the Maple Leaf Bookshop, with a new children’s book, crafts and more. Details on Maple Streets

& On Saturday, Nov. 17 at Garden District Book Shop and again Monday, Nov. 19 at Maple Street Books Uptown location Debra Shriver will be signing her book, In the Spirit of New Orleans Monday, November 19th, at 6PM at our Uptown store. Please join us for a wine and cheese reception to welcome her. The perfect holiday gift for any New Orleanian, this celebratory volume shares what makes the Crescent City so special from its fascinating history and rich musical legacy to its enduring traditions and cultural landmarks. Includes an insider’s list featuring bars for the cocktail connoisseur, venues for the music maven, and can’t-miss restaurants for the gourmand.

& The monthly meeting of the New Orleans Haiku Society will be Monday, Nov 19 at 6 p.m. at the Latter Memorial Library.

& 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.

& Tuesday, Nov. 20 at Garden District Book Shop Shelby Tucker will sign his book Client Service, the story of the IOS (Investors Overseas Services) swindle in the 1960s. Tucker was an investor and an insider who worked as a salesman for IOS in its early days.

Odd Words Green Sheet Extra! November 9, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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“If you finish too early, you’re doing it wrong.”
– unidenfitied character on Treme last week discussing, um, Indian suits. I think.

Just remember if you want to be in the list from the get-go on Thursday to get your listings into me by no later than Wednesday to odd.words.nola@gmail.com, Facebook, Twitter, snail mail, stuffing flyers into my hands or RFC1149.

& UPDATE: Also on Friday at 7 p.m., McKeown’s Books & Difficult Music hosts HOW the SKINNY VICTORY of BUTCHER’S SUGAR became SPITSHINE ERRATA, featuring authors Carolyn Hembree – Skinny; Ben Kopel – Victory; Brad Richard – Butcher’s Sugar’ Anne Marie Rooney – Spitshine; Geoff Wyss – How’ and, Michael Allen Zell – Errata.

& UPDATE:Also on Saturday, at 7 p.m. a new reading series at Kajun’s Pub, The Cold Cuts Series hosted by Tenderloin Magazine editors Mel Coyle and Jenn Nunes featuring Kim Vodicka, Vincent Cellucci, and Anne Marie Rooney.

& UPDATE:Join author Carolyn Morrow Long as she discusses her new release, Madame Lalaurie, Mistress of The Haunted House, at The Tennessee William’s Festival monthly Coffee and Conversation at 7 pm, Tuesday, Nov. 13 at the main branch Jefferson Parish Library. This session includes local author interviews, book signings of their latest releases, Q&A sessions, and complimentary French Market Coffee.

Come Home to New Orleans, Bob Kaufman November 9, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Bob Kaufman
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Reposting for the two kind European women who so wanted a copy:

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
And hear Leah Chase
Sing Mahalia Jackson
In the synagogue of the oaks
As magnolias brown and fall.

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
And see the old white south
Gathered at preservation hall
Where old Negro Bodhisattvas
Blow their Creole love songs.

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
See the White Citizens Councils
Huddle in their Potemkin Americas
At the swampy back of town
In terror of their children’s radios.

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
To see pale northern tourists
Hungry for that Black jazz
Wolf down bad okra gumbo
At Maspero’s slave exchange.

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
To see Lorca’s sons openly
Embracing in the red carnations
Mirrored in the dark windows
Of the sad, historic cathedral.

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
And the ghosts of Congo Square
Will second line behind
Your broken poet’s bones
With an African brass band

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
And Indians from all wards
Will carry you on their shoulders
The length of Basin Street
And sing that Indian Red.

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
& we will honor your fierce spirit
with votives, flowers & poundcake
among the ancien Creole poets,
Marie Laveau & Homer Plessy.

Come home to New Orleans
Bob Kaufman
And enter here, eternally
Into that crackling blueness
Of towering Gulf storms
Pouring out the ancient rain.

Odd Words November 8, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Dave Brinks, Ladyfest 2012, The Secret Brain
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“I’m surprised there are so many men here!” MC Megan Haris remarked to no one in particular among the smokers outside poet and artist Jena Mae’s new apartment/art space on St. Roch. Among the 40-Odd audience were partners, poets and friends and if you are going to celebrate Strong Women, I think you definitely want men in attendance. Jimmy Ross’s baklava and Thaddeus Conti’s red beans were awesome offerings at the temple of Calliope. Readers included Roselyn Lionhart (that ROSElyn like the flower), and it was a room full of lionhearted performers: Heather Tammany, R.K. Powers, Lee Meitzen-Grue, Megan Burns, Sandra Grace Johnson and Laura McKnight. If you missed it, don’t despair entirely (just a little; you deserve it), because you can catch an equally wonderful lineup Friday, Nov. 9 at 8 p.m. for Poetry and Piano at Buffa’s Bar. Music by Lady Baby Miss, and readers include Jessica Ruby Radcliffe, Chyana Bwyse Gradley, Gerrul Robinson, Cate Root, Kim Vodicka, Gina Ferrara, lauren Marie, Melante Leavitt, Ayanna Monila-Mills, Kate Smash, Beverly Rainbolt, Kelly Johns, Sunday Shae Parker, Trisha Rezende and Elizabeth Garcia. Forget poetry slams. This will be distaff smackdown, so if you missed last night (OK, you can get away with regret instead of despair if you missed it), but don’t miss this one.

& Tonight’s Main Event is the New Orleans launch of 17 Poets! co-host and tribal shaman of NOLA poetry Dave Brinks’s The Secret Brain. It’s already debuted at City Lights Books in San Francisco with all of the luminaries of that scene in attendance, and in Parish. Tonight’s show will combine readings with musical and dance performances by Rockin’ DOPSIE,, Gaynielle NEVILLE, Reverend Goat CARSON, Katarina BOUDREAUX, and Matthew SHILLING, keeping alive the half-century old tradition of mixed media poetry performance for which the Goldmine Saloon location is world-famous. So come stop by the bar that helped birth the Beats for a public viewing of Brink’s Secret Brain.

& Just in time for Mayor-Of-An-Imaginary-Disney-New-Orleans Mitch Landrieu’s latest bonehead proposal to close the Jackson Square pedestrian mall at night comes Jackson Squared : The Heart of the Quarter, by Tom Varisco, John Biguenet, Will Crocker and Jackson Hill. Tom Varisco’s new book documents a year in the life of the French Quarter’s Jackson Square with lively, outrageous, humorous, and sometimes shocking pictures by himself and photographers Will Crocker and Jackson Hill and essays by John Biguenet, John Carr, Nicole Biguenet Pedersen and Susan Sarver. Standing in the square next to Ole Hickory, you’ll meet musicians, artists, tourists and oddballs of every stripe. The book is an irreverent celebration of the heart of the quarter and New Orleans. Thursday, Nov. 8 at 6 pm. Somebody by a copy for Mitch so he is reminded he doesn’t live in Baton Rouge anymore.

& On Friday, Nov. 10 at 5 pm Octavia Books hosts a YA event featuring Robin Bridges’ The Unfailing Light, the new installment in her young adult trilogy, The Katerina Trilogy, set in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the reign of Tsar Alexander III.The Katrina Trilogy. Note the early start time.

& Friday, Nov. 9 at 5:30 p.m. Garden District Book Shop features Summer Wood’s Raising Wrecker, “the story of this nearly-broken boy whose presence turns a motley group of isolated eccentrics into a real family. Real enough to make mistakes. Real enough to stick together in spite of everything ready to tear them apart. There’s no guidebook to mothering for Melody, who thought the best thing in life was eighty acres of old growth along the Mattole River and nobody telling her what to do – until this boy came along.”

& If you already forgot about Friday night’s Ladyfest reading, you probably forgot to take, um, that supplement that supposed to help with brain function and memory. The reading is 8 pm until Midnight at Buffa’s Lounge.

& UPDATE: Also on Friday, McKeown’s hosts HOW the SKINNY VICTORY of BUTCHER’S SUGAR became SPITSHINE ERRATA, featuring authors Carolyn Hembree – Skinny; Ben Kopel – Victory; Brad Richard – Butcher’s Sugar’ Anne Marie Rooney – Spitshine; Geoff Wyss – How’ and, Michael Allen Zell – Errata

& The New Orleans Public Library is hosting an Adult Poetry Workshop at the Martin Luther King Branch Library, 1611 Caffin Avenue, from 3-5 pm and every second Friday through March. The workshop is hosted by Delia Tomino Nakayama and funded by Poets & Writers.

&Saturday, Nov. 10 ta 1 pm Garden District presents Eleni Gage’s, Other Waters. “When the protagonist May’s grandmother dies in India, a family squabble over property ignites a curse that drifts across continents and threatens Maya’s life. She hopes a trip back to India with her best friend, Heidi, will enable her to remove the curse, save her family, and put her own life back in order. Thus begins a journey into Maya’s parallel worlds– New York and an India filled with loving and annoying relatives, vivid colors, and superstitious customs she doesn’t, and does, believe in. But her time in India isn’t just a visit “home” or a chance to explore the strengthening and suffocating bonds of family, it’s also the beginning of a cathartic quest toward forging one identity out of two cultures.”

& There won’t be Story Time with Miss Maureen at Maple Street Book Shop’s uptown location due the University Montessori School Book Fair will be taking place all day.

& UPDATE:Also on Saturday at 7 p.m. a new reading series at Kajun’s Pub, The Cold Cuts Series hosted by Tenderloin Magazine editors Mel Coyle and Jenn Nunes featuring Kim Vodicka, Vincent Cellucci, and Anne Marie Rooney.

& Sunday Nov. 9 at 6 p.m.Fair Grinds Coffee Shop will host a book release party for Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind. How do we create new, non-hierarchical structures of support and mutual aid and include all ages in the struggle for social justice? Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind is a collection of concrete tips, suggestions, and narratives on ways that non-parents can support parents, children, and caregivers in their communities, social movements, and collective processes.

& On Monday, Nov. 12 Octavia Books presents p Martha Fitgerald featuring her new book, The Courtship of Two Doctors: A 1930s Love Story of Letters, Hope & Healing. In 1937, medical students began a two-year correspondence across 1,100 miles, and their fancy turned to deep respect and abiding love. Alice Baker of New Orleans and Joe Holoubek of Omaha became Dr. Alice and Dr. Joe, a professional couple known for their unbreakable bond. The Courtship of Two Doctors chronicles their early history, providing an inspiring look at the birth of a marriage and a lifetime of service.

& Tuesday, Nov. 13 at 5:30 pm Garden District feature’s David Spielman’s and Fred Lyon’s When Not Performing: New Orleans Musicians, “revealing portraits of New Orleans performers provide a provocative and intimate glimpse into the musical pulse of the city. They are captured in locations of their own choosing, places that define and inspire them as individuals. Often elusive as smoke, once captured their images are both haunting and familiar.
David G. Spielman followed these talented artists through the neighborhoods, backstreets, and bars, using little more than a Leica camera. Printed as duotones, the emotional images speak without shouting. Fred Lyon listened to the performers and engaged them in conversation, drawing meaning and understanding from their often complex tales of hardship, triumph, and family. Their stories allow the viewer to connect with each specific portrait and location. Among those captured in image and word are Terence Blanchard, Harry Connick Sr., Jeremy Davenport, Fats Domino, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Dr. John, Ellis Marsalis, Frank Minyard, Charmaine Neville, Albinas Prizgintas, Katey Red, Paul Sanchez, Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint, and Johnny Vidacovich, along with many others.”

& Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series is an Open Mic, preceded and followed by the usual poets-and-alcohol frivolity. Interested readers should contact Nancy Harris about featuring at New Orleans’ longest-running poetry reading series, founded by Everette Maddox. Next scheduled feature is Dec. 2 with John Gery’s UNO MFA Poets.

& 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) every Tuesdays at 1:30 p.m. repeating Sundays at Noon. She features interviews with authors of local and national interest.

& On Wednesday, Nov. 15 Octavia Books hosts B.A. Shapiro featuring her new — and now The New York Times bestselling — novel, The Art Forger. “A clever, twisty novel about art, authenticity, love, and betrayal. B. A. Shapiro knows about Degas, and she knows about art theft and forgery, and she also knows how to tell a gripping story.” —Tom Perrotta

If you’re feeling left out, it is probably because you didn’t send your event to odd.words.nola@gmail.com. Make sure you make the list!

Getting It Straight October 29, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, publishing, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Bob Man, Chris Rose, James Pogue, Louisiana Book Festival, Nathaniel Rich, New South Journalism, Oxford-American
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Let me get this right out front: this piece has not been fact checked. Hell, on a good day I manage to swat all the homonyms that jump up on this screen like roaches on toast. And at the end of the day Toulouse Street is more about fidelity than facts. Not an unusual state of affairs according to James Pogue, who says the problem with the famously aggressive fact checking of magazines like The New Yorker is it collides with “the emerging new essay…trying to do something that is obviously art” in which writers change facts.

Fortunately, I spent the morning with a panel of the checkers and the checked–~~local~~ magazine veterans Pogue, Nathaniel Rich, and Chris Rose–who have been on both sides of the fact check desk at publications including The Paris Review, GQ, The New Yorker and The Oxford American. All appear in the current issue of Ox Am, including Pogue’s piece “Diary of a Mad Fact-Checker”. Rich was fiction editor of The Paris Review and worked as fact checker at The New Yorker where even the poetry and fiction is fact checked “which really surprised some of the poets.” His piece in the current Ox Am is about bird watching and we have absolutely no idea if a Connecticut warbler is exactly the size Rich represented with his hand. However, since you can’t see this on the podcast we have decided to let it pass in honor of the greater truth. In the middle was Chris Rose, who hold the Brittany Spears beat at the Times Picayune among other duties, who put his case plainly: I just write it the way I’m pretty sure it happened.”

The problem with the approach Pogue describes, citing Dr. Hunter S. Thompson as the textbook illustration, is that for most writers “just making stuff up . . . completely destroys your credibility” and ends up just creating a media event a la James Frey. Still, the panel title was “New South Journalism” and depending on how you parse that sentence, it might include HST’s famous description from Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail of how to handle an uncommitted delegate. Or bats. The panelists made clear, however, such nonsense is not going to get in the mainstream of American publishing unless dressed as the deli delivery guy. It may, however, come to prevail in the online world. Rose noted that reporters filed copy directly onto NOLA.COM ~~at the same time it was sent to the~~ without passing through the copy desk. There were some howlers among the examples but Chris Rose’s probably deserves its 15 minutes in print somewhere. Trying to describe the important of Cosimo Matasa’s recording studio to this history of rock-and-roll, he wrote for the upcoming Ox Am music edition that Matasa was making rock-and-roll “before Dick Clark and Ed Sullivan ever laced up their blue suede shoes.” Until the fact checker called him to ask if either of these gentlemen were noted for wearing blue suede shows. I think you can see where this is going (and it not skip to 54:40 on the podcast), but you won’t read that stylistic bit in the upcoming Ox Am.

[The topic seemed to have leaked out of the room into a poetry interview/reading hours later, when Louisiana Poet Laureate Julie Kane shared an anecdote about the poet she knows who was published in The New Yorker and was told that the constellation he mentioned could not possibly have been in the sky at the time of day and year the poem was describing. "He was surprised they didn't call his lady friend to make sure she absolutely was in the sleeping bag next to him that night," she said.]

The panelists spent ~~two-thirds of their alloted~~ an awful lot of time on fact checking, but Rich’s tales about bird watchers at Grand Isle means I’m going to have to go back and unskip his article when I get a minute. (Nothing personal, Nathaniel, I just don’t have time to read a magazine one and through, and the leisure time for second passes through my magazine stack is measured in feet on one side of my couch), and on the transition away from pulp-and-polish to digital media Rose, who’s piece on the Ox Am was about the gradual demise of the city’s newspaper the Times-Picayune summed it up best “I make something you can hold in your hand at the end of the day–a story, a book, a newspaper–and after I’ve worked my ass off and bled, where is it?”

This is all good fun, whether the panelists are trying to on-up each other with the best example of overzealous fact-checking or when Rich tell us about his ~~week in~~ trip to Grand Isle to find birdwatchers in their natural environment, but there is a long, thoughtful discussion of the evolution away from print toward digital about midway through the podcast and I don’t have time to transcribe and which you really ought to listen to. Jump to 31:06 and listen through 40:22 if you are as pressed as time for I am. Bob Mann poses the question, Pogue answers first and Rich second, and Rose gives the coup de grace.

Podcast: New South Journalism – Louisiana Book Festival 2012

South of 90 October 28, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in books, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK.
Tags: A Vein in the Gulf, Côte Blanche, Julie Kane, Louisiana Book Festival, Martha Serpas
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Martha Serpas holds enough degrees in creative writing to sketch the outline of a novel on and a Master of Divinity from Yale. She has a preface by Harold Bloom in her first book of poems. She explains the title of a new poem “The Diener,” a word with a German root meaning servant and applied to the person who runs the hospital morgue. The title stumped Bloom, the sort of accomplishment you want in your obituary, like the drummer acquaintance I had in DC who visited New Orleans with The Nighthawks for several months in the 1980s and was introduced by Zigaboo Modaliste to his table at Dookie Chase as a “bad motherfuckin’ drummer.” If I ever find my provincial ass trapped in a Manhattan cocktail party, I want to arrive with Martha and Maud Newton. They can dump me at the door, as long as I can nod my head toward them across the room and say, I came with Martha and Maud.

She surveys the small room of poetry readers at the Louisiana Book Festival with a leonine calm, exudes a gentle accessibility and level headedness necessary to someone who volunteers as a hospital trauma chaplain. She was born in Galliano and attended LSU and the University of Houston. She spent enough time at NYU and in New Haven to attract luminaries such as Bloom but also taught at the University of Tampa and now in Houston, and prefers to describe herself as “from the Gulf Coast.” You sense that beneath the sheepskins is a girl from Galliano done good, can easily see her standing at the saw horse table peeling shrimp, a brown long neck at her elbow, someone from the only place on earth you can stand south of ninety.

Her love for her home south of Highway 90 comes bubbling out when talks about a film project A Vein in the Gulf, which resulted from the idea of her friend Elizabeth Coffman than they take a van full of film students and poets to the Louisiana coast to document the impact of wetlands loss. There is also a natural, Catholic-school modesty when she speaks of writing about Lafourche Parish, especially after what she calls “the big event” of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “I struggled just writing about my home town,” she said of her first book of poems, Côte Blanche, the one with a preface by Bloom. “Who am I to write these poems about these folk and these places?” After the storm, she came to a realization with the help of friends. “If [I] don’t write it, if I don’t take that platform how does that help the people I love and the place I love . . . well, maybe one person will understand the culture, appreciate the culture, can be moved by the culture [then] why would I not want to reach that one person?”

It is in that conversation that she drops the bomb that leaves me flabbergasted, the acknowledgment most folks north of 90 have not yet admitted to. “We have to keep trying to save [the wetlands] even though we know it’s impossible to save it. It’s too late.” I have read the literature of coastal loss since I was a weekly newspaper editor in St. Bernard Parish in the 1980s, insist to everyone I know that they must read Mike Tidwell’s story of the slow holocaust on the coast Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast but few people are willing to speak that truth aloud. “It’s too late.”

At the end of the interview I ask her if she finds some confluence between her work as a trauma chaplain and writing about Lafourche, “The first image that popped into my mind is when I visit a patient that is dying, what we would call the death watch, and people look at the monitors as if that is going to tell us anything in terms of how long that process will take, and we’re all there…the family…most people want to be there. That is what flashed through my head when you say that. It’s death, and its beautiful. Even the destruction of the wetlands is beautiful because something will come out of it, some life will come out of it even though … I can’t see it. I don’t see anything life-giving come out of it even as I know intellectually that something will.”

I know at the end of the interview that Côte Blanche is the first of the stack of books I brought home I will want to read, and that I need to see A Vein in the Gulf. Interviewer Julie Kane, the poet laureate of Louisiana, concluded my question and the author’s answer with a quotation from an author whose name neither I nor my record catch, that “all poetry is elegy.” As I pack up to leave the room, I think that the hurricane coast may have found its elegist. She prefaces her answer to my question with a quote from rabbi I can’t quite make out on the recording: “You are not required to complete the work nor are you free to desist from it.” If not their elegist, the people of Lafourche and the whole coast have certainly found their chaplain.

Podcast: Martha Serpas with Julie Kane – Louisiana Book Festival 2012

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Odd Words November 29, 2012

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Odd Words Green Sheet Extra! November 9, 2012

Come Home to New Orleans, Bob Kaufman November 9, 2012

Odd Words November 8, 2012

Getting It Straight October 29, 2012

South of 90 October 28, 2012

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