Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

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.

& 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Adiu paure Carnaval February 13, 2013

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

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

And so, from New Orleans, Adiu Paure Carnaval.

Adiu paure Carnaval
(Occitan)

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

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

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

Farewell, Poor Carnival
(English)

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

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

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

Splish Splash February 11, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sin. Repent. Repeat. February 7, 2013

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

Odd Words February 7, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sacred and Fatal February 1, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in art, cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, quotes, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Louise Bourgeois
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Annie Leibovitz portrait of Bourgeois.

“Self-expression is sacred and fatal. It’s a necessity.”
– Louise Bourgeois

Odd Words January 31, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Toulouse Street.
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Ploughshares has published its Literary Burroughs #49, covering the literary scene in New Orleans. You can check it out here. Kudos to auuthor Micheal Zell of Crescent City Books for a great job. Also, check out the review of Zell’s Eratta on the marquee alt-lit site HTML Giant.

The 5×20 Black Widow Salon at Crescent City Books originally scheduled for Feb. 4 has been moved to Monday, February 18th to push it past Carnival season.

It’s a quiet week, what with the Super Bowl in town. I’m not sure a new edition of the Bible personally signed by God could sell enough copies to cover the cost of a night’s room in a hotel this week. Come out and check out a new performance event, or support a local author. Maple Street Bookstore is even offering a night of quiet, acoustic music if the Super Gras is just too much for you. Tuesday, Feb. 5 at the Uptown location at 7 p.m. A $5 donation for the bands is requested. Featured are real live tigers
(sparse country splinters from Fayetteville, AR), pyeya (vocal trio singing balkan siren songs and never ever(acoustic folk embraces). I’m not sure what Balkan siren songs are but I’m intrigued.

Given all the insanity downtown, I think this might be a good week to start Infinite Jest.

& Tonight, Jan. 30 Octavia Books hosts a presentation and book signing by Ed Branley celebrating his new book, LEGENDARY LOCALS OF NEW ORLEANS, covering the full spectrum of the city’s historical personalities from John Lafitte to Drew Brees. Branley, a former history teacher, is now a computer consultant and independent scholar who teaches, writes, and continually discovers (and shares) the wonders of his hometown, New Orleans. This is his fourth book for Arcadia Publishing.

Friday Night Faubourg Marigny Art & Books hosts a “Superbowl Signing” 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. featuring FRED LYON’s AND DAVID G. SPIELMAN’s “WHEN NOT PERFORMING”. I did a French Quarter Fest signing here once and surprisingly, Otis sold almost exactly the number of books the next day to match the people who said they didn’t want to cart one around that night but promised to come back later for one.

& Monday, Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. Carolyn Hembree will read from her debut collection, Skinny, and her unpublished manuscript, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine & Other Ways to Escape a Plague, this Monday at Tulane’s Cudd Hall. A brief Q&A, reception and booksigning will follow the reading. This event will complete the New Orleans leg of her book tour.

& I’m not sure about the usual 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.

& On Tuesday, Feb. 5 at 7 p.m. The 1718 Society, a student-run literary organization of Tulane, Loyola, and UNO students, hosts reader Josip Novakovich. “Hailed as one of the best short story writers of the 1990s, Josip Novakovich was praised by the New York Times for writing fiction that has ‘the crackle of authenticity, like the bite of breaking glass.’ In his new collection, he explores a war-torn Balkan world in which a schoolchild’s innocence evaporates in a puff of cannon smoke, lust replaces love, and the joy of survival overrides all other pleasures.”

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

That’s it. No parades, riots in the streets downtown and you know you always meant to get around to Anna Karenina.

Ghostly January 24, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Fortin Street, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Odd, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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It’s 8:45. With the blackout curtains drawn you are not sure if it is anti- or post-meridian and you are not too sure you brain is clear on the matter after it shocked you awake with a dream meant for that purpose. You dream you are urinating and it has happened before, you were taking some medication that left you so dopey you were doing just that. You ask your doctor if you should see the urologist but you have just been discussing the problem with the medication another doctor has given you and she–who is younger than you–confesses to doing exactly the same thing when taking a similar medication, too knocked-out to answer the call of nature)

You are dead knocked out when the dream empties into your full body like an electric shock, bolting upright and every muscle at attention. You begin to wonder if your unconscious is just as confused as the waking brain after a 14 hour day starting at 3:a.m., up at 1 a.m. to have time for cigarettes, coffee and food in that rigorous, monastic order of addiction. Lunch at 3:30 in the afternoon with beers you hope will take off the coffee adrenaline edge of the day and lead to you what you plan as a nap which you now realize clearly is going all night with this interruption. You turn on the light, decide to ice your sprained wrist and read but realize you can’t smoke, elevate and read at the same time.

You look at the hotel window with the blackout curtains drawn for some hint of light and notice what looks like a pale leak of daylight above the curtain top but then the valence is hung from something clearly attached to the ceiling that would block any such light, and the glow is only on one end and ghostly blue. It is the reflection of the screen of your laptop. Ghostly is such a diaphanous adjective, weak tea any decent teacher of writing would strike right out but until you have studied that light, its faint gray-blue, the way it appears to hover just below the ceiling like a cloud of smoke and faintly pulse with the cycling of a screen saver you don’t know ghostly

The witching hour is only by the clock if you blow out a candle before you go to bed. Jump a time zone then get up with five hours sleep for a long day of coffee and tension in a meeting room with a handful of dreadfully intent people, two phones going and the walls covered with lists and charts, other people coming and going with urgent rumors or looking for news, then a late lunch with beer until you finally pass out at 5 p.m. and it might as well be the stroke of twelve in a cemetery. You have your own ghosts, the texts from your ex-wife asking if you’re free to talk and no you are not, not in the middle of all this, are just the incantation to call them up.

Exhaustion and Belgian ale put you to sleep but don’t unwind the spring work has wrapped around your chest. The dream is just a warning from your lizard brain which doesn’t know if it is time to eat or shit, run or hide in the dark. By the time you have padded to the bathroom and back, found your water bottle and the ice pack for your wrist you are groggy again. You lie on your back examining that light in the corner and you begin to understand what a little moonlight could do to someone awake at the wrong time with the burdens of the world like a lead stole filled with the world’s sins, at an hour when one’s own haunts creep just beneath the skin and suddenly you are sure that light is floating just under the ceiling.

Ghostly is a fine word, just the one you are looking for. It is the reason you got up to write this. You decide to keep it, it’s perfectly rational cause a talisman against the others that rattle their chains in your skull at the most inconvenient times.

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.

Everybody’s Having Fun January 19, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Carnival, Krewe du Vieux, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.
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Hot gluing feather boas to a tulle bustle is not what most men in America are doing on a Friday night. Most men in America could not, turned loose in a fabric store with five minutes and a $10,000 prize, find a bolt of tulle. When my daughter’s last North Dakota recital came and her mother was in New Orleans, I felt uniquely equipped by my Carnival training to carefully trim her tutu to the desired length.

Of course this means its Carnival Time And Everybody’s Having Fun assembling some sort of costume. When I lived in North Dakota people would say, “Oh, Mardi Gras. Always wanted to do that” but I’m not sure they really meant it. There is something in the Lutheran soul not properly equipped for a religious holiday involving men wearing bustles of tulle and boas in a general atmosphere of public drunkeness and lewdity. And I cannot imagine any of them dressed as a cross between Foghorn Leghorn, Super Chicken and Priapus.

Yes, there will be pictures tagged in Facebook I am sure and no I do not care what employment counselors think of that. I want everyone at my employing bank, Moloch. N.A., to know just how much fun they are not having Saturday night, how much fun we’ll be having on Tuesday in a few weeks while they slave over laptops and Policoms. I worked with a fellow for a while who managed an invite to a selective sub-krewe and who’s wife had landed a plum job at the Contemporary Arts Center any number of art majors I know would kill to have. He was British and I loved to kid him about “going native.” I was sure they would never return to the world headquarters of Moloch but they did.

I will never understand that decision.

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.

The Small Rain January 16, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in Fortin Street, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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One step out the door and I know I’m not going out, no way am I dragging my lingering smoker’s bronchitis out to the 7:10 Esplanade and downtown.Thank god and DARPA and whoever else is responsible for VPN. I linger a minute, immersed in the shocking north-blown damp, my hand out to capture to bit of icy rain. Spring they used to call this in North Dakota; I mean, the ice is off the lakes and the crocus are poking up through the last black bits of snow. That ice-cold rain even in the middle of June. The temperature has crept into the 70s but the rain comes down like some terrible accident at the ice house, stinging reminders of why the early pilots wore fleece-lined leather jackets, that 46.8 N is just over halfway to the pole.

It’s a small rain, as if the just visible mist were a distant cloud of tundra mosquitoes resolved into a swarm at the first scent of warm blood. I’ve just had my transom window repaired against the driving rains of New Orleans, the fat drops flung like missiles against the flimsy low-rent plastic and caulk that once passed for a window until there would be a fair-sized puddle just inside the door. I love the drenching New Orleans rain as long as I can sit just out of reach and contemplate its impenetrable jungle splendor and warmth, enjoy the cooling downdrafts. This winter rain is an entirely different animal, an arctic pseudo pod reaching out from the north to swallow its surprised victims.

Waiter, this is not the Wednesday I ordered. Take this unseasonable gazpacho back and bring me something warm.

3:40 AM January 16, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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Diurnal dysrythmia is today’s neologism, the inability to remain flaccid when desired; premature exclamation, the brain suddenly engaged when one ought to role over and go back to sleep. Associated symptoms include waking on weekends to feed dogs long departed and children who are not around, aural hallucinations of the Barney theme song over 0-dark:thirty Cheerios. Facebook at 4 a.m., the informal fraternity of the insomniac, is a bad idea. Do not encourage the squirrel that has leaped onto its wheel at this ungodly hour. Do not feed the squeak. Make coffee, yes, but only to turn on the program mode for a few hours from now when it will be badly needed. Turn off the architect lamp (upgrade to laptop with illuminated keyboard). Go back to bed while it is still warm between the sheets. Do not light another cigarette.

Isn’t it time you had a conversation with your doctor about these conversations you are having with your reflection?

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.

Some Where on the Far Side of Eisenhower January 12, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Fortin Street, Jazz, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Frenchman Street, Linnzi Zaorski
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Eric and I are the oldest people in the room I think, the only ones who might have heard these ancient swing tunes coming from the cloth grill of a hardwood hi-fi set or or on some long-reprogrammed station from a Solid State AM Radio in the Chevrolet dashboard of 1960. We stand up at the front of the bar because every seat along the bar and wall is taken by a crowd born in a time when the guitar was the undisputed king, when trumpet and strings meant Peter and the Wolf. Linnzi Zaorski stands willow-sapling straight at the microphone, the swing mostly in her sweet-tea voice with just with just a bobble-doll accompaniment from her head and shoulders, her hips and one hand keeping time as softly as brushes on a snare. Her publicity photos like those of the other jazz standard singers in town suggest sultry but under the spot tonight she is all wholesome blond and smile, ready for the pageant judges.

The band of trumpet, violin, hollow-bodied electric and upright bass doesn’t need a drummer to swing. Close your eyes when they start “Lady in Red” and you would swear there were two trumpets instead of Charlie Fardella’s one and a violin. Matt Rhodi’s fiddle reminds me that somewhere between Carnegie Hall and Church Point there is a whole other sound, that nothing swings quite like a violin. The bassist is late and through the first set Matt Johnson’s hollow body drives the band, comping Kansas City swing warm and bright as the glow of antique amplifier filaments, taking delicate solos that complement Zaorski’s voice. Once Robert Snow sets the dance floor thrumming its just a matter of time before the dancers peel off the wall and start to take the floor. I don’t have a notebook and I’m too beer-tipsy fascinated by it all to keep a set list in my head. The sound is almost too clear. You expect the wandering modulation of a distant short wave station broadcasting from somewhere on the far side of Eisenhower like the RKO tower. These songs were growing old before most of the band was born but here tonight they are fresh again. The seated players lean into the songs, intent as surgeons, while the base player’s eyes close and off he goes where ever the hell it is bass players go when they are mounted by the melody. The dance floor fills by fits and starts, one couple at a time at first as if by prearrangement, the jitterbug and Lindy Hop couples each taking their turns, inviting the crowd to marvel at their steps like the first Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy in Harlem most of a century ago.

“Can you believe this? That we’re here listening to this?” Eric asks. We are like two old vaudevillians between shows grabbing a glass of beer and of course I answer as I always do. “Yeah, this sucks. Cleveland. That’s where we should be tonight. I bet it’s happening in Cleveland.” We both laugh and the people around us give us the slantwise eyeball and edge away a just-visible inch. Cleveland. Right. Somewhere in Cleveland in a Holiday Inn there may be a quick-silver blond with Betty Grable legs crooning with a pianist who misses his ashtray more than his youth, but I don’t think you would find a house full of kids and wish-they-were’s leaning in toward the singer just as the band does, swept into Zaorski’s updo and baby-doll vocals. The whole room–band, dancers, audience– is titled slightly toward the singer and you can almost see the energy flicker by spark jump from the crowd up to her and come back in a brilliant million candle-power flood of Forties poise and song.

I first heard Zaokrski sitting in with the Jazz Vipers at the Spotted Cat, before the big split in the band, before HBO’s Treme packed that place like the last dry room on the Titanic and they moved the stage and took away the old wicker chairs and couch where non-dancers like me could wait for a chance to collapse and just get lost in the sound. I’m not about to Google a lady’s age but Zaorski started a dozen years before that in a barroom called Southport on Bourbon Street. Between songs she talks about singing over the football game, of the bartender vacuuming around the bands’ feet during the last set. Swing has come a long way since bands like the Jazz Vipers took swing out of the dance-class and wedding ballroom and brought it back to the smoke and mirrors of the barroom where it was born. Half a dozen bands work the trade now to fill all the dance cards of the jitterbug-crazy retro fedora and nylons crowd. Its impossible for a stand-and-drink man like myself not to watch the footwork of the dancers but when singers like the sparkling Zaorski and pin-up sulty Ingrid Lucia and the fiery Meschiya Lake with her updo and tattoos take the stage the real magic is straight up center over the microphone. The magic of all the swing cats–men and women, singers and players–is the magic of jazz, the ability to bend space and time like notes, to take you out of yourself and toward another time and place, in this case to a scene out of some Ronald Reagan Rest Home dream, where the syncopation of music and feet among the sharp hats and shapely gams made old cats like us first twinkle in someone’s eye.

The Point of the Pivot January 11, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in film, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson, storytelling, Tom Cruise
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I sat up late watching the movie Magnolia, fighting sleep but desperately attentive to the complicated plot, the interweaving of so many stories. It was so easy to miss something, something small and terribly significant.

Tom Cruise plays the role of the promoter of Seduce and Destroy, a misogynist self-improvement program for the trivialization and seduction of women. His stage presence is as mesmerizing as it repulsive, the serpent behind the snake oil, grabbing an imaginary ass from behind and working it as he speaks. The men in the audience hoot in delight. At the lunch break, he goes to a hotel room for a television interview, peels off his shirt to reveal a perfectly sculpted body. He drops his pants all the way down to his ankles as an assistant hands him a towel but he merely dabs at himself, stands their in his bulging briefs. The reporter is a woman and she calmly stares at him as he turns somersaults and rattles off about his success with women, his irresistible ability to seduce.

When he finally settles into the chair, she tells him he has missed a button putting on his shirt, and at that small and razor-edged maternal correction he slumps back in his chair, crosses his fingers on this chest. Two adversaries face each other. Not long into the interview comes the question, tearing apart his marketing mythos, his falsified biography, the carefully constructed and confident illusion of the master huckster. She shreds the nonexistent degree in psychology, pulls down the images of his imaginary family, holds up before him the small boy who cared for his dying mother after his father abandoned them.

Cruise freezes, refuses to speak, staring at her with burning intensity. Seconds drag by like hours in the long shot. It is then I notice the blemish , the bump on his cheek carefully blended by makeup into his skin, the smallest flaw in his curly-locked Herculean projection of perfection, the tiniest detail of theatrical composition of both the character and auteur Paul Thomas Anderson in over two hours of film. Following this moment the carefully constructed lives of all the characters begin to fall apart, their own masks striped away and their flaws revealed, and they begin to align themselves into a new coherence.

Perhaps it was not intentional but simply a blemish but in these days of digital production and over a hundred years perfecting film makeup I don’t think so.

The tiniest thing in the film’s complex web of interlocking plots, the point of the pivot, the detail of a master storyteller, something you can’t help but notice but miss the significance of until two days later staring at oneself in the mirror, a moment that the writer for the printed page would have to handle even more carefully than the director orchestrated his shot. This tiny, quickly forgotten bit of craft about which the entire story resolves is the signature of the master obscuring his hand among the actions of his puppets.

Thorsday January 10, 2013

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Dancing Bear, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Thor
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Thursday. Thor’s Day. The hammer wielding guy wasn’t so bad. To steal baldy from Wikipedia: “In Norse mythology, Thor (from Old Norse Þórr) is a hammer-wielding god associated with thunder, lightning, storms, oak trees, strength, the protection of mankind, and also hallowing, healing, and fertility. The cognate deity in wider Germanic mythology and paganism was known in Old English as Þunor and in Old High German as Donar (runic þonar ), stemming from a Common Germanic *Þunraz (meaning “thunder”).”

Here is a symbol typical of his hammer Mjolnir with interesting Celtic aspects to the scroll work that appear on almost every example I looked at.

Storms and oak trees, hallowing and fertility: I think if he was looking for a winter getaway he’d feel right at home in New Orleans.

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.

Little Miracles December 31, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Fortin Street, The Odd, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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It is raining starling shit on the sidewalk in front of my house as I sit and smoke a cigarette.

At first I have no idea what these black berry-like things are raining from the sky. I pick one up. It is a little smaller than a coffee bean but about the same shape a color. I look up, and see birds ranged along the overhead wires. I step out into the street to be sure of the bird and the ones above me take flight to the right in a widershins spiral, and their brethren in the tree just up the street lift off to my left in a clockwise helix until they merge into two intersecting whorls of chattering birds. I watch them until the hypnotic black kaleidoscopic shrinks into a vanishing point.

I sit down to finish my cigarette.

I love my block.

This Is No Tight Ship December 31, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Everette Maddox, Faubourg St. John, Federal Flood, Fortin Street, Mid-City, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.
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An open letter to the members of the Faubourg St. John Neighborhood Association, our Mayor and other leaders, the people of New Orleans and of the world:

“…I sympathize
with Huck Finn’s taste for
the mixed-up. This is no
tight ship. I wouldn’t
want my moments run off on an
assembly line like toy ducks. That’s
not the point…”
– Everette Maddox, “Just Normal”

Once again I hear the cry raised against the indiscriminate use of fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Yes they are illegal and to some people and their animals terribly annoying. I am sorry for your inconvenience. What disturbs me about this protest is that it is part and parcel of a snowballing intolerance for the transgressive by some citizens and the current city leadership. Whether it is fireworks on New Year’s Eve (or the sadly lost Mid-City Bonfire), unlicensed artisans at Jazz Fest or guerrilla food vendors at second lines or music clubs permitted only by the tolerance of neighbors who have long lived next door, we are losing the tolerance for the transgressive that is fundamental to who we are, to what this city is. It is that tolerance that made New Orleans a haven for gays and a magnet for artists, that makes Carnival and the year-round debauchery of Bourbon Street possible, that puts a pie-man on a bicycle at just the right corner at the very moment when you find you are most in need of a piece of sweet potato. Without it the inherent spontaneity of the city will be lost.

I spent 20 years wandering in regular America with only one dream, to return to this La La Land. I returned after the storm to a city that was not precisely the same one I left in my rear view mirror in 1986, and certainly not the city of my childhood, but so many of us spent so much effort in the years after the flood working to make sure that whatever came out of the events of 2005 it would be recognizably New Orleans. If we allow this creeping intolerance to take over the city it will become a Disney cartoon shadow of itself. If that is allowed to happen everything we have done in the last seven years will have been for nothing. We will become post-Hugo historic Charleston, S.C., a dark ghetto of transient tourist condos for the wealthy. The corner bars and restaurants that birthed the food and music of the city will be permitted out of existence. The city will keep its pretty buildings and fine restaurants but will no longer be New Orleans. It will be a frozen diorama of what once was.

I would not want to live in a city where a bar across from a church was not at least a grandfathered if not an explicitly permitted use.

I’m just a renter across from the race track but I still own property in Mid-City. I understand the complex and abstract math of property values. The banning of the bonfire depreciated my property on Toulouse Street in my eyes. I found Endymion to be mostly a bother (but a great excuse for an open-house party) and would never suggest it be moved out of Mid-City. When I lived in Treme years ago, I walked out of my large and cheap apartment (now an expensive condo) to listen to the New Year’s service music through the open windows of St. Anna’s that opened onto my yard. Before I sat down I noticed a hole in my plastic webbed lawn chair and beneath it a slug smashed on the concrete patio. There are common sense limits to tolerance but trying to ban fireworks, which have been both illegal and ubiquitous since my childhood in the 60s, is probably not a good use of the police’s time on National Amateur Drunk Driver Night. We need to learn to tolerate the inconveniences (fireworks, Endymion, all of Carnival if you happen to live uptown) in exchange for the pleasures our tolerance of the transgressive provides.

If you seek the perfect, suburban peace of the grave New Orleans is probably not the city for you. I am sorry if this statement angers you. I am one of you, if only a renter of a run down half shotgun on Fortin but I searched for a year for a property I could afford in this neighborhood. I have called Lake Vista, Gentilly, Treme and Carrollton home, but once I landed here I knew I had found the best neighborhood of all. When I walked into DeBlancs for the first time in 20 years and the woman behind the counter looked down at my license and up at me and said, “you look just like your father” who had passed on 20 years earlier I knew I was home. I’m not looking to stir up trouble but I have to say all this: I cannot idly sit by and watch the old and rough-running engine of this city throttled by the growing climate of intolerance until it stalls and dies. If you enjoy Endymion I have borne that burden for you, gladly. All I ask is the same forbearance in return.

Barbarians at the Gates December 28, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Toulouse Street.
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Having survived BIOS 1053 I can lay back and imagine the rhino virus flying antigens like pirate flags, a million bits of me flocking to antibody banners: the loyal Basophil as always in the vanguard, the trusty Leukocytes marshaling in the south for the counter attack. I believe they have deployed Archimedes’ mirrors. My sinuses are aflame.

Odd Words December 27, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Dream Eater December 22, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in A Fiction, Fortin Street, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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The city swallows dreams as it does the cars of the morning commute. Approaching from the east barricaded exits to nowhere stand as monuments to the vanity of speculators imagining hydrologically impossible towns, an endless extension of the city’s fringes farther into the dissolving marsh. The closer you approach, the towers of downtown bathed in a damp haze, the city appears like Atlantis ascending to reveal itself to a new age but this is just another soluble delusion. The exits to nowhere, the road collapsing into the soft earth which rolls the car like a small boat or drums a rattling tattoo, are reminders that the waters are gradually reclaiming the black muck bottom of forgotten dinosaur oceans, washed down by continental rivers, returning itself to the sea.

Every boarded corner barroom with its murals for Regal Beer is a dream. Canal Street with its tourist streetcars and its empty sailor’s stores is a dream. The mansions of forgotten cotton along St. Charles Avenue are a dream. The Lakefront shuttered at dusk against the predation of old fishermen and young lovers is a dream. The swallowed dreams confront us everywhere like empty bowls with the crazed scrapings of forgotten suppers, rattle in our ears like a bottle tree. They suck at our ankles like quicksand but the natives know the trick of crossing. We quicken our steps toward the corner spilling music and beer into the street, moving toward gumbo and corner smokers and everywhere the brass alleluia and the African drum. We move beneath the notice of the Manhattan-fashioned condos of the New Americans. Their dreams of bringing us the Anglo-Saxon gospel is another morsel for the hungry city.

Only those who willingly surrender their dreams to the city will see the windows of heaven opened and poured down upon them a blessing of dreams until there is no need. Sure its the old Malachi racket of every UHF messiah but just ask any oilman banished to Houston perdition contemplating the ex-wife bedrooms of his empty mansion as he puts the revolver to his lips. Look in the sunken, shadowed eyes of the skeleton woman backing her pearlescent Escalade into the shopping mall parking space. What use is an immortal soul without a guitar? What good is prosperity without a bar-tab entry to balance the books? What is the reason for a dream if you will not place it on the table and spin the wheel? Only the broken angels of St. Claude understand the bargain and make it freely and wear their dreams like ink in the skin. A terrible light pours out of their eyes like tears and bathes the city in dreams.

Cryptic Envelopment December 21, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Dancing Bear, New Orleans, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Jerry Garcia, New Yea, solstice, The wheel.
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The faster we go, the rounder we get.

Happy New Year.

It’s After the End of the World December 21, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Dancing Bear, New Orleans, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK.
Tags: apocalypse, calendar, Macha, Maya, Mayan, Pacha
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“It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”
– Sun Ra

I did not see the end of the world up close and personal, but I lived it with a vicarious survivor’s guilt seven years ago that was–for me–world shattering.
Shall we rehearse those memories, if only to put to rest the nonsense of millennial crazies? It is an exercise more appropriate to Good Friday than Christmas so let it pass. I will not mar your holiday with that old crown of thorns.

And yet it is fitting to remember as the great Mayan wheel turns from Macha to the Pacha that the elders of that race promise a transformation not of the universe but of the hearts of men. In New Orleans we live with peril the way the rest of America lives with Starbucks, ubiquitous and just around the corner. Men have gashed canals into the earth and sucked the black blood of the ancestors, collapsing geological into historical time and dooming the lands and cultures of the Creoles and Acadians to eradication. It is not possible to forget that the great cities of the Maya lasted centuries longer than New Orleans can survive. One can only hope that instead of the false apocalypse people remember the words of the Mayan elders, who tell us that the the new cycle, the Pacha, will be the end of man’s dominion, the lifting of Yahweh’s curse, and the beginning of a time of humanity’s cohabitation with the earth and with each other. A thousand years from now, let the broken towers of downtown rise up from the water to remind everyone of the foolishness of the past.

Here on Fortin Street, a dozen miles as the crow counts from The End of the World Marina, it is Solstice not Apocalypse. Here it is already after the end of the world. Tonight I will kindle a fire in the cold clear night and roast meat and drink strong ale as my German ancestors would have done. If tonight there are parties in New Orleans we do not mock anyone’s gods. We thank our own, the tangled saints of Africa and Spain and the gods of our ancestors, for another day and a year to come on this fragile land.

Odd Words December 20, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in Toulouse Street.
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Hogswatchnight is almost upon us, and if you are one of those people who finished shopping in October, well, we hate you. For the rest, I think you know there this is going. Anyone on your list who would not enjoy a book probably doesn’t belong on your list unless they are a relative, in which case I recommend a festive holiday tie or pair of socks. Better yet, get them a festive holiday tale that will confirm their opinion that you are the “Odd one” in the family: Hogfather

& Sunday, Dec. 23 17 Poets! and the Maple Leaf Bar Reading Series unite for a benefit for The Kitchen, a New York City non-profit, interdisciplinary organization whose facilities were damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Dave Brinks and Megan Burns at The Goldmine, 701 Dauphine St., will be opening the doors from 6 pm to 10 pm for a showing of the film POETRY IN MOTION, featuring Burroughs, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Snyder, Algarin, Snyder, Carroll, McClure, DiPrima, and many many more, followed by an open mic. No admission, but donations will be solicited to send to THE KITCHEN. At 3 p.m. Nancy Harris and the Maple Leaf Reading Series will host an open mic for donations to THE KITCHEN.

& If you’re looking for the perfect New Orleans holiday book don’t check the counters at Barnes & Noble. Get yourself out to your favorite local indie bookstore and buy a copy of The YAT Dictionary, by the insanely hilarious Chris Champagne. You can get yours personalized by Chris today at Octavia Books 3:30 to 5 PM, Maple Street by Bayou St John at 6pm, Friday, Dec. 21 at Finn McCool’s Christmas Market or Saturday, Dec. 22 at Crescent City Books on Chartres at 6 p.m.

& Another great gift book for Orleanians would be Rene Brunet’s and Jack Stewart’s chronicle of neighborhood movie theaters There’s One In Your Neighborhood. The authors will sign their book at Octavia Books Saturday, Dec. 22 at Octavia Books at 2 p.m. For more than a century the Brunet family has dedicated their lives to the movie theater industry. The co-author’s father opened his first theater in 1905 on Canal Street. When his father died in 1946, Rene Jr. at age 25, became the owner and operating manager of the Imperial Theater, which his father had built in 1921, was involved in preserving the oy Theater and Loew’s State Theater and, at the age of 75, saved the last single screen neighborhood movie theater in New Orleans, the Prytania Theater. He still owns and manages the Prytania and appears there every night, taking tickets at the door.

& Saturday at Maple Street Books it’s a holiday story time with Miss Maureen at 11:30 a.m. featuring Gaspard and Lisa’s Christmas Surprise by Anne Gutman and Georg Hallensleben

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.

Bad Apples December 16, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in A Fiction, cryptic envelopment, New Orleans, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Coco Robicheaux, Frenchman Street, Kenny Holladay, The Apple Barrel
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The Apple Barrel is a trip hazard with a liquor license, 500 square feet maybe counting the superfluous jukebox I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard. In front Kenny Claiborne in once-white Western boots sings Indian Red like a Seventh Ward Kaddish over a mournful dobro. Momma Cat passes the tips spittoon while keeping time with a tambourine stick she says she got at church. Marco and Monica who painted the mural behind the band are in from Sarasota and as we talk Claiborne calls “Coldplay. Because we can” and the dobro hollers its own metal voice into the song. Piano Dave says the tattoos at Electric Ladyland are overpriced but I still contemplate Bukowski and Maddox on my forearms and think anyone I have to explain them to is probably not worth working for. The tourists sit mostly in the back, as expressionless and obvious as tinsel Christmas trees in a bail bondsman’s office, nursing incongruous Stella Artois until they give up or get a table at Adolfo’s upstairs. Photos of Coco Robicheaux watch over us with a Bodhisattva’s Cheshire serenity and I write and have to scratch out Kenny Holladay instead of Claiborne when I start to jot these notes but as long as there’s a band I am half right: Coco and Kenny and a host of others whose boots will never pass through these door again are as palpable as the smoke from the musicians’ cigarettes. I contemplate my bottle and think that if I have another Jockamo there’s no telling what’s going to happen but we are prepared to exercise the uncertainly principle until we raise Schrodinger’s cat from the grave. We order Reposado shook over ice and tell J.D. to make one for himself, then pour the first taste onto the floor. Somewhere outside the door is the heart of Saturday night and Apple Maps will never get you there. You have to follow the woman dressed in wrong-holiday rabbit ears through this door and never be afraid to drink what’s in front of you.

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.

To the Moon, Alice December 11, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in A Fiction, Federal Flood, hurricane, je me souviens, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Hurricane Sandy, Superstorm Sandy
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The TWA terminal of gracefully contorted concrete stands ready to load orbital shuttles that will never come. I imagine Stanley Kubric in transit from L.A. to London stepping out of that building to stretch his legs and standing agog as I do, strains of the Vienna Waltz spinning through the air.

My weather app on the phone tells me I am in Far Rockaway.

There is something equally fantastic in the Jet Blue terminal, an ominous normality while somewhere beneath the view of arriving and departing passengers survivors huddle in tents. My phones’ weather feature says I am in Far Rockaway.

This does not look like Far Rockaway in the wake of Sandy. It looks like Starbucks and Cinnabon and I ♥ NY t-shirts. There is no Sandy memorial newspaper or magazine. There is no sign that just across the way people are huddled in tents in the freezing cold. They lack the dramatic quality of the huddled Black masses at the convention center, the suggestion of the alien that makes it all OK. God forbid we should see real Americans shivering in the freezing cold like Syrian refugees.

There is no mention of Sandy’s aftermath on the Jet Blue in flight video. Nothing to see here. Move along.

It can’t happen here.

Geography is Wrong December 9, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in A Fiction, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
Tags: fiction
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Geography is wrong. The world has its edges. You first discover this in school, especially if you are a quiet or odd child. Forget Pythagoras. Whatever your teacher said about a circular world you begin to find its corners, in retreat or in escape. Definite rectangles. Less tangible than the globe in the corner but clearly there.

Later, older and out in the world, you discover its edges.

This one is beautiful, indefinite, a faint, prismatic progression from sky to sea blue. You wonder if it has a sound, water falling over the edge like the surf on the rocks below you but steadier, a sound like sunlight on the skin, bound to the edge like the sun to its circuit. I can no more hear it from here than I can sunbathe at midnight, but I can imagine it and for now, that is enough. This is a quiet corner like those you remember from childhood, perfectly suited to lapses into imagination. I have had enough of edges—the crumbling soft rock and plummeting air, the hard mathematical choices, knives like laughter—and prefer this one keeps its distance for now: remote, beautiful and available.

There are two ways down from this rolling hill. One leads through the scrub to a road that leads to a highway that leads to an airport where planes roar backward and tail first in time toward places I have been and will not visit again. The other wanders lazily down until it is it cloven into two forks: left toward town, right toward the beach. Not a complicated choice and one completely out of your hands. You either need to go into town for something, groceries and bit of human company as you sip a beer, or you need nothing and want nothing and so go down to the beach, lay in the warm sand with your head pillowed on a spare towel, and look toward that striated edge-sky in the distance.

I arrived here, passport expired, with just enough money in a distant bank to make myself welcome. There is no need to renew my papers. Dollars are introduction enough and I am in no hurry to go. As long as the money lasts I am greeted at the market, poured my regular beer without asking, and mostly left alone. I ignore my fellow countrymen whenever I can, who arrive here only by accident or worse, driven by a sense of adventure I recognize and avoid. I wear the loose-fitting local clothes and a straw hat and let the sun be my disguise. Cornered, I smile and shrug and hold up my hands to say, not much, then direct them towards the magnificent cliffs further up the road, the explosions of surf, the rugged, sculptured stone, the cliff divers. I recommend a hotel there I have never visited and walk back up the sloping path toward the cottage.

I stop at the fork, select a comfortable rock and watch a liquid sun slowly pour over the horizon, spreading a molten orange line that momentarily illuminates the edge. I wait for the green flash, a signal to proceed, but it does not come. A shadowless twilight illuminates the path. The further I go from the shore the more the surf takes on the steady roar as of water over a cataract. Someday the green flash will come, and I will know it is time to go. Until then the sound of distant water lulls me to sleep.

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
1 comment so far

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
4 comments

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.

Cranes December 1, 2012

Posted by Mark Folse in cryptic envelopment, Fortin Street, Toulouse Street.
1 comment so far

The rain erodes rock,
crevices for the trees but
cranes are eternal.

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Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

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Matthew 25:40 December 25, 2012

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Cryptic Envelopment December 21, 2012

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Bad Apples December 16, 2012

Odd Words December 13, 2012

To the Moon, Alice December 11, 2012

Geography is Wrong December 9, 2012

Odd Words December 6, 2012

Death Will Tremble to Take Us December 5, 2012

O-o-o-oh, Romeo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o… December 3, 2012

Cranes December 1, 2012

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