Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

Odd Words January 27, 2011

Let’s start this week with literary tattoos. For over a year I had poet/playwright Raymond “Moose” Jackson’s haunting spoken word poem about New Year’s Eve 2006 in New Orleans “o’neil’s lament” on my I-Pod and would listen to it over and over again, with it’s powerful refrain that seemed to speak for everyone in New Orleans: “I am not allright, but I am upright.” When I went to get my fifth anniversary tattoo, a fairly common (for us) fleur-de-lis, I knew just how I wanted to personalize it, with those very words.

After I wrote the intro over the weekend, local artist provocateur Rex Dingler shows up on Facebook with these pictures. The site linked to above has a message that comes back if you email them saying they have such a backlog they don’t know when they’ll get around to posting anymore. If you have a literary tattoo send me a pic and some information on yourself and why you chose it and maybe we’ll make that a feature here.

And so, to the listings. I haven’t mentioned the ground rules in a while. I don’t post everything going on in town, just things I’m liable to show up for purely out of personal taste. Or because, well, it’s Odd which is a recurring them here. If you have an event coming up be sure to drop a line to markfolse ~AT~ rocketmail ~d0t~ com. If you actually read the blog, chances are it’s cool enough to list here.

§ On Thursday editors and contributors of the bilingual Arabic/English literary series Meena present a reading with musical accompaniment. 7 p.m. at Little Morocco , 7457 St. Charles Ave.

§ This sounds like a fun read, if you’re of a certain, um, bent : Meet Jeffrey and Randal, two desperate junkies and your guides on this top-to-bottom fun-house tour of Hollywood’s underbelly. From infamous crime scenes to celebrity treatment centers, SICK CITY is an outrageous page-turning adventure set in the sun-bleached wilds of LA. Tony O’Neill will be reading and signing Saturday night at 6 p.m and at the Maple Leaf Book Shop at 1 p.m.

§ While the library calendar is mostly listing story and reading time for kids and that sort of thing, I think I’ll need to wander over one day and check out this exhibit at the Main Branch on Loyola Avenue: Freedom Riders–A traveling exhibition developed by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in partnership with American Experience to tell the story of the 1961 Freedom Rides. On display at the Main Library during the month of January.

§ The Maple Leaf is an open mike on Sunday, and 17 Poets! will return next week with a very special feature pair. Watch this space for details.

Odd Words January 19, 2011

Let’s begin with an interview on TheMillions (and likely a book) every serious blogger should have a look at: The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay by Carl H. Klaus. The author is the founder of the NonFiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa and a prolific essayist himself.

I disagree with one part of the interview because it makes the mistake of generalizing bloggers when bogging is in fact a format, and in that format you find a wide range of writing from the most mundane to the truly inspired. (We sort of fall in the middle here, or at least I hope just a bit in the upper end of the class):

TM: Let’s talk about Montaigne. Andrew Sullivan has written in the Atlantic that Montaigne was “the quintessential blogger.” And Sarah Bakewell, who has just come out with a new biography of Montaigne, recently wrote in the Paris Review that “bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago” by Montaigne. I think you get much closer to the truth in your essay on Montaigne when you write that he “openly espouses a policy not of naturalness but of studied casualness or, to be more exact, artful artlessness.” Would you agree with me that it’s wrong to equate most bloggers today with Montaigne’s “artful artlessness?”

CK: Well listen, the differences between Montaigne and bloggers are so manifold that I find it surprising that anyone would even think of comparing them – because they have different agendas and completely different ways of going about writing. For example, Montaigne’s freewheeling style is grounded in an overriding concern with echoing the flow of his thought. Now the bloggers aren’t concerned with that kind of interiority. Their writing is largely concerned with topical subjects of the moment, and they have no consciousness of consciousness. That’s not what they’re after. Even more importantly, bloggers’ pieces are one-shot affairs, whereas Montaigne took his essays through three separate revisions. And the revisions were made by additions, by accretion. He never dropped anything.

If you’ve actually shown up here by anything other than a complete accident and have read so far I think you can surmise what my objections are. Toulouse Street is certainly concerned with the flow of thought, with interiority. It is entirely about my observations of the world (the city in particular) and about things I come across in my reading that set a train of thought running. I don’t write about public affairs, sports, food, my children, etc. Blogging is category so generic as to be almost meaningless. It would be like calling all writers “bookers”. If anything, this bit of the Internet has evolved from a sort of cork-board of odd pictures and moments into something else, just as Wet Bank Guide evolved from an exercise in explaining Katrina and the Federal Flood into one of explaining New Orleans. In both instances, I landed in the same place: telling not so much a story as what I’m thinking about at a particular place and time in a way that makes it worth the bother to read.

Still, for all my quibbles with that one question and answer, I think The Made-Up Self: Impersonation In the Personal Essay is yet another book I’m going to have to find time to ready.

§ I’m publishing this entry a day early so you’ll still have time to make this event at the Maple Street Book Shop: Jordan Flaherty, along with local poet Asia Rainey, will be the shop at 6:00 P.M. to discuss and sign Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to Jena Six. Eve Ensler, playwright of The Vagina Monologues and activist and founder of V-Day, says, This is the most important book I*ve read about Katrina and what came after. In the tradition of Howard Zinn this could be called The People*s History of the Storm. Jordan Flaherty was there on the front lines. For more information about this book, please visit floodlines.org.

§ Otherwise another quiet week. At the Maple Leaf on Sunday Cleveland poet Russell Vidrick reads from his work with poet Joseph Makkos. 17 Poets! is still on hiatus until February. Nothing else much at the bookstores of interest to me (the criteria for getting listed. That or a beer).

Odd Words January 13, 2011

My own fascination with the Arctic began during a decade in North Dakota, that unbroken site line to the horizon over the frozen landscape, but what’s captured my attention in this discussion of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is the connection between the author’s time in the earthquake disaster zone in Chile and the connection he found to the experience of the people of the Arctic north to place, and their sense of dislocation due to modernization and industrialization, the sense of profound attachment to place: mundane geography (to the outside) as a primal anchor, almost a sacred precinct. This book is jumping way up to the top of my endless backlog.

§ New Orleans is a town in love with its history of burlesque, with what seems a half-dozen troops of artists practicing that art of erotic dance. So its no surprise that Octavia Books would host author Karren Abbott and her book AMERICAN ROSE: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee. You have to love the Oscar Wilde quote on the store’s home page announcing this event: ““America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” January 15 at 6 p.m. at Octavia Books which is of course on Octavia Street.

§ UPDATE A new reading series hosted by Thaddeus Conti, Saturdays at 7 at the Jupiter Gallery across from the R-Bar. I was at a birthday party for Jonathan Kline and was told about it but forgot to write down who was reading. I carry a pen and notebook for a reason, or could have put it in the phone but the party hosted by his wife and local poety Gina Ferrara was too much fun. No guarantee of a reading this Saturday, but I’ll try to find out before then and update this post.

§ UPDATE On January 19th Jordan Flaherty, along with several others TBA, will be at the Maple Street Book Shop at 6:00 P.M. to discuss and sign Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to Jena Six. Eve Ensler, playwright of The Vagina Monologues and activist and founder of V-Day, says, “This is the most important book I’ve read about Katrina and what came after. In the tradition of Howard Zinn this could be called The People’s History of the Storm. Jordan Flaherty was there on the front lines.”

§ UPDATE The Maple Leaf Bar Poetry Series will be an open mike this Sunday.

§ UPDATE 17 Poets! reading series at the Goldmine Saloon will resume Feb. 3.

We do seem to like to have our salons in saloons here in New Orleans. Again, if you have an event coming up, please be sure to email me so I can make sure it’s on here.

Odd Words January 6, 2011

Last week I wrote about Bary Hannah,and someone sent me this link to a NYT reviewer’s take on the Long, Last, Happy.

I accept their criticisms of his iconic treatment of conventional plotting but I wonder myself if conventional narrative is essential. I just watched the film Crash and had a long discussion about it revolving around the idea that it was a story born of story boards, the creation first of characters and the situations that defined them and then the arrangement into a narrative that came not so much as an afterthought but as something born of those character and the situations, an assemblage of flash fiction nuggets into a narrative that ultimately works. Perhaps that worked so well here because it was a collaborative process, a collage assembled by many hands saying “no, no, this goes here”, something natural to Hollywood and the making of film.

In the end, what matters is that the work is engaging, opens a door to another world. For the purposes of pure providing the reader escape from their mundane life conventional narrative is as essential as the conventions of sitcom or daytime drama. If one’s purpose is the transformation of perspective, the opening of doors in the readers’ mind they did not know were there perhaps a disordering of conventional expectation about narrative is essential. If the goal is to take the expectations of a Southern Writer and to smash them and assemble something new out of the pieces, it’s perfect.

And so, to the listings.

§ UPDATE A new reading series hosted by Thaddeus Conti, tonight (Saturday) at 7 a the Jupiter Gallery across from the R-Bar. I was at a birthday party for Jonathan Kline and was told about it but forgot to write down who was reading. I carry a pen and notebook for a reason, or could have put it in the phone but the party was too much fun.

§ The first reading of the year at the Latter Library will be on Saturday, January 8th. The reading will happen at 2pm before the Saints play Seattle. The featured poets are Megan Burns, Jonathan Kline and Joseph Makkos. These readings are organized by another fantastic poet and contributor to A Howling in the Wires, Gina Ferrara.

§ On Sunday, January 9th Poet Bob Matlock reads from his work, followed by an open mike at the Maple Leaf Bar, 3-ish. No Saints game this Sunday so it should be peaceful on the patio.

§ Catholic school children were spared both Louisiana History and Health classes, so I had no idea there was a major slave revolt in New Orleans in 1811, but consider that I lived through (as a small child) the ugly days of New Orleans’ Resegratation in the early 1960s (which at least partly explains why I was in Catholic school). I call it resegratation because that’s precisely what happened, the erection of new structures to defeat attempts to desegregate the schools and we live everyday with the results of the creation of educational Bantustans. I may not make the signing, but apparently I know more about the slave uprising in Naiti than I do in my own state, so even if I miss this the book goes on the list. Garden District Books will host a discussion and signing of American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt by Dan Rasmussen Jan. 8 from 1-3 p.m.

§ Maple Street Bookstore is starting a book discussion group for writers, focusing on books about writing starting on January 10th. First up: read and discuss Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. You’ll receive a 10% discount on the book if you purchase it at Maple and join the circle! I’m not anxious to quite The Rumpus online poetry book club, which already sets be back $20 a month for a pre-publication title, but this sounds interesting.

§ In a similar vein Garden District Books will feature The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. So if you’re got a manuscript or even just a good idea you can drop by and give a one minute to pitch your book ideas to a once-in-a-lifetime, all-star cast of publishing experts, including Arielle Eckstut & David Henry Sterry, co-founders of The Book Doctors and co-authors of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published; Kathleen Nettleton of prestigious Pelican Publishing; and Susan Larson, author, ex-book editor of The New Orleans Times-Picayune who now hosts The Reading Life on WWNO-FM, is vice president for programming of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Just keep in mind that your chances of success fall somewhere between those of an American Idol contestant and those of the kids up the street at Stalling Park who want to play in the NBA. My recommendation, buy the book on writing at Octavia and Write Like a Motherfucker.

§ New Orleans is a town in love with its history of burlesque, with what seems a half-dozen troops of artists practicing that art of erotic dance. So its no surprise that Octavia Books would host author Karren Abbott and her book AMERICAN ROSE: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee. You have to love the Oscar Wilde quote on the store’s home page announcing this event: ““America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” January 15 at 6 p.m. at Octavia Books which is of course on Octavia Street.