September | 2013 | Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

James Joyce: 1929 Reading of Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegan’s Wake September 30, 2013

Posted by The Typist in books, cryptical envelopment, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Anna Livia Plurabelle, Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce, James Joyce: 1929 Reading of Anna Livia Plurabelle
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Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ‘Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip ! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread ! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbing till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me. that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas! Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all! Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest zswound. Oronoko ! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper! It’s well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait’s creakorheuman bitts your butts disagrees. Amn’t I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere! Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns. Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moy-valley way. Towy I too, rathmine.

Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland ! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord ! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us ! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

James Joyce

Whoops, nailed the wrong guy–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. for Banned Books Week September 26, 2013

Posted by The Typist in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Banned Books Week, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
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I have been picking examples from the famous obscenity cases, but here is one from the ongoing battle against the banning of books by school boards and others, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected . . . The
flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ who didn’t look like much, was actually the son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought . . .
Oh boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch this time! And that thought had a brother: There are right people to lynch.
People not well connected . . . . The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really WAS a
nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections then he had . . . . So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought . . . since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then just before the nobody died . . . . The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son . . . God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections.’

Odd Words September 26, 2013

Posted by The Typist in books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, Toulouse Street.
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& Thursday at 6 p.m. the UNO English Departments hosts Yeah, You Write!, a reading by undergraduate writers of poetry, fiction and non-fiction featuring Garrett Piglia, Jasmine Angel, Riley Bingham, Ryan Bonfanti, Shaima Washington, Sierz Martinez and William Web at the Sandbar.

& Also tonight at 6 p.m. Garden District Book Shop hosts Ava Leavell Haymon and Eldest Daughter, Poems. “In Eldest Daughter, Ava Leavell Haymon displays her mastery of the craft and engages us with the poetic gifts we have come to expect from her. As in previous collections, she combines the sensory and the spiritual in wild verbal fireworks. Concrete descriptions of a woman’s life in the mid-twentieth-century American South mix with wider concerns about family lies and truths, and culture that supports or forbids clear speech.”

& At 7 p.m. the Jefferson Parish East Bank Regional Library will offer a free screening of the film version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in honor of Banned Books Week.

& Press Street/Antenna Gallery is offering an OPEN STUDIO of after school academic tutoring & creative writing on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays from 3pm-5:30pm. The Gallery is located at 3718 St Claude Ave.

& Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. the Juju Bag Cafe, 5363 Franklin Ave., . presents a Spoken Word Showcase, with happy hour from 5-7 and open mic starting at 7:30 p.m. Check whodatpoets.com for featured performers.

& Odd Words usually doesn’t list plays, but how can I resist one written by a book store manager and set in a bookstore? What Do You Say to a Shadow? opens THIS FRIDAY at 7:30 PM, at the Shadowbox Theatre. In this original one-act by local author Michael Allen Zell, an old woman wanders into a French Quarter bookstore right before closing. As she tells her tale, woven with crime, New Orleans history, and books, the bookseller realizes there may be more to this person than meets the eye. Starring Big Easy Award winning actors Mary Pauley and Richard Mayer. Directed by Angela Jo Strohm. Final weekend Sept. 27-29th. 7:30 PM on Fridays. 7 PM on Saturdays and Sundays.

& Friday night Maple Street Book Shop hosts Texas gals and lifelong friends, Johnell Kelley and Robbyn Hill, a.k.a. Joan Rylen, signing their third and latest book, Big Easy Escapade 6-8PM. This is the third in their series of girl-get-aways turned mysteries.

& National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward comes to Octavia Books Friday night to present and sign her new book, MEN WE REAPED at 6 p.m. In this stirring memoir, Jesmyn Ward contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the still great risk of being a black man in the rural South. In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why?

& Saturday at 10:30 a.m. the Main Branch of the New Orleans Public Library hosts Book Talk by Martha Fitzgerald and her book The Courtship of Two Doctors: A 1930 Love Story of Letters, Hope & Healing. Journalist Martha Fitzgerald will discuss her parents, who were two doctors in training, one in New Orleans, and one in Nebraska whose letters describe 1930s New Orleans and pre-antibiotics medicine.

& At 11 a.m. Maple Street books hosts Poppy Tooker signing her book Louisiana Eats 11:30-1PM at our Uptown shop (7529 Maple Street). A native New Orleanian, Poppy Tooker is passionate about food and the people who make it. She hosts the popular weekly radio show Louisiana Eats From which this book originates. From the transcripts of fifteen one-on-one interviews featuring specialists of iconic Louisiana foods, Tooker introduces the reader to the stories behind the everyday foods that make culinary history.

& Story Time with Miss Maureen at Maple Street Books at 11:30 am Saturday will feature Secret Pizza Party by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri. Racoon loves pizza, but someone is always chasing him away from his favorite food with a broom! The solution? A secret pizza party, of course!

& The Algiers Regional Library will host a Banned Books Event Saturday at 2 p.m. All ages are invited to listen and read aloud from books that have been challenged or banned in schools, libraries and communities over the years. Special guest Susan Larson, host of WWNO’s The Reading Life will also share an exerpt from one of her favorite titles.

& Saturday at 3 p.m. the New Orleans event for the global 100,000 Poets for Change will host a reading/event to promote peace, justice and an ecologically sustainable way of life at the Zeitgeist Multi Disciplinary Arts Center Inc, 1618 Oretha C Haley Blvd, from 3-6 p.m. with a start-studded cast of local poets including include Jamie Bernstein, Johnette Downing, Mark Folse, Adelle Gautier, David Lanoue, Nanette Ledet, Delia Tomino Nakayama, Scott Nicholson, Melinda Palacio, Valentine Pierce, Kalamu ya Salaam and Mona Lisa Saloy. (I typed “star studded” before I remembered I was on the list. Really.)

& Sunday afternoon Octavia Books hosts a children’s book double-header. First, at 1 p.m. there is Denise Walter McConduit and THE BOY WHO WOULDN’T READ. In this captivating and hilarious illustrated poem, young readers will learn that a world without words is confusing and downright exhausting! Meet Robbie, who would rather hide under his desk and swing from chandeliers than read. At 2 p.m., it’s Rob Owen’s SPY BOY CHEYENNE, AND NINETY-SIX CRAYONS. This colorful journey demonstrates strength and independence while participating in important cultural and family traditions. An eight-year-old boy masks for the first time as Spy Boy in his Mardi Gras Indian tribe. His dad, Big Chief, and everyone else in the tribe, make suits in almost every color, including Goldenrod and Granny Smith Apple, just like the colors in Spy Boy’s crayon box. Spy Boy proudly leads his tribe down crowded New Orleans streets, but when he looks back, he discovers that he is lost and separated from his tribe. Follow Spy Boy as his spirit guide, Cheyenne, and his box of ninety-six crayons help him return to his family

& New Orleans Banned Book Week celebration at Le Nuit Comedy Theater will feature readings from Banned & Challenged Works by authors including Mark Folse, Lorin Gaudin, Denise W. McConduit, Kay Murphy, and Greg Herren. Also, music by Seva Venet’s Freedom of Jazz Trio! And a special screening of “Within Our Gates,” a film by Oscar Micheaux. I promise this will not be a family friendly event as I will be reading the first stroph of Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL” including all the naughty bits that landed the book in an obscenity trial.

& At 3 p.m. Sunday, Octavia Books will then feature Carrie Brown and THE LAST FIRST DAY. From the author of The Rope Walk, here is the story of a woman’s life in its twilight, as she looks back on a harrowing childhood and on the unaccountable love and happiness that emerged from it. “Brown has accomplished one of literature’s most difficult feats-to write compellingly, and convincingly, about human happiness. The Last First Day is marvelous.” -Ron Rash, author of Serena and The Cove.

& Every Sunday at 3 p.m. he Maple Leaf Reading Series, the oldest continuous reading series in the south, founded by Everette Maddox, features guest poets and an open mic.

Sunday is Slam and Spoken Word Day in New Orleans:

& WhoDatPoets.com lists five Spoken Word shows on Sunday nights:

The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. Spoken Word artists perform as a resident artist sketches the performers. Doors at 7 pm. and show at 8 pm. at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street.
The Black Star Cafe, 800 Belleville St. in Algiers at 7 p.m.;
The Shadowbox Theater at 2400 St.Claude Ave. at 7 p.m.;
Espe’s Kitchen, 1743 N Broad St. at 7 p.m.; and,
the T******* Wine Lounge, 3001 Tulane Ave., doors at 7 p.m., Admission $5.

For phone numbers with more details on all these readings visit WHODATPOETS.COM.

& Monday’s meeting of the Fiction Writers Group at the East Jefferson Regional Library is cancelled.

& 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 6 p.m. Octavia Books features a presentation and booksigning by John Mosier celebrating the publication of his new book, VERDUN: The Lost History of the Most Important Battle of World War I, 1914-1918. Alongside Waterloo and Gettysburg, the Battle of Verdun during the First World War stands as one history’s greatest clashes. Yet it is also one of the most complex and misunderstood, in a war only imperfectly grasped. In VERDUN, historian John Mosier offers an insightful reassessment of this titanic struggle in time for the 100th anniversary of the war’s commencement in 2014 .

& The 1718 Society’s October Reading will be Tuesday at 7PM at The Columns Hotel. Author and journalist Daniel Brook is the featured reader. His most recent book is A History of Future Cities. In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once themselves instant cities— St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai—to watch their “dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century.

& Also on Tuesday at 6 p.m. Garden District Books features Pamela Binnings Ewen’s An Accidental Life. New from lawyer-turned-novelist Pamela Binnings Ewen, An Accidental Life is fiction based on fact: the testimony of registered nurse Jill Stanek before a U.S. Congressional Committee confirming that it was routine for doctors in Chicago’s Christ Hospital to have nurses take infants born alive during abortions down to a “soiled utility room” and leave them to die.

& The East Jefferson hosts an Author Event! In Search of the Spirit World by John Werner Tuesday at 7 p.m. Werner discusses “all phases of the spirit world, particularly the powers of good and evil, heaven and hell, the difference between the spiritual abodes of man and angelic being, and more.” Werner was born a Catholic but he also comes from a family of psychics.

& On Tuesdays the Jefferson Parish Library Writers Group meets at the Westwego library from 7-9 pm.

& Every Tuesday night get on the list to spit at the longest running spoken word venue in New Orleans at Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club hosted by African-American Shakespear. Doors open at 7pm and the Mic pops at 8pm. It is $5 to get in.

& On Wednesday the Blood Jet Poetry Series is at BJs in the Bywater (4301 Burgundy) at 8PM. This week’s featured readers are poet/publisher Bill Lavender reading from his new novel Q & Jamie Bernstein reading from his "fictional biography" of James Booker.

& Don’t forget to stop by and visit The Historic New Orleans Collection exhibition exploring the work of 1960s counterculture artists Jon and Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb. The display, “Alternative Imprints: Jon Webb, Gypsy Lou, and the Hand-Sewn World of the Loujon Press,” will be on view in the Williams Research Center, located at 410 Chartres St., through Saturday, Nov. 16. Gallery hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 9:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m., and admission is free.

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d: Leaves of Grass 24 for Banned Books Week September 26, 2013

Posted by The Typist in books, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Banned Books Week, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
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24
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current
and index.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart of on the same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the
father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of
my own body, or any part of it,
Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded
duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
Sun so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my
winding paths, it shall be you!
Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d,
it shall be you.

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the
friendship I take again.

That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics
of books.

To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising
freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,
The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

OMG did he just say “vagina”? excerpts from Joyce’s Penelope episode from Ulysses for Banned Books Week September 25, 2013

Posted by The Typist in books, New Orleans, NOLA, Odd Words, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Banned Books Week, James Joyce, Molly Bloom, Penelope, Ulysses, vagina
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Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in the world besides theres something queer about their children always smelling around those filthy bitches all sides asking me if what I did had an offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold maybe what a question if I smathered it all over his wrinkly old face for him with all my compriments I suppose hed know then and could you pass it easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of Gibraltar the way he put it thats a very nice invention too by the way only I like letting myself down after in the hole as far as I can squeeze and pull the chain then to flush it nice cool pins and needles still theres something in it I suppose I always used to know by Millys when she was a child whether she had worms or not still all the same paying him for that how much is that doctor one guinea please and asking me had I frequent omissions where do those old fellows get all the words they have omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I wouldnt trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else still I liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so severe his nose intelligent like that you be damned you lying strap O anything no matter who except an idiot he was clever enough to spot that of course that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever something he got out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes and I said I hadnt are you sure O yes I said I am quite sure in a way that shut him up

Prescient v. Prurient: Reconsidering Henry Miller for Banned Books Week September 24, 2013

Posted by The Typist in Toulouse Street.
Tags: Banned Books Week, Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Tropic of Cancer
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I had a particularly juicy bit of the Tropic of Cancer, which I am reading for Banned Books Week, ready to post up when I came across this passage:

Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation.

Miller is remembered for his free-wheeling obscenity and obsession with sex, freely catalogued in a genre of his own creation, a transparent not-quite-roam a clef (in the sense that it did not fit the conventions of the novel of his time), works with Henry Miller as an indispensable central character. Tropic of Cancer, in this fashion, prefigures what would become the New Journalism in the 1960s. The passage above, written in the early 1930s, sounds like a something written last week, not last century.

I read The Air Conditioned Nightmare last year and was again shocked at how well Miller dissected the American character, how clearly he observed in the early 1940s the traps our transparent vision of individualism and exceptionalism would lead to, the ones we struggle to gnaw off our own legs today. While Miller is remembered by most, if at all, for his obsession with sex he ought to be remembered among figures like H.L. Menken and Hunter S. Thompson as fiercely perceptive critics of the inherent flaws in the American Dream.

If you want the prurient, you’ll just have to stop by Esoterotica tomorrow night where I’m seriously considering reading some of Tropic of Cancer instead of something original.

Howling for Banned Books Week September 23, 2013

Posted by The Typist in New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Banned Books Week, Howl
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Here is the approximately seven minute excerpt of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” I will be reading at the Banned Books event on the 29th.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan
– sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death
or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock
and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo
– tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king ligh
t of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguou
s picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbala
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnigh
t streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex o
r soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and short
s with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping
and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom
– ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of
the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver–joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves o
r with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat uplifting
s & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on
a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be
crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts…

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308#sthash.H271YdYW.dpuf

Odd Words September 19, 2013

Posted by The Typist in books, literature, New Orleans, Odd Words, Poetry, Toulouse Street.
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& Thursday at 4 pm Octavia Books hosts children’s author Michael Buckley, the bestselling and highly entertaining author of The Sisters Grimm and NERDS series. He will talk about and sign both series, including his latest and final The Sisters Grimm, Book Nine – THE COUNCIL OF MIRRORS – and his about-to-be-released NERDS, Book Five – ATTACK OF THE BULLIES.

& Following Buckley, at 5 p.m. Octavia features three YA authors. Lauren Myracle, the #1 most banned author in America, returns to Octavia Books to present and sign THE INFINITE MOMENT OF US. a warm examination of ordinary teens in a contemporary YA novel that celebrates friendship, romance, and the intensity of first love. Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian when they come to Octavia Books to discuss and sign their new joint novel, FIRE WITH FIRE. When sweet revenge turns sour… Book two of a trilogy from New York Times bestselling author Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian.

& Thursday at 6 p.m. Maple Street Book Shops hosts poet Melissa Ginsburg will be at our Uptown location Thursday, September 19th, at 6PM. She will read from her latest collection, Dear Weather Ghost. Irish musician and writer Danny Ellis will also be signing his memoir, The Boy at the Gate.

& Thursday at 8 p.m. The Shadow Box theater presents Picolla Tushy Presents booze, broads and bukowski, An hour long mixture of story telling, signing, and some burlesque honoring one of the most loved and/or hated poets of all time, Charles Bukowski, performed by women who love him, hate him, try to understand him, and enjoy him. It’s not your typical poetry reading for his was not your typical poetry.

& Thursday at the Jefferson Parish East Bank Regional Library the Great Books Club meets to discuss Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street.

& Odd Words usually doesn’t list plays, but how can I resist one written by a book store manager and set in a bookstore? What Do You Say to a Shadow? opens THIS FRIDAY at 7:30 PM, at the Shadowbox Theatre. In this original one-act by local author Michael Allen Zell, an old woman wanders into a French Quarter bookstore right before closing. As she tells her tale, woven with crime, New Orleans history, and books, the bookseller realizes there may be more to this person than meets the eye. Starring Big Easy Award winning actors Mary Pauley and Richard Mayer. Directed by Angela Jo Strohm. September 13-15, 20-22, and 27-29th. 7:30 PM on Fridays. 7 PM on Saturdays and Sundays.

& Poetry & Pink Ribbons continues its annual series of Write to Wellness workshops. Local NOLA writers lead creative writing workshops and wellness exercises for breast cancer patients, survivors, family and friends. Bring your story. Leave inspired. The instructors include Jarvis DeBerry, Alison Perlegrin Kelly Harris, Maurice Ruffin and Kysha Brown Robinson. There will be a reading by participants of their work on Oct. 19.

& Saturday Octavia Books hosts a children’s book double header. Come meet Anna Dewdney, author and illustrator of the bestselling Llama Llama books, while she is visiting Octavia Books to sign her books. This will be an amazing opportunity to purchase signed editions of her new book, Llama Llama and the Bully Goat, as well as some old favorites. Also featured is ]Annie Barrows. Listen to her new Ivy + Bean adventure, IVY + BEAN TAKE THE CASE. Watch out, you diabolical masterminds! There’s a new detective on Pancake Court: Bean! She laughs at danger! She solves even the most mysterious mysteries! What? There aren’t any mysteries? Then Bean and her assistant, Ivy, will make some.

& Poems & Pink Ribbons: Write for Wellness continues its series in which local NOLA writers lead creative writing workshops and wellness exercises for breast cancer patients, survivors, family and friends. Bring your story. Leave inspired. Poetry Writing Workshops continue through Saturdays October 12, 10 a.m. – Noon at the Keller Library and Community Center.

& Saturday at 11:30 am Maple Street Bookshop hosts Andrea Beaty who’ll be reading and signing her latest picture book Rosie Revere, Engineer is a beautifully-illustrated tale of a girl and her dream to become a great engineer, written by the same powerhouse team that brought us Iggy Peck, Architect. It’s currently number 8 on the New York Times Best Seller List.

& Sunday at 2 pm Garden District Book Shop hosts Frederick Starr and Robert Brantley’s Une Belle Maison: The Lombard Plantation House in New Orlean’s Bywater. Described in an 1835 bill of sale as “une belle maison,” the Lombard plantation house is a rare survivor. Built in the early nineteenth century as a West Indian-style residence, it was the focal point of a large plantation that stretched deep into the cypress swamps of what is now New Orleans’s Bywater neighborhood. Featuring the best Norman trussing in North America, it was one of many plantations homes and grand residences that lined the Mississippi downriver from the French Quarter. This is the story of the rise, fall, and eventual resurrection of one of America’s finest extant examples of West Indian Creole architecture and of the entire neighborhood of which it is an anchor.

& Ever Sunday at 3 p.m. he Maple Leaf Reading Series, the oldest continuous reading series in the south, founded by Everette Maddox, features guest poets and an open mic.

Sunday is Slam and Spoken Word Day in New Orleans:

& WhoDatPoets.com lists four Spoken Word shows on Sunday nights:

The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. Spoken Word artists perform as a resident artist sketches the performers. Doors at 7 pm. and show at 8 pm. at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street.
The Black Star Cafe, 800 Belleville St. in Algiers at 7 p.m.;
The Shadowbox Theater at 2400 St.Claude Ave. at 7 p.m.;
Espe’s Kitchen, 1743 N Broad St. at 7 p.m.; and,
the T—–y Wine Lounge, 3001 Tulane Ave., doors at 7 p.m., Admission $5.

For phone numbers with more details on all these readings visit WHODATPOETS.COM. (If I don’t block out the name of the location at 3001 Tulane, Facebook will reject my ad for promoting alcohol. Go figure.)

& Monday at 6 pm Octavia Books features Margaret Wrinkl, whose Wash takes us on an unforgettable journey across continents and through time, from the burgeoning American South to West Africa and deep into the ancestral stories that reside in the soul. WASH introduces a remarkable new voice in American literature. “A masterly literary work . . . Wrinkle’s novel does not allow us to draw easy correlations but invites us to consider the painful inheritance and implications of such a horrendous moment in American history. Rather than disapproving opprobrium and diatribes, this debut occasions celebration. Haunting, tender and superbly measured, Wash is both redemptive and affirming.” —Major Jackson, The New York Times Book Review.

Monday’s Writers Group at the East Jefferson Regional Library will host guest authors Mary Manhein and Chuck Hustmyre. As director of the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) Laboratory at Louisiana State University, Manhein unravels mysteries of life and death every day. Manhein, an expert on the human skeleton, assists law enforcement by providing profiles of remains that narrow the identification process when the traditional means used by medical examiners or coroners to conduct autopsies are no longer applicable — simply put, when bones are all that are left to tell the story. She assesses age, sex, race, height, signs of trauma, and time since death, and creates clay facial reconstructions. She is the author of fiction and nonfiction books; her latest mystery is Floating Bodies: The Canal Murders. Chuck Hustmyre is a bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction books and a screenwriter. He wrote the Lionsgate movies “House of the Rising Sun” and “End of the Gun.” Before embarking on a full-time writing career, Hustmyre spent 20 years in law enforcement, specializing in violent crime, drug and fugitive investigations. He was born in Baton Rouge and spent most of his law enforcement career in New Orleans

& Tuesday at 4 p.m. Poet-Teacher Delia Tomino Nakayama meets with interested teens and their Parents at poetry workshops initiated especially for teenagers at the Children’s Resource Center of the New Orleans Public Library.

& At the Nix Branch on Tuesday at 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. author Curtis J. Johnson signs Glimpses of Black Life Along Bayou Lafourche. All proceeds will go to the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville

& Tuesday at 6 pm Octavia Books hosts a book launch party celebrating the release of HARLOW, the new novel by David Armand, author of The Pugilist’s Wife (winner of the 2010 George Garrett Fiction Prize). David will give a reading and sign copies.vTaking place over the course of three abysmally cold winter days in the late 1980s, HARLOW tells the story of eighteen-year-old Leslie Somers, a boy who trudges his way through the dark Louisiana backwoods in search of his father, a man whom he has never met.

& Also on Tuesday at 6 pm Garden District Book Shop features Stephen Maitland-Lewis’s novel Ambition, the tale of George Tazoli, an ambitious dealer on the trading floor of a prominent California bank embroiled in romantic and boardroom machinations who learns that even wealth has a price.

& The East Jefferson Regional Library hosts an author event on Tuesday featuring Lisa Brown’s Posing as Nuns, Passing for White: The Gouley Sisters. Brown has documented and published a fascinating history of a somewhat eccentric and short lived order of 19th century nuns in New Orleans. It’s a story of three biological sisters, women of color, who established their own religious order, The Sisters of Our Lady of Lourdes, in 1883. Archbishop Napoleon Perché gave them permission to found the community in 1883, but after his death the same year, the Gouley sisters’ racial ambiguity – they apparently lived as white but appeared in church sacramental records as “colored”—and having closed their order to include only blood relatives, kept them an obscure and officially unrecognized entity within the local Catholic Church

& At the Maple Street Book Shop on Tuesday Saul Conrad, from Boston, who is touring in support of his new LP, will be playing at Maple Street Book Shop Tuesday, September 24th, at 7PM. “Conrad writes and sings at the intersection of Jonathan Richman and Daniel Johnston”, says the Boston Globe, while the Utne Reader has quoted the music as “existing on the far fringes of indie folk.” Singer/songwriter Ruby Ross will be opening.

& On Tuesdays the Jefferson Parish Library Writers Group meets at the Westwego library from 7-9 pm. Also, the East Bank Regional Library presents their weekly local author event featuring Sue Campbell’s Conversations in Heaven, The Amazing Journey at 7 p.m.

& On Wednesday at 2 p.m. in University of new Orleans LA 236 at Les White, Lisa Verner, and Neal Walsh discuss the books that changed their lives. We’ll have snacks and cold drinks for your enjoyment! Open to the public.

& Wednesday evening at 6pm celebrate the new issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas, the LEH’s award-winning quarterly magazine dedicated to the culture and history of our state. This is our sixth publication party at the Louisiana Humanities Center, each of them a festive, salon-style party sponsored by Abita Brewery and Zapp’s Chips. Presenting this time are issue contributors: Rachel Emanuel and AP Turead, Jr., discussing their article on Turead’s experience as the first African-American undergrad at LSU in 1953; Novelist David Armand, who’ll read from his new novel, Harlow, excerpted in the magazine and published this month by Texas A&M University Press; Rich, Tee, and Shirley Marvin, the collectors behind the Noel Rockmore exhibit currently at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum, and the subject of this issue’s cover story.

& On Wednesday the Blood Jet Poetry Series is at BJs in the Bywater (4301 Burgundy) at 8PM.

& Also at 8 pm Wednesday Esoterotica’s sexy literary provocateurs are doing it again… going completely unthemed, and that means anything goes! We’ve been saving some very special work for just this night, and you’re not going to want to miss it. Plus, in case you didn’t know, it’s also Banned Books Week and of course we at Esoterotica love to celebrate our Freedom to Read!

Odd Words September 12, 2013

Posted by The Typist in 504, books, literature, New Orleans, NOLA, novel, Odd Words, Poetry, publishing, reading, Toulouse Street.
Tags: Booklover's Guide to New Orleans, breast cancer, Poems & Pink Ribbons
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This week: The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans, Poetry & Pink Ribbons and a play within a, um, bookstore.

& Thursday at 6 p.m. Octavia Books hosts the launch of The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans, Susan Larson’s informative response to questions most frequently asked her as book editor of the Times-Picayune. Tourists and locals alike want to know what to read, where authors lived, which bookstores to browse, and when literary festivals are scheduled. Now all the answers can be found in this one convenient volume, the only complete directory of New Orleans’s “write life” available.. “Larson’s guide includes: a brief history of the fiction writers, poets, journalists, playwrights, historians, critics, essayists, and others who have flirted with the Crescent City’s muse across the years; a tour of both famous and lesser-known sites throughout the literary landscape, including authors’ homes and hangouts; an extensive reading list of favorite New Orleans titles in categories from mysteries to cooking; and a catalog of bookstores, libraries, literary events, and other resources.

& Thursday also features a Book Release party for the newest poetry collection from Trembling Pillow Press, Laura Goldstein’s loaded arc. Laura Goldstein will be reading from her new collection along with SPECIAL GUEST JS MAKKOS, who will also be performing and releasing his newest chapbook. The launch will be at 1501 St. Roch Avenue at 8 p.m. Goldstein has published six chapbooks as well as poetry and essays in the Denver Quarterly, American Letters and Commentary, MAKE Magazine, How2, Jacket2 and other fine publications. Laura holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches Writing and Literature at Loyola University and co-curates the Red Rover Series with Jennifer Karmin. She lives in Chicago with her husband, artist Brett Ian Balogh. loaded arc is her first full-length collection of poetry. JS MAKKOS is the publisher at Language Foundry, a print maker and poet.

& This is a music event but Jonathan Brown, who is also in the M.F.A. program at U.N.O, is the featured performer. He moved from a hip-hop orientation into music and toss in the M.F.A. and I’m putting this in. Also, Liz Hogan, another M.F.A. candidate at U.N.O., will be performing with the band Shiz. At the Allways Lounge, doors at 7, show at 8. Just in case you thought M.F.A. candidates were a staid lot of elbow patches and girls in glasses, come check this out.

& Thursday The Power of Poetry: A Workshop For Teens workshop sponsored by the Poets & Writers Inc. and led by Poet-Teacher Delia Tomino Nakayama continues at the NOPL Children’s Resource Center Branch, 913 Napoleon Ave. There are workshops today, Monday, Sept. 16, Wednesday Sept. 18, all from 4-6 p.m.

& On Friday at 1:30 p.m. the Walker Percy Center at Loyola University will host Mark LaFlaur reading from and discussing his book Elysian Fields in the cozy living room of Loyola’s Monroe Library. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Maple Street Book Shop will be onsite selling books. LaFluers quirky and compelling tale of two brothers in New Orleans, one a poet seeking to escape his ailing mother and his brother and flee to San Francisco, received starred reviews from both Kirkus Reviews and Publisher’s Weekly.

& Also on Friday at 7 p.m. Maple Street Book Shops hosts a launch party for the latest copy of the New Orleans Review. The new Fall issue is a set of 8 pieces (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry). A number of NOR editors and writers will read brief excerpts from some of the pieces. Wine and cheese will be served prior to the reading.

& Odd Words usually doesn’t list plays, but how can I resist one written by a book store manager and set in a bookstore? What Do You Say to a Shadow? opens THIS FRIDAY at 7:30 PM, at the Shadowbox Theatre. In this original one-act by local author Michael Allen Zell, an old woman wanders into a French Quarter bookstore right before closing. As she tells her tale, woven with crime, New Orleans history, and books, the bookseller realizes there may be more to this person than meets the eye. Starring Big Easy Award winning actors Mary Pauley and Richard Mayer. Directed by Angela Jo Strohm. September 13-15, 20-22, and 27-29th. 7:30 PM on Fridays. 7 PM on Saturdays and Sundays.

& Starting this Saturday Poetry & Pink Ribbons begins in annual series of Write to Wellness workshops. Local NOLA writers lead creative writing workshops and wellness exercises for breast cancer patients, survivors, family and friends. Bring your story. Leave inspired. The instructors include Jarvis DeBerry, Alison Perlegrin Kelly Harris, Maurice Ruffin and Kysha Brown Robinson. There will be a reading by participants of their work on Oct. 19.

& Saturdays Maple Street Bookshop hosts Story Time with Miss Maureen at 11:30 a.m. This week features The Dark by Lemony Snicket, my favorite children’s author pen name of all time. Laszlo is afraid of the dark. The dark lives in the same house as Laszlo. Mostly, though, the dark stays in the basement and doesn’t come into Lazslo’s room. But one night, it does.

& Saturday night the Tender Loin reading series continues at Kajuns Pub at 7 p.m. featuring JOSEPH MAKKOS, and visiting poets LAURA GOLDSTEIN and DANIELA OLSZEWKA! Cold Cuts is a poetry reading interested in performance and a performance interested in reading poetry. Each reading will consist of 3 – often on the theme of 2 poets and a 3rd weird thing: the performative. But we encourage all our poets to perform and all our performances to poet. We like to showcase our TENDER LOIN writers, and we like to showcase local artists. We also like your butt.

& There will be no Sunday reading at the Maple Leaf Reading Series, the oldest continuous reading series in the south, founded by Everette Maddox, due to the Saints game. Or rather due to the stadium-sized sound system that goes with their giant TV screen. It’s a great place to watch the game if you want to feel like you’re in the Dome. Not so great for poetry readings in the back.

& The Scholastic Writing Awards of Southeast Louisiana will kick off their annual competition this Sunday at the University of New Orleans Alumni Center at 4 p.m. featuring readings and performances by past Scholastic winners and Team Slam New Orleans, along with appearances by John Biguenet and Susan Larson. Students, take this chance to register early for the Write@UNO Weekend Workshops–a limited number of spots are available!

Sunday is Slam and Spoken Word Day in New Orleans:

& WhoDatPoets.com lists four Spoken Word shows on Sunday nights:

The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. Spoken Word artists perform as a resident artist sketches the performers. Doors at 7 pm. and show at 8 pm. at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street.
The Black Star Cafe, 800 Belleville St. in Algiers at 7 p.m.;
The Shadowbox Theater at 2400 St.Claude Ave. at 7 p.m.;
Espe’s Kitchen, 1743 N Broad St. at 7 p.m.; and,
the T—–y Wine Lounge, 3001 Tulane Ave., doors at 7 p.m., Admission $5.

& The Haiku Society of New Orleans monthy meeting this Monday will be at the Coffee Shop at 5335 Freret. 6-8pm and dinner across the street at Origami, as the Latter Memorial Library is under constructions. Free and open to all haiku lovers.

& On Tuesday at 6 p.m. at The Garden District Bookshop Pat Kogos discusses and signs her book, Priory, Louisiana. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina enters the Gulf of Mexico, and coastal residents flee the chaos. In the plantation town of Priory, Louisiana, guest rooms of a local inn, The Retreat, become shelter from the storm. Evacuees bond at The Retreat over shared heartache. They watch in disbelief as homes get swept to sea. Loved ones go missing. Passions ignite. No one will escape untouched.Priory, Louisiana is a story about the relentless nature of regret, the puzzling role of God in human suffering, and the opportunity to reinvent yourself after the life you know has washed away.

& Also on Tuesday at 6 p.m. Octavia Books hosts the release event with Poppy Tooker along with photographer David Spielman for <e & m>LOUISIANA EATS! This book gives readers an in-depth, behind the scenes look at Louisiana food producers and personalities interviewed on her popular WWNO (NPR affiliate) radio show of the same name. LOUISIANA EATS! features portrait photographs by David Spielman, revealing faces – some familiar and some, previously unknown who are the subject of each chapter.

& Tuesday at the Allways Lounge at 7 p.m. author Andy Reynolds debuts his novel Spectacle of the Extension. Reading fropm the book on Tuesday will be Sophia Vibra Horodysky and Moose Jackson Jackson will also perform with his band Shock Patina. ” “A young painter armed with a sarcastic tongue and the ability to pull amazing espresso shots, Em has moved across the country to shed her past and lose herself in her artistic process. One night the painting she’s been working on for months comes to life, its presence causing her to question the decisions she’s made and her relationship with reality.”

& On Wednesday the Blood Jet Poetry Series is at BJs in the Bywater (4301 Burgundy) at 8PM. Featured will be Desireee V. Dallagiacomo, and Thaddeus Conti extemporizing over images from his recently published art book Coloring Book for the Criminally Insane from Gallatin & Toulouse Press. Open mic to follow our features, limited sign up.

Complicated Life September 10, 2013

Posted by The Typist in A Fiction, cryptical envelopment, New Orleans, NOLA, The Narrative, The Typist, Toulouse Street.
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Shit Is Fucked September 9, 2013

Posted by The Typist in Murder, New Orleans, NOLA, Toulouse Street, Violence, We Are Not OK.
4 comments

Every single day, someone comes to this blog searching for the victim of a murder in New Orleans. Some days, perhaps birthdays or the anniversary of a death, there are dozens of hits on the list of murder victims I have kept for the last several years. I have not finished last year’s list because it is just so fucking painful. We all have our crosses to bear. Why take up this particular one of cataloging the dead?

I ask myself that question, and then I see a photograph like this of Paris Samuels, age 2, looking at the casket of her sister, 13-month-old Londyn Samuels, who was murdered by gunfire on August 29, as reported by the New Orleans Advocate. And I think if I do not do something, I shall go mad.

Shit Is Fucked. The drunken scene from The Wire where McNulty and Bunk lament the state of their lives, their police work, the general inability to deal with a world gone mad.

We live in a city full of golum-hearted motherfuckers, and short of God going all Sodom and Gomorrah I have no idea how it ever ends.

Odd Words September 4, 2013

Posted by The Typist in Toulouse Street.
Tags: Charles Bukowski, Loujon Press, Susan Larson, The Book Lovers Guide to New Orleans
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The Historic New Orleans Collection has opened a new exhibition exploring the work of 1960s counterculture artists Jon and Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb. The display, “Alternative Imprints: Jon Webb, Gypsy Lou, and the Hand-Sewn World of the Loujon Press,” will be on view in the Williams Research Center, located at 410 Chartres St., through Saturday, Nov. 16. Gallery hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 9:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m., and admission is free. In celebration of the exhibition THNOC will present an afternoon program featuring Edwin J. Blair, who donated many of the materials in the exhibition to THNOC; JoAnn Clevenger, owner of Upperline Restaurant and avid art collector; and Neeli Cherkovski, a poet and Charles Bukowski scholar. Admission is free, and reservations are encouraged as seating is limited. Saturday, Sept. 7, 2–4 p.m. The Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres St. Admission is free; seating is limited. Reservations at wrc@hnoc.org or (504) 523-4662.

Also this week, now available at your local indie bookstores is The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans, Susan Larson’s informative response to questions most frequently asked her as book editor of the Times-Picayune. Tourists and locals alike want to know what to read, where authors lived, which bookstores to browse, and when literary festivals are scheduled. Now all the answers can be found in this one convenient volume, the only complete directory of New Orleans’s “write life” available.. “Larson’s guide includes: a brief history of the fiction writers, poets, journalists, playwrights, historians, critics, essayists, and others who have flirted with the Crescent City’s muse across the years; a tour of both famous and lesser-known sites throughout the literary landscape, including authors’ homes and hangouts; an extensive reading list of favorite New Orleans titles in categories from mysteries to cooking; and a catalog of bookstores, libraries, literary events, and other resources.

If you thought August was slow, the coming week will more than make up for it with book launches, readings and signings galore all over town. I may need to publish cubes like Jazz Fest to help you keep all this straight.

& Thursday at 6 p.m. Maple Street Books will feature James Cobb signing Flood of Lies, the emotional story of the St. Rita’s Nursing Home disaster during Hurricane Katrina as told by the lawyer for owners Sal and Mabel Mangano who were slammed in the press as ‘Monsters of Hurricane Katrina.’ Flood of Lies tells the real story of the Manganos: a couple who sacrificed everything to save the lives of their beloved residents

& Thursday at 7 p.m. McKoewn’s Books & Difficult Music presents a reading by two authors published my local press Lavender Ink. New Orleans’ own and only Joel Dailey reads from his latest strike against banality in all its forms, “Industrial Loop.” Here’s what Andrei Codrescu said of him: “Dare I say it? Joel Dailey is the Robinson Jeffers of Post-Pop, an expansive nature poet whose nature is on TV. His work contains also the most thorough on-going critique of pretention in whatever form she may have been proclaimed. The shiv aims for the phoniness in the zeitgeist and comes off bloody more often than not.” Also joining us from the wilds of New York is poet and translator Mark Statman, author, most recently, of “A Map of the Winds”. Anselm Berrigan says of Mark’s new book: “A Map of the Winds is a lovely book, filled with moments of ordinary perception given uncommon attention. Sung through a register of gentle if unrelenting consciousness on the part of the poet that the present is always inexhaustibly on the move, Statman’s spare, concise, searching poems channel notations of experience through the visual and aural senses to frame and extend “voice that stands for voice / captures what I want and need / not resemblance”.” As always, this event is free and open to the public. Some refreshments provided.

& Also on Thursday at 7 p.m. New Orleans Literary & Performance Series presents its kick-off production of the 2013 Season: “AVANT GARDENING IN THE 21ST CENTURY” at the GOLD MINE SALOON, 705 Dauphine Street (corner of Dauphine & St. Peter, French Quarter) featuring:
JAMIL SHARIF, trumpet
ROCKIN DOPSIE, washboard
LOREN PICKFORD, saxophone
EARLE BROWN, saxophone
KATARINA BOUDREAUX, vocals
NEELI CHERKOVSKI, poet
JULIE KANE, poet
SUNNYLYN THIBODEAUX, poet
DAVE BRINKS, poet

CHERKOVSKI (biographer of poet Charles Bukowski) will give a reading in New Orleans along with a special Jazz Poetry performance featuring Rockin Dopsie on washboard, Jamil Sharif on trumpet, saxophonists Loren Pickford and Earle Brown, vocalist Katarina Boudreaux. former Louisiana Poet Laureate Julie Kane, poet Sunnylyn Ballard Thibodeaux, and poet and cultural historian Dave Brinks. This performance will celebrate The Historic New Orleans Collection’s current exhibition “Alternative Imprints” featuring LOUJON PRESS, publishers Gypsy Lou Webb and Jon Webb, The Outsider literary magazine, and the 50th Anniversary of Charles Bukowski’s first major collection of poetry, IT CATCHES MY HEART IN ITS HANDS, published in New Orleans by Loujon in 1963.

& Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. the Juju Bag Cafe, 5363 Franklin Ave., presents a Spoken Word Showcase, with happy hour from 5-7 and open mic starting at 7:30 p.m. Check whodatpoets.com for featured performers..

& Friday at 7 p.m. McKoewn’s Books hosts its 1+1+1 Reading featuring Descriptionfeaturing Delia Tomino Nakayama, Jamie Bernstein and Megan Burns. The 1+1+1 series features a selected poet, who selects a second to join then, and the second selects a third.

& Saturday at 10:30 a.m. meet talented children’s book writer and illustrator Brian Floca when he comes to Octavia Books to present and sign his new picture book, LOCOMOTIVE. Floca spent years researching LOCOMOTIVE – which includes traveling along the entire path of the first transcontinental railroad. His presentation will be filled with history. And, the book has already been critically heralded now with four starred reviews.

& Saturdays Maple Street Bookshop hosts Story Time with Miss Maureen at 11:30 a.m.

& At 1:30 on Saturday Octavia hosts a middle-school reader book event, a reading and signing with Newbery Medalist Susan Cooper featuring her new book, GHOST HAWK.

& In celebration of the exhibition “Alternative Imprints,” THNOC will present an afternoon program featuring Edwin J. Blair, who donated many of the materials in the exhibition to THNOC; JoAnn Clevenger, owner of Upperline Restaurant and avid art collector; and Neeli Cherkovski, a poet and Charles Bukowski scholar. Admission is free, and reservations are encouraged as seating is limited. Saturday, Sept. 7, 2–4 p.m. The Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres St. Admission is free; seating is limited. Reservations at wrc@hnoc.org or (504) 523-4662.

& Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. the monthly Poetry Buffet series hosted by Gina Ferrara continues its monthly reading at its temporary home at the Keller Library. Poets Clare L. Martin, Caroline Rash, and Mark Statman read from their work.

& Saturday evening at 6 p.m. Octavia Books hosts a talk and signing with Michaela Haas featuring her new book, DAKINI POWER: Twelve Extraordinary Women Shaping the Transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. The women featured in Dakini Power-contemporary teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, both Asians and Westerners, who teach in the West-have been universally recognized as accomplished practitioners and brilliant teachers whose life stories demonstrate their immense determination and bravery. Meeting them in this book, readers will be inspired to let go of old fears, explore new paths, and lead the lives they envision

& Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Maple Leaf Bar is the Maple Leaf Reading Series, the oldest continuous reading series in the south, founded by Everette Maddox. In the back patio, weather permitting. Periodic features and an open mic every Sunday.

Sunday is Slam and Spoken Word Day in New Orleans:

& Sunday at The Shadowbox Theater Team Slam New Orleans invites you to come celebrate with your 2013 National Poetry Slam champions.In addition to our regularly scheduled slam and open mic, the September show will feature a special 1 and 2 minute slam for poets tuning up for the Individual World Poetry Slam and the Texas Grand Slam Poetry Festival. 7 p.m. We will cap the open mic to make time for all of the awesome, so if you’d like to perform, please arrive early.

& WhoDatPoets.com lists four Spoken Word shows on Sunday nights:

The new Sunday show from Spoken Word New Orleans is Poetry and Paint Brushes. Spoken Word artists perform as a resident artist sketches the performers. Doors at 7 pm. and show at 8 pm. at Special Tea, 4337 Banks Street.
The Black Star Cafe, 800 Belleville St. in Algiers at 7 p.m.;
The Shadowbox Theater at 2400 St.Claude Ave. at 7 p.m.;
Espe’s Kitchen, 1743 N Broad St. at 7 p.m.; and,
the T—–y Wine Lounge, 3001 Tulane Ave., doors at 7 p.m., Admission $5.

& On Tuesday at 7 p.m.Stella Lithe and Laura Mattingly return to The Abbey on Decatur Street with their collaborative music and poetry show.

& Tuesday at 6 p.m. Garden District Book Shop Pat Kogos discusses and signs her book, Priory, Louisiana.In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina enters the Gulf of Mexico, and coastal residents flee the chaos. In the plantation town of Priory, Louisiana, guest rooms of a local inn, The Retreat, become shelter from the storm. Evacuees bond at The Retreat over shared heartache. They watch in disbelief as homes get swept to sea. Loved ones go missing. Passions ignite. No one will escape untouched. Priory, Louisiana is a story about the relentless nature of regret, the puzzling role of God in human suffering, and the opportunity to reinvent yourself after the life you know has washed away.

& Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. the Hubbell Library author’s series features Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans by Ben Sandmel.

& This Tuesday at 7 p.m. the Maple Street Book Shop features Everything Flows, the first collection of short fiction by novelist and screenwriter James Greer. Greer mixes anachronistic pseudo-history and unserious/serious digressions into pop culture, pop physics, pop philosophy and pop music to arrive at something both universal in scope and intensely personal, twisting language(s) into sometimes-strange shapes to devise new ways of looking at familiar things.

& On Tuesdays the Jefferson Parish Library Writers Group meets at the Westwego library from 7-9 pm.

& On Wednesday the inaugural reading for Blood Jet Poetry Series is at BJs in the Bywater (4301 Burgundy) at 8PM. We will be celebrating the SECOND printing of Laura Mattingly’s Book Of Incorporation from Language Foundry just out this summer. This handmade, typeset book will be available for purchase. Laura will be reading from her book along with a musical guest. We will also have a second poet sharing their works and wares with us to be announced shortly. Open mic to follow our features, limited sign up. Please share your words with us.

& Also on Wednesday is the launch party for Jonathan Kline’s new short novel The Wisdom of Ashes published by Lavender Ink, at Cafe Istanbul at 7 p.m. ” Inimitable story-teller Jonathan Kline’s web of stories connecting two poets, a nun, a black and white dog, and a huge red balloon to a heroin addict, the devil, the dead, and a mousy little man in a woman’s wool overcoat, in New Orleans in the early 1980s. In 44 moments, this novel weaves light and dark, memory and forgetting, madness and war, with smell of jasmine and the sound of cicadas in a walk along the levee.”