In the Presence of the Pulitzer Jurors

18 04 2013

Spring in New Orleans is nothing short of glorious. The weather’s perfect — warm but not yet too warm, low humidity… perfect for hanging out in City Park or walking the streets of the Quarter. Adventures abound.

Oh, and then there’s crawfish. We wait all year for crawfish (our reward for making it through another Carnival season alive) and spring produces the best of the lot. Around every corner, it seems, you’ll see those ubiquitous big metal pots, bubbling, a fire blazing underneath them. Friends are made fast around tables laden with crawfish, corn, onions, potatoes, and if you’re lucky, mushrooms, garlic, and even pineapple.

Spring also brings festival season. Nearly every weekend from here until summer’s heat hits hardest, there are festivals of all kinds, all over the city. Music festivals (this past weekend was the free little brother of Jazz Fest called French Quarter Fest), food festivals, neighborhood festivals, and my favorite, the Tennessee Williams Festival. (The festival was held a few weeks back, over a weekend towards the end of March.)

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Over a span of several days, scholars and literary fans from all over flock to the Hotel Monteleone to celebrate Tennessee Williams’ legacy and his influence on New Orleans and its culture. A Streetcar Named Desire is, of course, performed more than once, as are several other of his plays. There are intense panels discussing his work, and opportunities for writers to meet with agents and pitch their book ideas. The whole weekend culminates with a “Stella” shouting contest Sunday afternoon in Jackson Square, recreating that iconic moment when Marlon Brando bellows up to the apartment above for his wife.

In addition to the panels specifically about Tennessee Williams, there are lots of others about all kinds of literary topics. For $10 a panel, you can pick and choose which ones you want to attend, which is what I did. I went to one panel about the challenges of writing about New Orleans and another about the ideas of the exile and refuge in Southern literature (this panel included the scholar Frank Cha, who writes about and studies the representation of Asian Americans in Southern culture, which I found fascinating). I also went to a panel on creative nonfiction, which included John Jeremiah Sullivan, among others. They talked at length about the art of the essay and its place in modern literature, as well as how they interpret the “rules” of creative nonfiction. How creative can you get before it’s no longer nonfiction? (These panelists were largely in agreement that tactics like composite characters and time compression should be avoided. Otherwise, write fiction.)

All three of those panels were enlightening and entertaining, but the panel I was most looking forward to was the final one I attended, which was about reading in the digital age. More than the topic, though, I was excited about the panelists themselves: NPR’s Maureen Corrigan, novelist Michael Cunningham, New Orleans’ own Susan Larson, and New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner. The first three in that list made up the Pulitzer Prize jury for fiction last year (in addition, of course, to their many other honors and responsibilities). And, you may remember, no prize for fiction was actually awarded in 2012.

From left to right: Maureen Corrigan, Michael Cunningham, Dwight Garner, Susan Larson

From left to right: Maureen Corrigan, Michael Cunningham, Dwight Garner, Susan Larson

Now, I was keenly interested in hearing the Pulitzer jurors talk about their experience. When I heard last spring that no prize for fiction was awarded, I set out to read the three nominees: Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell, and The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace. As I wrote about here, I didn’t love Swamplandia! like I thought I would, I didn’t even finish The Pale King (there it sits now, on my bedside table, looking at me reproachfully), and I loved Train Dreams (I’ve reread it once already since that post).

I’d also read Maureen Corrigan’s feisty take-down of the Pulitzer board, published last April in The Washington Post. That explained what I hadn’t, until that point, understood: the Pulitzer jurors read and choose the finalists, but the Pulitzer board (in other words, different people) chooses the final winner of the prize from those nominees. Given how strongly she felt about the whole process, I could only imagine the other two jurors had equally deep feelings, and I was interested in hearing how it all played out.

One digression, though — if you are a book lover, this was the panel for you. The panelists talked about their reading habits (digital or paper or both), and they all mentioned having various books stashed around their homes, and even their cars (what else to do in the carpool lane?). They talked about which books they’d grab if their houses were on fire (Michael Cunningham — Madame Bovary, Dwight Garner — Machine Dreams, Maureen Corrigan — first edition, signed copy of Sailors of the Night, Susan Larson — Jane Eyre, the first book she ever bought with her own money).

(I love conversations like this, and have been thinking about which book I’d grab if the house was on fire. It would probably be either my tattered and much beloved copy of A Wrinkle in Time, or my tattered, much beloved, and doodled in [I drew about 100 pictures of my grandmother inside of it -- random!] copy of Ramona Quimby, Age 8.)

But, eventually, yes, the dreaded Pulitzer came up. And boy, was I excited for it – I mean, honestly, when else am I going to be in the same room with the three people who read 300 books in a year, discussed them, and whittled the list down to three Pulitzer finalists for fiction? (And then got shafted when a winner wasn’t declared?)

They all three said that the process itself was a wonderful experience and the three of them really bonded over it. They loved the discussions they had on all of the books, and only once in the entire year did they meet in person. With Susan Larson here in New Orleans, and Maureen Corrigan in DC, and Michael Cunningham all over the place, this makes sense. It was all via email and a few phone calls. (I wish I had access to those emails!)

I especially enjoyed their discussion about owning up to their own biases when it comes to how they each define “good writing.” Michael Cunningham said he’s a “sentence queen,” which I thought was about the best thing ever. He said he’s a sucker for beautiful writing, lovely sentences, interesting constructions. That’s his bias, whereas Maureen Corrigan said hers was demanding a plot. She said she wished they taught “plot” in current MFA programs, that there’s just not enough of it happening in books today. Susan Larson fell somewhere in between. (I confess to being something of a “sentence queen” myself. I love it when writers string together words in a way that stops me and makes me re-read the sentence, marveling at the beauty of what they’ve done.)

They also said, however, that this whole situation scarred them and that it’s something they’ll never get it over. If you’ve not read Maureen Corrigan’s Washington Post article I mentioned earlier, I highly recommend it. Her feelings on the matter are clear.

Someone in the crowd asked, during Q&A, “What was the problem? Why couldn’t you all just agree on a book? Wasn’t your task to choose one?” Which made the three of them have to explain, probably for the millionth time, that it wasn’t up to them. That they did their job. That they did what was asked of them (so don’t blame them!). Imagine having to go around and talk about something like that, correcting that misperception again and again. One of them said (I believe it was Michael Cunningham) that he wanted to get a tattoo on his arm that just said, “It wasn’t my fault.”

I’d bought a copy of Maureen Corrigan’s book, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, which is a memoir of sorts about the reading life (I just started it and already am sucked in). I took it up once the panel was over to ask her to sign it, which she graciously did, and also to ask her the question I couldn’t NOT ask — “If you had been able to pick a book, which book would you have chosen?” I mean come on, wouldn’t you ask that? It was my one shot.

She didn’t bite, though, and demurred with a quiet smile, saying, “Oh, I can’t answer that. I just can’t answer that.” Her young daughter, standing behind her at that point said to me, “She won’t even tell me! Trust me, I’ve tried.” Alas. It was worth a shot. I should have known better.

I see a Pulitzer for fiction was awarded this year — The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. It’s a book I’m not familiar with, but want to look into. However, one thing’s for certain — the members of the jury for this year must be breathing a big sigh of relief. And I suspect Maureen Corrigan, Michael Cunningham, and Susan Larson are doing their best to be happy for them.


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Read: “The Yellow Birds,” by Kevin Powers

10 01 2013

Nominated for the National Book Award, and written by Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds is a work of fiction that shares its lineage with books like “Slaughterhouse Five” and “The Things They Carried,” but has its own distinct voice. Just like Vonnegut really was in Dresden during WWII and Tim O’Brien really was in Vietnam, Powers really was in Iraq. Vonnegut and O’Brien used their experiences to write what are arguably the defining fictional accounts of their respective conflicts — and I think there’s a good chance that Powers has done the same for the Iraq War.

His personal history is interesting. Enlisted at 17, served in 2004 and 2005, and eventually got an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. You can hear his love of language often in his book, but I wouldn’t categorize his writing as at all flowery. It’s taut and moves quickly and flows, pulling you along. His descriptions are often poetic, though never distracting, as with this early sentence: “While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.”

The story’s one of survival, both physical and mental, following two soldiers as they try to keep it together while serving in Al Tafar, Iraq. The book hopscotches back and forth in time, from scenes set in Iraq to scenes after the narrator has returned home to Richmond, with one chapter early on taking place in Fort Dix, New Jersey, before the soldiers were deployed. That’s where our two main characters, John Bartle (21) and Daniel Murphy (18) meet. That’s also where the protagonist, Bartle, makes a promise to Murphy’s mother that you realize very early on he has been unable to keep.

The uncovering of this mystery stretches out over the entire book, unfolding piece by piece. The foreshadowing and suspense is masterful and kept me engaged to the point that it was tough to put the book down. I had to know what happened. And why, and who was right and who was wrong. The answers are eventually revealed, but the “why” and the question of “right or wrong” is left murkier, and up to your own interpretation. Truth and morality are relative in war — perhaps especially in war.

This was a tough book to read at times. Not because of the writing style but just because of the content, but that’s to be expected when you’re writing honestly and brutally about war and death and mayhem and madness. And Powers certainly did that. It made me squirm and it made me uncomfortable and it made me sad. But it also made me feel lucky and blessed to a) have never experienced anything like that and b) to have the great honor to read someone’s account who did.

I cannot understand war, cannot internalize it, have a hard time really picturing what it is like. What it is actually like. What it’s like to be there, to be 18, to be 21, to be that close to death all the time — your own or someone else’s. To be that responsible for something so immense, so massive. I cannot fathom it. But this book got me a lot closer than just about anything I have read or watched about war. The dehumanizing effects of war and the ability of the military to break down the individual’s desires and will to fit the desires and will of the greater unit are explored here with acuity. It should be tough to read. It couldn’t be any other way.

I was hooked right away, by the very first sentence: “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” Powers wrote the book, obviously, in first person. I’m a big sucker for first person in anything I read, but the effect here is stunning. You feel so close to the story, to the soldiers, to their lives and struggle in Iraq, and afterwards. It achieves intimacy right away, which adds to the toughness and uncomfortable feelings I mentioned earlier. You’re not just reading about everything that’s happening and everything they’re going through – you’re right there alongside them, going through it with them.

It’s interesting to me that two of the National Book Award nominees this year (neither one won) were about the Iraq War — this book, plus Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I haven’t read Billy Lynn’s… but I do plan to. I’m very curious about the similarities — and differences — between the two.

For now, I’ll just say that The Yellow Birds was well worth any uncomfortable feelings it stirred up. That’s what actual “art” should do. It should make you think, make you re-examine things, make you question, and make you feel something. This book did that times a thousand.


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2012: A Reading Year in Review

3 01 2013

At the end of 2011, I started keeping track of every book I read, jotting them down in a little notebook. I used to do this in high school and enjoyed looking back over it now and again, and I’ve found that’s still true. Now, with a full year complete, I thought I’d look back at what I read, what I liked best, and what I didn’t, during 2012. I re-read several books during the year, and I’ll note that when it’s the case.

I know some folks refuse to re-read books, for various reasons. I enjoy it, though. You’re a different person every time you pick up a book. I like seeing how my reactions and perceptions shift through the years. And with certain books — Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! comes to mind — I get more out of it with each and every re-reading. Plus, it’s like visiting old friends for me, and it can feel like coming home.

So, here’s the list — here’s what I read in 2012:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee (re-read)
2. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter — Carson McCullers (re-read)
3. The Best American Travel Writing 2011
4. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
5. Poser – Claire Dederer
6. We The Animals – Justin Torres
7. Salvage the Bones – Jesmyn Ward
8. Gilead – Marilynne Robison
9. The Dirty Life – Kristin Kimball
10. We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
11. The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides
12. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Steig Larsson
13. The Girl Who Played With Fire – Steig Larsson
14. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Steig Larsson
15. Fire Season – Philip Connors
16. Geek Love – Katherine Dunn (re-read)
17. Le Divorce – Diane Johnson
18. Paris Was Ours – Penelope Rowlands
19. A Visit From the Good Squad – Jennifer Egan
20. Tinkers — Paul Harding (re-read)
21. Swamplandia! — Karen Russell
22. Train Dreams – Denis Johnson
23. Tiny Beautiful Things – Cheryl Strayed
24. The War of Art – Steven Pressfield
25. Night — Elie Wiesel
26. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction – Lee Gutkind
27. Just Kids – Patti Smith (re-read)
28. The Sense of an Ending — Julian Barnes
29. Me Talk Pretty Some Day – David Sedaris
30. Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me? – Mindy Kaling
31. Still Alice — Lisa Genova
32. When You Are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
33. Barrel Fever – David Sedaris
34. Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing With the Death Penalty – Scott Turow (re-read)
35. Suite Francaise – Irene Nemirovsky
36. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012
37. The Best American Travel Writing 2012
38. In Praise of Messy Lives – Katie Roiphe

Looking over this list, I love remembering where I was when I was reading each of these, and why. For some, granted, I just picked them up and read them at home, but with others there was a real purpose or intent behind the selection and timing of the reading. For instance, I read Le Divorce and Paris Was Ours just before a return trip to Paris this past summer. I’d been to Paris once before, but just for a 24-hour layover, and this time, I was going for more than a week. Excited would be an understatement. (And naturally, Paris blew away my every expectation.)

I read those David Sedaris books in preparation for seeing him speak/read at Tulane in the fall. I’d owned Me Talk Pretty Some Day (and also Naked, which I still have yet to read) for over a decade, moving them from place to place, city to city. My boyfriend loves David Sedaris, and this fact combined with a feeling that I needed to know his writing before seeing him led me to read those three. And then it led me to wish I hadn’t waited so long. I stumbled across the Mindy Kaling book in a bookstore around the same time, and decided to see what her brand of humorous writing was like. She didn’t disappoint. I thought her book was very funny and heart-felt.

Right after the “Paris” books, I got into a little Pulitzer Prize phase, inspired I guess by the fact that no one won for fiction last year. For some reason, I’d been putting off reading A Visit from the Goon Squad. I don’t know, the description of the book didn’t do it for me. But once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. I thought it was incredibly modern and timeless at the same time. Regret, aging, desire… all that human mess. Just a fantastic book. One I’m looking forward to re-reading.

Then I re-read Tinkers, which won the Pulitzer earlier. What an exquisite little book. Spare, beautiful writing. Not a wasted word anywhere. Following that with both Swamplandia! and Train Dreams, I wanted to see if I could figure out what was missing for the Pulitzer committee. I expected to love Swamplandia!, and was surprised when I didn’t. I liked Train Dreams much more. It reminded me, in a way, of Tinkers. The spareness of the story. Communicating a lot without using a lot of words.

I also started, but did not finish, the final Pulitzer nominee from last year, the posthumously published The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace. Since I haven’t finished it, I didn’t list it here. I’m close, just 100 pages to go, but I’m not sure I’ll make it happen. It wasn’t so much that I hated the book, or his typical digressions/footnotes, or even the topic (it’s about the IRS and more than that, the banality of most people’s everyday work lives). I just wasn’t captured by the characters. I didn’t care what happened to them. And you’ve got to care, at a certain point, to keep going. To bother to finish. I just couldn’t be bothered. Maybe I’ll try again another day. It was the first thing I’ve ever read by him. I’ve since read some of his essays and enjoyed them, but I know from reading interviews with him, he never considered his essays to be his “real” calling, his most serious work. That, for him, was his fiction.

Of the books I read that weren’t re-reads, I liked All the King’s Men and Gilead a whole, whole lot. I didn’t know what to expect with All the King’s Men, but it was surprisingly funny, with a dry wit I loved, and it felt so modern. It could be written today, about today’s political landscape. Not that much has changed since the days of Huey Long/Willie Stark. Gilead is another one of those spare, beautifully written books. I’ll be re-reading it, I’m certain.

I expected to love, but didn’t, Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones. She’s from my home state of Mississippi, and the book’s about a family on the Gulf Coast dealing with Katrina bearing down on them. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was with this book, but it just wasn’t for me. It was dark and rough and tormented, a picture of poverty, but it wasn’t that. I like dark. It just… I don’t know. Maybe some of it hit too close to home.

Of the books I re-read, of course To Kill a Mockingbird is a standout. How could it not be? I’d read the book just once, in high school. I was curious to see how it held up and seemed to the adult me. I think it was even more powerful now, with a bit more perspective. We’re all just looking for our own Atticus Finch, aren’t we? Geek Love, a twisted book I also had just read once, in high school, was another that I loved as if reading it for the first time. The story of a carnival family, where the mother intentionally takes pesticides and poisons to produce freakish brood for their show, it’s beyond weird. And yet, not. The truths about family in this book ring true, even for those of us with moms who didn’t pray we’d come out with a marketable deformity. I’d count this as one of my all-time favorite books. Original, fun to read, compelling writing. I envy it.

I also re-read Just Kids, which won Patti Smith a National Book Award. I’d read it in 2011, but picked it up one afternoon this past year and got caught up all over again. I love everything about this book, the romanticism of living in New York when she did, hanging out with artists and musicians, the searching tale of her figuring out who she was and what she wanted, and then, yes, of course, the enduring love and friendship she found with Robert Mapplethorpe. What a gift this book is. It’s time travel that each one of us can take.

So, 38 down for 2012. I’ve started my first book of 2013, The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers. I was hooked by it right away. More to come!


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“we can’t turn back…”

15 07 2011

I recently read Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with Tom Wolfe, of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fame). It’s the one and only book I’ve ever read of his, and while it took me a little while to get into it, I ended up really enjoying it. Wolfe was from North Carolina, and died at the early age of 38. He was a contemporary of Faulkner and Hemingway, with Faulkner reportedly calling him the best writer of their generation. His writing is lush and wordy, so it doesn’t surprise me that Faulkner would be a fan.

Look Homeward, Angel is heavily autobiographical. It’s pretty much the story of his childhood and his family and at times I found it hard to read because I knew that. I simply couldn’t divorce what I knew the reaction was to his book when he published it from what I was reading. He had some harsh words and indictments for just about everyone around him and he didn’t shy away at all from writing what he really thought of people in this book.

The other book I own of his, but have yet to read, is You Can’t Go Home Again, which is all about this reaction that his family and friends had to this book being published while he, and they, were still alive. As someone who’s thought from time to time about writing similarly barely disguised “fiction,” it’s an interesting cautionary tale. Wolfe was ostracized after Angel was released. Lucky for him, I guess, You Can’t Go Home Again was published after his death, so any lingering resentments would have had to be taken up grave-side.

Here’s one beautiful passage from the book, in a section about the death of one of his brothers:

“… we can’t turn back the days that have gone. We can’t turn life  back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire — a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron — which we cannot get back.” — Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, p. 461


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“the music of a free society”

28 10 2010

Read this the other day and it really resonated with me, as we head into another big election, with the political rhetoric and nonsense heating up, as it always does. When you get angry and you get frustrated, remember these words and at least be happy you can freely express yourself.

“We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in the public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.”
– Daniel Gilbert, from an essay for the Edge Foundation, found in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007


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“there is no less creative sense than that”

19 10 2010

“The history of religion in the West is nearly equivalent to the history of the failure of preaching. By and large, preaching is a kind of moral violence that excites people’s sense of guilt, and there is no less creative sense than that. You cannot love and feel guilty at the same time, any more than you can be afraid and angry at the same time.”
– Alan Watts, from Still the Mind


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“part of a greater certainty”

18 09 2010

A paragraph from the beautifully written book I’m reading right now…

“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.”

– From Tinkers, by Paul Harding


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Read: Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

15 09 2010

So it has now become obvious to me that I dealt with the 5th anniversary of the hurricane by reading 5 books about it, one right after the other, starting the weekend of the anniversary and ending last night. It wasn’t something I really planned out, but just felt compelled to do. And no, the “5″ thing wasn’t on purpose either. I had one of the books and bought the other 4 at a book signing on Saturday, August 28th. I enjoyed and would recommend them all, especially Zeitoun, which I’ll talk about first.

1. Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
Zeitoun is much more than a book about Hurricane Katrina. It’s a book about human rights and compassion and being open to understanding one another, and it’s a book about doing the right thing. The story of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun is a true one, rendered beautifully and heart-wrenchingly by Eggers into a tale I literally could not put down. More than once, I looked up, shocked by what I was reading, tears in my eyes. Knowing it’s real makes it all the more painful, and all the more necessary for as many people as possible to read it.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun is from Syria and has lived here in New Orleans for years (and is now an American citizen), running a successful house-painting and construction company. He’s a father of 5 (4 at the time of the hurricane) and a good-hearted, hard-working man. His wife, Kathy, is from Baton Rouge and helps run the company with him. They are both Muslim. This shouldn’t matter, but apparently it does.

Kathy evacuated with their children before the storm hit. Zeitoun, as he is known to everyone, stayed behind to watch over their home and business and rental properties. When the flooding began, he used a canoe to rescue several elderly neighbors, and he helped everyone he could, including going into houses across the street from him nightly to feed and water 4 dogs that were left behind to fend for themselves.

His thanks for this, for his unselfish acts of heroism? He is arrested on suspicion of terrorism in the chaotic days after the storm and locked up for a month in a maximum security jail, where he is repeatedly denied a phone call, he isn’t read his rights once, and he is never told of the supposed charges against him. I won’t say more so as not to give anything else away, but this is by far one of the most compelling books I have read in a long, long time. Read it.

2. Nine Lives, by Dan Baum
This is also a book about much more than the hurricane, and is also based on the lives of real New Orleanians. Dan Baum is a journalist who was in town to cover the storm and its aftermath and found himself wanting to tell the story of this strange place and its citizens. This book is his attempt to do so, and I think it’s a damn fine one.

Cleverly using Hurricane Betsy in 1965 as one sort of bookend to the story, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as the other, he fills in the in-between gaps in time by talking about the lives of, yes, 9 people. We learn about them as they go through the years and face challenges, experience joy, change, and grow. They are as varied as a Mardi Gras Indian Chief, the Orleans Parish coroner, an NOPD cop, a worker on the streetcar lines, an Uptown lawyer who becomes King of Rex, and a downtown high school band leader.

I learned so much about New Orleans history, culture, and people from this book. He covers immense ground here. I love, too, that the characters don’t necessary know one another or interact. He didn’t choose them for that reason. As this is such a small town, though, it is inevitable that some of their paths do cross, but it’s not one of those contrived things. It just happens, as does so much of life here.

3. 1 Dead in Attack, by Chris Rose
Now, unlike the first two, this is purely a book about the hurricane and what it was like to live here in the days, months, and years afterward. And let me say, Chris Rose paints a picture at turns sad and horrific and at others surreal and amusing. A columnist with the Times-Picayune at the time of Katrina, he was back in the city right after the storm and he documented it all in his columns for the paper. This book is a collection of those columns.

He talks about the challenges of being away from your family (his then-wife and children stayed in Maryland that fall with his folks), and he talks about the challenges of living in a war zone. He also lays himself bare and raw, talking about the difficulties he had dealing with a lot of it — difficulties many here after the storm faced. He is colorful and funny and has a voice all his own. He makes you feel, as much as is humanly possible, what it was like to be here back then. His title refers to one of the markings he saw on a house that had been searched after the storm. It’s poignant and painful, just as his book often is.

4. A.D./New Orleans After the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld
This a graphic novel about the hurricane — the first graphic novel I’ve ever read, actually. And it was incredibly moving, much more so than I’d expected. Using drawings to tell the stories of several residents, some who evacuated, and some who stayed, he created scenes that I’d only imagined but had never actually seen myself. And what a remarkable job he did. With dignity and care, he recreated something horrible and turned it into something beautiful and touching.

5. Why New Orleans Matters, by Tom Piazza
This book was written shortly after the hurricane, in part as a response to those stupid and short-sighted enough to say things like, “Why should we rebuild New Orleans?” It’s also a love letter to the city and its special culture. You can learn lots about the history of New Orleans music and food from this book, as well as about other cultural touchstones like our love for a parade.

Whew. This was some pretty heavy reading, all in all, but they were all good. On to some fiction for me now, though…


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“it’s ours”

18 08 2010

I love this.

“there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by nothing

that
gentle pure
space

it’s worth

centuries of
existence

say

just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch

that space
there
before they get to us

ensures
that when they do
they won’t
get it all

ever.”

– by Charles Bukowski, from the collection You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense


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“it’s that it was so much lighter”

7 07 2010

“We danced something out, god knows what, but I was earnest, earnest, wanting out and up so badly. All this weight we get in time. It isn’t that childhood was any better, it’s that it was so much lighter.”

From High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah (p. 71, from the short story “Carriba”)


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