Category: New Orleans

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You can’t build a house on anger

Jonathan Capehart of the WaPost visited New Orleans expecting to find anger and resentment:

And then I got my feet on the ground in New Orleans. The anger I was ready to embrace never materialized, because the people I met were moving beyond it.

He found people trying to build their homes. I find it a little weird that he was “ready to embrace” the anger of the locals, but we all project, right?

Meanwhile, we have a little bit of Louisiana right here in Ringwood, because one of our neighbors wasn’t as lucky as we were in that storm last week, and took a little roof damage from a fallen tree. Amy waves at the blue tarp on their roof when we pass it.

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Whoa,LA

Yesterday, I saw a billboard on the NJ Turnpike:

Forever New Orleans

Open to Just About Anything

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No-No-NO,LA

In the last few days, I’ve come across a pair of strange articles about New Orleans.

The first contends that a collection of public-housing buildings should not be knocked down, since they’re pretty nice buildings and just need “full-scale renovations”.

Oh, and the low-income residents shouldn’t be brought back in. Instead, the apartments should be sold to middle-class people, because, um, there are enough poor people in New Orleans already. Seriously:

The feds’ impulse to replace such perfectly good housing takes root in the flawed notion that the buildings are the problem with blighted public housing, not the dependent underclass people who live in it. Most residents of New Orleans’s housing projects paid less than $100 in monthly rent. Even if they weren’t on welfare, in other words, they were essentially dependent on government. Also, the complexes teemed with long-term tenants’ sons and grandsons, who terrorized the projects through violent crime. The failure of the city’s elected leaders to police and incarcerate these criminals long ago turned the projects into killing grounds with their own system of murderous street justice.

And nearly 18 months after Katrina, New Orleans certainly isn’t lacking for an underclass. In fact, the city’s murder rate is once again out of control, mainly due to unparented, impulsive young men shooting other unparented, impulsive young men.

What New Orleans is lacking is enough middle-class and working-class residents, who began leaving the city long before Katrina. Without such citizens, the Big Easy won’t have the committed voters and tax dollars it needs to become a functional, healthy city — something it hasn’t been for decades.

But, amazingly, that’s not the strangest and most insulting assessment I’ve read about the city this week. No, that honor goes to Andres Duany, who says, well, I’ve gotta just let him speak for himself:

I remember specifically when on a street in the Marigny I came upon a colorful little house framed by banana trees. I thought, “This is Cuba.” (I am Cuban.) I realized at that instant that New Orleans is not really an American city, but rather a Caribbean one. I understood that, when seen through the lens of the Caribbean, New Orleans is not among the most haphazard, poorest, or misgoverned American cities, but rather the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities. This insight was fundamental because from that moment I understood New Orleans and truly began to sympathize. But the government? Like everyone, I found the city government to be a bit random; then I thought that if New Orleans were to be governed as efficiently as, say, Minneapolis, it would be a different place — and not one that I could care for. Let me work with the government the way it is. It is the human flaws that make New Orleans the most human of American cities. (New Orleans came to feel so much like Cuba that I was driven to buy a house in the Marigny as a surrogate for my inaccessible Santiago de Cuba.)

Keep reading, because his prescription for the city’s future success relies on this, um, lowering of standards.

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Eco Chamber

I finished the Berlin Noir trilogy on Christmas morning. They’re fantastic novels, and I recommend them highly. I don’t read many mystery novels, but these were amazing (and are highly recommended by Ron Rosenbaum), and I devoured the 830 pages from Thursday to Monday. I’ll hit my local library next week to see if they have the fourth novel in the series, which came out a little while ago.

Finishing the novels meant that I had to choose my next read from the Christmas gifts I would receive that day. (I’d decided against reading that copy of Ajax I brought with me, for reasons I can’t explain to myself.)

The Beckett, I thought, was out. No way was I starting that up in New Year’s week.

No Crime & Punishment, either. (One of Amy’s cousins wanted to get me something from my wish list, but couldn’t find Demons, so he picked up C&P instead)

No Chris Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic. I was heading out of New Orleans for a while.

What I decided to read was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a book that had stymied me on three separate occasions.

“Here’s my big chance!” I thought. “I’ll employ The Eco Strategy and finally read this book!”

See, unlike my experiences with Nightwood, I didn’t stop reading Under the Volcano because I didn’t enjoy the book. Rather, I stopped reading it because it is a difficult book and because I have too many other things to read on hand.

Ah, but The Eco Strategy! First employed in July 2004, when I visited Budapest for my friends’ wedding! At that time, I finished the two books that I brought along for the trip: Trainspotting and Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. “Whatever will I do?” I thought. “I have another day here, plus a long trip home!”

I visited a nearby bookstore and realized that this was the only possible scenario in which I would finally read Foucault’s Pendulum! “If I can’t get through that book now, I’ll never make it through!”

My attention focused on Eco’s book, I found it smooth sailing and awfully rewarding.

Similarly, I passed the mysterious 40-page barrier that had stopped me in my previous attempts at reading Under the Volcano, a novel praised so highly by William Gass that I was embarrassed not to be able to read it further. At 130 pages, it’s become quite “easier,” although it’s no page-turner a la Berlin Noir.

Still, I plan on finishing up Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare book tonight or tomorrow morning, then plunging back into Geoffrey Firmin’s last day.

Then, I might start exploring this, for That Thing I’m Trying To Write.

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Tryout

Got back from Louisiana last night, after a 2.5-hour delay due to weather problems up here at Newark. Spent the “day off” dealing with a plumber and running yet more errands.

One of these errands involved stopping by my office and picking up a new 13.3″ MacBook to try out for a few days. We ordered a bunch of refurbished models for editors’ use during travel, and I was interested in seeing how they feel. My G4 PowerBook (12″) is getting kinda long in the tooth, although it’s still fine for travel and all. Still, it’d be nice to have another laptop in the house, so the official VM wife (who’ll likely make me the official MI husband) and I can blog away in the living room, sneaking sidelong glances at each other’s posts.

Or not. I’ll see how the holiday bonus looks, since most of our money’s going into plans for fixing up the house in 2007 (starting with that aforementioned plumber’s visit today).

The holiday trip went alright. On Christmas afternoon, I was deluged by presents. I can’t fault Amy’s parents for using my Amazon wish list to guide their purchases, but I wish they’d pay a little more attention to the size & weight of some of the items. For example, while I was quite happy to receive the four-volume, hardcover, slipcased edition of Samuel Beckett’s works, I wasn’t so happy about lugging it home in my suitcase.

Still, it’s a minor complaint, considering I could’ve shipped it home Tuesday morning.

Anyway, its nowhere near as interesting a gift as the small wooden case they gave me. It has a slide-off lid, and it’s nowhere near long enough for a pen, prompting me to ask, “Am I supposed to hide weed in this?”

That’s the Christmas spirit, I guess. I’ll process my pix from the trip this evening, and try to get those posted.

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It’s only the river

Amy & I meandered through the French Quarter yesterday, in search of cheap novelties (some voodoo dolls at the French Market), some holiday presents (a couple of higher-end masks at Rumors, and a sweatshirt from the local Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, which my boss contends has the best margaritas around), and coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde.

We took a ton of pictures yesterday, but I forgot to bring the cable for my camera along for the trip, so mine will have to wait till we’re home next week. Amy has been working much more diligently on hers, and has demonstrated an eye for photography that leaves me jealous. She’s also willing to spend time with Photoshop and Lightroom to improve her pix, while my point-and-click mentality seems to carry over to many aspects of my life.

Anyway, the Quarter was pretty full of people, even though we got in pretty early (around 9am). The New Orleans Bowl football game between Rice and Troy had been the night before, so partisans for those two schools were everywhere. In fact, CDM was completely packed when we arrived. The weather was in the mid-50s, and Amy pointed out that you could tell which people were locals because they were the ones wearing scarves and gloves.

After breakfast, we began taking pictures. I brought my laptop along, in hopes that the citywide WiFi service was actually functioning, but the Earthlink-provided network didn’t show up on my menu when we were sitting in Jackson Square, so I dropped the laptop off in our car. Sorry, no liveblogging from the streets of NO,LA, dear readers. Maybe next trip.

When Amy gets her pix posted, you’ll get an idea of how gorgeous the morning light can be in the Quarter. It was the first sunny day since we arrived on Thursday, which got Amy in a good mood. The rain and drear can bring a body down, like it has today.

(In fact, we’ve spent a good chunk of time just hanging out in her parents’ living room. Since I just crossed the 700-page mark in that Berlin Noir omnibus I brought along for the trip, I can attest that we’ve, um, had some time on our hands.)

During our walk yesterday, we stopped at Faulkner House Books in Pirate Alley (yarr!), where I picked up a small collection of post-Katrina columns by Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose, who’s been chronicling the human costs of the catastrophe as well as anybody. I’ll probably read it after I finish the remaining 130 pages of Berlin Noir today.

It turns out the bookstore’s doing pretty well, at least if some of the comments I heard from the manager about the prices they fetched for a few rarities is true. I’m being deliberately vague, but it sounds like they made some serious scratch from selling a couple of New Orleans-related literary memorabilia. It warms my heart that there’s a market for the stuff.

I can’t offer much of an assessment on the city’s recovery. The French Quarter isn’t like the rest of the area and, while there were plenty more tourists than our last trip in July, that’s not adding much to the conversation. During the coverage of the New Orleans Bowl on ESPN, the commentators talked about “how little has been done” down here for the people, and showed a short clip of the student-athletes taking a bus tour through the lower Ninth Ward.

As Amy & I walked through the Quarter, we reminisced about our wedding weekend down here. There are so many landmarks for me (and even more for Amy, who spent so many years in the city), so many resonances, so many reminiscences, that it’s hard for me to imagine that it can go away for good, within our lifetimes.

Last night, at the home of Amy’s grandmother, some family members railed against FEMA, the local contractors, and the state’s governor, who evidently finished a legislative session unable to pass a bill to spend the state’s $2 billion surlplus. Since it’s not their district, these in-laws didn’t directly lambaste the re-elections of Ray Nagin or Rep. Jefferson, who was recently caught with $90,000 dollars in bribe money in his freezer, but they weren’t happy about either of those developments.

After we got back from her grandmother’s place (we were dropping off some leftover chicken tenders & cream cheese wrapped in bacon), we found a documentary about New Zealand on the Travel Channel. There was a segment on Napier, the art-deco city on the north island. It spent a little time showing off the buildings, then explained how it all resulted from a massive earthquake and fire in 1931 that wiped out the city. (In fact, the whole documentary was along these lines: each segment started out with beautiful images and descriptions of wonder and grandeur, then segued into “the dark secret behind it.”)

The third novel in that Berlin Noir omnibus jumps 9 years from the end of the second, from 1938 to 1947. Berlin is in ruins, and the Russians are starting to separate the east section of the city from the west. It made me wonder what the city’s like today, how it integrated in the last 15 years.

The rain’s heavy again today, and they’re issuing flood warnings. Nothing cataclysmic, of course: just enough to overrun the various drainage systems for a while.