Reflections, from a Distance & Up Close
Richard Ford’s reflections on New Orleans showed up yesterday in the NYT op-ed pages and the Observer. The Times also has essays from John Barry, who wrote the book on the flood of ’27 (Rising Tide) and from perhaps the most famous literary icon the city has in this era, Anne Rice:
“Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn’t do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920s couldn’t do. Nature had done what “modern life” with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn’t do. It has done what racism couldn’t do, and what segregation couldn’t do either. Nature has laid the city waste–with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii…
“But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us ‘Sin City,’ and turned your backs.”
Her son, Christopher, turns up in Salon, “trying to find a quick and efficient method for mourning 20 years’ worth of memories, and it is proving to be an impossible and irresponsible task.” Salon also now has a correspondent in the field; novelist Stephen Elliott hops on a bus chartered by local and national African-American community leaders, including U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, to drive into the city, pick up survivors, and get them to a closed Air Force base.
And NYT magazine columnist Rob Walker, a former resident of the city, has posted an essay on his own website about being asked by other media outlets “to write about or comment on the event and, for lack of a better word, its ‘meaning.'” Watching the news on TV, he recalls, “I did not feel like explaining New Orleans. I felt like crying.”
5 September 2005 | uncategorized |
Take It, This Cesspool
Blake Bailey, the acclaimed biographer of Richard Yates, has bad luck with hurricanes. After making it through three Florida storms last year, and then getting caught in Ivan while he was on the road, he and his family moved two months ago…to New Orleans.
“The night before evacuation–we didn’t know that yet–we had a dinner party and our guests congratulated us on our cool house. It was true. For the past week or so, I could hardly get any work done because I kept turning around in my desk chair to survey my awesome new study: the rounded moldings over the doors, the glimmering parquet floors, everything. This was our reward for years and years of hard work.”
You can guess how the story goes from there, although Bailey does still have a flicker of hope: “Mornings are bad, to be sure: that first minute after you wake up, and you remember all over again that you’re broke and everything is gone and your poor old cat is dead; but there, too, is your wife’s warm haunch, right where you left it, and there’s the gaping baby between you.” Left unspoken, however, is the impact on his planned biography of John Cheever. Bailey took his laptop with him, but whatever papers he left behind were destroyed along with the rest of his neighborhood.
UPDATE: A mutual acquaintance passes along this news from Bailey: “all my research is on the computer, thanks,” he says, “and now i don’t have to do even more niggling cross-ref with the paper stuff. onward and upward…” Best wishes from this and many other corners, I’m sure!
5 September 2005 | uncategorized |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
