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 |

See the Calluses on the Invisible Hand

Among the socialists over at the Lenin’s Tomb blog is science-fiction writer China Mieville, who’s got something to say about what happened in the Gulfcoast region last week. Much of the blog’s anti-capitalist critque is predictable even to sympathetic readers, but Mieville deserves recognition one of the first commentators to point out that as mayor of New Orleans, Ray “get off your asses and do something” Nagin should also be held accountable for the handling of the pre-Katrina evacuation (Lou Dobbs was raising that point on Friday, along with Josh Levin at Slate, but Mieville posted about it the day after the hurricane… and revisited the subject over the weekend).

He’s also the only source I’ve seen–and I admit I don’t get around that much of the political blogosphere–to discuss what may have been one of the key factors in FEMA’s failure: the feds subcontracted the “catastrophic hurricane disaster plan” to a consulting firm called IEM (Innovative Energy Management) which has worked with a dozen federal agencies and ten state emergency management agencies. The company, based in Baton Rouge, is a client of The Livingston Group, a D.C. lobbying firm run by Bob Livingston, who was a representative from Louisiana’s 1st district, which includes New Orleans suburbs–but you might remember him as the would-be Speaker of the House who was forced out of office by Larry Flynt.

But let’s widen the perspective a bit here: one of IEM’s announced partners on this project, as on several other projects, is James Lee Witt & Associates. Witt was the director of FEMA under Bill Clinton, and is largely credited with turning that once lackluster organization around (never mind what has or hasn’t happened to it since), and, as of last Saturday, was appointed by the governor of Louisiana to oversee recovery efforts in that state.

UPDATE: Announced being the key word, it turns out. “In May of 2004, IEM included James Lee Witt Associates, LLC in their proposal to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for developing a FEMA Catastrophic Plan for Southeast Louisiana and the New Madrid Seismic Zone,” a Witt Associates representative emailed me today after seeing the original version of this post. “After the proposal was submitted to FEMA, James Lee Witt Associates was not approached again by IEM, nor did JLWA have any involvement whatsoever in the project.”

So apparently, in addition to everything else one could say about IEM, they’re not above making use of somebody else’s good name to advance themselves.

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5 September 2005 | uncategorized |