The Thin Red Line

I had thought that  I was burned out on reading about hurricane Katrina but when I happened upon Michael Tisserand’s Sugarcane Academy the other day I stayed up until after 2 a.m. reading it.    I found myself fascinated by the story of Paul Reynaud– a New Orleans first grade teacher who was the driving force behind the creation of Sugarcane Academy, a school for evacuee children that was created in New Iberia Louisiana in the weeks immediately following the storm and then continued in borrowed space at Loyola University in New Orleans once people were allowed back into the city.

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It almost feels like a cheat to blog about a book I first read more than twenty years ago, but the fact is the past few days I have been ignoring three new novels awaiting my attention (including Water For Elephants, which I really want to read) in order to re-read for the bazzillionth time John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces.   So rather than attempt to write what would be yet another paean to what is already a well-known and well-loved novel  OR tease out three paragraphs of  on the stories of having met Toole’s mother at a speech and reading she gave at Dominican College in New Orleans (where Toole himself had been on the faculty prior to his suicide) and the errrrr unforgettable experience of seeing the work produced as a MUSICAL at LSU in Baton Rouge.  

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…to Miss New Orleans.   And after reading City Adrift, I fear that the day is coming that New Orleans exists only as a memory, not just for me but for everyone.    Released by Louisiana State University Press and the Center For Public Integrity, City Adrift is a very carefully reasoned and balanced review of eight serious aspects of the problems facing New Orleans before and after Katrina.

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And then it went fast.

Yesterday afternoon a not particularly humpy UPS guy (Ron quipped ‘I thought that was illegal’) dropped off a box from Earthlink. David came over after work and he and Ron fiddled with things a bit and today we have broadband again, wireless networked to two computers. We are thrilled with the speed. David was very pleased he got it to work after not being able to get the laptop online on Linux a couple of weeks back. (The latest on that is that we will try re-installing XP and see if we can’t get the lappy onto our wireless as well.)

I previously read and blogged about Jed Horne’s Katrina Book Breach Of Faith and recently happened upon this 2005 title detailing the story of Curtis Kyls who was arrested for the 1984 murder of Dolores Dye in a supermarket parking lot. The cover blurbs compare it to In Cold Blood and Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, and it does read like a novel, a real page turner. Kyls, who insisted all along that he had nothing whatever to do with Dye’s murder, spent 14 years incarcerated at Orleans Parish Prison and the Angola Penitentiary as his case wound through 5 trials, 4 hung juries, one conviction and an appeal that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, making it one of the most litigated murder cases in history. He was ultimately released in 1998 when Orleans district attorney Harry Connick declined to begin work on a sixth trial.

Regardless of whether you believe Kyls did or did not kill Dye, the case represents a serious mis-carriage of justice, which Horne amply demonstrates was emblematic of the troubled criminal justice system in Louisiana in the 80’s and 90’s. (Horne himself flatly states that he does not know whether or not Kyls is guilty of the crime and leaves it for the reader to determine.) I remember when I read and blogged about Bayou Farewell, remarking how despite having grown up in New Orleans just 75 miles or so away the Cajun coast was a world I had known very little of and with this book I was again struck by what a different and foreign world the people in this book inhabited, just a very few miles from where I grew up. Recommended.

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Ron teased me that the only reason I picked up The Naked Soldier was in hopes there would be pictures of naked soldiers inside, which is as good a theory as any. (Honestly I don’t know why I decided to read it.) Tony Sloane was a lower class 18 year old from rural England who decided on a whim to join the French Foreign Legion. This book is a memoir of his 5 years of service in that famous army. To be honest, I found his story appalling. The early chapters relate the intense abuse that new recruits to the Legion are systematically subjected to, while the later chapters relate how the recruits become “cold blooded killers” who routinely subject not only new recruits but also the general population of various African countries to unimaginably horrific treatment. Unless you are interested in reading about lawless, reckless and unspeakably cruel young men, this one is NOT recommended.

I was shelving in the 910’s this afternoon and came across a post-Katrina travel guide for New Orleans (first one I’ve seen) and picked up. I was mostly interested in finding out what things are still there and still recommended. It was somewhat disappointing in that as of the November 2006 publication date so much was still up in the air. I was very pleased to learn that The Fairmont Hotel (the subject of Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel, site of my high school senior luncheon and where Joel and I stayed on a visit some years back) is being repaired and will re-open. (Previously Ron and I had heard that there were no plans to re-open so this was good news.) They also say that The Camelia Grill is expected to re-open, though as of the press date it had not.

Reading about New Orleans, the restaurants and the food put in the mood to make jambalaya for dinner. I have chopped onions and celery, sliced smoked sausage, peeled a pound of frozen shrimp and boiled the shrimp shells to make a broth. Now I just have to put it together. This is not exactly on my diet, but I have been pretty good about South Beaching it for the past week or so and my blood sugar has been in the low 100’s every morning so I feel entitled to indulge. Bon Appetit!

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Sunday was as expected a busy, hectic day. We are getting huge volumes of returns and have a lot of material backed up to be shelved. To make sure it was a completely sucky day, my hearing aid died at the beginning of the shift. The switch is broken and it will not turn on or off and regardless of the non-setting it constantly makes a deep pitched banging noise, which is usually the signal for a dying battery. Have to disconnect the battery to get it to be quiet. It always un-nerves me when I have to be out in public when my ear is out and I can’t hear at all.

And to top it all off, my toothache, which had been on hiatus is back tonight with a vengence, and I am out of the Vicodin my dentist gave me a couple of weeks ago. So for the first time ever on this job, I am calling in sick today and going to try to get my hearing aids fixed. Tomorrow I have a dentist appointment and will hopefully get more pain meds and by Thursday will feel up to going back to work. Feh.

I finished reading Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen. I was under-whelmed. Unlike in D*U*C*K, where she rhapsodized about the food a lot, there is little specific mention of the restaurant’s food as the protagonists are busy buying a rustic fishing camp in Shell Beach and consulting on a restaurant that is to be opened in a floating casino. Neither of these ideas much interested me, and I frequently found myself discovering that the characters are not at all as I had perceived them in the later book. (Notably I had gotten the distinct impression in D*U*C*K that Ricky and G-Man were black but in this book it is made clear they are white– that the characterizations in the later book were so poorly drawn that I could be left with such a big mis-perception is unfortunate.) I suppose sooner or later the two earlier books in this sequence will happen my way and I will probably read them, but I can’t say I enjoyed or recommend this book or this author.

I am also about half way through reading A Perfect Mess and am thoroughly enjoying it. Also about a third of the way through A Boy’s Life. Today’s illustration is of a metal advertising sign (Joel used to have a huge collection of these, including this one, which I sold off before I moved down here.) for a product which unfortunately I do not have, but it seemed topical

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Ron predicted that UW would examine Staci and send her right back home to Kathi’s and so they did. He talked to them on the phone. Clint got in okay and they will be here until Wednesday. We are planning to get together with them Tuesday, my next day off.

Work was the usual easy Sunday. I was amazed that most of the Harry Potters remained unclaimed on their cart in the back room. (I have also suffered from the temptation to go ahead and buy a copy, but new books are not in our budget so I have so far resisted, though who knows how long my resolve will last…)

I had not previously heard of Poppy Z. Brite, who apparently has written seven other novels, but I came across D*U*C*K the other day and was sufficiently intrigued to bring it home and read it. It is a very short novel (132 pages) about a gay black couple in New Orleans who are chefs and run a restaurant called Liquor, where they use booze in all the recipes. The plot centers around their experiences catering a banquet in Opelousas for an organization of duck hunters who are working to preserve the wetlands. Brite (who appears to be a petite white woman reminiscent of a porcelain doll in her jacket photo) writes with authority about New Orleans and restaurant kitchens, although at times her gay, black, male protagonists fail to ring true. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is in some ways an erotic love poem to New Orleans and its food. But given the extreme brevity and the $35 cover price (?!?!???!!!) I can’t recommend anyone go out and buy it.

Also, although this book is available from Pierce County Library, it is for some reason not listed in Worldcat, so there is no link to the book cover.

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Roux The Day is one of a series of seven Gourmet Detective mysteries by Peter King. The "Gourmet Detective" is a London-based foodie who works for chefs finding rare ingredients, recipes and substitutions. While on another case in Los Angeles he receives a telephone from a New Orleans attorney and agrees to stop over in The Big Easy on his way home to assist in authenticating and purchasing a "chef’s book"– a book of recipes and menu information for a particular restaurant which is up for auction in a local charity event.

The GD arrives at the auction to find that the book has already been sold, he is told to a New Orleans bookshop owner. The GD proceeds to the bookshop in hopes of getting the book, only to find a recently deceased man at the shop owner’s desk. The lawyer who hired him indicates that obtaining the book is paramount and offers a huge bonus if the book can be produced and authenticated. The GD is then "kidnapped" by a group of women chefs who call themselves "The Wiches" (for Women In Culinary & Hotel Employment).

As promising as the premise was, and much as I enjoy reading about New Orleans and the food there, I found this book difficult to get into. Though it is less than 250 pages it took me over a month of fits and starts. While the author seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of gastronomy, New Orleans seems to be just another backdrop for the protagonist to be presented against. And while there was much local trivia incorporated into the text, it failed to credibly draw up the city for me. I doubt I will try any of the other GD mysteries. (I also find it annoying that the gentleman’s name is never mentioned, forcing me to use the silly "Gourmet Detective" title over and over.

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I vaguely remember reading, not too long before I left New Orleans in the mid–late eighties of the arrival of Andrei Codrescu, though I don’t recall hearing anything of him since and had not previously read anything he wrote. So there were the dual pleasures of discovering Codrescu and seeing Codrescu discover N’awlins. The included essays were written over a 20 year period or so and thus cover the author’s becoming a New Orleanian. Most of the pieces are of a very short form written as weekly newspaper column and even the longer pieces are still fairly short and for the volume of it, you’d think this would be a quick read, but it isn’t. I found many of the stories required savoring and digesting and in the end they proved just too rich and filling to have more than two or three at a sitting. Recommended.

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Another Katrina book today. Like The Great Deluge, Breach of Faith documents Katrina’s assault on New Orleans through the stories of dozens of people who lived through it. While Deluge strictly limited itself to the week or so surrounding the storm, Breach covers approximately 6 months after the event. Where Deluge focused a lot on FEMA and gave a somewhat sympathetic view of Michael Brown, Breach focused more on the post storm political maneuvering and utterly savages "Brownie".

As a native of New Orleans I probably have an unusually high degree of interest in reading about Katrina and its aftermath and thoroughly enjoyed this book. But honestly I can’t imagine that most people who have read one of the other Katrina books would have the patience for another 400 page rendering of the story. That said, Breach is very well written and does not seem to have drawn the sorts of criticism that Deluge did. If you still have the stomach for reading more on Katrina, this one comes highly recommended.

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Today I want to talk about a couple of Katrina books I’ve read recently. DISASTER Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security provided a very different perspective and proved very enlightening. The book begins with a discussion of “Hurricane Pam” a training exercise first developed in May 1995 and largely ignored until July 2004 when a large contingent of local, state and federal disaster officials participated in a week-long dry run, discussing in detail the actions they would take if a category 5 hurricane hit New Orleans dead-on. While widely regarded as helpful, the exercise demonstrated a number of serious short-comings, all of which the FEMA participants assured the locals the feds would be prepared to address.

The book goes on to give a somewhat detailed explanation of New Orleans’ unique geography and vulnerability and a history of the city’s complex and highly political flood protection systems. So far, standard fare. But then it gets interesting, moving on to present a history of FEMA and telling me some things I didn’t know.

Created from an alphabet soup of other agencies FEMA has had a mission dealing with both natural disasters and what has come to be called terrorism. In the Reagan years, the natural disasters side of FEMA very much took a back seat to an operation that spent incredible sums of money preparing for extraordinarily unlikely scenarios on the order of keeping the US government operating in the event of a planet-wide nuclear holocaust. (visions of Uncle Ronnie Ray Gun stumping for Star Wars) The doomsday focus continued through the first Bush administration and then Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, FEMA proved useless, many Floridians suffered horribly and in turn voted out Pappy Bush.

The Clinton years brought about great change. Bill appointed a guy from Arkansas with no formal education at all, who nonetheless was quite skilled at emergency management. He canned the doomsday spook operations, focused on providing post-disaster service as well as working with local governments on advance planning to reduce and mitigate the effects of disasters, and was widely praised on both sides of the aisle.

Then along came Junior and 9/11. Anything related to the “war on terror” was a slam dunk for beaucoup funding, the “black ops” section of FEMA was back with a vengeance and disaster prevention, planning and service again took a low funded back seat. The Reagan Years redux. Katrina, the authors argue was not “the perfect storm”, but only an ordinary hurricane that became such a monumental catastrophe only due to the Bushie’s years of short changing both FEMA and the Corps of Engineers responsible for maintaining the system of levees and flood walls.

The book then details the widely reported incompetence shown by the feds in the days and weeks following the storm. While this section provided little that I had not already heard many times in the reporting as it happened, it gave a unique perspective of some of the officials who seemed to display such stunning ineptitude. While by no means giving Michael Brown a pass, it made a good case that the FEMA director was more scape-goat than villain. I would definitely consider this book worth reading if you’ve an interest in understanding better how the so-called “war on terror” has decimated the government’s ability to handle its most basic responsibilities to provide for the common welfare.

Another excellent Katrina book I’ve read recently is The Great Deluge, which follows the stories of several dozen people in the New Orleans area in the days immediately before and after Katrina. This book gives the best sense I have yet gotten of what it was really like to be in New Orleans during that horrible week, which was quite different than the impressions I got watching it happen on tv. In contrast to the title above, this book is completely limited to a time frame of about a week and discusses only the events until the evacuation was completed the Saturday morning following the storm. I was particularly taken with the story of the doctors at Baptist Hospital (It’s actually called something else now but I forget what and will always know it as Baptist.) A doctor and several nurses were later charged with homicide when dead patients were found to have been injected with morphine and other strong drugs. (That these people were seriously ill to begin with and were left in a sweltering, un-air conditioned hospital for nearly a week and may well have been given drugs for anxiety and pain because they were suffering severe anxiety and pain seemed to escape the prosecutor.) There has been some criticism of the author’s methods and some questioning of the accuracy of some of the reporting, but it seemed credible to me and was a good read.

And for any who are worried that this blog is going to be all New Orleans or all about Katrina, be assured I have a wide and eclectic range of reading interests and expect to write about all kinds of books here.

Until next time, keep turning those pages and support your local public library.

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Joel and Alan– Summer 1997

I really like the way Bev’s blog shows This Day In My History, allowing easy access to posts from this day in years past. This started out to be a post remembering this day two years ago, based on the much more cumbersome method of digging through old e-mail files to remember what happened or seemed important June 1, 2005. The inspiration for this of course was a fleeting stab of grief for Joel that quite passed long before I could dress it up as a blog post, though I will leave this pic from the past above, since it is nice to see myself looking so much younger and all but giddy with happiness.

Yesterday I read a wonderful book, Not Left Behind, a highly visual account of the Best Friends Animal Society’s work rescuing abandoned pets in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The quality of the photographs is excellent. As heartbreaking as some of the rescue photos are, the later photos showing the animals being cared for at the temporary shelter and subsequently being adopted are joyous and moving. (And several of the rescuers are humpy.

When I post about a book, note that you can click on the picture to link to that title on Worldcat which is a kind of meta search site for public libraries. By entering your zip code (just once) Worldcat will locate a copy of the book at the library nearest you. If this doesn’t happen to be your library, you should be able to borrow it through Inter Library Loan. Some libraries charge for this service but most do not. Check your library’s web site or contact the Reference desk for details. Borrowing instead of buying saves paper and trees as well as space in your house. If you really do prefer to buy, click on the title of the book to link to an Amazon.com sales page. (I am not shilling for Amazon, btw, and do not receive commissions from them, the link is provided only as a convenience.) I will try to be consistent with these conventions going forward.

On Library Thing I post reviews for books that particularly interest me and that don’t already have good reviews (good meaning informative, well written and helpful as opposed to positive or recommended) regardless of when the book was published, but here on the blog I think I am going to only post about new releases. Which means that I need to close the lap top and get back to my reading. So that’s all for today. Having opened with an old pic of my old huzband I decided to close with a pic of my new hubby.

Ron and Alan– Christmas 2006

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