In New Orleans right now, there's a collective fatigue/sadness/resignation that's palpable when you walk through the grocery, or ride the elevator to your office like I just did.
"I can't believe this is happening," I said to the worried-looking black woman who rode with me from the parking lot. I'd been admiring her bright blue sandals, didn't want to waste a chance to commiserate about Gustav.
"I know, baby. My mind can't even wrap around it. We'll be okay, though, we'll be okay, it's going away," she said, pushing her hands into a prayer.
She got to her floor sooner than I wanted her to. I wanted to know her plan, tell her mine.
There was a time before Katrina when the possibility of a hurricane sent a funky buzz through the city, and citizens hit the streets to gas up the car, shop for Vienna sausages and canned tuna and Bunny Bread, Doritos, onion dip, jugs of water, cases of beer, bags of ice, and chatted it up in check out lines, then returned home to wait it out, the Southern equivalent of a snow day.
I was court watching yesterday morning on Tulane and Broad, and the judge had to continue a drug trial because one of the twelve jurors didn't show up. "She must be evacuating," the judge said, after leaving a voice message for the missing woman. Today, the courthouse was close, along with some schools and essential services.
There's a 311 number for the 30,000 + people to call who need a ride out of town and a place to stay. Yesterday people couldn't get through because the line was busy. Here we go again? (They've supposedly added operators.) The new homeland security czar was on the news this morning, reiterating: "There will be no shelters of last resort."
Malcolm and I will go across the lake to my sister's house in Mandeville because she and her husband are taking their young sons to Vicksburg. The boys are scared of storms. I'd rather stay put in our 100-year-old house that came through Katrina okay except for roof damage, but we're renovating and we've been living in the attic. Heat rises and when the power goes out it'll be hellishly hot up there.
This year we have no big, sweet dog to tend to, no helpful teenage son sprung free from high school to pull in closer. (He's off to college, landlocked.) It's just the two of us and Malcolm wants to be near his clients so he can get back into the city as soon as the coast is clear. What a terrible phrase. Our coast is already clear, since 2005.
Gustav won't enter the Gulf of Mexico until Sunday and landfall wouldn't happen until Tuesday morning, but New Orleanians are worried about wind and water, broken levees, looting, about suffering again when they're still suffering. A scar's reopening even if the storm turns for somewhere else, and then there's the wicked coincidence that this is all happening on the anniversary of Katina.
McSweeney’s for your iPod.
Current mood: content
Category: Writing and Poetry
(Or other audio appliance.) McSweeney's recently hooked up with emusic to release stories from past issues read by their authors. The second CD - McSweeney's Field Recordings: Sweet Nothings and Essential Slow Jams, features the voices of Sheila Heti, Ben Ehrenreich, Tony d'Souza, Chris Bachelder, and me, reading our stories in natural settings. For mine, I sat on the sea wall at Lake Pontchartrain, water lapping at my feet and earth movers at my back because the corps is adding 8 more feet of hurricane protection.
My friend Jack Pendarvis' funny story, "The Big Dud," can be found on the first McSweeney's Audiobook and if you haven't heard Jack read, well, I promise you'll laugh out loud. If you think the woman's voice sounds like Joey Lauren Adams, you're correct.
Currently
listening
:
Infiniheart
By
Chad Vangaalen
Release date: 2005-08-23
Narrative Magazine’s new ’do.
Current mood: grateful
Narrative Magazine's been relaunched with a lively new design for its story-packed site. And once you sign in, you're good to go. The new archives make rummaging easier, and NM's running new features like Story/Poem-of-the-Day, and works grouped by themes like Sex (that's where my story is), War, Writing. All of this reading pleasure is FREE.
A new, long story I've been working on for a couple of years - Closer, Still - is being serialized this week at Five Chapters. The lit mag is the brainchild of Dave Daley, the instigator/editor of McSweeney's "Twenty Minute Stories" , which can be found on line and in issue 12 of that magazine.
On Tuesday morning, I drove an open-hearted, fuschia-haired writer and literary blogger, Carolyn Kellogg, around New Orleans. Maud Newton sent her to me. Carolyn's on the road and she called Monday to say she was in town for the night. So off we drove to look at the flooded neighborhoods and to talk.
The interview she did with me is on the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy. I hope I don't sound like a numbed out fool. We were talking intently when we turned into the Lower Ninth Ward and then my brain froze. I hadn't been down there in a couple of months, and to see a neighborhood vanquished - and it's people - freezes my brain and hurts my heart.
Carolyn's driving from Pitt where she just finished grad school back to LA where she lives, and blogging from the road. I put the press on her to move to New Orleans, buy a shotgun and teach high school, because that's what I do when I meet someone I like who doesn't live here but maybe could. I want to capture the good people who come through town and keep them here to help us rebuild. But she loves her city, too.
Time Out Chicago / Issue 123 : July 5, 2007 - July 11, 2007 Review Famous Fathers By Pia Z. Ehrhardt. MacAdam/Cage, $19.50.
Ehrhardt's first book is full of stories about women and girls who toy with adultery and indiscretion; a few, as in the titular story, even flirt with father/daughter incest. Her characters, all living in or around New Orleans, are flawed and selfish, and yet it's impossible to avert one's gaze. Each story is like a perfectly wrapped present you didn't know you wanted until you received it.
Ehrhardt's characters are both odd and familiar people; if you secretly aren't them, you probably know them. In "Tell Me in Italian," a daughter who is having an affair with a married man helps her mother catch her husband in his love nest with one of his students. The type of moral dilemmas this situation could present don't weigh on Ehrhardt's characters. They aren't filled with self-loathing or guilt like a good adulterer should be, and that in itself is refreshing. The "bad" women don't come to a worse end; they simply go on living their complicated lives. Stephen Elliott's excellent My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up comes to mind as a comparison, though Ehrhardt is less frank, settling for quietly unsettling.
The antidote for chick lit, Ehrhardt's characters make the same questionable choices again and again. Her beautifully simple and flowing prose guides them through their damaged lives and toward a measure of, if not forgiveness, then understanding.—Beth Dugan
FF in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Current mood: cheerful
Posted on Sun, Sep. 23, 2007
The pursuit of love, searingly depicted Famous Fathers By Pia Z. Ehrhardt Macadam Cage. 170 pp. $19.50 Reviewed by Michelle Reale
New Orleans author Pia Ehrhardt redefines human relationships in a way that can make a reader flinch, though in a good way. The 11 stories in this inaugural collection are searing in their depiction of the pursuit of love and second chances. One touches on the mystifying and tempestuous relationship between a father and daughter; another on how too much love can sometimes be as damaging as not enough.
Refreshingly, Ehrhardt doesn't string the reader along with inflated prose or over-the-top characterizations. Her stories are clean, sharp-edged, and imbued with honesty. She somehow manages to strike emotional chords by means of characters who are often morally bankrupt. Add to that the resonance that is New Orleans. The city is so trapped in our collective psyche as synonymous with bad luck and devastation, that the mere mention of the place serves as a metaphor for love itself, cracked perhaps, but unbroken.
The title story is narrated by high school senior Katie, who longs for the attention of her very busy and famous father, the mayor of Texadelphia. She befriends two girls in school whose love for their fathers is often a manipulative - and erotic - ploy to get whatever they want. Katie begins to date Larry, a young guy who works for her father, and suddenly gets her father's attention. Blurting out at the dinner table one evening that she has had sex with Larry changes the already fragile dynamic of her family and forces a father to see the reality of his daughter's life in a light most men would rather not.
In "Running the Room," a woman has no qualms about using her married daughter to hide behind while she carries on an affair with a city councilman, leading her daughter to ponder her own marriage in a blasé fashion:
I'm married, I understand what can happen over time, how you run out of new material and repeat yourself, zone out of your own thoughts because they're kind of dull, and so what? You go to bed at night and say, was your day any good, dear, mine was fine, and let's hope tomorrow is like today, and months go by and you lose sight of the fact that you're way out of range, a hundred miles from thrilling.
In "How It Floods," while a hurricane brews in the Gulf, a woman's casual flirtation with a civil engineer concerned about the levee's holding should disaster strike ends in a way she should have foreseen: "Tricky girls find men who trick them." In "Stop," the narrator schools the reader on how to be comforted when love, as it often does, goes frantically, unpredictably, messily awry - or even worse, when the seemingly insurmountably mundane aspects of life force us into going through the motions with love as with everything else.
No one escapes in Ehrhardt's stories: To love is to burn. Still, somehow, Ehrhardt's stories have an aspect of survivability, an "it is what it is" sort of a moral. Love may be flawed, but its pursuit is inevitable. Finding it, whenever or wherever, can make you "remember how rare it is to be loved for a minute like you're new."
content
busy
chipper