Paper Paper: September 2009

I don't generally read books about New Orleans. Its not for a lack of interest but rather a lack of stamina. When I arrive back home and I pick up a book to read, I do it to escape. And tomes like THE GREAT DELUGE by Douglas Brinkley don't really give me that satisfaction when I curl up on the couch with it.

I wasn't in the city to live thru Katrina but like anybody else I still live with Katrina in the city. There are hundreds of abandoned buildings within any 1 mile radius of you wherever you go. The most prolific graffiti in the city is still the thousands of spray painted X's left by the military on the front of every household in search of surviovrs (most of them are dated 9-11 too). Driving down the street to my cousins house there are even still 9 foot high flood marks on the pylons underneath the interstate overpass.

(Used to be you could see those lines everywhere in the city and immediatley determine just how far below the sea that part of town was. The brown lines traced the outside of buildings with a pefect plumb precision. Its harder and harder to find them now with every passing year and each rainstorm but shielded as these ones under the bridge are they will be there indefinitley.)

So I generally don't read books about New Orleans published anytiime after 2005. Dan Baum's was the first. He tricked me into finishing his book NINE LIVES by dividing the narrative into 9 independent story lines and then chopping up each of these into easy to read third person vignettes. It follows the lives of 9 residents of the city he interviewed beginning with the childhood memories of Ronald Lewis in the Lower Ninth Ward immediately after Hurrican Betsy in 1965.

By starting in the past and working his way thru time towards Katrina, Baum made the journey that much more palatable. He also chose nine very interesting and disparate lives to follow including Joyce Montana the wife of legendary Mardi Gras Indian Chief Tootie, an emphatic bandleader in NO East, a transexual bartender, and a former military man turned hardass cop in the city (his is one of the more brief and painful accounts to get thru. He ended up quitting the force almost immediately after the storm but not before driving around with a corpse in his car and shooting hysterically at a group of people outside a looted store.)

Even though the book does provide a nice overview of the past, the last third of it is devoted to the storm and the trials in coming back. One of the most interesting accounts comes from Anthony Wells, a black man who was raised in California by a father from New Orleans and who eventually settles in NO East as an old man. His story is the only one retold as a direct transcription of his own words which makes it seem all the more authentic and fun to read.

That is to say, 'easier' to read; None of the Katrina accounts were 'fun' to read. They made my blood boil. Each injustice was followed by another one as if the only assisstance the government could provide was to insure each injury was followed with an insult (Conservatives will be shocked to read how the guns of Joann Guidos, the trani bartender, are illegally seized by the city police during the mandatory evacuation. Frank Minyard, the city coroner, couldn't get any government agency to bring the bodies of the deceased to his makeshift morgue until the task had been contracted out 10 days after the fact.) The whole book has me slightly depressed and off-balance in the days after finishing it.

The one thing that did lift my spirits was part of Anthony Wells' evacuation story involving Tennessee. Read it here:

Didn't I tell you Knoxville was a good place to go? Not perfect but still:
"They welcomed us like we were a good commodity like they was afraid every other town would get people from New Orleans and they wouldn't."