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Random Nola Book Thoughts

by Cheryl Wagner, July 1, 2009 12:57 PM
Like a lot of New Orleans bookworms, I lost almost all my books in the flood. Piling all of my ruined belongings on the street for the debris trucks gave me a quick and crazy quasi-Buddhist lesson in impermanence that I can't seem to learn from or shake. In the past, I was always in a battle with my book pile. I'd devised a solution that was part gifting milk crates of books to people and part bringing my basset hound to the French Quarter to trade books and hang out with Kaylie the Hungarian Vizsla at Kaboom Books.

But then Kaboom moved to Houston after the storm. Now books are returning to dust and pile.

Here's a small and somewhat random sampling of books that I have or used to have that have contributed to my understanding of New Orleans:

The New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn

by Delia Labarre

This collection of satirical writings and illustrations about New Orleans first published in the Daily City Item makes for some sad, yet hilarious, reading. Fired from a newspaper in Cincinnati for marrying a black woman, Hearn moved to New Orleans in the early 1880s before ultimately relocating to Japan. From Hearn's musings on the "bummer class" of "low ruffians and aristocratic rascals" to teeth gnashing for "the indignant dead" (the legions of unavenged Nola murder victims), I cannot even go into the million reasons why the subtitle of this artifact of New Orleans life from the 1880s should be And the Song Remains the Same. New Orleans readers in particular will be surprised (or not) to find that such current New Orleans problems as "the city does not pay police to kick and gouge and bite prisoners" were old topics even back then. "The Chinese opium-smokers have not departed from the city as we had fondly hoped," Hearn wrote. "They have simply established themselves in other streets." Um, yeah.

Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana

by Lyle Saxon

My father (not even a Cajun) and his hunting buddies scared me with tales of the swamp werewolf when I was a child. Now I know why.

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

This comic novel is still a New Orleans classic. This was the first book I ever read that featured characters that spoke like some of my relatives. When I first read it, my mother told me that the man who wrote it had killed himself, and he had been nice, so that was a tragedy, and that a nun we knew had known him. That's how small Louisiana is.

Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

by John H. Davis

A relative of Carlos Marcello controls a lot of properties in my neighborhood. While this isn't the best book of all time, it does provide a bit of history of the mystery.

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow

by Dedra Johnson

The tales of Catholic school girlhood in this novel set in New Orleans in the '70s resonated with me. This book made me remember both mean, old school nuns and younger, folksinging nuns from my childhood. It reminded me that school often provides a fleeting oasis of calm for children with troubled home lives.

I also like that New Orleans lives and breathes in this novel instead of just sitting there like a lump of overchewed beignet clichés. After a neighbor's Space Walk party turned to a brutal brawl in front of my house recently, I found myself thinking about how Sandrine, the little girl protagonist of this novel, feared some of her mother's parties. She got this vague feeling of dread when the mac-and-cheese or jambalaya fixings came out.

Whatever It Takes

by Paul Tough

The widespread flooding in New Orleans pushed the school system here to a tipping point. I walked away from Paul Tough's book with a better understanding of the daily challenges facing school reformers and a feel for how Geoffrey Canada is meeting (and not meeting) these challenges in Harlem. Barack Obama's interest in using Geoffery Canada's Harlem Children's Zone as a blueprint for school reform in urban areas ups the ante for New Orleans and other cities.

Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery

by Mary Niall Mitchell

Mitchell uses letters, photographs, newspapers, novels, and legal documents to examine how the black child became a blank screen on which to project the country's hopes and fears of American life after slavery. I've met more than a few missionaries and reformers and never thought about them much in their historical context before. Mitchell's discussion of "northern civilizing efforts" in this book changed that. Since the flood, I've been listening to black and white New Orleanians joke and not-joke about "carpetbaggers" of every stripe.

Chord Changes on the Chalkboard: How Public School Teachers Shaped Jazz and the Music of New Orleans

by Al Kennedy, with a foreword by Ellis Marsalis, Jr.

Al Kennedy shaped my understanding of how jazz and culture and public education shape each other in New Orleans. I look at (and listen to) school marching bands and brass bands differently now as a result.




Books mentioned in this post

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole

Gumbo Ya Ya A Collection Of Louisiana

Lyle Saxon

Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery

Mary Niall Mitchell

Chord Changes on the Chalkboard: How Public School Teachers Shaped Jazz and the Music of New Orleans

Al Kennedy

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Aroun

Wagner, Cheryl

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow

Dedra Johnson

Whatever It Takes Geoffrey Canadas Quest to Change Harlem & America

Paul Tough

The New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn: Illustrated Sketches from the Daily City Item

LaBarre, Delia

Mafia Kingfish Carlos Marcello & The

John H Davis
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6 Responses to "Random Nola Book Thoughts"

CherylWagner July 2, 2009 at 02:28 PM
KiwiChief, Thanks for the kind words about the book, but thanks more for sharing your town’s rebuilding story. Your tale of the mythical Time Before FEMA and the tornado that hit your town, rebuilding efforts that are subsequently proved to be for naught, and your remarks about “persistent ambivalence” strike a chord with me. I also often think about how people keep (or fail to keep) their bearings and identities after major impacts (or displacement). It’s a fascinating topic that did not interest me at all before I witnessed so much of this firsthand. As for whether any “civil defense” as you define it (“defending our collective selves and sanity against the leakage of violence from the natural world into the social order“) transpired here in Nola? Not so much. Whether it’s possible? Hopefully, as you suggest, to some extent. Cheryl W.

KiwiChief July 2, 2009 at 12:30 PM
Cheryl, I finished reading your book today. Like all truly great reads, it made me sad to come to its end, but grateful that the end was so hopeful. In my early teens, the town where I grew up was hit by a very large tornado, which destroyed more than half the homes and buildings there killing 32 people. FEMA did not yet exist. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing. We pulled together and got things done. Much of what we did was wrong, but we did what we had to do to get through the experience and knew full well as we went that it might all be for naught. (A subsequent tornado proved some of it was.) As only someone with first-hand experience could, you captured perfectly the sense of persistent ambivalence that comes with living through disaster in Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around. People who live through disaster know they have to move forward, but they are never again quite certain they are moving in the right direction or at the right pace. This often makes staying where they are not only the best option, but the one that allows them to keep their bearings. That I too have first-hand experience of this disaster duality, which juxtaposes humor and grace with dysfunction and decay, makes your graceful and often humorous retelling of your story both compelling and heartwarming. These days I work as a so-called emergency manager for local government. I say so-called, because I have never really believed that we truly manage emergencies, or even our response to them for that matter. To the contrary, we try not to let them manage us, if only by ensuring they do not rob us of our souls. (In some ways the now ancient moniker for what we do -- civil defense -- speaks more directly to what we do: Defending our collective selves and sanity against the leakage of violence from the natural world into the social order.) To the extent that the people of New Orleans or anyplace else can look back and say "we're recovering," it is because

CherylWagner July 2, 2009 at 09:12 AM
Northwestkid, I'm far from a cookbook expert, but I'm a fan of things like the old NOPSI cookbook and the old Louisiana Power & Light cookbook pamphlets. Those and various civic group cookbooks include regional recipes but also do not foodie things up too much. I find it to be selective memory to ignore the Southern love of food industrial complex cooking (like Rotel Dip, jello concoctions ("pink stuff"), and the 5-can casseroles) that clogged the arteries of my youth. That said, yeah, you should have given me your books before you moved. Cheryl W.

CherylWagner July 1, 2009 at 10:31 PM
RaginCajun, Why in the world have I not read THE EARL OF LOUISIANA? It sounds great. Thanks for the suggestion. Cheryl W.

Northwestkid July 1, 2009 at 09:54 PM
I am looking forward to reading your book. I spent the last eight years in New Orleans being a madwoman trying to change the regional psyche. I guess I knew I was in trouble when my step son to be greeted me with "you must be one of those people against littering." However today even natives are thinking about green energy, a clean city and future progress. It took an all powerful woman, Katrina to open that door. I am not as brave as you and have escaped to Portland, my little shangri-la. I would add One Dead in the Attic by Chris Rose, Path of Destruction by Mark Schliefstein and a cook book...how can you read about New Orleans without food? Commander's Kitchen by Ti Martin and the late Jamie Shannon would be a good choice. Sorry that our paths hadn't crossed, I gave away a lot of books before I left.

RaginCajun July 1, 2009 at 02:18 PM
Thanks for the recommendations, Cheryl. I'd like to add "The Earl of Louisiana" by the great A. J. Liebling. Liebling chronicles the escapades of Governor Earl K. Long (brother of Huey) following his release from a mental institution. http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780807133439-0

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