Crescent City blues

Oct. 2, 2006 | The editors at the New Orleans Review have put together a post-Katrina issue that avoids easy responses to the disaster, withholds simple prognoses for the future, and inhabits its moment of most-relevance so surely that its collective voice rises high above the din. And what a disheartening din it's been. Whether it was Anderson Cooper's repeated public tears, Celine Dion's Marie Antoinette-esque sound bite "Let them touch those things!" President Bush's Potemkin photo ops, or, later, Ray Nagin's helpless racial buffoonishisms, the culture hasn't managed to deal with the hurricane in any significant way. Perhaps we're all still too shocked. And why shouldn't we be? We lost one of our most beloved and mythical cities, a psychological escape of libertinism and subversion -- whether we've been there or not -- from our prudish, puritanical country.

No literary journal has ever been called upon to react specifically to the loss of its place of genesis, and what more could have been expected from this collection than page after page of horror and sorrow? But after the first four poems without a mention of Katrina anywhere, I understood that something very different was being done. Look at these lines from Ralph Adamo's poem "New Orleans Elegies": "I wish once we could sleep like two horses/ standing side by side after a twilight feed,/ eyes lashed for the night, forelegs atremble,/ but just barely, with being so strongly still." And again from Brad Richard's poem "St. Roch Camp Santo, New Orleans" a few pages later: "I would kiss his dark sore if it would give/ either of us solace, if it would bring back whole/ companions who died from the wrong touch,/ whatever killer stole their love" And from "Memento N.O." by Srdjan Smaji: "me kneeling & you kneeling/ me pressing into you/ in the alley behind the bar.../ we return repentant/ two prodigals all apologies/ & our friends plug us back/ into the same conversation." The first 112 pages of the review are full of stories and poems like these, not of Katrina, not disaster, but of people, of their desires, loves, losses, of their small lives frankly lived in a city we all recognize within a few words, the first glimpse of an image: New Orleans, our New Orleans, even if it wasn't ours. Cajun, jazz, the French Quarter, Canal Street, Bourbon Street, Algiers, Louis Armstrong and, of course, Mardi Gras. David Rae Morris' photograph on Page 92 of a New Orleans brass band marching beside a death-head wearing a "Constitution" sash is an image understandable only in the context of that one place.

That place is gone. Whether intended or not, the first half of the New Orleans Review has the feeling of walking around in a Holocaust museum: all of those head shots, all of those piles of shoes. This is the lost New Orleans we knew and took for granted. From Aliisa Rosenthal's story "Mambo": "I light one feminine cigarette under the languish of saxophones and cellos. There are debutantes in the gutters here. The dirty blonde and rusting beauties decay in hot puddles. But we're all sipping mint juleps and our feet are leveraged into stilettos and we know how to limbo our words into a drawl with lusty undertones, until the boys lunge at palmettos in the dark lantern light." And from Tara Jill Ciccarone's "Wait for Me, Susanna": "the men drinking their beers in front of the little grocery stores, saying How ya doing with sex in their eyes always, the young women, curvy and without makeup in flowered dresses, blooming themselves, the heat that slowed the body, teaching the body not to fight so much, to give in to the needs of the flesh and take it slow, and the guitar players on the sidewalks outside the coffee shops not wanting to go to work." And from C.W. Cannon's "Fools Rush In": "The kid's cornet was right on the thermostat, frowning and threatening and ignoring all supplicants, sending the mercury up, up. The band started chanting Talk Dat Shit Now and Say What?! and pointing at the dancers, pushing them to march harder. The boy blowing into his horn through the side of his mouth found some undiscovered and previously unused muscle in his face or his belly and started swinging and leaned into it, bumped the volume up one more decibel, and treated the air in front of his cornet to a righteous, vicious pummeling."

It's wonderful stuff, like a vault full of the literary art of Atlantis. Reading it in the context of Katrina is to almost hear these characters and places cry out, "We existed. We existed like this." But the work is so good that it transports the reader at times away from the fact of pre-Katrina New Orleans' own existential end, no one piece more so than C. Morgan Babst's story "Other Real Girls." With early lines like, "The cheese man liked their school skirts, and they would unbutton their second buttons and pull their Wigwams up to their knees for him ... Lille turned up her turned-up nose at him because he was a Yat. He came from the West Bank ... Allie had tried to keep from getting a crush on him," Babst creates a world quick to seduce. Complete in its universe, it leaves no ground to wonder whether Allie or Lille or any of the often nasty teenage girls of a certain New Orleans privileged upper class captured here are anything but real. "Other Real Girls" should win an award, as should the whole issue. Interviewing Christopher Chambers, editor since 1999 of the New Orleans Review, about what happened to him, his staff and his city after Katrina, I received this e-mail: "I am so tired of talking about Katrina, yet living here there is no way not to talk about it. We used to joke that New Orleans was like a third world country ... it is no longer a joke. City services are unreliable, leadership and a coherent plan for recovery nonexistent, violent crime back to pre-K[atrina] levels with one third of the population. Looting continues ... not sure why this has been swept under the rug ... Everyone here has been traumatized, and there is an undercurrent of bad energy. Recklessness, rage, and hard drinking like even this town has never seen."

Chambers and the NOR's poetry editor Katie Ford deserve credit for the artistic achievement of their editing. Running only work that's set in the days before Katrina in the first half of the issue, they ground and contextualize the loss and drama of the post-Katrina second half. And they manage to make the turn from the "pre" to "post" landscape feel as sudden and dramatic as it was in life. Though there are warnings of impending disaster, they are as easy to ignore as were all of those 1950s-era levee warnings. The excerpt of Walker Percy's 1968 essay "New Orleans Mon Amour," which opens the issue, reveals that the city has always suffered corruption and a certain sense of doom, and James Nolan's poem "Acts of God" admits that the city had been flooded by hurricanes past. Of all the lively poems and stories about New Orleans nightlife and Mardi Gras, almost none can be said to end joyfully.

And still, on Page 113, when Katrina appears almost out of nowhere in Anne Gisleson's essay "The Chain Catches Hold," we're not prepared. Gisleson's essay seems to be a quaint walk through interesting neighborhoods of the city. It's not. Like the whole of the issue itself, Gisleson's essay is a bait and switch: Here's New Orleans, here's New Orleans taken away. She writes about bars, brawls, a decaying mural, quietly decaying fences. Interesting but innocuous stuff. And then comes this entry: "Fall 2005. The razor wire rolled back, the concrete barricades moved to the side, the Bywater was opened back up to us officially in early October. On one end of Clouet Street at the river, a block from our house, a fire, started by either looters or the police, depending on whom you talked to, had raged for several days during the aftermath and destroyed six blocks of riverfront warehouses and wharves ... thousands of propane tanks were being stored inside ... during the fire many of them exploded and shot all over the neighborhood into houses, throughout streets. You can still come across their dented blackened carapaces, in gutters, on sidewalks and untended yards, pocked with rust, puckered holes."

Next page: Why is he taking shots at Andrei Codrescu, "the famous New Orleans author"?