(no subject)

Late last night, watching the Hurricaine news, my roommate and I started laughing in a bad manic way as we wondered if God were punishing New Orleans for Anne Rice's Jesus book. It was funny in the moment, in that black humour way, but certainly doesn't translate to paper.

The news keeps saying that in addition to snakes, reptiles and fire ant balls (yes, they are real, the Times Picayune blog informs us this morning) there are now sharks in the water of the city. Sharks are sort of an in joke around here, as they alarm more than a few people I know and really, is anyone doing better than the sharks?

One of the problems in writing about this is that I am not anywhere, nor do I have any particular skill sets where this is anything I can do. And I don't want to write yet about my trip there or why The Vampire Lestat mattered more than anything when I was twelve or the memory of buses with the destination marker Desire, because then it's like the end.

At like 2am I caught some Anderson Cooper on CNN:HN. He looked tired. Anderson Cooper never really seems anything but spritely. He kept saying that surely things must be getting better because so much relief work is going on, but yet it didn't seem like that. He also seemed like he'd been awake for days, and probably has been.

I've been thinking of reporters I have known during this a lot, because I've worked with reporters in that area and because I've worked with the sorts of people who go into these sorts of situations. They're difficult people with difficult jobs who don't ever really get to be okay in the head.

Among other things, I keep thinking of Rudy Giuliani's most eloquent 9/11 moment, when asked how many rescue workers were dead, he said he didn't know, but the number will be "more than we can bear." In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 things did get out of hand here in very odd ways. There was one day where everything I saw on the streets was the escalation of some domestic disturbance. Eventually I saw a couple headbutting each other in the street outside of the Empire State building. Had our event been the sort of thing that put the basic resources of life at risk or out of reach throughout the city, I can easily see how it would have become both as violent and nonsensical as much of what seems to be happening in New Orleans now.

I have always been fascinated with dying cities, since I was very small. My interests were Pompeii, Heculaneum and Sunday afternoon disaster movies on WPIX. Well and dinosaurs, and maybe they had cities too right? I was little. Kids are like that.

But it's a constant motif in my world that comes, I think, from many places, including growing up in New York, which in being a 19th Century City has a constant sense of decay bricked over and fingers crossed. I read Hiroshima in second grade and planned very carefully for the end of the world. Maybe some of my resourcefulness comes from being a dark child, I don't know.

I read books about doommed cities and cultures over and over again. Honestly, I can't think of anything I'm really fond of that isn't like that. Winterlong, Aestival Tide, Imajica -- all doomed places inching towards or past their conclusions. You could even say it of Harry Potter in a way, and Cyteen.

In Winterlong, which is set in the Washington DC area, much is made of the Narrow Forest (the Mall, reclaimed by its bordering trees) and the Curators who live in the museums. Yesterday I heard they rescued people from a New Orleans museum who didn't want to go because there would be no one left to guard the art.

I have always had a keen sense that fiction is a terrible thing, simply because it might just be true in some way, some day. Maybe if I read different books as a rule, I'd use a cheerier adjective.

The news says places are being closed to evacuees now. There's some problem with the bus caravans to Houston and Baton Rouge says it can't take any more refugees.

more Katrina links

the grim reality

This may or may not be it, but it's utterly possible that this _is_ what is happening, has happened:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/lori/477492.html

Speculative numbers based on solid facts.

the political situation

http://www.livejournal.com/users/tanuki_green/142191.html

meanwhile

I've a fitting tomorrow for the new Julie Taymor project.

Regrettably, I'm working non-union, but who knows, maybe I'll get lucky. Fittings are fun and it's Julie Taymor! and a musical! hee! Shooting on the 29th.

(no subject)

Steve Erickson is one of my favourite authors. He's both a novelist and essayist and has done political coverage for Rolling Stone now and again. Among other things, he has an obsession with Sally Hemmings. He sees her everywhere. She speaks to him. Both in the fiction and the non -- there's a lack of distinction to it that fascinates me, that I _know_.

One of Erickson's books that I feel fortunate to own is Leap Year. It's an odd account of the 1988 election season and still a great, relevant read. It's out of print and probably the hardest of his out of print books to find. The following is a passage from it:

My train was bound to go to New Orleans sooner or later, or I was bound to wind up on a train that did. I arrive at nght, in a peculiarly empty station; New Orleans is a town schizophrenic in its fullness and emptiness of life. The cab takes me to the Quarter and I take a room at the St. Peter's Guest House. Considering that a number of the guests have been stashed away by the hotel management in the old servants' quarters of the house, I'm lucky to have a room on the courtyard. I eat dinner at Tujague's and dessert at a place across the street near the Mississippi where they serve the fried holes of donuts. These fried donut holes are quite the thing in New Orleans. Down the street is Storyville, where you can hear blues and jazz. Every bar in the Quarter is teeming with people listening to blues and jazz and sooner or later you're bound to run into someone you know even in this city where you don't know anyone. A few hours before dawn everyone goes home and pulls closed the curtains and sleeps so as to survive the daylight, hoping in the meantime no one invades this sanctum to pound a stake through his heart. By the second night I realize on the banks of the Mississippi that this is one of those places and times where north might be any direction at all; across the river beyond the banks on the other side is a void the extent of which no instinct can determine. When I've been in New Orleans forty-eight hours and will be gone in another thirty-six, I leave Storyville one night having had enough music. The silence of the leaving is uncommon and I relish it, the night having had to fall down its own deep well to get that quiet. I turn off Decatur onto St. Peter Street and walk along the Square....

She could be any age. She could be any color. Sally stands in a hallway behind a pair of shuttered doors not unlike the ones to my own room at my hotel; she calls. Except it isn't me she means. She wears a cape and earrings in the shape of masks at the end of small scepters, as if they came from France two hundred years ago. Thomas. "No," I say, "sory." I think she's working but when she steps into the street, in as dim a light as the street would offer, I see it isn't like that, it's not in her eyes that she's selling anything. Thomas? she says again. "No, I'm not Thomas." She has long straight black hair and under the cape her dress is plain. When she sees I'm not who she wants, she turns quickly to leave and I hear a small metal sound in the road at my feet; that's when I pick up the earring, the mask on the end of the scepter. I think she hears me when I call her, I think she keeps going because she thinks I have the wrong idea, that I've taken her inquiry for something else. She picks up her pace and disappears. Back in my hotel room there is on the small cepter part of the jewel of her blood, still slightly wet, as thought she pierced her own ear herself.

I see her again two days later, or maybe it's the day after. It's my last day in New Orleans anyway.