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Treme, HBO's new series (image courtesy of HBO.com)
This is Patrick Sauer’s fourth “Read It Like a Man” weekly column for Blisstree. Find his previous installment on “80s Hair Metal” here.
Chapter 4: NOLA
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? I do.
To me, it’s truly the happiest place on earth. But last year, due to economic conditions beyond my control (I blame Goldman Sachs for forcing me to play Wii every afternoon throughout 2009), the wife and I weren’t able to make our annual pilgrimage to Jazz Fest.
This year, that situation will be rectified, and thanks to Treme and a never-ending WWOZ iTunes stream, I’m more excited than ever. On tap are Simon & Garfunkel, a panel discussion with David Simon (hosted by Harry Shearer, ideally conducted as Kent Brockman), Trombone Shorty, Pearl Jam, the softshell crabs at Clancy’s, the oyster and bacon sandwich at Cochon, and general day-drinking debauchery that will keep my BAC and BMI well above medically recommended levels.
To get in the swinging mood, I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite local literary works. New Orleans attracts the eccentric, so naturally it’s a writer’s paradise. This chapter could come in a hundred different versions; terrific titles I won’t be discussing include Rising Tide, The Moviegoer, The Awakening, A Streetcar Named Desire, 1 Dead in Attic, Yellow Jack, and any of Anne Rice’s bloody gay vampire series, if that’s what you like to sink your teeth into.
If you’ve never been, you should go. And don’t take my word for it, put your trust in Louis Armstrong: “Way down yonder in New Orleans/In the land of dreamy scenes/There’s a garden of Eden/You know what I mean?”
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Beignet Breakdown: Admittedly, Toole’s amazing novel isn’t under the radar, but it’s so good that if you only read one book about New Orleans in your lifetime, make it the one with a protagonist so insufferable that you’ll never look askance at the most obnoxious guy in your office again. For the uninitiated (if you exist), A Confederacy of Dunes is the story of Ignatius Reilly, an obese flatulent asexual medieval scholar forced to (gasp) get a job in a plebeian world that fails to recognize his genius. Basically, it’s a series of madcap encounters between Reilly and local pathetic oddballs like his tortured sodden mother, a pornography-selling teenager, a dim-witted stripper with a feisty cockatoo, a group of belligerent fightin’ lesbians, a senile office clerk way gone in dementia, a hapless cop in ridiculous disguises, and a horny “activist” in the Bronx who apparently lusts for Reilly’s lumpy bones. There’s no way to do the story justice in a paragraph, other than to say it’s one of the funniest books in the American canon. (And not English comp “Chaucer is so ribald” funny, but fat-guy-fall-down-go-boom funny.) Here’s a taste from Ignatius: “…When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”
One of the amazing things about A Confederacy of Dunces is that each chapter and sub-chapter move the plot forward. There’s no wasted paper; it’s the African Queen of books about intolerable corpulent gassy faux-radical Fortuna-obsessed hot dog vendors. There are also couple of interesting backstories that make A Confederacy of Dunces particularly endearing:
* John Kennedy Toole committed suicide 11 years before publication, which only came about because his mother found a faded carbon copy of the manuscript and convinced Walker Percy to read it. It became a cult classic and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
* It’s become the book that can’t be adapted, a supreme irony because Reilly’s favorite pastime is attending movies he knows he’ll hate (a.k.a.“filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency.”) Numerous filmmakers have tried to bring it to the big screen and failed. As recently as 2007, a version was in the works with Lily Tomlin, Paul Rudd, Mos Def, and Will Ferrell in a fat suit, but it’s gone the way of all the other productions, including an insane Harold Ramis project that was to star John Belushi and Richard Pryor. Bluto’s fondness for Chicago cuisine and speedballs shitcanned the project, and as Ramis said in And Here’s the Kicker: “It’s defeated every writer who’s ever tried it over the years.”
Why Women Need to Read: Regardless of the ancillary factoids, A Confederacy of Dunces is a must-read for fans of the awesome, whether you set foot in NOLA or not. Toole’s secret weapon is that, in a strange way, he makes Reilly admirable, if not lovable. Wouldn’t we all like to live our lives completely on our own terms? To tell the world what we’re thinking at every turn? Yes, we would. Reilly is such a singular over-the-top character that nobody has ever spent time with anyone like him – a few hours would be grounds for justifiable homicide – but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t want to be him, if only for one day. A Confederacy of Dunces is as much New Orleans as crawfish and the Neville Brothers, so read it. Now. It will open your valve and let you revel in telling the “undesirables” to go to hell.
Letters From New Orleans by Rob Walker
Beignet Breakdown: Walker is best known as the man behind the “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine, a weekly look at the enjoyable crap that makes us Americans. Right around 2000, Walker and his girlfriend “E.” left Gotham and decamped to New Orleans. He started sending emails of the sights and sounds, little slice-of-life vignettes that give a sense of what life is like down there without being polemical or overly guidebook-y. Told in the first-person, Walker weaves together mythology, conversations, observations, bits of history, unanswered questions, and hilarious moments in time that capture the flavor of the oddity that is New Orleans. One of the reasons it works so well is that it isn’t all reflexive. Walker puts on a skeleton costume and throws out beads while marching in a Carnival parade, attends a jazz funeral after seeing an ad in the paper, and indulges in a long, lazy boozy lunch at old-school coats-and-ties staple Galatoire’s.
Why Women Need to Read: Walker’s book is pre-K (he was there from 2000-03), so his pieces don’t carry the post-storm weariness. He’s certainly not oblivious to the day-to-day realities of most New Orleanians, but his time there wasn’t defined by the destruction of a great American city and the deaths of its citizens. Thus, he’s unencumbered while ruminating on how NOLA is a place of nonconformity that refuses to change come hell or (ahem) high water. It’s a place where a man can get fried pound cake, where former Bill Clinton paramour Gennifer Flowers can reinvent herself as a torch singer, and where levy bonfires are a Christmastime tradition. Letters From New Orleans is a great primer, a quick read, and Walker distills the Big Easy in a single word better than I ever could: “unselfconsciousness.”
City of Refuge by Tom Piazza
Beignet Breakdown: A dedicated music writer, Tom Piazza moved from Iowa to New Orleans in 1994 and dived jazz-first into the city’s wondrous cultural scene. He became so immersed that his current gig is writing for HBO’s new series Treme, which is at least one lonely blogger’s dream. Shortly after Katrina, Piazza wrote Why New Orleans Matters, an important visceral screed about the “profoundly wounded place.” It had the immediacy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but deeper truths always come from fiction, so in 2008, he called upon his inner-Charles Dickens and penned the novel City of Refuge. Similar to Oliver Twist or Hard Times, Piazza used rich, sympathetic characters to show that when the sun refuses to shine, the moon turns red with blood, and the new world has yet to be revealed – good luck finding a saint marching anywhere.
City of Refuge tells the parallel story of two families – one black, one white – and how they deal with Katrina’s aftermath. S.J. Williams, a carpenter and widower from the Lower Nine, waits it out; Craig Donaldson, a Midwest native editing an alternative newspaper, doesn’t. Over the course of six months, both men will be uprooted and moved around the country. Both men bear the scars of Katrina, yet yearn to get back to the thing that has a hold on them, New Orleans. Williams watches his neighbors drown, his community wash away, and has to come to grips with the fact that everything he’s ever known is gone. Donaldson has more resources, but he’s stuck in a Chicago suburb that will have to be his home if he wants to keep his wife and two kids together.
Why Women Need to Read: The broad outline is familiar, but it serves Williams and Donaldson because they aren’t archetypes. Their personal journeys – thick with rage, hope, and reality – are what sets this novel apart from the long-faded news coverage and Spike Lee’s great When the Levees Broke. And as tremendous as Treme has been so far, City of Refuge is as-it-happens, so it’s more urgent and perilous. (Although, one suspects Creighton Bernette abides, City of Refuge is probably on his bookshelf, and I’ll bet you a Hubig’s pie that Piazza had a hand in his “manmade catastrophe, a Federal fuck-up of epic proportions” rant.) All told, City of Refuge even does an better job than Piazza’s first attempt at grappling with Katrina. It proves why New Orleans matters.
Earth Week just wrapped, but I encourage anyone headed to NOLA to recycle those beer cans, eat a local lunch (like say a Central Grocery muffuletta, Zapp’s Cajun Crawtator and an Abita turbodog), and if you’re a better person than I am, swing a hammer with Brad Pitt’s Make It Right nonprofit.
Oh, and if anyone is out at Jazz Fest, look me up. Say hello. I’ll be the doughy white guy in cargo shorts and flip-flops nodding his head rhythmically.
Laissez les bon temp rouler.
Patrick Sauer is a writer, blogger, and performer. Originally from Billings, Montana, he now lives in Brooklyn. For more, check out: patrickjsauer.com.
