PEN World Voices

A few weeks ago, I was on a panel on New Orleans at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City. We had an interesting discussion, moderated by Nathaniel Rich with a panel that also included Sarah Broom, Richard Campanella, Nicholas Lemann, and Fatima Sheik. Part of what distinguished this New Orleans conversation from many others that I have heard and been a part of was the fact that there seemed to be a consensus that New Orleans needs to, at least in some ways, shed some of its claimed exceptionalism if it is going to be able to break out of its myriad difficulties. This is something that I have been banging on about for years and which, at least in some ways, appears to be the view of other folks who care about this city.

WNYC has a recording of the panel discussion on its website and highlighted the following "bon mots" from the discussion (not all of which I agree with):

Billy Sothern, a New Orleans anti-death penalty lawyer and author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections From a Drowned City," on understanding New Orleans: "I think there are many who view NOLA as this exceptional place and some of them are the city’s biggest fans. But I argue that instead of its exceptionalism, the rest of America needs to be concerned with New Orleans because it's highly representative of the problems of the rest of the country ... These kinds of issues are coming to a neighborhood near you — they may already have but they are going to get worse. Instead of a metaphor, I think it's important to not say we have this 'New Orleans problem' with the schools and crime. Instead, we have this 'American problem' that is tragically magnified in the city of New Orleans."

Nicholas Lemann, a New Orleans native, staff writer for The New Yorker (among other magazines), and Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, on race: "The fabled white elite that controls everything in New Orleans are probably the least powerful white elite than you'd find in any big city in the country. Not because someone took their power away, but for various cultural reasons. New Orleans has no locally controlled major economic institutions, so the infamous New Orleans white elite does not have the inclination to do what one would want done in New Orleans. And if they had the inclination, they would not be able to do them."

Sarah Broom, a New Orleans native who wrote "A Yellow House in New Orleans," on local pride: "I think this 'love of place' is really just from people who are stuck in a lots of ways. There were very few opportunities for [career] advancement. It's almost impossible for a highly-educated person to move back to New Orleans and find some sort of intellectual rigor. That is just the truth. Part of it is that Hurricane Katrina forced a lot of people from New Orleans and now they don't want to come back. This population of people who can't come back because they can't afford to are also made up of people who don't actually want to return."

Fatima Shaik, who is the author of four books of fiction set in Louisiana, on writing about New Orleans: "I think writers after Katrina were thrust into the roles of sociologists. People who are from New Orleans are likely to write about it. I think those people who are not from the city and want to write about it should focus on writing across the cultures and writing accurately. People don't have a conversation across cultures. Writers can do that."

Because PEN had proposed a New Orleans-based project, the panel drafted a statement reflecting the kind of project that we believed could be beneficial as well as some general statements that we felt should guide any effort to "help" New Orleans:

A few things we don’t want to do: we don’t want to be redundant, meaning we don’t want to start a service or project that already exists locally. Even worse, we don’t want to compete or confuse. There was a consensus in our group that education is of paramount importance and should be a component of PEN’s work in New Orleans. One way of doing this is to expand upon initiatives already in place within PEN, such as the children’s education program, prison writing and folklore projects. Where such programs exist we think there is a pressing need to implement them in New Orleans in an aggressive way. Ideally we would hope for PEN to extend these projects into New Orleans, while at the same start a new, unique project. It’s crucial that this process leads to real results.

The project should be mindful of the fact there are major human rights failings in New Orleans that have not been addressed adequately by the local and federal government and the criminal justice system.

Some ideas for projects to be implemented with PEN’s help in New Orleans:

1. Books are not allowed in New Orleans prisons. PEN should aggressively advocate to change that policy, especially given the incredibly high incarceration rate.

2. PEN should continue to support the MLK Visiting Authors program financially.

3. PEN can launch a mapping project. We would like for students to be involved with the technical and creative process of creating maps of their local neighborhoods. We could partner with the (potential) forthcoming publication, “Mapping New Orleans.”

4. Science and engineering can be a venue for storytelling. We can begin an initiative to create a workshop to bring together scientists, engineers, and writers and teach research methodology to writers—perhaps in the form of a lecture series.

5. Introduce the Prison Writing Program into New Orleans prisons.

6. We would like to launch a movie series in various parks and neighborhoods by pairing local documentaries with films that are about New Orleans in the hope of drawing a large public.

7. A regular reading series that could be held in outdoor places around the city—perhaps we can partner with local reading series, arts markets, and farmers’ markets.

8. A PEN/New Orleans literary prize should be established, for a writer, a student, or a group of students.

9. Establish a relationship with local radio stations as well as the Times Picayune, following the example of the StoryCorps project two years ago. The Times-Pic featured selected stories from that project.

10. We can try to launch a series of guest editorials in the Times Picayune by influential PEN Writers, which could be connected to another of the projects mentioned herein, where applicable.

11. Once we have identified projects on which to focus our energy and funding, have a PEN author write an editorial in a national publication to draw attention to our efforts.

12. PEN should provide a page on its web site for people who are coming to New Orleans and may be interested in doing nonprofit or volunteer work in the city, including partner organizations: a page of links to local projects.

13. Some local organizations that PEN can partner with include Tulane’s Center for Public Service, Times-Pic, MLK School, Neighborhood Story Project, Xavier, Loyola, Dillard, New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities, the American Folklore Project (Maggi Michel, a representative of the American Folklore Project has expressed great interest in helping), the New Orleans Film Society, and Patois.

We would like to stress the importance of bringing into underserved schools professionals in the arts, sciences, technologies, and engineering.

All programming should be forward-looking and should not dwell excessively on Katrina.

We hope this will be the beginning of a practical discussion about what steps to take and how to implement one or several of these projects effectively. We hope such a conversation can take place within the next two months, whether at a meeting or through a web conversation. In many of the proposals given above, we have much more to add, including contacts and local organizations with whom we are in touch and who can bring about immediate results.

Sarah "Lyons" Wakeman

Thinking of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, who joined the Union army during the Civil War, fought, died, and was buried, all as a man, "Lyons." She is buried at the Union cemetery at the Chalmette Battlefield.

We brought her zinnias this Memorial Day.

Life for Pot

In case you are wondering why America's prison population has exploded to become the largest in human history, the fact that a Slidell, Louisiana man received a life without the possibility of parole sentence for possession with intent to distribute marijuana might provide some answers.

From the Times Picayune:

Fourth marijuana conviction gets Slidell man life in prison
Thursday, May 05, 2011, 5:51 PM
By Ramon Antonio Vargas

Cornell Hood II got off with probation after three marijuana convictions in New Orleans.

He didn't fare too well after moving to St. Tammany Parish, however. A single such conviction on the north shore landed the 35-year-old in prison for the rest of his life.

State Judge Raymond S. Childress punished Hood under Louisiana's repeat-offender law in his courtroom in Covington on Thursday. A jury on Feb. 15 found the defendant guilty of attempting to possess and distribute marijuana at his Slidell home, court records show.

More here.

Recordio 1947

I have a collection of old, home recorded records that I found at various junk and thrift stores. I found several recently, all apparently recorded by the same person, at the Latter Library book sale. My favorite of the bunch is labeled "Wayne, Jack and Brian - 3/24/47". Wayne and Jack both introduce themselves as students at the "Audubon School" and gave their last names as something that sounds to me like Laszlo.

The record is very sweet with the eldest, Wayne, reciting two nursery rhymes for his dad, then Jack, slightly less sure, and then, finally, little Brian, unable to talk above a squeak as his dad encourages him to say a few words for the record so that his grandparents can hear him.

These little boys would all now be past sixty. I would like to give them their record back. Anyone know a Laszlo family, or something like that, with three boys, Wayne, Jack, and Brian, all born in the thirties or forties and from New Orleans.

***

Here are two of the rhymes they recited for their dad:

The Secret

We have a secret, just we three,

The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry-tree;

The bird told the tree, and the tree told me,

And nobody knows it but just us three.

But of course the robin knows it best,

Because she built the--I shan't tell the rest;

And laid the four little--something in it--

I'm afraid I shall tell it every minute.

But if the tree and the robin don't peep,

I'll try my best the secret to keep;

Though I know when the little birds fly about

Then the whole secret will be out.

The Turtle

There was a little turtle

Who lived in a box.

He swam in the puddles

And climbed on the rocks.

He snapped at the mosquito,

He snapped at the flea.

He snapped at the minnow,

And he snapped at me.

He caught the mosquito,

He caught the flea.

He caught the minnow,

But he didn't catch me!

It's 10:20 a.m., do you know where your power comes from?

After reading the headlines about nuclear meltdowns in Japan, I thought to myself, I wonder if I live near a nuclear power plant, here in disaster prone Southern Louisiana. A link from Greenpeace informed me about Waterford 3, a nuclear power plant about twenty miles up the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish. Greenpeace offered the following risk assessment in the event of a serious accident:

Government data estimates that an accident at Waterford 3 would lead to 96,000 deaths and 279,000 injuries within a year, as well as 9,000 cancer deaths over the lifetime of the exposed population. The cost of such an accident was predicted to be $131 billion in 1980.

The crisis in Japan is the world's second (and far biggest) environmental disaster to strike the world, greedy for power, in the past year. When we were facing the BP spill last year here in Louisiana, I was reminded of Moby Dick, and the lengths that we have gone to historically to keep the lights on. (An op-ed in the New York Times beat me to the punch in employing the metaphor.)

The power from Waterford 3 keeps my air conditioning on all summer long in my drafty, inefficient New Orleans home. Realistically, I do not expect that my concerns about where my energy comes from, or its consequences, will change my thermostat. And if we are unwilling, I can be pretty sure that others, less concerned, will not change there behaviors. But clearly with consumption of energy growing these energy related disasters will continue until we identify energy sources that don't spoil the seas, rape the earth, and rise the tides.

I expect, or at least hope, that these past few days have tipped the scales on the cost benefit analysis that keeps us dependent on dangerous means of energy production.

Founding Fathers Too Freaked Out by Cars

Seth Meyers' Saturday Night Live Weekend Update from a couple of weeks ago nails the debate, and the absurdity, of conservative legal theories (that seem to hold sway in the minds of several of the Supreme Court justices) that fetishize the beliefs of the founding fathers in addressing modern social and legal issues.

Meyers suggested that the founding fathers would be too "freaked out" by cars, planes, and the fact that all of the slaves had been freed to even engage these weighty issues in modern American life. It's too good to miss.

Character and Fitness

Jason Flores-Williams is having his New Orleans book launch for his new book, Character and Fitness, on Saturday, January 22, 2011, at 8 p.m., at FAB Books, 900 Frenchmen Street, New Orleans, LA. I will opening up by reading something short, along with Jason's friend and New Orleans' writer, Raphaelle O'Neil. (http://www.myspace.com/nolabutterfly) Be forewarned, last time I did a reading with Jason, he read a piece that compared his transvestite lover favorably with a twelve year old boy. (Whereas I will likely be reading about being a twelve year old boy at sleep away camp.)

Here are the first few paragraphs of the book, posted on The Brooklyn Rail (which is serializing the book, a chapter a month):

Chapter 1

I drink my coffee and stare out the window at the cars passing by on the highway. I remember the old Kerouac line: whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny automobile? It was all open roads and possibilities for that guy. A wide-eyed, down-to-earth madness that rolled from one coast to another. Football-playing kids with books of poetry by their beds. I grew up in Kerouac's America. He was my guy. One of the first things I did when I got to New York was take the train up to Columbia so that I could walk in his footsteps. I lived for his idea of what we were supposed to be. But there are no angels anymore. No more saints. No visionary catholic supplications or prayers to make to god. No more optimism. No fantastic smiles. No great west. No more cowboys or jazzmen, unless they're in a Visa commercial. I would love to go moan for man, but the credit cards would sue me and the student loan companies would put me in default. No need to go looking for Dean Moriarty, because he works for the collections department of an insurance company in Delaware. He hates his job and would quit and hit the road, but can't afford to miss a mortgage payment. And he's not really in traveling shape anymore, but about 80 pounds overweight. Too big to fail.

I turn away from the window, go back to the Sallie Mae website and finish with the electronic forms for my second-to-last deferment. After this one, I'll be coming in here to Starbucks looking for a job. I can see myself filling out the application at the wobbly table in the corner, wallowing in the glory that really never was, then sitting there with a stupid smile on my face as the 21-year-old assistant manager holds up a mirror to more than two decades of overeducated bad decisions. The goatee with the first signs of grey, crow's feet around the eyes, and the tattoos no longer anti-establishment cool, but mile markers on the road to nowhere. I never expected or even wanted my life to be a straight line, but thought that if you put the time in and paid your dues, then you wouldn't end up back in the same place you were 20 years ago.

I put away my laptop, finish the coffee and head out the door. I walk past the California Pizza Kitchen, the Chipotle and up the sidewalk toward the Target. The way the sun glistens off the minivans is spectacular, haunting. I enter through the sliding automatic doors into the fluorescent lights and cut through rows of candles, heaters, curtains, blinds, slipcovers, mirrors, humidifiers and pet supplies. I stop to ask a salesclerk about the soy milk. The man is maybe 75, thick coke-bottle glasses, splotchy face and crooked back. He should be off somewhere playing shuffleboard and bitching about the young, not spending the last years before the grand exit struggling in the belly of a big box store. It takes him 25 seconds just to walk across the aisle. "I'm sorry to bother you, sir. But do you know where the soy milk is?"

'The milk!"

"No sir, the soy milk…."

"The milk!"

"No sir, the soy milk."

"What milk?"

I feel like the most bourgeois, pretentious yuppie that ever lived. Ohmygawd, you've never heard of soy milk? Didn't you read the article in Salon about the dairy industry? There's as much suffering in a cup of milk as a pound of beef! "Oh wait, sir, hold on…I think I see it right over there! Thank you!" I take off through maternity, outerwear, plus sizes, women's shoes, accessories, luggage, infant, toddler, patio furniture and into the refrigerated food section…Like a liberal in Texas, it's surrounded by chicken nuggets, buffalo wings, sausage patties and microwave-ready cheeseburgers. I take two half-gallons off the shelf and tell myself how wonderful I am for making the enlightened consumer choice, but really the soy milk is made by a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company that's owned by a conglomerate with its headquarters on a space station that controls the factories that make the chicken nuggets, buffalo wings, sausage patties and microwave-ready cheeseburgers. There is no escape from complicity when you're an American. All we can do is turn down the volume from 11 to 9.