review
The book itself is alternatingly hilarious (Michael Patrick Welch’s loving description of teaching music to inner-city kids comes immediately to mind) and devastating (as in the bleak dissonance of Bud Faust’s poetry). At times, most notably in Susan Gisleson’s “Why I Live Below Sea Level,” it manages to be both. But the piece that captures what Strange described as “the duality of living in New Orleans” with the most poetic accuracy is Jim Louis’ “Razor Knives.” In the deceptively short non-fiction piece about the trials of tutoring kids in the Sixth Ward in 1995, Louis expresses the struggle of attempting to point others towards some sort of hope in the middle of horror, not to mention the effort it takes to remain positive oneself. That “Razor Knives” takes place ten years before Katrina serves only to underscore how the storm amplified an already-existing condition. The piece ends with a very simple setting of the scene, a scene that is a bit fantastical but, hey, in New Orleans circa 2008, what isn’t?
The student that Louis has been tutoring has left for the day, returning to the neighborhood “that hears, as we do, the nightly cough of gunfire.” Louis, meanwhile, is standing on his porch and looking out on the street when he perceives “five blocks down and one over, on St. Ann, a marching band practicing for Mardi Gras strut[ting] by a crime scene as the pregnant widow, seeing her husband’s blood washed by the rain into the gutter, faints.”
This is true life, the mélange of dark and light, good and evil, that exists everywhere but for whatever reason is played out in such shocking contrast in New Orleans. There is happiness, and there is sadness, there are celebrations and catastrophes, but the one thing that remains constant is the humanity and worth of the people who live at the storm’s center, the people who, everyday, are forced to come to terms with what it means to be alive in a world gone mad. Everywhere, in every city, life is a delicate burden; we just happen to handle ours—as we do everything here—on a stage much larger, much more extravagant. But in doing this, by capturing and expressing the losses and gains of normal human beings with such prescience, we show the rest of the world both the despair and the hope of being alive. In that way, New Orleans is teacher to the world.
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The book itself is alternatingly hilarious (Michael Patrick Welch’s loving description of teaching music to inner-city kids comes immediately to mind) and devastating (as in the bleak dissonance of Bud Faust’s poetry). At times, most notably in Susan Gisleson’s “Why I Live Below Sea Level,” it manages to be both. But the piece that captures what Strange described as “the duality of living in New Orleans” with the most poetic accuracy is Jim Louis’ “Razor Knives.” In the deceptively short non-fiction piece about the trials of tutoring kids in the Sixth Ward in 1995, Louis expresses the struggle of attempting to point others towards some sort of hope in the middle of horror, not to mention the effort it takes to remain positive oneself. That “Razor Knives” takes place ten years before Katrina serves only to underscore how the storm amplified an already-existing condition. The piece ends with a very simple setting of the scene, a scene that is a bit fantastical but, hey, in New Orleans circa 2008, what isn’t?
The student that Louis has been tutoring has left for the day, returning to the neighborhood “that hears, as we do, the nightly cough of gunfire.” Louis, meanwhile, is standing on his porch and looking out on the street when he perceives “five blocks down and one over, on St. Ann, a marching band practicing for Mardi Gras strut[ting] by a crime scene as the pregnant widow, seeing her husband’s blood washed by the rain into the gutter, faints.”
This is true life, the mélange of dark and light, good and evil, that exists everywhere but for whatever reason is played out in such shocking contrast in New Orleans. There is happiness, and there is sadness, there are celebrations and catastrophes, but the one thing that remains constant is the humanity and worth of the people who live at the storm’s center, the people who, everyday, are forced to come to terms with what it means to be alive in a world gone mad. Everywhere, in every city, life is a delicate burden; we just happen to handle ours—as we do everything here—on a stage much larger, much more extravagant. But in doing this, by capturing and expressing the losses and gains of normal human beings with such prescience, we show the rest of the world both the despair and the hope of being alive. In that way, New Orleans is teacher to the world.
- dave 9-11-2008 11:16 pm