We have bad air today in the city, a Code Red Smog Alert, heading into the mid-90s and air like a wall, assaultive. I spent yesterday running errands and am well on my way to spending today in bed reading. I ought to get myself up to Jasper to pick up the two PowerBooks, both failed, that have been made into one working Mac with all data retrieved by a fellow working out of his farm. It's surely cooler up there in the foothills that we call the North Georgia mountains, but that would mean dressing and driving and leaving the wonderful book I'm reading, in time to get up there, maybe find some good country food and still get back in time for tonight's Episode 9 of John From Cincinnati. We'll see.
I started Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water yesterday, after one of my errands took me to Barnes & Noble in Dunwoody where a cute student-looking young man named Fareed was kind enough to first determine they had the book "in stock" meaning in the warehouse but no copies in the store before calling the Border's up the road at my request and having them hold a copy for me. It doesn't get much nicer than that and I'll continue to check Barnes & Noble first, in honor of Fareed. Clark is supposed to be coming to Rising Tide II to participate in a Writers' Panel along with a couple of other New Orleans writers, including Slate. New Orleans has a history of being rich in writers. They've got all sorts of interesting panels planned and that many bloggers in one place just has to be fun, most especially when that place is New Orleans. Y'all come too. Register (or donate) here. Dave Zirin, author of Welcome to the Terrordome is keynote speaking but I found myself inexplicably drawn to the poetic sound of the title of Clark's book, and I'm so glad I did, because it's beautiful and complex, the very personal telling of his experiences staying in New Orleans during Katrina's landfall and the federal flood that followed and I can't put it down.
Maybe it's just me, but somehow we ("we" meaning those of us who live in what Dangerblond calls that "Large, Powerful Country to the North of New Orleans”) seem to be paying closer attention to this, the second anniversary of Katrina, than we did to last year's first anniversary. Maybe it's because no one is confessing to murdering Jon Benet in order to get out of jail in Tailand, or maybe it's because the struggle continues to be so poignant and excruciatingly slow for so many stuck still dispersed or immersed in the muck of wrangling with intractable insurance carriers and a seemingly endless Road Home, just living their honorable lives with their jobs and their families while too many folks "to the North" argue ridiculously about whether or not they should. As if.
Michael Grunwald said it out loud this week in Time, just about as well as it's been said in the MSM since It Happened, starting his cover story about New Orleans with:
The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe.
So much to read and so little time. Middle Son is coming home from New Orleans for a visit later this week and should be here the next two weekends. The weekend after that I'll be heading down there for RT II and, with luck he will have already started his fall classes. If I don't go to Jasper for the computers now, it's likely to take me until September. Mostly, I'm excited about having him home and excited about going down there for RT II, but today I think I'm back to bed and the book about a Heart Like Water. Go. Now. Read.
Peace, out, y'all.
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