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Walking out of New Orleans

Bart has linked to his neighbor Michael Homan’s blog post about his experiences getting out of New Orleans over the past few days.

They promised they would take us to Baton Rouge, and from there it would be relatively easy for me to get a cab or bus and meet the family in Jackson.

But then everything went to hell. They instead locked up the truck and drove us to the refugee camp on I-10 and Causeway and dropped us off. Many refused to get out of the van but they were forced. The van drove away as quickly as it could, as the drivers appeared to be terrified, and we were suddenly in the middle of 20,000 people.


He goes on to detail how it is that he “escaped” this refugee collection point; his account implies that the people on the freeway were being guarded, just as in the 1927 flood.

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Castle Rock

Last night I had the deep pleasure of reading Alice Munro’s recent New Yorker piece, The View from Castle Rock, to Viv aloud. Man, such fine writing! It’s so precise and finely crafted, pivoting from scene to scene with the grace of a dancing master. (My reading order for the mag got scrambled as I had picked up the more-recent food issue while on a trip out of town and just turned to the issue last night).

The story is a sketch of a Scots family’s passage from Edinburgh to Quebec in 1818, and there are no improbable crises or supernatural eruptions to color he tale, only the rolling passage of the ship over waves, echoed in Munro’s rythmic, stately prose. I found the story compelling formally. I was fascinated at the economy and mythic brevity with which Munro introduces and signals the role and character of each play on her pitching stage. Moreover, though, I found the tale moving, falling headfirst into the hoary bit of stage management – a jump cut to the present (seeTitanic and ST:TNG’s The Inner Light) and, friends, weeping like a baby as I read the last few paragraphs.

In the Irish, and other, emigrant songs I have learned over the past ten years, the stunning sadness and permanency of the nineteenth-century experience of that long, final boat journey is well-captured. But these songs are songs crafted to provide a broad audience with a formal, social mechanism to express the sense of loss and sadness, and a means for their descendants to touch that as well. As such, the songs are usually quite generalized and do not dwell on the images and experiences of the trip itself so much as the dramatic moment of boarding the ship or the last glimpse of the homeland.

Munro’s story includes these moments, but her novelistic skill has permitted her to stitch these revenants from the cloth of history and with a puff of her breath send them dancing into our minds, inviting us to complete the act of resurrection and, for a few moments, bring these dead Scots to life one more.

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Not Dead Yet

A few folks have corresponded with me via email about this, but I feel like I should address it here as well.

This was originally posted to Siffblog; I try to crosspost here as well.

Tablet has announced that the current issue, #103, will be the final edition of the magazine. While Siffblog has been affiliated with Tablet, I have used only my own resources to create and host the blog; therefore, I see no reason that Siffblog should cease operations.

However, I have been thinking about what the best route forward for the blog is. An informal relationship with one or more paper-based local publications would be mutually beneficial to all parties, I believe, publishers, publicists, film freaks, and film writers included.

I also would like to strengthen or formalize this blog’s ties to existing local film arts organizations. In an ideal world, this site would publish updated schedules and times for all of these organizations at no cost to them in order to expand online information resources about small-audience film.

In short, I have some thinking to do, which will produce some work for me. Sometime in the next month, I probably will do a site redesign – as simple as possible, mind you, as we’re currently househunting and that is really time consuming. After that, I will probably have a decent plan in place for the blog. For now, though, dear contributors, please do not fret: the Siffblog abides, man, the Siffblog abides.

Please continue doing what you’ve done to the place. It really helps to pull it all together.

P. S. Perhaps now it’s time to have a Siffblog party – slash – wake for Tablet?

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One down?

Who knows if this will pan out, but NOLA.com is reporting that the 17th St. Canal breach is closed. Earlier today I flashed on how to get a satellite view of Editor B’s house, post flood, and, as expected, it’s clearly in a flood zone.

Amusingly, I also found Detroit-bound Mike Hurtt quoted in this pre-storm AP / CNN piece about Dr. John.

Finally, poking around that old BKB songlist site, I noticed that we at least took a running stab at The Lakes of the Ponchartrain, although we did a weird, downstream cowboy version that eroded the melodic charm of the original.

Happily, I found this decent Irish version with some liner notes to check out. Unsurprisingly, it also touches on themes that will have a bit of resonance in the coming days.

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Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

— The Declaration of Independence, 1776.

You know what? I’m pissed. I mean, really! Not like insurrectionist-type pissed, but the situation on the Gulf Coast can’t possibly be seen as anything less than a failure to meet the responsibilities assigned above under the very most basic covenants of our country.

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Wash day

Taking a break from doing laundry, I noticed that one P. J. Murhpy of Wexford, Ireland had posted his chord transcription for Lousiana, 1927. I can finally scratch an itch I have had for several days.

I wonder if Mr. Murphy is any relation to celebrated Father Murphy of song and story?

At New Orleans as the storm was passing

Oe’r drying streets of an emptied town

Fed’ral neglect sent the waters crashing

and brought the choppers from far and near

Then Mayor Nagin of the Old Ninth Ward

Broke down in tears with a warning cry

“Goddamn I’m pissed” came the raging curses

And stunned the nation from shore to shore.



Huh, that was too damn easy. I suppose I should point out that the link above is to Boulavogue, a song which celebrates the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and that the doggerel immediately preceding this paragraph is, I suppose, a filk version. Here are some lines from the traditional version that are of interest:

Look out for hirelings, King George of England,

Search ev’ry kingdom where breathes a slave,

For Father Murphy of the County Wexford

Sweeps o’er the land like a mighty wave.

…

Ah, Father Murphy, had aid come over

The green flag floated from shore to shore!

I’ve played Boulavogue for six or seven years, and to my embarrassment have never really looked into the history of the events recounted. Reading through the Wikipedia link, I note with interest that the heart of the rebellion’s threat to the Crown was the “unprecedented ‘unholy union'” of Irish Presbyterians and Catholics, common cause across cultural and class barriers to resist and roll back the power of King George. Of further interest is the record of two landings in Ireland by French forces. In the United States, the primary locale where French and Irish culture have rubbed up against one another for generations is clearly New Orleans.

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3108

As Paul drafted me to participate in this World Blog Day thing, I assembled a list of blog-types outside my normal blog-pale. However, I restricted my search to blogs of direct personal interest to me based on my life experiences. As an anti-chain-letter type, though, I decline to pass this along.

I have lived in both Mexico and Chile, and my wife is Cuban. Therefore, poking about for some Spanish-language blogs struck me as worthwhile. Now, I’m pretty much illiterate in Spanish, which means I am limited in my ability to follow the content. Be that as it may, I set out to locate a blog each of interest based in Cuba, Mexico, and Chile.

Tojomik appears to blog from Viña del Mar, Chile, where I lived in 1969. I had no luck tracking down a Havana-based blog (Google results for anything related to Havana are hopelessly junked up with political ranting and fingerpointing of both left and right). freak.monkeysensei.net originates in Guadalajara, as does the French-language Blogue du Colegio Franco-Mexicano de Guadalajara.

Speaking of French, I have also lived in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and in this instance, the language stuck. Every now and then I wander through the Francophone side of the blogosphere, generally returning with a chastened sense of my own ignorance of the language. Given recent events, I thought it would be interesting to find an American blog in French published down Louisiana way. I also figured I should be able to dig a few up from Lausanne, the town I lived in while in Switzerland.

From Lousiana, we find Mais oui, la Louisiane! Il apparait que la Louisiane peut-etre inundeé et qu’elle a referé aux Google Actualité “pour lire de ce qui se passe en Louisiane.”

According to the geographic locator site above, climbtothestars.org is Lausanne-based, among 19 results. Random sampling revealed three abandoned or abortive blogs among the 19.

Finally, my family has had a long-standing and intimate relationship with an Algerian Berber family who sent one of their sons to the US fro graduate school. We visited them high in the Kabilye, a mountainous province to the south of Algiers, while we lived in Switzerland. Algeria has had a hard row to hoe over the past twenty-odd years, and thus I was uncertain that I would find anything from the country. The Berbers are a Muslim people that are distinct from Arab, and who have struggled within Algeria for the right to pursue education in their own language and script in addition to the predominant official languages of French and Arabic. It’s thought that the Berber presence in North Africa long predates the Roman. Interestingly, this language was also found in the Canary Islands, the part of Spain my father-in-law’s family emigrated to Cuba from around the turn of the century.

Of course, there are multiple resources to locate Algerian bloggers. To my frustration, though, I struck out on locating an Algerian Berber blogger; I did locate a sporadically updated blog, blognnegh…, identified as in Tamazeight, however.

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A Miscellany

ITEM: Both Matt and Bart have updates. The Royal Pendletons are playing a gig this evening in Memphis, which seems a perfectly sensible way to deal with the fate of the band’s city. Bart and company are safely ensconced in a rainy Bloomington.

ITEM: Having nothing at all to do with the topic du jour, high school co-conspirator and Gulf War One Navy vet Wes Burton called me tonight to let me know that other high school co-conspirator Therron Thomas has gotten word that he’s being deployed to Iraq. Therron’s a 20-year full-timer in the National Guard, devoting most of his time to work as a training sergeant, so while he might prefer that things were otherwise, I’m certain he’ll be as well prepared for his tour as anyone possibly can be. Wes and I will be working together on some care packages for the Sergeant and his men.

ITEM: Returning to the knee-deep topic at hand, I hadn’t been able to mention that that Times-Picayune blog has some really quite wonderful writing, if occasionally, um, overboard. I was savoring one particular piece, about a boat tour of a flooded neighborhood, when an interesting recycling of Thomas Pynchon actually caused me to burst out laughing, probably not an intended reaction.

And then a screaming came across the water. To his right, Parks saw a woman gesticulating wildly from a second floor balcony at her home. Parks, a captain of sport fishing boats and offshore supply vessels who works out of Gulfport, Miss., navigated closer.

ITEM: I have a persistent case of half-remembered songs about New Orleans rising in concert with the waters, lapping at the sandbags of my mind. Under it all runs a funereal, no lyrics, brass-band version of St. James Infirmary. Up front, Tom Waits (I Wish I Was in New Orleans) and Randy Newman (Lousiana 1927) are duking it out for time at the piano, elaborately filigreed chords overlapping and changing the dominant lyric at the moment of harmonic convergence, while in the background Arlo Guthrie (The City of New Orleans) warbles about a train ride. Professor Longhair and/or The Dixie Cups (Big Chief, Iko Iko) sort of amusedly fight to keep sliptime with the martial drums from Jimmy Driftwood’s The Battle of New Orleans (caution: embedded quicktime) behind the whole toxic soup of sonic residue. I’m sure the stew will grow more dense over the next couple weeks.

ITEM: Will someone please draft a note to the TV people that the omnious martial symphony crap is the wrongest music possible for a Gulf Coast hurricane and flood? See above.

ITEM: Finally for the night, I wanted to mention that I won’t be able to follow the course of the flood as closely as I have been due to some time commitments tomorrow that will likely carry through until Sunday, probably far enough in the future that much of the uncertainty surrounding events in the Crescent City will be resolved.