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Not for Long

Bart’s linktrawl brought me to Jacob Appelbaum’s weblog, who took some pictures of the grave of a marked-for-recovery body today. Something about his pix looked familiar, and he does not appear to be aware that the rough dirt grave and plywood marker in the image looks as though it must be the desecrated remains of Vera Smith’s temporary tomb, possibly the most moving and remarkable single image that the New Orleans disaster left the nation.

There lay Vera. God help us. Let’s hope she gets home to Texas, as her family have requested.

I mean, really, that is fucking ridiculous! The body WAS MARKED. I suppose I could be wrong, if Jacob’s photos were taken a week or more ago – but it certainly appears as if a body recovery team destroyed the tomb and replaced it with the spray-painted sign. Geez, guys, couldn’t you have just checked and then leaned the sign up against the bricks or something?

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Smoot

This week Chicagoan Dave Fortney is visiting – what could be more appropriate than the ssurprising and cryptic email in my inbox announcing an ex-Chicago underground scribbler’s website to be found at skipwilliamson.com

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72

AskMe on 72-hour survival kits. I just realized we have a perfect place to store a disaster kit, inside the huge old steamer trunk we use as a coffee table.

On September 11, 2005, the Seattle P-I ran a two-sided one-page disaster-preparedness checklist. Alas, I can’t find it online.

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Around the corner from the tree

Tonight we had dinner with Chris and Poupou in the Little Saigon area at the intersection of 12th and Jackson. We were aiming to eat at the Tamarind Tree but found ourselves in a long line of people who had obviously been waiting for some time. I scouted for nearby eateries and found the family-style Thanh Vi right around the corner. Our experience was not at all like that recounted behind the link.

We ate ourselves silly for about $35. Of especial note were Viv’s amazing thin-cut charcoal-broiled ribs.

Chris also informed me that I appear to have allowed the domain for the International Organization of Cynics, Ne’er-Do-Wells, and Misanthropes lapse inadvertently. Horrors!

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Dhalgren redux

Editor B sends along a link to this essay on Delany’s Dhalgren and New Orleans by Bishda Bannerjee at reason.com.

As Americans struggled to grasp what was unfolding in New Orleans, the word “unimaginable” recurred frequently—even though the catastrophe had been imagined, and envisioned, many times. Thirty years ago, science fiction writer Samuel Delany wrote, in high detail, about the unfolding of racially-charged violence, rape, and looting in “Bellona,” a major American city struck by an unspecified catastrophe and ignored by the National Guard.

Delany’s Dhalgren focuses on a group of people who choose to remain in Bellona despite—and partly, because of—its dystopian qualities (including lack of water and sanitation). This surreal work of science fiction seemed especially apt last week, as fires raged and stories of racism, rape, looting, and murder proliferated…

As I recall, Bellona is explicitly situated in the Southeast in the novel, although the context provided by Delany’s autobiography makes it clear that he was actually writing a dream-version of his hometown, New York City, in which only those persons who interact with his main character remain in the city – the athorila invention here was to remove the teeming masses of city life and leave only the personal incidents, allowing his character the freedom of the anonymous drift the metropolis permits.

UPDATE: B. has also posted a roundup of NOLA-X bloggers.

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I see

TidBITS takes a look at ShowMacster, an add-on for iChat that allows you to add inline video and photos to the outbound video stream, so your conversation partner can see slides or clips directly in the cintext of the iChat videoconference window.

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A minor issue

The September 12 issue of the New Yorker arrived today. The issue features a deal of writing concerning the flood in New Orleans, as may be expected. However, the cover, depicting a sax player on the roofs of the French Quarter, is quite weak by comparison to Speigelman’s amazing black-on-black cover of four years ago, depicting the memory of the World Trade Center. I acknowledge that the New Yorker is by design focused on New York. But seriously, couldn’t someone have picked up the phone and asked him to come up with something that similarly reflects the shock and pain of the nation in the wake of this year’s autumnal catastrophe?

As an aside, New Yorker, will you puh-leeze get with the twenty-first century and at the very least offer Google-based searchability or a consistent linking protocol? I had to hack the 9/11 essay link out of a 404 from a four-year old link on a non-Conde Nast website.