Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006 - (Page 62)

Curtains, molded and stained at the flood-level line. needed a TV at least to keep track of the weather; we found one on sale yesterday. My collection of vinyl records and our sound system are gone, but we’ve hooked up our iPod to two small speakers. So at the moment, I’m listening to Aretha Franklin insist that I make her feel like a natural woman. A friend lent us some pots, and Marsha has developed a meticulous method for cleaning our plates and glasses that weren’t submerged in the floodwater in our kitchen. Friday night, we’ll host our first dinner party here, probably on the patio by candlelight, for a few of the friends who have been feeding us regularly since we returned to New Orleans. We’ve got music, food, a cool breeze off the river, and hot water at the end of the day. At least this morning, life’s good. Oct. 24, 2005 Pulp Fiction I had always thought that when you lose everything, the irreplaceable mementoes of life must be the hardest to part with. And dredged up from the muck left by the receding flood, such things, ruined beyond repair, do wound me — the spontaneous gift of a beautiful bowl bestowed for no reason one evening by a friend now long dead, the self-portrait with green teeth by a second-grader now grown into his 20s, the battered music box that served as the first token of a love that has outlasted more than just this most recent disaster. But I could not have guessed that of all the things 62 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2005-06 lost in the flood, my mold-encrusted books would weigh so heavily upon me. When I kicked open my door the first time we returned to our house after the hurricane, what caught my eye was not the heavy sofa that had floated across the living room to totter upon the stairs, nor even the veil of mold that shrouded every surface. What I fixed upon was the copy of Mary Reilly my friend Valerie Martin had autographed for me that now lay at my feet, its pages black and waterlogged. The novel had been shelved at the top of the bookcase with other prized volumes by admired writers; I realized immediately that sometime during the three weeks my house had remained flooded four feet deep, the bookcase had pitched forward into the water. So I knew the soggy pile of books sprawled across the floor and discolored by the mold must include the whole set of Janette Turner Hospital’s stories and novels I had been reading my way through this past summer, the collection of poetry John Balaban had insisted I take as a gift at a conference we both attended, the inscribed copy of Helen Scully’s first novel, the volumes by Angela Carter I had found here and there over 20 years, the boxed set of Tolstoy’s diaries I’d requested in place of a fee for a favor I had done a publisher, novels by Tim Gautreaux and Tom Franklin and Steve Stern and Ha Jin, Michael Henry Heim’s translation of Chekhov’s letters, Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote. Though I was surrounded by tens of thousands of dollars of damage, what pierced my heart was the swollen paperback of The Tain, the Irish epic, which Marsha and I had discovered in a British bookshop on our first trip to Europe 30 years ago. The ruined books, heavy with water and slippery with mold, clung to one another. It was difficult work, lifting

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005 Contents Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina: “It’s time somebody woke us us up.” Missing New Orleans On Perilous Ground The Buildings of Louisiana (Architectural History by Karen Kingsley) Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums Back to New Orleans Diary of a Displaced Person Jazz Notes (Music History by Bruce Raeburn) Cradle of the Stars The Terrible and the Brave Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by James Lee Burke)

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

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