On the Parade Route

They're all blending together. Beads, booze, and screams create a seamless transition from one event to the next. It's like the city is bleeding, oozing this chaotic stuff. And yet, New Orleans, you haven't impressed me yet. I'm winning this bet so far.

Two nights ago we were standing on another parade route on St. Charles Ave. Members of the crowd wore costumes; bright blue, green, and red wigs; held beer and wine; and became increasingly more decadent as the night went on.

A friend of mine, the Rock, lost her i-phone in the madness. This set off a Futile search among the Carnival debris. (How do they ever Clean this place?) Assuming that the device, if on the ground, was hopelessly smashed, I thought the best bet was to ask if anyone had picked it up.

I approached a couple. The young woman wore a cotton candy blue wig and seemed to be drowning in gaudy plastic necklaces. The young man wore a wife beater and jeans. They appeared to be arguing, but being drunk and still somewhat in a festive mood I decided to give it a gamble. "Excuse me," I said, "I know this is ridiculous, but have you seen an i-phone?"

No one has ever given me look of more intense disbelieving disgust. "Are you serious?" the young woman said, "Are you from here?"

"I'll take that as a 'no'." I said and started to turn.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" she said, stopping me. "Look around you! You think this is a motherfucking game? Give it up, man. Let it go. It's Mardi Gras. Just let it go!"

She then turned to the young man. "And as for you..."

I disappeared as quickly as I could back into the crowd.

Okay, fair. An i-phone is a lost cause on a parade route. She could have at least recommended St. Jude.

But, I like to believe that if I had asked her for anything, she would have given the same answer. Have you seen a man wearing a Cat in the Hat hat? Have you seen my wife? Excuse me, I know this is hopeless, but have you come across a blue, Colonial style house, maybe sitting in the middle of the street?

It's Mardi Gras. Just let it go.

It's the (High) Life

A few years ago, my roommate, D, introduced me to a drinking game unique to Iowa City. One sits at Brother's near the door on a Tuesday ($1 High Life night) with a beer and drinks every time one 1.) sees someone wearing sunglasses, a woman's underwear, or backwards cap; 2.) hears someone say "Bro," 3.) smells someone's cologne or perfume from ten feet away, or 4.) witnesses any behavior that would be inappropriate at the Mill just around the corner.

D explained as we walked through the Ped Mall, "High Life is the only beer that tastes better in a can than it does in a bottle."

"Does that make it good?" I asked.

"Oh, Sam, hell no."

Within a half hour, we were drunk. "It's a very effective game," D explained looking somewhat unsteady on his stool. "If you're not careful, you're on the floor in an hour, but at least you're only ten dollars down."

"The Champagne of Beer..." I said, reading the label.

"Yeah," D exclaimed. "Someone deserves a medal for that tagline The champagne of beers. Yes sir, that was a genius advertising move. What will we say about it? Why, it's the champagne of beers, sir. It will make us rich. Every person in the world will feel a little better about drinking this stuff with a slogan like that."

That was my first introduction to High Life and I have since tried to avoid it. A friend once described it, unfavorably, as "crispy." It always reminds me of being uncomfortably surrounded by bros and sorority girls with only five dollars in my pocket and few alternatives.

Then I came to New Orleans where PBR, the favored cheap beer in Iowa City, seems to have long ago lost that battle to High Life. The first time I went into the Marigny, IB bought a round of High Life and Brother's came rushing back to me in a torrent. "High Life? Seriously?" I said.

"Yeah," IB replied. "It's my favorite cheap beer."

I looked around the room. I was surrounded by people wearing flannel shirts and skinny jeans, sporting bad mustaches and Buddy Holy glasses, clearing not wearing cologne, and drinking High Life and there was not a PBR to be seen. Truly, I was in a strange land.

"Not PBR?" I asked, feebly.

"Nah. I prefer High Life."

"But, that's what bro's drink," I protested.

IB shrugged and gestured around the room. "Drink it ironically and reclaim it for hipsterdom."

Since then, High Life has become my fallback drink at bars. It's reasonable. When you're on an AmeriCorps stipend, you must be mindful of your tab. But I still do not feel comfortable with this decision since High Life seems to follow me everywhere.

High Life is haunting me. Every time I go out to the bars, someone hands me a High Life. The other day, Janis picked me up at my house to drive us downtown for a show. As I buckled up she shoved  High Life at me. "Here," she said, "you need this."

It's fizzing up my gut and brains. My fingers twitch and I think that I've forgotten the meaning of champagne.

On New Years, I was standing outside of Cafe Envie in the Quarter, waiting for people to finish using the the toilets and grab espressos so we could move on to the Marigny. I am always mindful in the Quarter. Not necessarily keeping an eye out for pickpockets or dangerous situations so much as potential oddities. There's a fine line between strange and lethal there.

Anyway, I looked up the street and two desperately underclad kids were walking toward us. A couple, I imagined. They seemed to be arguing and the guy appeared to be chasing after his girlfriend, who was marching with purpose, arms wrapped around her tanktop, skinny torso.

"We can't get there from here. We have to turn back and go down Esplanade," the guy was saying.

"I know where I'm going," the girl said, "We're meeting up with Galen on Bourbon."

"When did that happen?" the guy asked, exasperated.

The girl walked past me. As the guy walked by he reached out, grabbed my left hand and placed in it a full high life. "Here," he said, fixing me with a kind, but intense look. "Drink this."

Then he quickly pursued his girlfriend down the street, continuing the argument where he'd left off. I stared at the bottle. His command reminded me a bit of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. DRINK ME. I was holding a reference. This was the key to an adventure, so I hoped.

"Well, you have to," Janis, who had seen the gifting, encouraged.

"You're right," I said, holding up the High Life, champagne of beers, and toasting 2012 the Crescent City way, the AmeriCorps way. "Thank you, New Orleans."

Bring It, Mardi Gras

The other day, driving home from work in the shadow of raised I-10, we were talking about Mardi Gras. It's surprising how rarely Carnival has come up in conversation outside of work where it's simply a useful excuse to ask for money. Whenever someone  does mention it, Mardi Gras, there is something ominous about the words. There's weight to it. Like throwing two stones into the waters of a conversation. Mardi Gras.

So, we were talking about It. My roommate, J, neighbor, A, and Mr. J who has lived for several years in New Orleans since the Storm. J said, "You know, I've heard a lot about Mardi Gras. But I just have this feeling that I have no idea what I'm getting myself into."

"That's good," Mr. J said, his soft no-nonsense voice graving. "Because you don't."

There are telltale signs all around the city, but there have been all year. If you walk through any park and look up at oak boughs, you'll see hundreds of beads hanging there, the Bones from Carnivals past. I think that people resign themselves to Mardi Gras, rather than anticipate it.

Last night we all went to Tipitina's to see Papa Grow's Funk, Glenn David Andrews, and the Funky Meter. We started out at Balcony Bar, but M insisted that we move. "The lead guitarist for this band is great!" M said. "Haven't you ever heard James Brown say 'Take it away!' This is the guy he was telling to take it away."

So we went. The music was phenomenal and everyone danced, even me, which was odd. I lost my voice somewhere around 11:30, hunching over the bar, competing with and losing to the music. Around that time, M sauntered up to me.

M shouted, "Are you having a good time?"

I thought about it for a moment, mustered my vocal chords and said, "Yeah. I am."

M grinned. "That's my favorite thing in the world. Seeing people experience New Orleans. And you're just about to see the best of it. It's Mardi Gras."

Yesterday, a friend of mine who has lived in New Orleans for several years offered me this advice: "Write your address on your arm in sharpie. Maybe a friends' phone number, too. You never know what may happen. This guy I know ended up without his wallet and phone and too drunk to find his way home, but he'd written his address on his arm, so somebody threw him in a cab and he made it back safely."

This evening it's Krewe du Vieux, one of the first parades of the season. I am going into the Marigny to attend the parade with a friend's house as home base. I do not know what to expect and I'm content with that. I go to this Carnival without expectations or anticipation. I invite the Most Unique City in America to entertain me, Goethe's Faust-style.

So, New Orleans, I'll agree to this wager.  Nur rastlos betätigt sich der Man. Satisfy me. I dare you.

Heroes

Today I finished reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. Maybe my expectations were too High, but I was hoping that by reading this text I would be seized with some sort of poetic, ancestral blood lust. Yes! Now, I will write epics that will survive centuries! Gold! Monsters! Mead!

No such luck.

I was glad for the change of pace, though. I had just finished reading Plato's Republic. Guilt has dictated my reading list over the past few months. You see, I managed to get a BA in English without having read any of the Seminal Texts. Sure, I've read some Shakespeare, but I never got through the whole Bible or Canterbury Tales and I've only read excerpts of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I have read the Epic of Gilgamesh, though.

I know all of these stories by reputation. Because of this I have very high expectations, tracing this lineage of Inspiration back a few thousand years.


The Repbulic was boring.

Beowulf, on the other hand, was like reading a comic book. Seriously. It's a heroic story with vengeance, drinking, fighting, dragons, terrible monsters, episodic ordeals. Who wouldn't want to read this?

Maybe I'm jaded, or perhaps I've read too many deconstructive texts, but all I could think about while reading Beowulf was Alan Moore's The Watchmen. A critic wrote about that epic something to the effect of, "The Watchmen is Alan Moore's admonishment to anyone who ever wanted a hero to save them." And isn't this a fitting parallel? Beowulf ends foreshadowing of the complete destruction of Goetaland from invaders. Because Beowulf won't be there to Save them.

Two days ago my friends and I were sitting around drinking whiskey and talking about Andy Warhol. Yes, we do that sometimes. We tried to discuss his art and his commentaries, but again and again we came back to talking about the man himself. We concluded that he was an asshole and one M pointed out that he was probably sitting up in some ostentatiously flamboyant afterlife laughing at us.

Warhol. Andy Warhol. No matter how you feel about the man, you cannot escape him. Can you? His work is Everywhere. I have no idea what he did to the discussion about Art (and Visual Art in particular), but he certainly did Something Permanent to it.

Kind of like Samuel Beckett.

A few years ago I took a digital poetics class from Dee Morris. In discussing the lineage of digital poetics, she said, "And this all comes back to the great Samuel Beckett." Dee never prefaced any other person with "the great" and it carried the same weight as the Old Man speaking of "the great DiMaggio."

I don't like Beckett. But I can't stop reading him. This goes beyond my desire to familiarize myself with the Canon (just so that I can say, "Yes, I know goddamn canon."). Samuel Beckett Haunts me. Even if his work confuses, frustrates, and bores the hell out of me, I keep coming back to it. Isn't that the best relationship to have with the Greats? To loath and to worship.

My hero, Samuel Beckett. And, in that critic's estimation, he's the best hero I could choose, because I have no wish or expectation for Samuel Beckett to come and save me (though, wouldn't that be awesome?).

If I'm ever reincarnated, I wish I could come back as Samuel Beckett's fingertips.

Genre Wars, Part I

A few days ago I read "Why Isn't Literary Fiction Getting More Attention," a guest-post on Jane Friedman's blog by writer and teacher April Line. The gist of it is self explanatory. Normally I'm irked by people trashing my aesthetic, but this one just confused me.

Line draws a pretty obvious initial line in the sand between the people who prefer "... Amy Hempel or John McNally or Joan Didion than Stephanie Meyer or Nora Roberts or John Grisham." The former three, I suppose, are "literary authors" and the latter are "genre."

Okay, fine, I'll walk with you. I take exception to her straw-manning the concept of genre by not naming authors who carry the same critical baggage as her "literary" short list (like Madeleine L'Engle; or ... I've got nothing for romance, but that's because I'm not well read there; or Jonathan Lethem), but whatever.

However, next she sites a little-known book, Ron Currie Jr.'s God is Dead, as a good example of fine literary writing. This is where she lost me. I have never read God Is Dead, but the reviews say that it is a collection of short stories begins with "the death of God, who, disguised as a Sudanese woman, dies in Darfur." Bookslut and Line herself use the phrase "post-apocalyptic" to describe it.

But, in fact, that is a genre. My friends and I all it "post-apocalyptic fiction."

I'm honestly not sure if April Line would place God Is Dead in the same genus as The Day of the Triffids or The Road or The Stand, but I would. I have no idea if I would place God Is Dead in the same category as Amy Hempel, since I have not read the former. But I tend to think of Joan Didion as an apocalyptic writer. That's just my opinion.

That's where we all get stuck: personal opinion. Personally, I think the only place the word "genre" belongs is in academia - where, if we didn't have such fine words to argue about we'd have nothing to do - and secret, underground, publishers' marketing rooms where the purpose is to figure out how to get the most people to actually buy their books (or, in a less cynical view, get the books to the people who like them).

Basically, I don't think that Line is angry that "genre books" are selling better than "literature." She's upset that not enough people are reading her favorite books.

There's no reason to fault anyone for that, though. We don't choose what we love. I just don't take kindly to the attitude, It's not that what I like is bad, it's that you aren't sophisticated enough appreciate it. The real difference between genre and literature is the speaker's ego. And, yes, I realize the irony in my making a fuss about it.

The Lonely Art

A few months ago I wrote a post, "Thoughts on the Iowa City Book Festival" and spent a while talking about a panel discussion about teaching writing. The panelists were Camille T. Dungy and Ibtisam Barakat. There was a tangential point that Barakat made that I didn't write about because I wasn't entirely sure what to Do with it.

Writing is a lonely art, she said, but it's essentially a means to an end. She elaborated that sharing ones writing and participating in a community of writers is one way to do what we're essentially all trying to do, the Human Endeavor: to not be Lonely.

I have been finding it difficult to write, lately. Working in AmeriCorps in a city far from home, living and working with people who are far from home, I am a captive participant in an ad hoc community. It's not a bad thing. The real problem is that saying "No" is treason and you begin to think of everything in absolutes. If I don't go out this evening, this opportunity may never come again.

A former writing teacher, Sean Christopher Lewis, said that one of the greatest challenges for a writer is to say to your friends, "Sorry, guys, I can't go out tonight. I'm going to hang out with these people I made up."

I agree with Barakat, though. Everything we do is to somehow weave our lives in and around Others and some of us find that the act of locking ourselves up with a computer or a notebook is the most expedient way of doing so. One of the most honest answer's I've ever heard to the question, "Why do you write?" was from Eric "Pogi" Sumangil who said, "I write for the same reason I do everything -- to impress women."

This observation doesn't really boil down to writing advice. Or, if it does, I suppose it helps put this habit in the context of Human Endeavors. I stay in and write because, in the end, writing will help me bridge a gap, which is the whole point of communication: to commune with other people.

Anyway, enough of this. How about a prompt?

Prompt: Write an Ad

Introducing: Nothing.

The average American is exposed to Want over 5,000 times a month.  We literally spend our lives bombarded with Inadequacy and pulled down by the desire for Things and Stuff. Don't you think you deserve better? We do.


We think you're perfect the way you are. That's why we're giving you Nothing.


With the scientifically proven power of Nothing, you'll lead a happier, more successful life. You'll earn more money, get that job you always wanted, have a great sex life, see the number of friends you have quintuple, never have a dull night, and find that Everything is just that easy.


We guarantee that Nothing is your solution.


Go to your local Big Box, give the manger the balance in your savings account, and get Nothing today!

No! I Refuse! I… I… I’m Going to Grad School!

Honestly, I never quite understood the Urgency of the desire to go to grad school is until I got an eight-to-five Job.

Maybe I just haven’t learned the knack of living with such intractable constraints. But, I honestly can’t figure out how other people balance work and family and hobbies all in 24 hours.

That is the greatest obstacle to Resolutions.

Usually, resolving to do things is easy. I could promise to do anything. But suddenly I have limitations. And my job has brought out the cynic and pessimist in me. Suddenly, I rarely think about aspirations and dreams so much as processes and the clearly attainable.

Since becoming a grant writer, I have become obsessed with budgets and strategic plans.

But, I will not let that stop me now. I shall make promises and keep them this year because, really, it’s the End of the World, and so I need to make this one count.

Anyway, the aspirations are divided up into writing goals and life goals, because that’s the only distinction I make on a day-to-day basis.

Writing Goals:

1.  Keep writing at least once a week in Scribbler’s Doorless Room. Make at least one post every month about writing. Do a book review every two months. That sounds manageable.

2.  At some point, write a story/essay/play/poem every day for a week and post it in Scribbler’s Doorless Room. If that works, go for a month. If that works, keep going until exhaustion takes hold.

3.  Write one new story/essay/play/poem and revise one old story/essay/play/poem every month.

4.  Submit my “finished” plays to more competitions.

5.  Film “The Fear of”.

Life Goals:

1.  Be a better grant writer and copywriter. … And figure out what that means. Getting more money, I suppose. That works for me.

2.  Get into grad school. Or reapply.

3.  Or get a Fulbright. Or reapply.

4.  Or get a job teaching English abroad. Or reapply.

5.  Or get a salaried job writing copy or grants. Or reapply.

6.  Or get a job with AmeriCorps and do good work.

7.  Read at least a book a week.

8.  Laugh and smile more often, so as to confuse my enemies.