On wood

I bought the wood for this bookshelf at the salvation lumber yard around the corner from my house, and while I was working with it I kept thinking about its imperfections, and how I liked them. I learned to appreciate imperfections by reading poetry—or, being taught to read poetry by Donald Revell—and thinking about Jackson Pollack paintings. Pollack said, “I don’t make mistakes, because I deny the existence of mistakes,” or something. Then I thought about what a silly rubric I was using to judge my wood: How could a pice of wood be considered in terms of perfection? What does a perfect piece of wood look like? Certainly not straight and smooth, like a metal beam or a sheet of glass. Then I thought of my favorite woodworker, Sam Maloof, and his crazy curved designs. Then I measured and made a cut.

There’s a culture of building in New Orleans—not surprising given it’s hurricane territory, but there’s something beyond that. Besides the perpetual building and rebuilding of houses, New Orleanians are at work all year creating costumes and floats for Mardi Gras, and poverty is always a good incentive to repurpose something you already have rather than buying something new. Quintron has been building his own instruments for years, and there’s no shortage of homes around here that people have transformed into event spaces, speakeasies, or elaborate tree houses with spiral staircases, rope bridges, and water slides. Add to that the rebuilding after Katrina that’s still very apparent, and the lively gentrifying/remodeling of my neighborhood, and one can hardly help but feel the urge to grab a saw and a sander and go at it. There’s also a communal effort to use salvaged materials, so much that the area I live in has been dubbed the “re-use district.”

I’ve always joked that if this whole writing thing doesn’t work out, I’m going to become a furniture maker. I told this to a friend once and she said that furniture maker is pretty much the sexiest occupation a man could have. So, that didn’t discourage me much.

My grandfather fancied himself a woodworker. He made some decent pieces, a few of which I hope to own once I stop moving around so much. He died before I knew him well, but he apparently had an affinity for wood. A native of the Plains, he moved to Wyoming’s mountains to work in the timber. He came into some money once and bought a lumber mill, which he mismanaged and drank away in a little more than a year. He built a house in the town where my Dad grew up that never did sit quite right. When he and my grandma moved out of the mountains into the house in which they both died, he built a woodworking shop in the basement. I remember rifling through it as a child, handling his tools, smelling the sawdust, playing among the stacks of planks of cherry and cedar and ash.

The bookshelf’s basic design came to Akasha as we were drifting off to sleep one night, and in the morning she drew a rough blueprint. I added the final touch—the triangle design in the back, which also keeps the whole thing from tilting—and began to gather supplies. I got the tools from the local tool library, of which I’m an incredibly proud member, although since my car’s not running properly I had to bike across town in the summer heat with a circular saw, a power drill, and other heavy miscellany in my backpack. The bookshelf only took two days to build, and everyone is happy with the way it turned out. We didn’t even wait to stain it before we filled it with books. Once we did, we arranged the living room around it. Akasha, our friend Jenny, and I sat in a circle admiring it, and discussing its plentiful merits.

This is what free trade should look like

Last weekend, Akasha and our friend Jenny attended a free trade event at the Tree House, which has just begun hosting events after a several-months-long hiatus due to some problems with the law. The gist of the event was that there was a bunch of free crap you could take home (including hair cuts), and if you wanted to get rid of some crap, you could take it there and other people would take it home. Plus there were plenty of old hippies, crust punks, ghetto adolescents, and dogs taking advantage of the rope swings and water slides.

Hooray for summer!

New Orleans Long Distance

Yusef Komunyakaa: A Jazz Biography

This biographical sketch exists as the result of an assignment I received in my Louisiana Literature class. At the beginning of the course each student picked a Louisiana writer to have as a subject for several assignments throughout the semester. I picked Yusef Komunyakaa for reasons that should become apparent to you shortly.

Yusef Komunyakaa first learned to play music—that is, to speak, since oral language is our first music—as a small black boy in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where a paper mill dominated the town and the public library did not admit blacks. His father was a carpenter and a Calvinist. Yusef partook in carpentry years later in New Orleans, renovating a house in the Bywater. He wrote his first poems about Vietnam in that house, in intermittent trips down the ladder from the ceiling he was tearing out.

Yusef was born in 1947 and he is not nearly dead. He teaches poetry at New York University. In between this and that he has lived in Arizona, Colorado, California, Louisiana (again), New Jersey and Indiana, at least. He has mostly been a poet and a writer and a teacher. He daydreams about making sculptures and has recently begun to write plays. His grandfather stowed away on a boat from Trinidad. His grandmothers taught him to half-boil the wildness out of raccoons before roasting them.

Yusef walked with Robert Hayden in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado and they talked about how it paralleled a moonscape. Hayden wrote a poem about this later that taught Yusef how language and imagination can transform a physical landscape into a spiritual one—the poem was not a realistic recreation of the day as they gazed out at the rocky formations called Kissing Camels and Balanced Rock, as myriads of birds flashed in the high reddish crevices, but a fantastic tale from a poet who after a long journey arrives in America, and considers the country as an alien.

Yusef earned degrees from the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and the University of California, Irvine. He has taught at the University of New Orleans, the University of Indiana, Princeton, and NYU. Wesleyan University Press has published most of his books, some of the more notable of which are Copacetic (1984), Dien Cai Dau (1988), I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), Magic City (1992), Thieves of Paradise (1998), Pleasure Dome (2001), and Neon Vernacular, a collection for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Lately, he’s been publishing with Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Yusef refuses to define himself as a jazz poet, although he sometimes writes jazz poetry. Occasionally he will write a poem with a refrain and then remove the refrain before he finishes the poem. The refrain is a false engine, but an engine nevertheless. “Yusef” is the refrain for this jazz biography.

Garcia Lorca invoked duende to help him write poetry. Yusef invokes the blues. No five hundred dollar suit will keep him out of Robert Johnson’s shoes.

Yusef had one more child in 2002 than he had in 2004. What happened was his son’s poet mother killed herself and their son in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She cut her son’s wrists with a kitchen knife and then cut her own throat. The son was two years old. Someone found them in a pool of blood in their dining room, along with a note that mentioned Yusef.

Yusef has at least one other daughter, who at the time of an old interview lived in Arizona, where Yusef’s mother also lived. Arizona is where Yusef went after the war. He was an air conditioning mechanic and a police officer. He thought he would be able to fight crime with a gun on his hip, but he ended up mostly behind a desk.

Yusef ingested a lot of images in Vietnam—violent ones, funny ones, enraging ones, pitiful ones, surreal ones. His poems often move from one image to the other, with space in between that creates tension. While he was in Vietnam he rode helicopters into combat zones to get the story, to get the picture. He brought along volumes of poetry with him and read them to calm down. The men he saw killing in Vietnam were men he saw loving the next day. The first Vietnam poem he wrote was “Instructions for Building Straw Huts,” in that house in the Bywater, at 818 Piety Street, a few blocks down from my own.

At one point in time Yusef dreamed of returning to New Orleans, and then came Katrina. He has this to say in 2006:

I hate to think of that tragedy being parlayed into a real estate project, but given that it’s in the United States, most likely the Ninth Ward is going to become a boom area for developers. However, we have to keep the horror of Katrina in our conscience, in our psyche, and we have to make decisions based on that awareness. For years, whenever I went back to New Orleans, I thought, “I’m going to move back here. I’m going to have an apartment here.” That’s the furthest thing from my mind at this moment, because I don’t want to participate in that evil at all.

The curve of the universe

My friend Tom tried to explain to me one time how the universe expands. He used the “balloon analogy,” noting correctly that one can comprehend the universe’s expansion by imagining a two-dimensional balloon being blown up—with all parts moving away from each other at all times on a flat plane—and then imagining an additional spatial dimension to this movement so that everything is moving away from everything else in all directions at the same rate. Or something. Apparently, this analogy has been the source of great confusion among amateur cosmologists trying to grasp the larger physical questions of our universe, but I find it quite apt when thinking about how one must move around New Orleans on a bicycle.

The moniker “Crescent City” is no joke. New Orleans proper rests in a severe bend in the Mississippi, and the geniuses who laid out the city’s streets did so along the arcs that the river creates—rather than paving straight roads with truncated endpoints. The cross-town streets therefore look from above like the tracks of a giant rake drug on the bank along the river’s curve, with cross streets fanning out from a centerpoint somewhere in the vicinity of Gert Town or Mid City, and cumulating at (more or less) right angles along the river’s edge.

The routes one chooses when traveling through a city by bike are different from those one would choose by car, for obvious reasons—car travel favors broad, fast lanes along legal routes, whereas bikes prefer short and straight, and have little regard for one-way streets, speed limits or other variables that impede automobiles. The most important determining factor for a cyclist picking a path (besides, perhaps, having ample lateral space between traffic and parked cars) is distance—we need not venture five extra blocks to arrive at the main thoroughfare when we can cut through a residential area at the same speed, and every inch saved is welcome, since we’re propelling ourselves by our own strength.

It is during this effort to pick the shortest (therefore straightest) distance between two points in New Orleans that I think of the two-dimensional balloon being blown up, the universe moving outward in all directions forever. There are no straight routes in New Orleans—at least not cross-town—and every time I mount my bike and attempt to take off toward a destination I must ride a warped pathway—just as if I tried to point my spaceship at a distant star and rocket straight toward it, having instead to surf the curve of space expanding around me. In New Orleans, as in the larger expanses of the universe, there are no direct routes.

There are a couple handy tools when it comes to determining the most direct route to take through New Orleans on your bike, however: Google Maps’ bicycle directions, and the NolaCycle bike map. The latter provides mostly accurate information about road condition (a serious, serious issue in New Orleans, and one I believe I will be baffled by as long as I’m a resident), as well as general traffic speed, which is an issue because drivers in New Orleans tend to think that two inches between car and handlebar is plenty of space to give a cyclist.

Google Maps’ bike directions does not offer qualitative information about particular bike routes (although they tend to avoid hills, busy intersections, and non-bike-friendly streets), but it is immensely helpful when figuring out which is the shortest. It beats a normal street map because New Orleans’ streets curve at different pitches, so it’s tough to tell which would take you least out of the way just by looking. With Google, it’s all science and gigabytes and general computer smartness, even providing you exact distances for three different routes to the tenth of the mile. It’s so useful that it makes me almost want to forgive Google for not providing public transit directions for New Orleans (but then again, there’s not much public transit here anyway). Note: One slightly obnoxious thing about Google’s bike directions is that it won’t ever direct you the wrong way down a one-way street—something that’s completely common, especially on streets with hardly any traffic.

Utilizing Google bike directions can lead to some interesting sights because it does not discriminate by neighborhood quality when providing routes—in New Orleans, where the urban planners have not thoroughly separated the poor from the rest of us like they have in many American cities, the shortest route between two affluent areas can take you through places that look like … well, post-Katrina New Orleans, I guess. This is good for me because it helps confirm my suspicions that, contrary to what lots of white people will tell you, you will not necessarily be mugged, raped, shot, skewered upon a spit, infected with swine flu, cursed by a voodoo practitioner, surrounded by hoards of gangster teenagers with machine guns, sold crack at affordable prices, or be made fun of for the utter whiteness of your physical appearance, attire and demeanor immediately upon entering New Orleans’ “bad neighborhoods.” Some of these things might happen if you spend longer amounts of time in sketchy areas, but most likely just the latter two. (And if you’re a girl, you might be vulgarly hit on—but that happens in New Orleans’ “good neighborhoods,” too.)

So far, the two most interesting rides I’ve begun to frequently undertake are the one from my house to my friends’ house in Mid-City via Lafitte Street—which takes me through the “Frontier of New Orleans,” past a street sign and stoplight graveyard, and right by the best graffiti I’ve ever seen sprayed at a police station (see below)—and the ride I take daily to and from work, which leads me through the Central City and Freret neighborhoods, both enormously blighted (and formerly horrifying) neighborhoods on the rebound. I would never have seen either of them had I stuck to automobile routes—unless I was making a special trip to Zeitgeist, perhaps—and I imagine a good portion of New Orleans’ wealthier natives haven’t been down these roads more than once. I find it consoling that New Orleans still has an “inner city” that actually exists in the middle of the urban area, rather than having its poor and troublesome residents swept to the peripheries.

50% of N.O.P.D. pigs R dyke lesbian or straight up faggot

I don’t know about you, but I like my “bad neighborhoods” where I can see them. It’s harder to forget about them that way, it makes it harder for you to feel sorry for yourself, and harder to stereotype the people who live there when they’re nodding at you from the sidewalks.

Banksy

Near the Canal Street exit off Interstate 10, westbound.

Lloydweather

This obituary is wheatpasted on an abandoned building around the corner from my apartment.

Forest Lloydweather committed suicide on 13 Aug 1913, in a vacant house in the north part of Jonesboro, and was buried in Jonesboro cemetery. His badly decomposed body was found Sunday (31 Aug) by his father in the northeast corner of the northeast room of the house where he shot himself with a crossbow and arrow. He would have been 30 years old next month. In addition to his father, he left one sister, Violet Messinger, a schoolteacher for Carleton Elementary. Previously, Mr. Lloydweather had taken out patents on a variety of contraptions including a “vending” machine that dispensed holy water. When he failed to make a living from his inventions, he took employment in a silica mine but was dismissed for attempting to kill himself by putting a stick of dynamite on his left shoulder and touching a lit match to it. Some months later, as an apprentice to an apothecary, he tried to drink molten rubber but was stopped prematurely by a patron who happened to be a gnostic. His last place of employment was Defiance Box Mill in Ullin, where he was a bookkeeper. His last known place of residence was in Anna. Despite his tortured spirit, and often surly demeanor, Mr. Lloydweather will be … (illegible) … his unique perseverance.

Gertrude Stein in New Orleans

FromThe Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946. “Baby Woojums” is Stein, “Papa Woojums” is Van Vechten, who was a writer, photographer, and Stein’s literary executor.

Portrait by Carl Van Vechten

To Carl Van Vechten
Postmark: 21 February 1935
The Roosevelt Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana

My dearest papa Woojums

Here we are still in New Orleans, hot and delicious and the only thing missing is you, and you would make it hotter and deliciouser which would have been so nice, and we do like it, and have seen the levies and ferried across the Mississippi and have been given bulbs of a Mexican lily given to the first governor of New Orleans and the social register of the bawdy houses a charming little blue book with the simple advertisements of the ladies by themselves and we have eaten oyster a la Rockefeller and innuemerable shrimps made in every way and all delicious and we were taken to visit the last of the Creoles in her original house unchanged for a hundred years and you would have enjoyed it, and all the time papa Woojums hundreds of miles away and he did say papa Woojums did say that he would not be hundreds of miles away and the moral of that is put no faith in papa Woojums, no not any. It is wonderful unblameable weather and the clouds go up and down, and it is all very lovely and very lively, oh and we have seen the most wonderfully large camellia trees growing with camellias, they were transplanted from old plantations a hundred years old and still cheerful, and we are coming back and buy a Ford and just run around, we have met up with Sherwood [Anderson] and now to-morrow we must leave all these joys behind us. We are so happy about Fania not that she is nervous but that [it] will be and has been alright and lots of love always and always.

B.W. to her pa

On the cockroach

Akasha is terrified of cockroaches. I caught one the size of a hamster crawling up our kitchen wall today. Good thing she’s out of town.

It’s well-known, at least among New Yorkers and those who listen to rap music from New York, that when the apocalypse comes, rats and cockroaches are going to be the only species to survive. While this might be true, the reverence in which people hold cockroaches as ultimate survivors, and the terror that roaches instill in some unhearty souls seems to me a bit silly after encountering a number of them crawling around my house.

Cockroaches have been an abstract idea for most of my life. Like black people, they were almost completely absent from the early stages of my development. The only time I recall seeing a cockroach in Wyoming was in the basement of Kentucky Friend Chicken, where I’d gone after hours with my then-girlfriend, who managed the place. The roach did not seem out of its element at all, even though it was unprecedented in my experience, simply because the rest of that restaurant was so wretched. The grease on the tile floor of the kitchen made it slippery as an ice rink, and was almost certainly responsible for the awful stench that permeated the preparation area but, by some magic of ventilation, did not seep into the dining space.

When I moved to New Orleans and embarked upon apartment scouting I received explicit instructions that I was to rent for no reason any apartment that revealed evidence of cockroach (or other) infestation. I arrived a couple weeks before Akasha, so she was coaching me by phone. After finding what I considered a dream house and coming mere pen strokes away from signing a lease before taking a second run through it and finding the corpses of a half dozen vermin in various locations throughout the premises, and then relaying this news to Akasha and having her strictly forbid me from completing the transaction, I became from that point forward acutely aware of all things cockroach-related during my renewed apartment search. I scrutinized every cranny, grilled current tenants, inquired among realtors, listened to their ruminations.

Consensus told me that the little cockroaches are way worse than the big ones, which just wander in off the street like vagabonds searching for somewhere dry and well-lit. The little ones set up shop behind your stove and swarm out when you warm it up. Their excrement, Akasha told me, is poisonous (what excrement isn’t?!). They live in your home and breed. Fortunately, I’ve only found big ones in the place we live.

The overwhelming impression I get when I see a cockroach is how dumb and unexpressive it is. Sure, it’s an insect, has a bug brain, and so forth, but I expect something as large as a mouse to tremble like one when I catch it. I get no such satisfaction. It is amusing, though, walking in on one by surprise as it sulks across the bathroom shelf and halts with embarrassing obviousness as the light comes on, acting as if I’m some tyrannosaurus who won’t see it if it doesn’t move.

One night when Mike Abu and I got drunk he started badgering me about what I thought was the fundamental difference between humans and other animals. Imagining that no answer I gave would be the correct one to his inebriated philosophy, I sheeped out a few guesses halfway prepared to defend myself, and asked him what the correct answer was. “We’re smarter than they are!” he replied.

It’s true. Of course, in the sense that we’ve become completely incapable of interacting with our environment in any manner that even resembles sustainability, we’re the most retarded animals on the planet. But at the same time, it would take millennia for even such noble and supremely intelligent species as dolphins or chimps to begin to understand the complexities of the toaster oven, much less the microchip. Sure, the insects in Starship Troopers could send their spores into space as well as humans could, but I don’t see that competition creeping up on us in real life just yet. And there is a substantial precedent of human beings who are capable of symbiosis with their environment—those just happen to be the ones we slaughter along with the beasts.

I guess what I’m getting at is that cockroaches are dumb, and nothing to be respected or feared. But how sound is that presumptuous logic, and how safely can I extend it to apply to other animals (even human ones)? Can I safely condescend other creatures because they lack my intelligence, even if they pose a potential threat? I say yes. It’s the easy impulse to fear the gangbanger with a gun, or the grizzly bear when you haven’t got one, but I firmly believe that in just about any situation there is a way to neutralize both simply by being smart enough to know the right action to take. Of course, the unconscious knowledge of instinct is likely to be at least as important in situations regarding these brutes as rational deliberation, but since humans have the capacity for both, we have an edge above other animals that might face them. As long as we humans can keep ourselves beyond the crippling scope of technology that weakens our animal instincts, we will almost certainly be able to avoid being trapped against the wall under a Tupperware, having a piece of junk mail slid beneath our feet, and being flung suddenly onto our backs into a toilet about to flush.

Sex with a shark in slow motion/Come inside my ocean

To eat a shark you must—and everyone knows this—first empty its stomach of license plates. It can’t reach climax with a belly full of metal.

I saw two Vietnamese restaurateurs pulling enormous catfish out of the Mississippi River and piling them in a shallow recess on the bank where they muscled over one another dying for a breath. The fish were longer than the men’s arms and colored a dull silver-brown. From where I stood with my bike at the top of the levee, I could see the old sugar factory, hulking and decrepit, filling the sky with sweet black smoke.

This area of the city, in St. Bernard Parish, just downriver from the Lower Ninth Ward, was inextricably altered by the flood. A nerdy girl I work with—mousy, thin, shy, dry brown hair, 30 years old and living with her parents—evacuated from here to Texas, where she and her family slept on the floor of a church for two weeks. After they returned, she and her parents and sister rented a two-bedroom apartment in Metarie where the four of them fought over one bathroom for a year and moved back into their house just in time for the money to run out. It’s easy to scan a streetful of unassuming people in New Orleans and think to yourself, “You’ve been through more than I have, you’ve been through more than I have, you’ve been through more than I have, you’ve been through more than I have …”

The clarity of water some sharks swim through is nearly blinding. The catfish don’t have this problem. One could almost consider them Midwestern, since the gunk they swim through is largely chunks of Minnesota and Missouri. Sharks have impeccable eyesight, and often spot their next mate from leagues away. The oil seeping into the Gulf of Mexico is troubling because it will prevent shark sex. Obviously, this will result in the extinction of shark porn on the Internet—a significant loss.

The oil companies have been draining the earth’s testicles, making them ache. Since the earth lacks a mighty phallus with which it could attack or at least defend itself—something, for misogynistic reasons, I would expect a planet to have—it must depend upon a slow secretion to inflict harm upon its enemies. Its ejaculation—fittingly, since it is our Mother and therefore female—is not the spurting mess of a man, but, in scale, more like the emerging wetness of an aroused vagina. Unfortunately, the earth is capable of multiple orgasms and will likely not be spent until the water that covers her is black with her secretion, and it evaporates into the air, travels across land in the clouds and rains gray death onto our crops and cattle. The purest parts of our citizenry will go crazy searching for cracks in the ground they expect to open and swallow them like sperm. I will be in the back of a bar somewhere setting a circle of tires on fire, dancing with the sharks and chanting, “We will never die.”