Friday, December 11, 2009

In Which A Grammatically-Inconsistent Summary Is Provided And Analysis Foreshadowed

Saturday, 12/5: Fly. Stop. Fly. Arrive at New Orleans aeroport at approximately 4:30 p.m. local time (which is, as I'm constantly forgetting, one hour behind time-to-which-I'm-accustomed). Drive to Baton Rouge. Eat at local Greek-and-Lebanese chain. Find motel. Sleep.

Sunday, 12/6: Arise. Examine websites of two local megachurches. Choose The Healing Place Church on basis of less overtly political Statement of Belief (this territory has been well-covered in a previous post). Attend "church". Leave "church" emotionally numb and further from God than when we arrived. Drive to Livonia, LA. Eve bikes about 30 miles to Plaquemine as I drive there and look around. When Eve arrives, go to Bayou Segnette State Park, set up camp in the dark, and sleep.

Monday, 12/7: Arise to rain. Determine too cold and wet to bike, so drive to Plaquemine and look around. Find beautiful Catholic church. Examine abandoned lock. Climb levee. Follow river south. Find plantation, attend tour administered by contagiously-unhappy Darlene. Tour attempts to address issue of slavery in Southern culture; ends up, as was inevitable, both euphemizing and romanticizing it. Drive into New Orleans. Get coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde. Find that we both like beignets more than any other form of fried dough. Wander French Quarter. Eat oh-my-god-this-is-amazing sandwiches. Go to Bayou Segnette. Sleep as rain starts to fall.

Tuesday, 12/8: Arise to puddles as previously described. Dry clothes and sleeping bags in free laundry room. Go to Westwego Library. Drive to Grand Isle State Park. Set up camp, explore, eat, get flat tire on drive back from restaurant, sleep.

Wednesday, 12/9: Arise to one tire flat instead of four flats as dreamt by Mac. Make arrangements to get tire fixed. Unpack car, organize everything. Bask in first and only sunlight since Saturday. Shower. Fix tire. Drive back up to NOLA, stopping at Walmart for groceries and two new tires and oil change. Drive to St. Bernard State Park. Set up camp. Drive to New Orleans. Park, wander, look for music. Find, first, passable music at trashy tourist bar. Leave, find pretty good music at emptier bar. Go to Candlelight Lounge. Wait for Treme Brass Band to arrive and play. Wait. Wait. Listen to excellent Treme Brass Band. Eat. Sleep.

Thursday, 12/10: Arise to cold. Drive to New Orleans, find cafe. Go to surprisingly small exhibition of pictures of the end of the Mississippi. Drive around New Orleans. Go to African-American Museum. Eat. Sleep.

Friday, 12/11: Arise to colder-than-yesterday. Drive to New Orleans. Find cafe. Post.

Stanley Fish Is A Complete Fucking Idiot

I'm sorry. I know that the few of you who might read this thing don't come here for this reason. But my god. Despite his badass name, this older essay and, more recently, this I'm-trying-to-be-contrarian-but-this-is-all-I-can-come-up-with-may-God-forgive-my-stupidity-and-the-New-York-Times-reward-it deserve nothing else but public scorn. And that's all I have to say about that. More coming, and when it does I promise it will be about New Orleans, neogeography (this is a stupid term, I know, but don't you love the rhyme?), and music. Honest.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

In Which We Go To Church Without Going To Church

Baton Rouge, LA--More accurately NOLA, I suppose, but in my mind I'm back in Baton Rouge, and since this post will take as its subject a memory I feel it's fitting to town-stamp it at the memory's site. In Baton Rouge we went to church in a warehouse and listened to a fake preacher who was actually an accountant. The church, which retains the name not because it deserves it but because I can't think of what else to call it, was this one suggested to Eve by the person (I think a he, but his name is eluding me) who showed her around St. Francisville LA. Brief Sunday-morning analysis of the website was inconclusive--we chose the Healing Place Church over Bethany because of the former's less overtly political website; Bethany's scared us, HPC's scared us less, but we shouldn't have worried in the least, because just once before (in a classroom--a brief primer: this fool of a professor equated the perjury charge leveled against a policeman friend of his who had perjured himself during a murder trial with Bill Clinton's acquittal in the Senate of perjury, neglecting to consider that just maybe lying to a jury during a murder trial isn't quite equivalent to saying that someone didn't fellate you when in fact they did (brief, brief aside: Google's dictionary doesn't recognize the verb fellate, and I'm not sure if the reason is more likely to be prudishness or frequency of usage, but a brief experiment reveals that it does recognize the noun fellatio and so it's probably the latter reason)) have I been in a place where so much was said without anything being said. We arrived ten minutes early and sat in the car for nine, watching the cars-nearly all expensive, and nearly all SUVs--file in and steeling ourselves for we-didn't-know-what. They could tell we were first-timers, either because we had quizzical expressions or because we reeked of Christlessness or both, and so ushered us to specially-marked seats in more or less the middle of the warehouse theater (I simply can't think of another way to describe this place) that they tried to pass as a nave--for the entire "service" I fretted, and my guess is that Eve did as well, that they would try to work on us, as it were, but thankfully they left us more or less alone.

The first half-hour was dominated by a predictably solid but mind-numbingly dull band singing what seemed to be secular love songs with two or three references to Jesus scattered throughout. Instrumentation: one drummer; one percussionist (solitary, inaudible conga); no less than four male guitarists, two of whom sang; two female lead vocalists; one mixed chorus of perhaps 25; one bassist; one keyboardist. Type: all young; all dressed nicely but casually; all painstakingly groomed to varying degrees of hipness. Intra-band engagements: one, between blond female vocalist and indistinct guitarist. Favorite Christmas carols of Mac's forever ruined by godawful cover: one, "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear".

Ratio of spoken-word mentions of "dollars" to spoken-word mentions of "God": approximately 4:1. Ratio of amount of sermon devoted to various fundraising efforts to amount of sermon devoted to reading and analysis of biblical passage (from Luke): approximately 1:1. Amount of money raised by church in the previous 21-day period: $830,000. Amount of money spent on new church complex that could instead have been spent on any number of excellent causes in the area:.... but I'm becoming bitter. Eve said after we left that she didn't feel like she had gone to church.

In Which There Is Water-Oh-My-God-Everywhere-!

New Orleans, LA--Once again (in a metaphorical rather than literal sense), some other-named town just outside of a city will not get its just deserts in this blog, as New Orleans will serve as a stand-in for whatever municipality truly contains the St. Bernard State Park (which, by the way, has free wireless, as do two of the other three LA S.P.s that Eve or I or both have stayed at; the one holdout S.P., at Grand Isle, is consistently rated one of the top State Parks in the country, a fact which I'm sure provides its supervisor a simultaneously plentiful source of pride (that his State Park, alone of Louisiana's, made the list) and fear (that when the day inevitably comes that sees G.I.S.P. fall off the list, his professional life will be, for all intents and purposes, ended)). Had I written something at Bayou Segnette S.P., however, I would most likely have town-stamped the post "Westwego, LA," not because B.S.S.P. is any further from New Orleans than St. Bernard, but because "Westwego" is such a wonderful name--as is, by the way, "Cut Off, LA," which, before you ask, is most definitely not cut off, and in fact it's difficult to imagine when it might have been, and so the pertinent question becomes not "From what is or has Cut Off (been) cut off from?" but rather "Just what, exactly, is or was cut off?"

But I'll diverge from this burlesque line of questioning-or-not-questioning (Ed.: not to mention sentence-completing-or-sentence-fragment-abandoning) to address facts: there is more water in Louisiana than anywhere else I've ever, carefully, set foot. On Monday night, we were positioned at Bayou Segnette S.P., Eve comfortably in her hammock (which setup now includes accompanying tarp so that it looks like a sharply-executed, floating blue tent), I in a new and unfamiliar tent, hastily and haphazardly erected (the consequences of this slapdashery being, as we shall see, more severe than I would have predicted). Our shelters having gotten us through the previous night's showers moisture-free, we viewed Monday night's projected thunderstorms with scorn. I learned, quickly, that "thunderstorm" has in a hurricane-ravaged land a slightly different meaning than that to which I was accustomed. The storm raged for close to five hours, and when I say "raged" I mean think of the most powerful Northeastern rainstorm you can. For me this is Hurricane Bob (I think) of the early nineties, when I was maybe seven. Tent-posts and guy-lines were whipped out of the ground like candles from a cake (Ed.: spare us your pathetic hyperbole: you replaced precisely one post, and the fact that you replaced it three times speaks more to your weakness than to the strength of the storm). Maybe so--but the rain and wind and lightning and cold, and the inch-deep-and-growing puddle in the tent drove me, still sleepless at 3 a.m., to the shelter of the car, and it was only when the rain and lightning ceased at 5 that I fell asleep, awakening at 6:30 to this strange and dreamlike sight. The rain had created ponds where the previous evening there had been grass--and, we later learned, had flooded a few suburbs not far from where we were staying.

Let me clarify the term "suburb" (Ed.: as usual, I see absolutely no way of stopping you), for here, again, the typical Northeastern meaning of the word is inadequate. The areas around New Orleans are overwhelmingly, for lack of a better word, depressed (topographically and economically) and depressing. In a way, it's the opposite of what seems to happen in the North--where the richer, and overwhelmingly whiter, folks move out of the inner city to the suburbs or (though I detest the term, it is occasionally useful) exurbs. But here--and I cannot speak to Southern cities in general, although I have a (fallible, obviously) hunch that it applies generally--people flock to the city. It doesn't seem, at least I haven't seen evidence of it, that there's a single suburb in the Northern sense of the word. Everyone seems to live in the city, if not formally then at least roughly defined. But let me leave sociology, such as it is, to the sociologists, seeing as they know how to do it properly.

The parts of Louisiana south of New Orleans extend much further than one could imagine, particularly if (like me) you heard a "preacher" in Baton Rouge proclaim his masculine being-from-Southern-Louisiana and thought there was a great deal more to go in that direction--but that's a story, and what a story, for another time. Maine has islands, plenty of islands, and a rocky coast which appears on a map to be a fairly accurate kind of meta-geology, that is to say it looks as rocky pictographically as it does in person; and southern Louisiana (actually southern, you shape-shifting ape-lifting preacher-man) looks much the same, map-wise; but it is not. For one thing, it's bigger: broader, longer, grander, but also thinner, less dense. I think it's the effect of the trees. In Maine you can't see very far because even the islands have enormous thick pine forests; in southern LA you can see forever, over the islands to the sea to more islands to more sea to even more islands and beyond them who knows? And Grand Isle is their apogee, level enough but in danger (as, geographically speaking, is New Orleans) of falling into the flat, flat ocean. That's the thing about these places--they're precarious.