Shhh! I'm Reading.

Recently, I leant a friend a copy of Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding (which is amazing and I highly recommend by the way). He made it through 350 of its 500 odd pages and then gave it back saying “I loved it up until that point but the characters just got so pathetic so I stopped.” What the fuck is that about? This is a perfectly intelligent individual whose tastes are cultivated and whose literary sensibility I have the highest regard for but really? After 350 pages you’re packing it in? I don’t have it in me to quit after that kind of investment. It would send me on a sneaky shame spiral. I’d be asking myself “what kind of weak willed person are you?” I’d be having a psychological tug-of-war with myself. Anyway, that was all before I bought Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. And I think maybe I get it now. There is an empty spot on my bookshelf that calls to me in a consoling voice saying “give in, why struggle, just put me back and enjoy how pretty my dust jacket is.” I’ve heard it called the world’s most disastrous masterpiece. Indeed. Alternately, literature’s most beautiful failure. There are the typically boring Murakami characters (I mean that in the most complimentary way; the alluringly dull characters are the chief reason to read a Murakami novel) and then there is the shoulder pad swaddled assassin who is ballzy and self-sufficient on the one hand but laments the size of her cleavage on the other (huh?). Oh and there are elves or little people or something. But tally ho! I will finish the bloody thing even if it means I have to suffer the little people and the cleave talk and the annoying teenage literary prodigy.

I finally picked up Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven this week because he is a genius and basically the best comic writer around (maybe along with Jeff Lemire). In Ice Haven, there is this little kid named Charles who is like me but a boy and I dunno, 8 or something. Charles and I should be BFF’s. Also, there’s a comic book critic named Harry Naybors (ha!), a married couple who are PI’s, Leopold and Loeb and Jon Benet Ramsay’s ransom note. It’s hilarious and suburban and weird in that wonderful Clowes way. Like Ghost World but more entertaining.

I can’t seem to let New Orleans go. I dream about this certain redfish dish at Bayona. I should probably just move there. In the meantime, Tom Piazza keeps me company. I read Why New Orleans Matters while I was in NOLA (as only the most dorky, Commander’s Palace frequenting tourist would). And of course, there’s Treme, on which he’s a regular writer. Lately I’ve been deep in his collection of essays on music and America and life and yes, New Orleans, Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. I am learning things I didn’t realize I wanted to know about Jimmy Martin. I’m buying expensive box sets of blues records by people like Charley Patton and Son House. My bank account wants a word with Tom Piazza.

Top of my list of best bibliophilic events in Toronto are the wine and cheese nights Nicholas Hoare Books puts on with its eponymous owner who, clad in bow-tie and brass buttoned blazer, whizzes through a dangerous number of book recommendations; pithy anecdotes and witty asides included. Nicholas Hoare is a British gentleman who has family ties to people like Allen Lane and has an intimate knowledge of myriad country piles; all of which would be sort of insufferable if he wasn’t such a lark. In reference to a children’s book about caterpillars, he observes with delight “and the little ‘pillies ate the denrobiums!” Ha! Without fail, I discover a truckload of titles I’d never heard of but which, on account of Sir Hoare’s enthusiasm, are suddenly essential. My favorite kind of bibliophilic encounter. It was here that I picked up Joshua Knelman’s Hot Art and Calvin Trillin’s Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin. I also nabbed a copy of Nobel winner Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems: 1954-1986 which I’d been searching for all over town.  

Oh, and one more. I squirreled up a copy of Petrograd at The Beguiling over the weekend. It’s about Rasputin and some spies and is full of Tyler Crook’s gorgeous inky illustrations. Fun!

(art by Daniel Clowes via Hey Oscar Wilde!)

When I travel to a town I’ve never been to before I begin with the literature. It might be novels, historical studies or journalism. I’ll usually try and find the local entertainment rag online as well. This is me getting my bearings and while of course it does little to dispel the shock of the new upon landing, it tends to serve me better than a Lonely Planet. Plus, I can’t navigate to save my life anyway so there’d be little point; I leave that to my partner and his cartographic ninja skills.

Once I’d decided I wanted to head to New Orleans then, I began with a book list. I started with the usual suspects. I read Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, an intimate and tenderly wrought account of one family living through both the post 9/11 politics of being Muslim in America and Katrina. It both tore my heart out and convinced me of Eggers’ brilliance. It’s an important book that everyone should read. You’ve got to read Confederacy of Dunces right? It’s as good as its Pulitzer seal suggests. It’s also hilarious. For preparatory reading though, few things can match Dan Baum’s Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death and Life in New Orleans. I didn’t know it until I’d returned home and had time to digest but that mouthful of a subtitle captures the city beautifully. It begins with Betsy and finishes with a post-Katrina New Orleans struggling to get her footing and is threaded together by the stories of, yes, 9 lives. Together, though they spring from vastly different socioeconomic roots, their stories fashion a wholly personal oral history of the city that cuts to the quick in a way a more traditionally structured historical study couldn’t. More importantly, it allows New Orleanians to tell the story of New Orleans.

While in New Orleans I stopped in at the Tulane University Bookstore and snagged a copy of Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters and Andrei Codrescu’s The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans. The first is equal parts love letter to his adopted city and lament for the civic failures surrounding Katrina. As I was reading about how he came to fall head over heels for New Orleans, I too was falling hard - a person of a certain disposition is all but guaranteed to do so - and in so in a strange way, probably unintended by its author, the book was a comfort to me; as though someoneI was whispering in my ear “it’s okay, I understand, I too fell prey to her wiles!” Codrescu is a beloved NPR contributor and this collection of his essays is fabulously varied in subject matter, tackling everything from baseball and sex to the Ceausescu dictatorship and, as the titular essay intimates, his adopted home town of New Orleans. It’s a brilliant collection and Codrescu writes with a verve and swagger that only a New Orleanian - by way of Romania - writer could pull off. A certain anecdote about swindling his way into Commander’s Palace with an out of town friend is alone worth the price of admission.

In his gorgeous paean to the crescent city, Why New Orleans Matters, Tom Piazza invokes the gospel traditional “no cross, no crown” as shorthand for the complex tangle of beauty and heartbreak that makes New Orleans a city like no other. That’s it exactly: a city gorgeous despite, or perhaps a city gorgeous in part because of all its hardship. Like an arrow straight to the heart, I fell hard for NOLA. She knocked me on my knees and left me full of heartache and longing the moment I left in a way no other town I’ve visited has. I’m fairly certain I’ll spend the rest of my days finding ways to get back there as often as possible. And if that sounds melodramatic, I can only assume you’ve never been. New Orleans will make a romantic out of a stone cold gangsta. She’s a hard knock town, a love-worn lady fond of misfits and rascals. And she’s a show stopper, beautiful beyond measure. New York? Meh. New York’s got nothin’ on NOLA. I can’t top Piazza’s love letter of a book in attempting to impart just why so many people fall in love with New Orleans and in any case nothing will compare to going so just go, do it now and do it fast.

My love affair with New Orleans started with a little rambling book purveyor in the Riverbend neighborhood called the Maple Street Book Shop. You’ll find them on an unassuming block under sprawling oaks; spot the sign with the tagline “fight the stupids.” And while we’re on that, let me tell you (though obviously the owners had loftier and more menacing stupids in mind when they chose it - New Orleanians have the pick of the civic litter where stupids are concerned), after being accosted outside yet another Tropical Isle by a dude in an inflatable hand grenade suit shilling treacly neon colored plonk, a person of a certain disposition (ie anyone likely to be reading this) is going to be feeling especially receptive to such a mandate. Maple Street is a bookstore for genuine bibliophilic wanderers. Its meandering nooks and secret pockets invite leisurely exploration and discovery. It feels a little like stopping by a friend’s house - a friend with a brilliant library - only better because if you like a book you can take it home with you. If on the other hand you need a bit of guidance or if you welcome recommendations, you’ll find its staff are whip smart, voracious readers and, in true New Orleans fashion, will treat you like family your first time in (seriously, they offered me bacon topped (yep!) butterscotch donuts from the cop run donut shop round the way). I pillaged their terrific stock of locally themed titles, picking up Mike Tidwell’s study of the environmental and cultural devastation along Louisiana’s Cajun coast Bayou Farewell and Chin Music Press’s edited collection Where We Know: New Orleans as Home (the follow up to 2006’s Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans.) It’s a politically progressive little shop, a neighborhood joint that serves as an anchor for its community. The out of towner willing to hop on a streetcar and take a small jaunt across town will be handsomely rewarded.

**An addendum: Maple Leaf graciously pointed out that they intended the phrase “fight the stupids” in the symptomatic sense. As in, “got a nasty case of the stupids? Cure them with a good book.” I paraphrase but you get the gist. I concede I missed that…on the other hand, few remedies are as effective as a good book in fighting the breed of Stupid I mention above so I’m content to let my comment stand.