This is Patrick Sauer’s fourth “Read It Like a Man” weekly column for Blisstree. Find his previous installment on “80s Hair Metal” here.
Chapter 4: NOLA
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? I do.
To me, it’s truly the happiest place on earth. But last year, due to economic conditions beyond my control (I blame Goldman Sachs for forcing me to play Wii every afternoon throughout 2009), the wife and I weren’t able to make our annual pilgrimage to Jazz Fest.
This year, that situation will be rectified, and thanks to Treme and a never-ending WWOZ iTunes stream, I’m more excited than ever. On tap are Simon & Garfunkel, a panel discussion with David Simon (hosted by Harry Shearer, ideally conducted as Kent Brockman), Trombone Shorty, Pearl Jam, the softshell crabs at Clancy’s, the oyster and bacon sandwich at Cochon, and general day-drinking debauchery that will keep my BAC and BMI well above medically recommended levels.
To get in the swinging mood, I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite local literary works. New Orleans attracts the eccentric, so naturally it’s a writer’s paradise. This chapter could come in a hundred different versions; terrific titles I won’t be discussing include Rising Tide, The Moviegoer, The Awakening, A Streetcar Named Desire, 1 Dead in Attic, Yellow Jack, and any of Anne Rice’s bloody gay vampire series, if that’s what you like to sink your teeth into.
If you’ve never been, you should go. And don’t take my word for it, put your trust in Louis Armstrong: “Way down yonder in New Orleans/In the land of dreamy scenes/There’s a garden of Eden/You know what I mean?”
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Beignet Breakdown: Admittedly, Toole’s amazing novel isn’t under the radar, but it’s so good that if you only read one book about New Orleans in your lifetime, make it the one with a protagonist so insufferable that you’ll never look askance at the most obnoxious guy in your office again. For the uninitiated (if you exist), A Confederacy of Dunes is the story of Ignatius Reilly, an obese flatulent asexual medieval scholar forced to (gasp) get a job in a plebeian world that fails to recognize his genius. Basically, it’s a series of madcap encounters between Reilly and local pathetic oddballs like his tortured sodden mother, a pornography-selling teenager, a dim-witted stripper with a feisty cockatoo, a group of belligerent fightin’ lesbians, a senile office clerk way gone in dementia, a hapless cop in ridiculous disguises, and a horny “activist” in the Bronx who apparently lusts for Reilly’s lumpy bones. There’s no way to do the story justice in a paragraph, other than to say it’s one of the funniest books in the American canon. (And not English comp “Chaucer is so ribald” funny, but fat-guy-fall-down-go-boom funny.) Here’s a taste from Ignatius: “…When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”
One of the amazing things about A Confederacy of Dunces is that each chapter and sub-chapter move the plot forward. There’s no wasted paper; it’s the African Queen of books about intolerable corpulent gassy faux-radical Fortuna-obsessed hot dog vendors. There are also couple of interesting backstories that make A Confederacy of Dunces particularly endearing:
* John Kennedy Toole committed suicide 11 years before publication, which only came about because his mother found a faded carbon copy of the manuscript and convinced Walker Percy to read it. It became a cult classic and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
* It’s become the book that can’t be adapted, a supreme irony because Reilly’s favorite pastime is attending movies he knows he’ll hate (a.k.a.“filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency.”) Numerous filmmakers have tried to bring it to the big screen and failed. As recently as 2007, a version was in the works with Lily Tomlin, Paul Rudd, Mos Def, and Will Ferrell in a fat suit, but it’s gone the way of all the other productions, including an insane Harold Ramis project that was to star John Belushi and Richard Pryor. Bluto’s fondness for Chicago cuisine and speedballs shitcanned the project, and as Ramis said in And Here’s the Kicker: “It’s defeated every writer who’s ever tried it over the years.”
Why Women Need to Read: Regardless of the ancillary factoids, A Confederacy of Dunces is a must-read for fans of the awesome, whether you set foot in NOLA or not. Toole’s secret weapon is that, in a strange way, he makes Reilly admirable, if not lovable. Wouldn’t we all like to live our lives completely on our own terms? To tell the world what we’re thinking at every turn? Yes, we would. Reilly is such a singular over-the-top character that nobody has ever spent time with anyone like him – a few hours would be grounds for justifiable homicide – but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t want to be him, if only for one day. A Confederacy of Dunces is as much New Orleans as crawfish and the Neville Brothers, so read it. Now. It will open your valve and let you revel in telling the “undesirables” to go to hell.
Letters From New Orleans by Rob Walker
Beignet Breakdown: Walker is best known as the man behind the “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine, a weekly look at the enjoyable crap that makes us Americans. Right around 2000, Walker and his girlfriend “E.” left Gotham and decamped to New Orleans. He started sending emails of the sights and sounds, little slice-of-life vignettes that give a sense of what life is like down there without being polemical or overly guidebook-y. Told in the first-person, Walker weaves together mythology, conversations, observations, bits of history, unanswered questions, and hilarious moments in time that capture the flavor of the oddity that is New Orleans. One of the reasons it works so well is that it isn’t all reflexive. Walker puts on a skeleton costume and throws out beads while marching in a Carnival parade, attends a jazz funeral after seeing an ad in the paper, and indulges in a long, lazy boozy lunch at old-school coats-and-ties staple Galatoire’s.
Why Women Need to Read: Walker’s book is pre-K (he was there from 2000-03), so his pieces don’t carry the post-storm weariness. He’s certainly not oblivious to the day-to-day realities of most New Orleanians, but his time there wasn’t defined by the destruction of a great American city and the deaths of its citizens. Thus, he’s unencumbered while ruminating on how NOLA is a place of nonconformity that refuses to change come hell or (ahem) high water. It’s a place where a man can get fried pound cake, where former Bill Clinton paramour Gennifer Flowers can reinvent herself as a torch singer, and where levy bonfires are a Christmastime tradition. Letters From New Orleans is a great primer, a quick read, and Walker distills the Big Easy in a single word better than I ever could: “unselfconsciousness.”
City of Refuge by Tom Piazza
Beignet Breakdown: A dedicated music writer, Tom Piazza moved from Iowa to New Orleans in 1994 and dived jazz-first into the city’s wondrous cultural scene. He became so immersed that his current gig is writing for HBO’s new series Treme, which is at least one lonely blogger’s dream. Shortly after Katrina, Piazza wrote Why New Orleans Matters, an important visceral screed about the “profoundly wounded place.” It had the immediacy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but deeper truths always come from fiction, so in 2008, he called upon his inner-Charles Dickens and penned the novel City of Refuge. Similar to Oliver Twist or Hard Times, Piazza used rich, sympathetic characters to show that when the sun refuses to shine, the moon turns red with blood, and the new world has yet to be revealed – good luck finding a saint marching anywhere.
City of Refuge tells the parallel story of two families – one black, one white – and how they deal with Katrina’s aftermath. S.J. Williams, a carpenter and widower from the Lower Nine, waits it out; Craig Donaldson, a Midwest native editing an alternative newspaper, doesn’t. Over the course of six months, both men will be uprooted and moved around the country. Both men bear the scars of Katrina, yet yearn to get back to the thing that has a hold on them, New Orleans. Williams watches his neighbors drown, his community wash away, and has to come to grips with the fact that everything he’s ever known is gone. Donaldson has more resources, but he’s stuck in a Chicago suburb that will have to be his home if he wants to keep his wife and two kids together.
Why Women Need to Read: The broad outline is familiar, but it serves Williams and Donaldson because they aren’t archetypes. Their personal journeys – thick with rage, hope, and reality – are what sets this novel apart from the long-faded news coverage and Spike Lee’s great When the Levees Broke. And as tremendous as Treme has been so far, City of Refuge is as-it-happens, so it’s more urgent and perilous. (Although, one suspects Creighton Bernette abides, City of Refuge is probably on his bookshelf, and I’ll bet you a Hubig’s pie that Piazza had a hand in his “manmade catastrophe, a Federal fuck-up of epic proportions” rant.) All told, City of Refuge even does an better job than Piazza’s first attempt at grappling with Katrina. It proves why New Orleans matters.
Earth Week just wrapped, but I encourage anyone headed to NOLA to recycle those beer cans, eat a local lunch (like say a Central Grocery muffuletta, Zapp’s Cajun Crawtator and an Abita turbodog), and if you’re a better person than I am, swing a hammer with Brad Pitt’s Make It Right nonprofit.
Oh, and if anyone is out at Jazz Fest, look me up. Say hello. I’ll be the doughy white guy in cargo shorts and flip-flops nodding his head rhythmically.
Laissez les bon temp rouler.
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photo: Thinkstock
This is Patrick Sauer’s fifth weekly column for Blisstree about books he thinks women should read. Find his previous installment on New Orleans here.
Chapter 5: Unemployment
If you swing from the left side of the plate – like, say, the author of this post – there’s a perplexing yin-and-yang to our current economy. On the one hand, you want to believe all the rosy economic reports, because without a rebound, Barry will have to go back to Kenya after a single term. On the other hand, does it feel any different out there with regard to gainful employment?
Granted, I subsist in the freelance magazine writing world, which is rapidly going the way of switchboard operators, typewriter repairmen, and doffers. My career path aside, however, I haven’t heard a peep from friends, family members, or business acquaintances about new developments in any industry, other than that “underemployed” is now a permanent thing. (Obviously, I don’t hang out with enough people in the actuary racket.)
“Termination facilitators” are always prattling on about the “golden opportunities” that come from the loss of employment, but we all know that’s grade-A M.B.A. hogwash. The only appealing part of George Clooney’s Up In the Air shtick is Clooney himself (or, for us dudes, when we get to roger Vera Farmiga on a luggage rack). Losing a job – even a job that you claim to hate – sucks. There’s nothing freeing about it, except perhaps for all the unwanted free time that you can now devote to leisure reading.
Like I’ve always said since I made it up three minutes ago, “You can’t spell broke-ass Jabroni without a J-O-B.”
Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy by John Bowe
The Grind: To keep from weeping uncontrollably about humanity, you probably haven’t been keeping tabs on the ongoing American indentured servitude. Well, John Bowe has, and what he presents is borderline unfathomable, completely revolting, but also undeniably compelling. In Nobodies, he uses a boatload of empirical data and statistics to bolster his argument that American corporations are turning their beneficial backs on slavery. Today. In the 21st-century. In many of the products we own and the food we eat, or at least us common folk. (Good for you, if you make your socks out of flax grown in your windowbox garden.)
Nobodies consists of three essays that never quite coalesce into a unified whole in a narrative sense, but are so eye-opening that it doesn’t matter. The first is “Florida,” which details how companies like PepsiCo and Tropicana subcontract out to ruthless operators for their citrus fruits and vegetables. (Kudos, I suppose, are in order for Taco Bell; they added a penny per pound for its tomatoes.) “Florida” takes place in Imokalee, where laborers work for scraps, under the constant torment of a living embodiment of evil known as “El Diablo.” Enjoy your morning orange juice, but know that the victims include a father of six with a child suffering from leukemia. In the third essay “Saipan,” Bowe goes to Saipan, the U.S. commonwealth where laissez-faire economics are taken to mean, “Anything goes as long as Target meets its clothing demand.” Supported by classy politicos like former anti-regulation-exterminator-turned-disgraced-congressman-turned-Dancing With the Stars-reject Tom DeLay, Saipan is also heavily vested in the underage sex trade. Anything for a green card, Amirite! There are no-wage, orange-picking jobs to be had!
Why Women Need to Read: As awful as those two essays are, it’s the middle one that will make you vomit up your samosas. “Tulsa” tells the story of the John Pickle Company, a successful welding outfit that made pressurized tanks for the oil industry. Fed up with American workers and their “rights,” owner John Pickle devised a scheme with some Kuwaitis to import 53 Indian workers as part of a “training program,” then kept them locked up in factory housing with crappy bunk beds, two toilets, and inedible food. When they complained about the quarter of an apple they got at meals (And no milk for grown-ups!), Pickle more or less told the employees – some of whom were college-educated – that they should be happy they landed in the land of opportunity. Eventually, in the true Jesus Christ sense of Christianity, a local Pentecostal lay minister took the workers’ cause as his own, ultimately sheltering all of the men at considerable cost to himself.
Pickle never served a day in jail, nor near as I can tell, ever paid a cent of the $1.3 million civil suit he lost. Don’t you just hate it when there’s no happy ending?
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The Grind: Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, debuted to much-deserved praise in 2007. It takes place at a Chicago advertising agency during the dwindling days of the dot.com boom. Projects are being shuttered, piecemeal layoffs have everyone on edge, and the formerly jovial white-collar office is gripped in panic. (Nothing recognizable here, right?) A mysterious potentially job-saving pro-bono campaign comes along in which the staff must come up with a way to make breast cancer victims laugh off their disease. It gets ratcheted up when rumor spreads that an unloved supervisor is a sufferer herself.
Ferris writes the book in first-person plural, the “we” representing the workers as a collective, but unlike Michael Scott’s “we are family” ethos on NBC’s The Office, these employees are, unsurprisingly, out for themselves. Ferris is an ad vet, so the book nails the ridiculous PR doublespeak speak like the healthy cookies without “lastive acid,” (a made-up fear-mongering substance), and a new Tom Waits-inspired piratical phrase for firings, “walking Spanish down the hall.” Then We Came to the End features a number of memorably desperate characters including a no-longer-employed guy who breaks in after-hours to work on the breast cancer initiative, and a heartbroken woman who’s forced to gaze upon a billboard featuring her no-longer missing/murder-victim daughter.
Why Women Need to Read: As grim as it sounds, Ferris doesn’t set out to destroy soulless corporate America. As the book goes along, it becomes clear he understands that “we” are all defined by what we do, and there’s pride to be had in whatever it is, even in silly faux-important manipulative marketing campaigns. Plus, Then We Came to the End is really freaking funny, capturing the joy of free bagels, the annoyance of the guy who only speaks in The Godfather quotes, and the camaraderie that’s found even in a barely-functioning office. Anyone who has ever toiled at a crappy desk job will appreciate Ferris’s deft touch, while also laughing themselves to tears (of both kinds) at the workplace oddball with a totem pole fixation. “We” all have to file TPS reports, but we all also have to find the things that sustain us through the workday – until they don’t.
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Grind: For whatever reason, we Americans don’t read plays just for the hell of it. We probably get forever turned off by a complete lack of comprehension of King Lear during high school, coupled with the super-annoying theatrical drama club queens who pretend they do. Whatever the reason, it’s too bad. Plays are typically short, so you can add them to the yearly book total with impunity. And unlike lame novels, you get to say things out loud.
Why Women Need to Read: When it comes to David Mamet, it also means you get to drop angry F-Bombs with full-throated authority. Before we workshop the truer-than-ever Glengarry Glen Ross, take a second to think of one of those Wall Street assholes who got some $10-million-dollar-taxpayer-funded bonus, while the rest of us scratched and clawed for a goddamned measly $250 unemployment check that they caused us to need by sending the economy down the shitpipe in the first place. (Cussing is fun!) Now you’re in the right mindset. Run with it!
And don’t forget, one effective way of handling the current jobless recovery crisis is by finding fictional people worse off than you, like these soon-to-be-jobless sad schlubby salesmen. Thus, it’s now time to read this slice o’Mametian wordsmithery aloud:
Moss: You build it!
Aaronow: That’s what I…
Moss: You fucking build it! Men come…
Aaronow: Men come work for you…
Moss: … you’re absolutely right.
Aaronow: They…
Moss: They have…
Aaronow: When they…
Moss: Look look look look, when they build your business, then you can’t fucking turn around, enslave them, treat them like children, fuck them up the ass, leave them to fend for themselves…no.
Can’t you just feel the hopelessness? Go ahead, soak in the sweaty desperation. The pain, the anguish, the regret, the end of the road with nothing to show for it. No job? Big deal. At least we’re not Shelly “the Machine” Levene. Dogshit wackos Bruce and Harriett Nyborg just like talking to salesmen.
Ahhhhh. I feel better about the job market already (mostly because I’m not in it – Hey-Oh!), and if you read Glengarry Glen Ross you will, too. As a reward for your efforts, I command that you pour yourself a cup of Joe, put the dogs up, and enjoy the greatest soliloquy since Hamlet held his skull. It’s like Billy Shakespeare’s – only in this one, Alec Baldwin holds his balls.
Baldwin’s character’s speech is only in the movie (not the stage) version, but don’t cheat on your homework assignment. Reading is what we’re all about at Mitch & Murray. Otherwise, put that coffee down! Coffee – and kick-ass Mamet monologues – are for CLOSERS!
You think I’m fucking with you?
Oh, have I got your attention now?
Good. Because I want you to know you’re not alone. Hang in there.
You’re not weak. The job leads are weak.
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