He had met her through a mutual friend that thought they would be good for each other. On their first date, he had taken her to Olivier’s and it felt like they had known each other all their lives. They ate Creole Rabbit and Crawfish Étouffée.
She left him on a gray and drizzling day. He still goes to Olivier’s and watches for her, though he knows she won’t come walking in.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
—- Groucho Marx
Statue on top of a crypt, Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, New Orleans
I had a lot of fun last week at the Set List on the Green – downtown Dallas in Klyde Warren Park. So much fun that, braving a bit of chill, I hopped a train and headed down as the sun set.
What Set List is about is, on Thursdays at 6:30 PM they have six local musicians take the stage for a half-hour set each. What is cool is the wide variety of talent (and, frankly, wide range of talent) on display. Though, not surprisingly, the musical stylings tend toward the folk/acoustic/country/songwriter sort of thing… your really don’t know what to expect.
It makes for a nice evening. A chair or blanket on the grass, a bit of sustenance from a local gourmet food truck, a beer or glass of wine from a nearby stand, and some good local music. I am compiling quite a list of music that I like and am able to follow them around the city… find stuff I like. It’s pretty damn cool, if you ask me.
This is only the second SOG (Setlist On the Green) and it’s the last of the season. Due to the impending cold weather (yes, it does get semi-cold here in Dallas in the dead of winter) they will be on hiatus until March. I’m looking forward to it starting up again… though if they go on Thursdays, they will compete with the Patio Sessions nearby…. so little time, so many choices.
At any rate, the lineup this week:
This time, I did drag my camera along.
Arianne Gray
Tyler Lowe
Nicholas Altobelli
Claire Fowler
Carl Sullivan and the Rising Suns
New Orleans Cemetery – Saint Louis #1
On our last trip to the Big Easy, we signed up for a New Orleans Cemetery tour from Tulane University.
The Cemeteries of New Orleans are famous – when you visit you notice them right away on your drive away from the airport. Because of the high water table, burial in the city is above ground in crypts. If you tried to stick a coffin underground it would come bobbing up in the first hurricane and go hurtling down the street.
The dense clusters of stone crypts packed into rows give the cemeteries of New Orleans the nickname, “cities of the dead.”
All the parents piled in to the bus on the Tulane campus for the trip to St. Louis Cemetery #1. The woman sitting next to us spent her time making desperate phone calls. She was from Rockaway in New York and her house had been destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. She had decided to go ahead and make the planned trip to visit her daughter at school so she could use the Internet to register for assistance while her husband remained behind trying to salvage what he could. There was a lot of irony in a parent from New York coming to see her daughter in New Orleans as a refugee from a devastating hurricane.
The tour was very interesting – mostly because of our tour guide. A spry elderly New Orleans native of French extraction – thick with that amazing melodious Cajun accent – she spoke a lot of the unique way of looking at life (and death) necessary for survival in a place as inhospitable to polite civilization as New Orleans. She spoke of the constant friction between the attitude of the New Orleans natives and the Americans… spoken as if they were aliens from another planet.
She said she didn’t understand the Americans, even though she was glad she was married to one, because, “Darling, somebody has to do the work.” She said, not long after she was married, her husband had to go in to the office on a Saturday,
“Honey, where’re you goin’,” she asked.
“I’m going to work.”
“What do you mean? It’s Saturday. Nobody works on a Saturday!”
The concept was completely incomprehensible to her.
Then she went on to describe the details of a New Orleans internment. She said, “Ah never though this was unusual. I thought everybody did it like this. When I went to another city I was stunned. Ah said ‘You did a hole? And drop a body down there? And cover it up?’ Ah couldn’t believe it.”
You see, I always knew about the above ground crypts in New Orleans, but I never understood the process. You see, these are family crypts – or in some cases, organizational crypts. They are built in two parts, an upper chamber and a lower one. A small opening at the back of the crypt connects the two.
When you die, there is no embalming… and no fancy metal or lined casket – just a pine box. They open the crypt and you go in the top chamber. There you wait, for at least a year and a day, until the next person expires. Then they open up the tomb, secure in the knowledge that the tropical heat and humidity have done their work, and there isn’t much left of you. Any surviving pieces of casket are removed and everything else is pushed back through the opening where it falls into the lower chamber, leaving room for the next occupant.
This is repeated as long as necessary. Some of the tombs had dozens of names on them, spanning well over a century.
Some of the details are fascinating. The walls of the cemetery are lined with small “wall tombs.” These are for when, as our guide said, “Somebody dies too soon, before the year and a day. They get stuck in the wall tomb until they can get moved back into the family crypt.”
Our tour guide in front of a typical New Orleans burial crypt.
A street in the City of the Dead. Family crypts on the left, wall crypts on the right.
Older crypts, getting run down.
Wall crypts. Space is at a premium. Look at the tiny spaces at ground level.
Layton family crypt. Over a century of family members.
Our guide said she was waiting for tomb space to open up and had saved money to buy in. “Space is limited, and in death like in life, it’s location, location location. I don’t want to go to my rest outside the city, I want a tomb in New Orleans.”
When a family dies out, nobody is left to take care of their crypt and it can collapse. Our guide said she had her eye on this spot in case it came up for sale.
25 literary girls who’ll break your heart
30 movie girls who’ll break your heart
5 landmarks you probably didn’t know about in Downtown Dallas
Though I was familiar with four of these (I noticed the hidden Houston street ramp during Ciclovia Dallas) I have never been to Lubben Plaza. I’m going to have to give it a shot – that one sculpture, The Harrow, looks really cool.
When They’re Grown, the Real Pain Begins
All of that changes when they are grown. They fall in love, break their hearts, apply for jobs, leave or lose the jobs, choose new homes, can’t pay the rent for those new homes and question their choice of profession. They forge their way, all just outside of your helping reach. Then, when bad things happen, they need you like crazy, but you discover that the kind of help you’ve spent 25 years learning how to give is no longer helpful.
¡Que rico un café Flor de Caña!
Es café macerado en ron, posee todas las propiedades organolépticas del ron, pero tiene grado de alcohol
Coffee flavored with Flor de Caña – this is truly the best of all possible worlds.
America Leads World in Energy Revolution
The U.S. is already reaping the benefits of new energy extraction techniques, but other gas-rich nations are having trouble achieving similar results. The basic obstacles are the same everywhere: environmental worries, government hangups, and a lack of technical expertise and infrastructure related to fuel extraction.
The 40 Greatest Villains Of Literature
As always, “Blood Meridian” is up there. Look at it this way, “Blood Meridian” is written by the same guy that wrote “No Country for Old Men.” And the people that made the list included Judge Holden and they left Anton Chigurh off. I’ve read both books… I can see why.
Judge Holden (Blood Meridian)
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Year: 1985
Judge Holden is, apparently, a real, historical figure, though evidence is minimal. After reading Blood Meridian, we’d suggest that we hope he was entirely made-up, seeing as Holden is the devil incarnate, leading a pack of criminals into robbery, rape and murder, throwing in a touch of paedophilia along the way. A seven-foot monster, with pale white skin, McCarthy paints him as almost supernatural in ability, but also in badness. A true villain of the peace in every way.
The 40 coolest characters in literature
A great list… and the don’t come any cooler than Ignatius J. Reilly.
Ignatius J. Reilly
Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces)
Author: John Kennedy Toole
Quite possibly the funniest character in modern literature, the larger than life Ignatius J. Reilly deplores the modern world and its pop culture leanings. He dresses in a hunting cap, flannel shirt, baggy pants and scarf, and spends the entire novel criticising everyone and everything around him. He would no doubt despise the thought of being considered cool. Such disregard to these conventions makes him, inadvertently, very cool.
$10k college degrees are on to something
Higher education costs are inflated by bloated bureaucracies and bills paid with other people’s money. Universities employ professors too busy with research to spend much time teaching. They sink vast sums into money-losing intercollegiate sports. And they spend lavishly on marketing efforts to build prestige and buck up their college rankings.
Then, after deciding what they need to spend, they price accordingly. Their tuition is a function of this bloat and government’s willingness to subsidize them.
God buries His workmen but carries on His work.
—-Charles Wesley
“Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.”
—- Charles F. Lummis
“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, “planned” communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.”
—-Joyce Carol Oates
“For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.”
—-Eugene Ionesco
“Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God’s best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of one’s self, and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another.”
—-Thomas Hughes
“Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his MAKING friends–whether he may be equally capable of RETAINING them, is less certain.”
—-Jane Austen
“There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.”
Spoken by Ratty to Mole in Wind in the Willows a children’s book by Kenneth Grahame
Sailboats on White Rock Lake, Dallas, TX
(Click for a larger and more detailed version on Flickr)
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…”
– Antoine de Saint Exupery
Bill Chance 