“In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all.”
― Jose Saramago
Sculptures are rare. It’s not as if you walk down pavements dodging sculptures, do you? Sculpture is a rare use of materials. We’re in the industrial north here, where billions of tons of material are being used to make cars, pottery, books, textiles, chemicals – but how many kilos of sculpture are made today? The non-utilitarian use of material is important.
—–Tony Cragg
I have always been a fan of the sculptor Tony Cragg.
Especially his work, Stevenson, in the Dallas Museum of Art.
… Oh, and the sculpture I discovered along the street in Dallas.
… Or the fantastic exhibition at the DMA when I was in need of uplift.
I was very happy to find his work, Runner, a large work in polished stainless steel, along the walkway in the new expansion of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden in New Orleans.
It was like stumbling across an old friend.
“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor
For the last month or so my Wild Detectives Difficult Reads Book Club (DRBC) has been digging through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It was originally scheduled for the beginning of the year, with a weekly meeting at the book store – but was cancelled due to the quarantine. Finally, we started back up with Zoom meetings every Wednesday evening, instead of meeting in person. It actually works pretty well.
I made sure I could call into the Zoom meeting from my son’s apartment when I was on my New Orleans trip last week. He is working remotely and is something of a gamer – he had dedicated panel lights and an expensive headset with fancy microphone and the meeting worked really well from his place – I need to up my Zoom game from home now. In particular, everyone said my voice was very clear.
“You sound like a DJ, and you look like one too,” one woman said.
“Look like a DJ?” I replied, “Everyone has always said I have a face for radio.”
But before the meeting I had to get my weekly chunk of reading done (we are about a third of the way through). We had made it up to The Grand Inquisitor chapter (which sort of stands on its own) – the heart of the book and arguably is one of the most famous and influential works of literature ever written. It is also a dense and difficult read.
It was a beautiful day. I took my Kindle, walked down through the French Quarter and picked out a bench along the Mississippi to sit down and work my way through the (e-ink) pages.
The French Quarter is known for a lot of things – but it isn’t really known for a place to hang out and read Russian Literature (though a lot of literature has been written there). For me, however, it was perfect.
And I don’t care what you think… the bars are closed for Covid anyway.
“Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast.”
― Hunter Murphy, Imogene in New Orleans
My son lives in a high-rise in downtown New Orleans. He works two blocks away. He doesn’t need a car and has gone without one for several years now.
One reason I drove there was he needed to send a painting back to Dallas, one that barely fit in the back of my Toyota Matrix… I was hoping there would be room back there alongside my Xootr Swift folding bike (there was – no problem).
Lee had to exchange an expensive video game controller at Best Buy and the closest store to where he lived was in Gretna, across the Mississippi on the West Bank. That’s a fifty dollar Uber round-trip so we decided to take my car over there. We could then eat lunch in Gretna after a long run (for him) and bike ride (for me).
I knew there was a nice trail along the top of the Levee from Gretna on past Algiers point. I had ridden the trail two years earlier, during a Writer’s Marathon. That day I had ridden across the river on the Ferry with a group of poets and we wrote poetry in a succession of restaurants and coffee spots in Algiers.
On the way back, I spotted a blue rental bike at the Algiers Point Ferry station – rented it – and rode back and forth along the levee. The only problem was that was July and it was unbelievably hot. I wrote that it was like cycling through a blast furnace.
This was November, though, and the weather was perfect. It was a blast. I cycled down to Algiers point and stopped to take a photo of my folding bike with the river and New Orleans in the background (see top of the entry).
While I was stopped, Lee ran by. We agreed that he would run a bit more then turn around and I’d ride a couple miles to the end of the train and also turn around. That would put us back at the car at about the same time.
The problem was that when I reached what I thought was the end of the trail I discovered a strip of fresh asphalt stretching into the distance. This was brand new trail – and judging by the oil and marking flags it had been laid down less that a week ago.
And that is irresistible to me. Although I knew I should turn around or I would leave Lee waiting at the car (I had the keys) I kept going. And going. And going. I didn’t get to the end before I felt guilty and turned around – but I was close… maybe four more miles. I justified myself by saying, “I know he’s waiting – but over the last almost three decades I have had to wait on him a minute or two.” I ended up riding about fifteen miles – which is a good distance on the inefficient folding bike.
He was hungry and frustrated when I got there – but the restaurant had half-price burgers and cold beer and soon everything was right with the world.
“The Earth is God’s pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
I left my son’s apartment on Poydras Street, downtown New Orleans, and walked to Canal Street on Rampart Street (don’t ask me what direction – the compass is all screwed up in New Orleans – for example the West Bank is actually East of downtown – although it is connected to the Western Half of the United States) I walked up on to the ruins of the Hard Rock Hotel collapse.
It happened over a year ago – a disaster that took the lives of three construction workers – two bodies remained in the wreckage for ten months. It is a giant eyesore right in the heart of the city – a terrible reminder of the fragility of life. I didn’t realize when I read about it that the actual collapse of the steel superstructure was so high up in the air – sitting on top of eight stories or so of concrete floors.
The Google Maps Street View from Canal still shows it pre-collapse.
I walked past on my way to the French Quarter. The locals ignored the now-all-too-familiar sight while tourists gestured and offered up theories and speculation.
“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
― Tennessee Williams
After a lot of driving through Texas and Louisiana I’m home again. Working on some writing and some photography.
New Orleans was odd – because of the pandemic – down in the quarter the ratio of crazy street people to visitors was a lot higher than usual. A lot of places are closed. A lot of places that I have loved over the years are no more.
But it is still New Orleans.
A line of paddlewheelers and other tourist transport ships are lined up, empty, unused, along the Mississippi riverfront. It’s sad to see.
I hope they are all moving and crowded again, soon.
“Thoreau the “Patron Saint of Swamps” because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, “my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings
Alligator, Robert Tabak
I have been feeling in a deep hopeless rut lately, and I’m sure a lot of you have too. After writing another Sunday Snippet I decided to set an ambitious goal for myself. I’ll write a short piece of fiction every day and put it up here. Obviously, quality will vary – you get what you get. Length too – I’ll have to write something short on busy days. They will be raw first drafts and full of errors.
I’m not sure how long I can keep it up… I do write quickly, but coming up with an idea every day will be a difficult challenge. So far so good. Maybe a hundred in a row might be a good, achievable, and tough goal.
Here’s another one for today (#43). What do you think? Any comments, criticism, insults, ideas, prompts, abuse … anything is welcome. Feel free to comment or contact me.
Thanks for reading.
Over the last few summers I have gone to New Orleans for a Writing Marathon. Even though last year’s was a disaster – I always look forward to it a lot. Let’s see – I learned about the New Orleans Writing Marathon on November 11, 2012 when Candy ran into one of the participants at breakfast at St. Vincent’s Guest House.
Obviously, it was not going to be possible to pull this off live this year. So they did a virtual writing event instead. It was fun, not as fun as the real thing, but cool nonetheless. We did three writing sessions – one10 minutes, and two 20 or so. That gives me three entries. I did edit them a bit and change the point of view. It is what it is.
My boss on the construction project was from Boston and was completely freaked out by the whole thing of working in the Louisiana swamp. He kept me around because I had worked here before and had experience my whole life in tropical, dangerous, insane places. I don’t know how many times I had to reassure him that it was going to be OK – that we weren’t all going to die, killed by water that rose from the ground, or bees, or snakes or any of the other horrible things that lived in the swamp. I don’t know if he was crazy or I was… probably both of us.
Luckily, our work crew was great. They were local Cajuns – I think that all twenty of them were related to each other in one way or another. They were used to working in heat and in dangerous conditions and would follow instructions and work really really hard right up until five PM. At the minute the day ended they would drop what they were doing and the coolers of beer would pop out of their trunks.
One day, the work crew super, an old, sturdy Cajun with a name that had way too many vowels in it asked the guy from Boston, “Hey, you wanna go see my ‘gator?” Of course we did.
We piled into his rusty pickup and drove for an hour through the densest jungle on oil lease dirt roads past thick trees, tangling vines, and stretches of open water. Finally we stopped at a little bridge where a huge pipeline emerged from the much and crossed on a little bridge.
The super began giving his “Gator Call” – an inhuman whooping and throwing chunks of white bread into the water.
“This is nuts!” I said to myself. When I looked up the pair were standing on top of the pipeline. The guy from Boston’s eyes were so big they were touching. He was pointing at the water at something but couldn’t talk.
“What the hell are you guys doing up there? How did you climb up there so fast?” I said as I followed his finger into the water.
Suddenly a huge tree I had been staring at opened its mouth and gobbled up a soggy hunk of bread. It wasn’t a tree, it was an alligator. In the next split second I discovered I was standing on the pipe next to the other two.
It looked like a dinosaur. I had seen small alligators in zoos – but this was different.
I learned something that day. I didn’t know that alligators ate bread.
“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
French Quarter
New Orleans, Louisiana
Halloween
I have been feeling in a deep hopeless rut lately, and I’m sure a lot of you have too. After writing another Sunday Snippet I decided to set an ambitious goal for myself. I’ll write a short piece of fiction every day and put it up here. Obviously, quality will vary – you get what you get. Length too – I’ll have to write something short on busy days. They will be raw first drafts and full of errors.
I’m not sure how long I can keep it up… I do write quickly, but coming up with an idea every day will be a difficult challenge. So far so good. Maybe a hundred in a row might be a good, achievable, and tough goal.
Here’s another one for today (#42). What do you think? Any comments, criticism, insults, ideas, prompts, abuse … anything is welcome. Feel free to comment or contact me.
Thanks for reading.
Over the last few summers I have gone to New Orleans for a Writing Marathon. Even though last year’s was a disaster – I always look forward to it a lot. Let’s see – I learned about the New Orleans Writing Marathon on November 11, 2012 when Candy ran into one of the participants at breakfast at St. Vincent’s Guest House.
Obviously, it was not going to be possible to pull this off live this year. So they did a virtual writing event instead. It was fun, not as fun as the real thing, but cool nonetheless. We did three writing sessions – one10 minutes, and two 20 or so. That gives me three entries. I did edit them a bit and change the point of view. It is what it is.
Sam couldn’t have imagined the French Quarter empty. Most of the Bourbon street bars never close – they are open all night, every night – or were. Because they never planned on closing they don’t even have doors. They had to nail plywood over the openings.
Molly’s on Decatur and a few other places barely closed during Katrina. And now they are empty. The streets are deserted. The pavement untrodden and the air unvibrated with music or shouting.
Sam found it to be beautiful in one sense. He lives in a high rise downtown and gets up before dawn to beat the awful summer humidity for his morning run. Sam now runs in the quarter, up Decatur and down Chartres, up Bourbon and down Royal. At dawn he has the beauty and the history all to himself.
But it isn’t right. It isn’t the same. Sam has seen some of the streets at odd times – times odder than He’d like to admit – times when there weren’t very many people out (and the people that were out you don’t want to meet). But nothing like this.
The ghosts can’t come out in times like this. A disease that kills off ghosts. Because how can you have ghosts without people to haunt? How can you have a specter without crowds to gasp.
It is a gap in time. A space without history. All spaces have ends, though. He can’t imagine the end – but it will come. The crowds, the drunks the music will reappear.
And so will the ghosts.
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
The Window at Molly’s, the street (Decatur) unusually quiet, with notebook, vintage Esterbrook pen, and Molly’s frozen Irish Coffee
I have been feeling in a deep hopeless rut lately, and I’m sure a lot of you have too. After writing another Sunday Snippet I decided to set an ambitious goal for myself. I’ll write a short piece of fiction every day and put it up here. Obviously, quality will vary – you get what you get. Length too – I’ll have to write something short on busy days. They will be raw first drafts and full of errors.
I’m not sure how long I can keep it up… I do write quickly, but coming up with an idea every day will be a difficult challenge. So far so good. Maybe a hundred in a row might be a good, achievable, and tough goal.
Here’s another one for today (#41). What do you think? Any comments, criticism, insults, ideas, prompts, abuse … anything is welcome. Feel free to comment or contact me.
Thanks for reading.
Over the last few summers I have gone to New Orleans for a Writing Marathon. Even though last year’s was a disaster – I always look forward to it a lot. Let’s see – I learned about the New Orleans Writing Marathon on November 11, 2012 when Candy ran into one of the participants at breakfast at St. Vincent’s Guest House.
Obviously, it was not going to be possible to pull this off live this year. So they did a virtual writing event instead. It was fun, not as fun as the real thing, but cool nonetheless. We did three writing sessions – one10 minutes, and two 20 or so. That gives me three entries. I did edit them a bit and change the point of view. It is what it is.
Everyone has their addiction. There are dope addicts with their needles and pipes. Exercise addicts – skinny and sweat. Alcoholics, foodies and bulimics.
You don’t get to decide if you are an addict or not – if you think you are, you are, if you don’t think you’re an addict – well, addicts don’t always know they are addicts. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
When Sam was young he said that since everyone is an addict it was important to pick a good addiction. Now, older, he’s not even sure that you can choose your addiction. Yeah, maybe you can steer your course a little one way or another – but for the most part you don’t choose your addiction, your addiction chooses you.
Sam is a writing addict. There are all the hallmarks. There two stacks of Moleskines – one stack are full books, the others waiting. There are tins full of fountain pens. There are three laptops and a crazy portable keyboard. There are two computers, one set up in such a way that it can only be used as a word processor.
He can’t go to sleep at night unless he has written at least an hour. He can’t, really. He’s tried. When Sam is hit by writer’s block it’s like a junkie with no heroin in town. Horrible. Withdrawls.
Sometime the withdrawal is so painful Sam is forced to pull a Jack Torrance – His sentence of choice is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog…. Written over and over again. It has all the letters at least. But it isn’t satisfying, it is like a vampire with only raw hamburger.
So Sam writes. Does He write well? Usually not. But there is that rush when He falls into the writing and the world disappears. The rush. Another addict’s word.
That’s Sam’s addiction. Word Counts – hours spent scribbling.
But now Sam needs to change his addiction. He needs to get addicted to editing. Because writing isn’t really writing. Writing is typing. Editing is writing. But in Editing there is no rush – except maybe when you are finished – and Sam is never finished.
That’s what an addiction is all about. Never finished.
Bill Chance 