Rebuilding the American Imagination in New Orleans
Filed under: Uncategorized — annebabson @ 2:28 pm
Tags: American cinema, American Creativity, American culture, American film, American identity, American Imagination, Anne Babson, Anne Rice, Black Trenchcoats, Blanche DuBois, Bohemian Culture, Bourbon Street, Bronx, CBGB's, Coney Island, Congo Square, Creative Class, Creativity, David Bowie, Divine Comedy, East Bank, East Village, Elysian Fields Avenue, Gattling Gun, gentrification, global warming, Haight-Ashbury, HBO, Hip-Hop, Hurricane, iPAd, Jazz, John Goodman, Katrina, Light bulb, Magazine Street, Moon Landing, New Orleans, New York, poetry, punk rock, Restoration, Rumi, San Francicso, Sandy, Shotgun flats, southern culture, Southern Literature, southern living, Southern Writing, streetcar, Sundance, Tabasco, Tennessee Williams, The American Experience, Treme, Truman Capote, University of Mississippi, West Bank, West Berlin, Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire
It's the end of the school term at the University of Mississippi, and on his way out of town, I ran into one of my former students, a young man determined to become a movie star one day. I asked him now that he had graduated whether he intended to take off for New York or Los Angeles to kick-start his career.
It's not just a shotgun house on the East Bank that's getting restored here; it's the life of the mind.
"No," He told me, "New York and LA are not where it's all happening in film. If you want to break into movies, the place to do it right now is New Orleans."
He expects to run into me at spoken word readings, maybe in the Treme, maybe at independent bookstores on the East Bank, maybe on Magazine Street while he's filming something for HBO or a small-company film headed for Sundance.
New Orleans has always been a town of piratical thinkers, of renegades, moral reprobates, and drama queens. Writers like Truman Capote and Anne Rice have parked themselves in town to invent themselves and expand the American imagination in words. In music, the greatest genius of the art form for at least a hundred years, Louis Armstrong, might not have single-handedly invented jazz out of whole cloth, but he took the antecedent rhythms out of Congo Square that came to this continent in shackles but rattled chains into a liberatory syncopation and paired them with European instruments and am American sense of whimsy and delight to make arguably the best thing America has ever invented. Yes, the light bulb was an astonishment. True, the Gattling gun presaged our imperialism, yes, I am very, very fond of the iPad and the moon landing, but I can't dance to either of them without somebody cranking up the volume and giving me a beat and a yowling horn to curl my spine. That came out of New Orleans, that and some awfully good food that mixes African and French sensibilities, a kind of architecture, with a vernacular as unashamed as a Bourbon Street sex worker leaning over a wrought-iron balcony in something lacy, a cultural patois of sin and penitence gumbo-mixed together into a bitter and intoxicating stew. All that predates the current surge in American culture.
After Katrina cleared away the poorest people of the town, already decaying under the weight of perpetual corruption prior to global warming events, many questioned if the City of New Orleans would become a sort of a tourist park version of its former self, as New York's bohemian and dangerous identity got gentrified into the Atlantic Ocean and washed up the Hudson, a trend that predated Hurricane Sandy but certainly culminated in that storm's washing away of much of Coney Island and the Lower East Side. Some even wondered, as the first episode of the cable drama Treme does, whether New Orleans, poised as it is on land below sea level, was worth saving at all. John Goodman's character in Treme declared that New Orleans was a city that had captured the world's imagination and threw the fictitious British journalist and his camera into the Mississippi River like so much British tea in Boston on the eve of another American revolution of ideas.
Instead of becoming a place that operates like a Disney version of its former self, a beacon to apple-cheeked, conservative Midwesterners who want the same kind of fun they get in Branson, Missouri, only maybe a little bit more Tabasco-flavored, New Orleans retained its personality. As it turns out, creative thinkers of all the art forms recently gentrified out of neighborhoods in California and New York began to seek welcoming ports, and no town could offer so many rent-to-own residences than a town half washed-away by a category-five deluge.
Indeed, there is something about wreckage and urban decay that permits the expansion of avant-garde thought. After the wall was built, West Berlin became a place for David Bowie to reinvent his next musical self, for Wim Wenders to reimagine the divine comedy in black trench coat and male ponytail. After the Bronx burnt, hip-hop started in neighborhoods too dangerous to walk in broad daylight in New York and punk rock found, if not its birthplace, then its homecoming court in the East Village. Now, in New Orleans, where writers have typed and horn-players have blown, there is a new explosion, a green growth fertilized by the ashes of the past, sprouting branches because the space to grow exists.
And no — we are not about to stop experimenting because the rent for our cultural laboratories went up in New York and San Francisco so very high that not even the superstars of our art forms could afford them. The best crops grow in muck. Now that the black mold has been Hazmatted away, we find gutted shot guns and reclaimed gothic ornaments to embellish our new ideas. That beat from Congo Square is still tom-tomming, still tom-tom, tom-tom, blood and tom-tom like a patient on whom the paddles worked. We have sinus rhythm. The avant garde has left Soho to the bankers. Haight-Ashbury belongs to Google executives now. Want to be a star? Have something to say? The American cultural experiment is beginning a new series of tests on streets named for dead French royalists. It's like that invitation the Sufi mystical poet Rumi extended to all of us about a thousand years ago:
Out beyond right-doing and wrong-doing
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
That's where the artists go to imagine new things, the mystics seek the face of God beyond human agency and Pharisee-like self-righteousness. That field, this year and for at least a few more, is possibly near Elysian Fields Avenue . Like Tennessee Williams told us, you take the streetcar over there. After that, don't put a paper lantern on the lamps like Williams' Blanche DuBois did to hide the ugly truth. The creative possibilities are often in the ugliness. Take the ashes and make your beauty. Meet Rumi there. Meet America there. Meet New Orleans, the city of the world's imagination, there.
The South Comes North, Conquers and Desegregates: Anne Babson and Caroline Randall Williams read tonight in Pittsburgh
Tags: African-American Experience, African-American poetry, American culture, American Poetry, Anne Babson, Caroline Randall-Williams, Classical Literature, Confederacy, Derrida, East End Book Exchange, Greek Myths, Iambic Drawl, literary theory, Lucy Negro Redux, Pittsburgh, poetry, Post-Post Modernism, racism, Richard Howard, Robert E. Lee, Shakespeare, Southern Writing, The American Experience, the New South, the white trash pantheon, white privilege, whiteness
Oh, readers of this blog,whom I adore — please come revel with me tonight. I am not inviting you to meet me in a wheat field under the full moon with a blanket. I am not inviting you to look for me hiding in a cave on the edge of Hannibal, Missouri, so we can sneak in the church balcony and watch our own funeral. I am not inviting you to slip out of the governor's ball so we can elope in my mother's buggy. No, none of these. I am asking you to escape with me North.
Come see me tonight at 7 pm at East End Book Exchange in Pittsburgh
I am reading tonight (October 24) in Pittsburgh at East End Book Exchange, 4754 Liberty Avenue, in the Little Italy section of town known as Bloomfield, at 7 pm. The reading is called "Iambic Drawl." With me will be the brilliant and lovely Caroline Randall Williams. Caroline Randall Williams is a poet from Tennessee who has done something really radical — she has written a book of poetry, Lucy Negro Redux, in which she reclaims (and repurposes) Shakespeare for African-American Southern women, who have often had complicated and rather painful relationships with older white men. She talks about it, really talks about it in her very clever book, a book so clever it hurts my feelings that I have never thought of anything so clever to write myself.
I will read selections and delicatessen cuts from my collection The White Trash Pantheon, which resets the ancient Greek myths in the Deep South. In it, as many of you know, I write about white privilege, although I do so with a lot of humor, as this allows white folks like me to examine our pretensions and reject them. I also write about idolatry, as myths about white people in the South have engendered false gods that some have actually revered.
Together, Miz Caroline and I are busting a few myths, including, but not limited to:
White people have a unified and illustrious heritage.
Black people do not.
White people have some kind of a corner on the market for heroism.
Black people are merely victims in society, not participants, not contributors.
White women are the only women who are really beautiful and elegant.
Black women are the only women who are really drudges.
Old books have nothing fresh to say to new people.
New people have nothing fresh to say to old books.
We are going to tear down these walls and others and dance around linguistically.You should come out and hear us!
In high-falluting literary and scholarly circles, there is an abiding tendency to see African-American writers as operating in some sort of a cloister wholly separate in their influences and their production of poetry, and if white folks should read that poetry, it is because we are committed to being somehow politically correct. Paris Review poetry editor Richard Howard once remarked that black poets would only be great writers when they stopped writing about race all the time. What Mr. Howard failed to realize was that he was writing about his own race all the time, too, the presumptuous
privilege of belonging to a dominant racial group that has believed that its culture was THE culture and that African-American culture was merely multiculture. The work of Caroline Randall-Williams belies this notion, as I hope does my own. Mr. Howard's idea is wrong, and it ought to be obvious to all — African-American culture is at the center of all cultural achievements in America, not a parenthetical influence at all. We should not read African-American poets' work because we are being democratic. We should read African-American poets' work because much of it is good, some of it great.
This woman is on her way to greatness!
I am reading, then, with Caroline Randall-Williams because I actually get to — she is a good poet on her way very possibly to being a great poet. If you meet her tonight, which I hope you will, you will almost instantly realize she is ten times smarter than the rest of us. She is also delightful and gorgeous. Her career is a freight train barreling down the track, and we can get out of the way or get on board, because she is part of the next big thing, as I hope to be right with her. She likes what I do to old books in my writing, because she likes to mess with old books, too. Call it quilting or decoupage if you like, but we have been calling it post-post modernism. We deride the Derridian idea that text has no inherent meaning. We just think that we get to couple authorial intentions of old to our own; we write back. We also write around. We write beneath and above. We believe in capital-T-truths, but you'll have to ask us nicely if you want to hear which ones.
So come out to East End Book Exchange tonight at 7 pm. We are going to be post-post. We are going to be the Confederacy's worst nightmare. The South rises again tonight and wins Pennsylvania, only it's not as General Lee imagined it, not at all.