I've just wasted the last hour notifying various file-sharing sites to remove illegally posted copies of my books. I'm not even going to say what I think about so-called fans who use these slimeball sites to steal work from writers, except this. I hate to give these sites any publicity at all, but I will say that other writers should check scribd.com and 4shared.com for stolen work.

A few days ago I tweeted the statement, "I think art about New Orleans, especially post-K, should be made by New Orleanians. #thereisaidit" I define New Orleanians as people living in the greater New Orleans area long-term as well as devoted exiles. I do NOT include jet-setters who own New Orleans homes that stand empty 90% of the time or those who left the city post-K and don't want to return.

But my Twitter statement still makes me antsy, because in general, I don't believe in using the word "should" around art at all. I've always been deeply suspicious of any statement beginning "Artists (writers, whatever) should..." that doesn't end "...do the best work they're capable of, full stop."

As well, I had made a hero's exception for Josh Neufeld, author of A.D.: After the Deluge, and a friend e-mailed to ask why. My friend wrote, "I bought that damned book because I thought he was a New Orleanian. Boy was I pissed when I got it and found out he was a New Yorker. I think it's a good book but if I had known he was a New Yorker living in New York I never would have bought it, to be quite honest. If he's giving profits from the book to the people who need it most, I'll feel ok about it, but I feel kind of like a duped schmuck as it is!"

I replied, "Neufeld = honorary New Orleanian because he did major, major rescue work down here after the levees failed, Like, lifesaving work. He has also put together a great A.D. website with tons of Katrina info & resources; http://www.smithmag.net/afterthedeluge/ . I couldn't find any indication that he had donated proceeds to us, but I'm kinda OK with that. I know how much it costs to research & make a book, and graphic novels sell even worse than regular books. Most likely there are no 'proceeds.' He also financed his own book tour, & I noticed that many of his signing events were also benefits for Common Ground & other local charities, so that's good."

But I realized that if I believe Josh Neufeld could get it right, there must be other non-New Orleanians out there who can get it right too. And for me, at least these days, that's what is most important in art about New Orleans: getting it right. Even before the storm, so much of it didn't. And if you haven't lived or spent major chunks of time here since the levees failed, you do not know what it was like those first couple of years. You can't research it. You can't imagine it from the footage you saw on TV. You might think you can, your heart might break for us and you might try to tell people why we still matter and if so I thank you, but you don't know the stenches, the tears, the daily assaults on the mind and spirit. You can never know these things if you weren't here. And you should be glad.

So I'm trying to at least modify my "should." It's hard to come up with another pithy line, though. Art about New Orleans, especially post-K, is less likely to suck and be offensive if made by New Orleanians? Art about New Orleans, especially post-K, has virtually no chance of getting it right if not made by New Orleanians? I don't know. Artists will, and should, make art about the things that grab them by the throat and won't let go. So if what happened to us after the federal levees failed does that to you, then by all means, go with it. At least your heart will be in the right place, and that will show even if you don't know the Ninth Ward from the Lower Ninth Ward. But if you decide -- as many already seem to have done -- that "Hey! Post-Katrina New Orleans would be a really cool, edgy place to set this!", then may God have mercy on your soul, because New Orleans will not.

I've spent the last few days (daze) chowing down on a big-ass plate of invasion of privacy sauced with chronic depression and garnished with screaming panic attacks. There were demands by resident crackheads/junkies/general parasites for money and food. When said demands were refused, there were intrusions onto my property and peepings through my windows. There were threats (by me) to shoot people if said intrusions and peepings were repeated. There was lack of backup by my partner. There were, perhaps most gallingly, accusations that I was "a good Christian lady." I think things have calmed down now, and if any perforated corpses happen to be found near my house, well, that's just life in the goddamn hood.

I'm reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, whose books I always find interesting. In Chapter 3 he discusses unconscious biases as measured by Implicit Association Tests (IATs). You can take a bunch of different IATs at http://www.implicit.harvard.edu , but the one Gladwell describes in most detail is the Race IAT:

I've taken the Race IAT on many occasions, and the result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy. At the beginning of the test, you are asked what your attitudes toward blacks and whites are. I answered, as I am sure most of you would, that I think of the races as equal. Then comes the test.

Basically, you have to sort black and white faces and positive/negative words into two categories, then sort them again paired with "good" or "bad" concepts. For instance, you have to sort words like hurt, evil, and glorious into the categories "European American or Good" or "African American or Bad," then reverse the pairings: "African American or Good" and "European American or Bad." Supposedly most test takers of either race take significantly longer to sort the second set of pairings because they are biased to associate African American and bad, even if they don't consciously feel that way. Malcolm Gladwell, who's half black, was mortified to learn that he had "a moderate automatic preference for whites." He comments:

[O]f the fifty thousand African Americans who have taken the Race IAT so far, about half of them, like me, have stronger associations with whites than with blacks. How could we not? We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good.

Well, I wondered. As far as I'm concerned, I don't live in North America. I live in a small northern outpost of the Caribbean that is, at most, a neglected protectorate of the United States. I am a white person living in a majority-black neighborhood and city. I find myself in way fewer all-white or mostly white environments here in New Orleans than in any other place I've ever lived or visited, except Jamaica and maybe London. Aside from Chris, most of the people I see and speak to on a daily basis are black. If I see white people in my neighborhood, it means potential disruption: volunteers (good/neutral) or lost tourists (neutral/bad). I'm pretty selective about the cultural messages I get: I watch no TV except sporting events (which have a large black demographic); I read the Times-Picayune (which has a significant black readership); many of our local political and cultural readers are black. I didn't feel I'd been inoculated with the white=good virus. And according to the Race IAT, I haven't: "Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American compared to European American." Which is exactly what I predicted before I took the test. Gladwell says you can't fool the test or answer to make yourself look better. I don't know about that. I do agree with the statement he makes a few pages later:

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means we can change our first impressions ... by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions. If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way -- who would like to have a set of associations with blacks as positive as those that you have with whites -- it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.

Which is true, obviously, of any minority you want to feel more comfortable with: people of other races, queer people, trans people. And which also makes me wonder: what would the Race IAT scores of black New Orleanians look like? How much would they vary by neighborhood, income and education level? Does white privilege allow me to romanticize somewhat, influencing my score? Chris and I can live in Central City more safely than many of our black neighbors: we're perceived as having money and influence because we're white, and to some degree, we do. The criminal element perceives us as too much trouble to mess with, and there's truth to that too. Black-on-black crime is by far the commonest type of violent crime in New Orleans. Other white people sometimes wonder how we "dare" to live here, but the truth is that our neighbors are probably in far more danger from each other than we are from any of them.

Bravo to Mondo Bizarro for taking a fresh look at Central City. It's impossible to ignore the poverty and crime here, but it's also important to remember that this neighborhood has contributed a great deal to New Orleans culture. Several of the placards are in my immediate neighborhood, and I plan on going out to find them, dial the numbers, and hear the stories soon.

I tried to post an entry from my iPhone over the weekend, but it got hung up and, I see, never posted. May try to recreate it later. For now, something else.

I don't know of anything that captures how long some New Orleanians have waited to be back in their homes, and how grateful they are for that return, than this: "'And listen!' said [Earnest] Hammond as he reached into his bathroom and flushed the toilet, successfully." (I wish you could see the picture of Mr. Hammond embracing the director of Unity. He is black, bald, bushy-bearded like a Biblical prophet, 71 years old but as thin and straight as a sapling.)

The sound of a working toilet flushing in your house can be a miracle after four years. This man was not helped by your tax dollars they tell you they're sending down here, or by any arm of the U.S. government. In fact, FEMA was threatening to prosecute him for continuing to live in the trailer near his moldy, flood-ravaged house in the Seventh Ward (note: we're glad that the Lower Ninth Ward is imprinted on the public consciousness now, very glad, but it's far from the only New Orleans neighborhood where homes were destroyed on a mind-numbing scale). He initially began rehabbing his own house by collecting cans, then got help from UNITY of greater New Orleans, a Catholic group that helps the homeless, and the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana's Rebuild Program. I can't blame people who have no use for organized religion, but as I've said before, the church volunteers were down here feeding people while the Red Cross and FEMA were still trying to find its own ass, and volunteer groups continue to do, in my view, far greater work for the individual than the government will ever do. I hope you'll keep this in mind if ever again you're considering a donation to help south Louisiana.

marquisdd's 8/29 entry makes me remember writing the last paragraphs of Soul Kitchen days before we evacuated: "How the hell did we ever end up with so much good luck? Rickey wondered. What if something bad happened to balance it out? Then he thought of everything that had happened over the last few months, and he began to laugh. If the balancing hadn't already happened, the world was a crueler place than he was willing to believe."

It sure was, Rickey (I miss you like a brother). One of my silly but self-amusing little conceits of the sort writers tend to cultivate, unremarked upon by anyone as far as I know, is that all three of the extant Liquor novels end with the characters laughing together. Even if I manage to write another someday, I don't think I'll be able to end one that way again.

This anniversary of the federal levee failure is hitting me harder than either of the previous two. Last year I was hunkering down for Gustav, and I guess kind of in shock that it was coming. In '07 I was lying sick in bed from the pills I was addicted to. And of course the first anniversary, '06, was beautiful, then horrible: we went out to the dedication of the St. Bernard Parish memorial in Shell Beach that morning, and that afternoon one of our most beloved cats, Nathan, suddenly collapsed from undiagnosed/asymptomatic diabetes and died early the next morning.

The truth is that I will never like this time of year. There was never much to like about it, especially for someone who has always lived in the hot, humid south and hated school since the seventh grade. A confession: Chris and I had to change our anniversary, because neither of us was sure, but we thought it might be August 29. (Like many queer couples I've known, lacking a formal marriage date, we date our anniversary to the first time we had sex.) On the one hand, it was the best thing that ever happened to me; on the other, I was being unfaithful to another man, confused about what to do, and on the brink of the scary decision to move out on my own and fully support myself for the first time. (I say "fully," but during some of those lean times, it sure helped having a boyfriend who was a chef and would feed me.) So it wasn't an entirely happy time then, either. We moved our anniversary to November 5 because it would be a good time to travel and I've always been fond of Guy Fawkes' Day.

Anyway, I have no idea what I'm doing to observe today. I thought we might go to the N.O. Museum of Art events -- there will be a reading of the names of New Orleans' flood dead, and a showing of When The Levees Broke -- or some memorial Mass, but Chris doesn't want to get up early and I can't blame him, as he had to deal with restaurant drama (a cook/waiter quitting) until 4am last night. Maybe I will find some fucking sack and read my signed copy of Josh Neufield's A.D.

There's a new graphic novel out, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufield, who has previously done artwork for Harvey Pekar's great American Splendor. (I usually include Amazon links because it seems to be easiest for all concerned, but in this case I ask you to support an independent New Orleans bookstore, Octavia Books, if possible. Amazon does have A.D. in stock, though.) The three panels reprinted in today's Times-Picayune made me lie down and bawl for twenty minutes, so I don't know if I will be able to read the comic, but I'll certainly buy it. Neufield is signing locally this weekend: Friday, 7pm, The Canary, 329 Julia St.; Saturday, 1-3pm at Maple Street Books, 7523 Maple St.; Saturday, 3:30pm, Octavia Books, 513 Octavia St. (I'm going to try & make this one); Sunday, 1pm, Beth's Books/Sound Cafe, 2700 Chartres St.

Just to clarify: It's not the flying I'm scared of. Commercial flying is an intensely unpleasant experience because the airlines and TSA make it so, but I don't find it scary. It's the idea of being away from New Orleans in a place where I can't hop in my car and drive back in a couple of hours. It's the memories of the big electronic signs on the I-10 that read NEW ORLEANS: CITY CLOSED. It's the fact that outside the city limits, the true heart of darkness begins.

I am turning into such a fucking hippie. I just signed up for the local paid recycling plan, since Nagin's wonderful recovery plan for the city hasn't managed to include the resumption of curbside recycling in nearly four years, and I bought a copy of Mother Earth News today. Well, dammit, I want a decent gardening magazine, and most of the ones on the market seem geared toward either morons (three different stories on How To Water) or yuppies more interested in landscaping than gardening per se (Planning Your Perfect Pergola). Not all that impressed with Mother Earth so far either, though. Any suggestions, txtriffidranch?

Last night I had occasion to send "Enough Rope" to a gay couple from my OLGC rosary group. Rereading the essay, thinking about it and my other, somewhat less serious gender essay "Cocksucker Suit" (published in Greg Herren & Paul Willis' anthology Love, Bourbon Street), I came to a realization that I hadn't ever really admitted to myself before:

I like wearing dresses.

Mentally and emotionally I identify as male and always will, but the older I get, the more fluid my feelings on gender seem to become. It makes me happy that terms like "genderqueer" are used in casual online conversation. It makes me realize that when I put on a nice dress and shoes, fix my sacrum-length hair, and generally get all done up, it doesn't make me feel female; it just makes me feel sharp, the same way I feel when I wear my cockseersucker suit and Stacy Adams boys' alligator loafers. I don't wear much makeup, but I do like me some jewelry. Most of the time my style of dress resembles supergee's timeless description of his own fashion sense -- "garish and slovenly" -- but when I want to look nice, I don't care what gender my clothes are. I did for a while in 2004 and 2005, going through a phase where I wasn't at all comfortable wearing women's clothes or jewelry, but then in '05 there was this certain little event, and after that I found that I had bigger things to worry about than whether wearing a dress made me less manly. And everybody knows that most men in New Orleans, gay or straight, have at least one dress in their closet anyway.

An ice cream truck just went by playing the theme from The Godfather. That is so wrong, yet so New Orleans.

So here's me on teewee today. You have to watch a Ronnie Lamarque commercial first, but he's amusing; Chris and I once saw him dining at the late, lamented Hong Kong Restaurant & Lounge at the lake (a tiki paradise if ever there was one); we were starstruck and wanted to go over to his table and sing his jingle, "Bridgin' the gap! Ooo, ooo, ooo!", but ultimately we did not. And speaking of starstruck, at WWL-TV today I actually got to shake the hand of Jim Henderson, voice of the Saints!!!

Anyway. Yeah. There I am. Thank God Alden Hagardorn from St. Henry's was there to do most of the talking, but I did manage to hit all the points we OLGC people wanted to hit. I look pale and tired, but please bear in mind that ninety minutes before airtime I was huddled under the covers crying and going "No! No!" Given that, and with the help of my good friends Cheron, Harold, Alden, and -Pam, I think it went OK.

I always thought the people who had "THANKS, HOUSTON" bumper stickers* on their cars after the federal levee failure were racist assholes, and I still do, but today I just have to say:

THANKS, CHINA

*as in, "Thanks for taking black people out of New Orleans"

If you belong to prime_liquor or nextroundsonme, you may already know that I was asked to contribute to Livejournal's tenth-anniversary anthology. After some foolish angsting about how I wasn't going to get paid for something I do for free in the first place, I sent in my chosen five entries and promptly caught the superflu. When I was finally well enough to check my e-mail, I found that I'd made the final round but had blown the deadline to send back their contract. Happily, they seem to have forgiven me this, and my entry will either appear in the anthology or receive an honorable mention (I'm not sure when I find out which).

As I expected, the piece chosen was "Not OK." I initially planned to submit this one, then almost didn't, then went through fits of agony after I had, all because I worried that it would appear in the book and stupid people would read it and think it described how things are in New Orleans now. Then I regained a portion of my senses and remembered that you cannot make your plans according to what stupid people might think. (And of course, numbers 8, 10, and 13 are still true, along with some of the others to varying degrees.) At any rate, as the sperm said to the egg, it's an honor to be chosen out of millions. Thanks to everyone who suggested other possible entries, soothed my fevered brow, or helped in any of the many, many other ways that people have helped me during the nearly six (!) years I have kept this journal.

One day I may write of something interesting again, like the Chekov-esque saga of my vegetable seedlings (if we have cucumbers and tomatoes this year, they will have been watered by my sweat and tears) or my four pretty good weeks off Cymbalta followed by my one spectacularly bad week (I'm back on the shit now, and have pretty much accepted that I will need to stay on it for the foreseeable future if I have any hope of acting like something human, but I don't like it, dammit). For now, my major ambitions in life are to finish the book-shaped treasure box I was making before I got sick and to maybe get a few things on eBay before the week is out. Please be patient with me.

I like John Maginnis. He seems a sensible observer of Louisiana politics: smart, level-headed and, if not impartial, at least capable of seeing both sides of an issue. Here he explains, among other things, why Louisiana's nascent status as "Hollywood South" isn't the great economic boon it masquerades as:


Through its Movie Production Tax Credit Program, the state, in effect, covers 25 percent of a film company's in-state expenses and 35 percent of its in-state labor. This has brought producers flocking and has catapulted Louisiana to the third leading movie-making state, behind California and New York.

A state-commissioned economic study released last week counted $462 million in direct spending on movie production in 2007, including 3,000 direct jobs paying on average about $35,000 per year, a $105 million payroll.

On the other side of the ledger, the state paid out $115 million in tax credits to investors, who purchased them at a discount from the movie producers. Minus state taxes paid on film projects, the net cost to Louisiana was $101 million -- or about equal what those 3,000 direct jobs paid.
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It's a new, clean, glamorous industry, but not cheap. A bunch more economic development like it would break the state.


I know people who have gotten some of the jobs created, and if these jobs helped them for a little while, then I am happy that they were helped even if the state as whole wasn't. But I still want the movies out of my city, out of my state, and most especially out of my pocketbook.

It bothers me tremendously that young people these days don't seem to think Catcher in the Rye is a good novel. I could write a treatise about all the reasons it bothers me, but one of the main reasons is that I think Holden Caulfield was absolutely spot-on about how the movie industry is a sort of fecal King Midas, turning everything it touches to shit. However, my hatred is probably best summed up by Ray Bradbury's little-known short story "Sun and Shadow." The story's protagonist, Ricardo, is all het up about a fashion shoot in his small Mexican village, but the basic principles remain the same.

*Reprinted in Golden Apples of the Sun, a collection which is itself reprinted in its entirety, along with A Medicine for Melancholy, in the Bradbury omnibus Twice 22.