johnbyronkuhner.com

      I headed downtown yesterday afternoon to do some bookshopping and to see some of the parades.  No luck finding books by Richard Burton – I’ve now gone clear from the Catskills to the Gulf, checking all the likely bookshops, without finding a single copy of his 80 or so volumes of work.  And such a fine writer too!  The days of local used bookshops must be numbered.  I could find any of Burton’s works on the internet in seconds, and now google is putting them all online to boot.

      New Orleans has two types of used bookshops: organized, spiffy parnassi run by classy dames who think highly of their books, their clientele, and themselves, all of which they are thoroughly acquainted with; and intellectual compost-heaps run by madhouse bachelors, where twenty thousand books are stuffed into two hundred square feet.  In one of the latter, on a pulverulent couch which served as the “Classics” section, I found a copy of the “Institutum Societatis Jesu,” containing the various prescriptions and bylaws of the Jesuits  (e.g.: “Praesertim in arte scribendi ac dicendi, reliquo studiorum tempore ne intermittant, et maxime eam linguae Latinae peritiam acquirere conentur, quae et clericos deceat, et Societatis traditionibus sit consona”), and an edition of Baudelaire’s Latin verse.

      This last merits some attention.  Who even knew Baudelaire composed in Latin?  The poems have a juvenalia-aroma on them, but they are impressive for all that.  One is entitled “Czar Peter the Great Visits the Sorbonne,” and features the Czar weaping at a bust of Richelieu, the “egregius terrae coelique minister,” who was

              pius utiliter, sancteque profanus, doctis doctorumque Deo sacraverat aedes.

             “cunningly pious, and sacredly profane, the man who consecrated this temple to the learned and the god of the learned.”

      Pius utiliter, sancteque profanus.  A fine motto for New Orleans.

      I stepped out of the shop into more carnival folly, as the Krewe of Cork, a group of superannuated epicures who celebrate all forms of crapulence and inebriation, was parading through the Quarter.  After a little spectating and a late lunch with my books (as sheets of third-world rain dropped out of the sky), I set out for home along the parade route.  The Krewe of Oshun and Krewe of Pygmalion rolled that night.  Neither parade was very special, as it seemed to me, but I stopped and watched next to a fat black man who was in the “throws of ecstasy,” screaming and yelling at the float-riders with all his energy, “Be my Valentine!!!  Be my Valentine!!!”  After a few floats passed this way, he came up to me and pointed to his Mr.-T-esque halter of beads and said, “This is what it’s all about man, it’s all about the hype.  It’s all about the hype.  Tomorrow I tell you, I gotta get up real early and get something for the lady at my house, or else I won’t have no house.  But I’m tellin’ you, it’s not about what you give them, it’s about the presentation.  That’s what matters.  It’s the way you give it.  That’s all I’m sayin’.”  He smoothed away the sweat from all over his round, bald head, thinking it over.  Then came another float, and he ran into the street again looking up at the riders, and screaming once more, “Be my Valentine!!!”

      I heard a bit of symbolism that I found compelling from another parade.  The Krewe of Eve, an all-female Krewe in Mandeville, besides the usual beads was throwing out to the crowd “plush apples.”  That says it all, as far as life goes, I’m afraid. 

      I continued home, saw the length of the evening’s pomp, and retired to my thoughts once more.  It was so hot and steamy last night that I slept with only a sheet – this in February.

      One of the things that has most struck me – and which I never noticed before here – is the omnipresence of political discussion.  There are strange things here, like truly local talk radio – not talking about Democrats and Republicans, but about New Orleans and its specific problems.  There is an Onion-type newspaper, the New Orleans Levee.  And sitting in a restaurant this evening, I noticed that there were several clocks.  One gave the time.  Another was labeled “Chalmette Parish,” a suburb known for simpletons, which was several hours behind.  Another was labeled “City Hall.”  As I looked back at it a few times, I saw it was completely stopped.

      The main newspaper, the Times-Picayune, is also heavily local in its inflection, but in a robust, healthy way.  I think Katrina exposed the problems of the complacency of the governed.  A real vocal press opposition to C. Ray Nagin and his ilk has formed.  I literally have not passed any of my seven days here without people talking about “City Hall.”