Tomorrow rolls one of Mardi Gras’ first parades: the ribald Krewe du Vieux (pronounced croo duh voo). Its wonderful website gives you a taste of the mix of commentary, buffoonery, and transgression that characterizes the whole season. It’s like something out of Petronius or Lucilius, and yet here it is, in America.
And there are something like 70 krewes, all with parades!
I arrived in the New Orleans area on Monday and stayed with a friend out in Mandeville, which is on the other side of (the surprisingly beautiful) Lake Pontchartrain. Yesterday I found a room in the Crescent City itself, and today I moved in, with a singer/songwriter (and apparently local legend) named Johnny Angel. For information on him and his band The Swingin’ Demons, try a google search or his myspace profile. “Saturday Night Saloon” reminds me so much of my last trip to New Orleans I think I must have seen him perform. Either that or he’s got the signature New Orleans sound. It’s hard to be sad while listening to that brass play. I say he’s a local legend because I stopped in at a gallery a few blocks away, a place that had just opened up, and the owner, not a personal friend of the man, was full of Johnny Angel stories. The pizzeria down the block had a picture of him up on the wall, and the owner had good things to say about him. This afternoon I spoke with a young lady who was sitting on a stoop smoking a cigarette, and she said she had known about him since high school. “In a town full of characters, he’s made a real name for himself,” she said. All I’ve seen so far is that he has the sideburns of an Elvis impersonator. And (of course) he’s from Staten Island. That’s about as much as I’ll write about him, as obviously he hardly consented to have his home life thrust on the internet.
I’ve got the back room of the house, just off the kitchen – it looks like an old sun room, with five big wide windows. There’s a yard, much neglected, but with a lovely old live oak. All very promising.
The neighborhood, Carrollton, is at the end of the streetcar line. It has everything one could ask for: a bookshop, a dozen cafes (at least – how do they all stay open?), one of the finest diners in the world (the Camellia Grill), oak-lined streets, a place called the Book Barn (open Tuesdays and Fridays), a supermarket, close access to Audubon Park (New Orleans’ Central Park), and what may be the best pizzeria in New Orleans (Nino’s). This last being the most important – and a good omen.
I’ll keep posting thoughts on both the trip and on this most remarkable city as I go. Now that I have a place to lay my head here, I can turn to writing.
I was speaking with my mother about the most recent Church problems, when she referred to Benedict XVI as “your pope,” i.e. my pope, a pope of the more conservative Catholics, and the younger Catholics. And there is no doubt that I was happy on the day Benedict was elected. I watched the news of his election in a school library in Manhattan, and I was aghast at the indignation at his election coming from other people in the room. I myself felt that his election might mean that there was a place for people like myself in the Church – intelligent people who valued the place of the brain in man’s relationship with God, and who respected the traditions of the past as a way which had in the past led people to God, and probably would do the same today.
I had read Benedict’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy, a really lovely book which I recommend to all. I thought to myself, “A pope has the power to make the changes in the liturgy this book proposes. And if Benedict does nothing other than make these liturgical changes, he will be one of the great popes of all time.” These changes involved little more than reorienting the priests ad orientem, permitting kneeling, and the like. Nothing major.
Of course he has done nothing on these questions, while showing an unusual incompetence with public relations. Of course it is good to reconcile with the Lefebvrites. Reconciliation is good. But this Williamson character has all the smarmy makings of a real villain, and Benedict must know that Hitler youth alums need to tread carefully around the Holocaust.
In the meantime, the real problem of the conservatives simply will not go away: the emphasis on Law as the mode of reaching God only creates split people with split lives. Maciel is only the latest example. In fact, the emphasis on keeping an unkeepable Law – this is something Paul knew long ago – creates a secret breeding ground for much worse conduct. And it is all overlaid with a corrosive hypocrisy.
Rod Dreher has an excellent piece on all this here. The lesson he takes from it all: we conservatives lamented the liberals in the church destroying the intellectual tradition and undermining the integrity of the Gospel. And now we have to lament what the conservatives are doing.
Protestantism is apparently alive and well in rural Georgia…
(In background: Main Square and Courthouse, Preston, GA.)
I drove out of Atlanta this morning. The Atlanta suburbs peter out around the latitude of Fayetteville, twenty-five miles to the south, although there are scattered housing developments among the pine trees for another fifteen miles. Around Zebulon I was in the countryside; there were scattered farms and fields. But for the most part I found miles of pine trees, all young, reclaiming old fields or old clear-cuts. Clearcutting is still the dominant mode of timber harvesting in this area, to judge by the fact that almost all the woodlots in the area had trees of the same age. Many were recently cut, and I passed at least half a dozen trucks bearing timber north on the road from Thomaston.
I stopped in both Thomaston and Butler to get myself a drink, but was unable to do so. Each town had about fifty or so storefronts, but the majority were closed and about a third were completely empty. In neither town was there a coffee shop, luncheonette, pizzeria, deli or other place to get a coffee or soda (and I did not patronize the gas stations, which probably offered something like this). The general feel was of decay. A few shops had signs in Spanish.
Thomaston and Butler had a layout common in Southern towns: a series of shops gather around a fairly large central square, in the center of which is the courthouse. It was standard even by 1840 or so; Appomattox features this pattern in miniature. I would imagine that there are northern towns which feature this pattern but I cannot think of any offhand. It appears to have grown out of the fact that Southern life centered on the plantation more than the town, which was reserved for legal business and specialty shops. The absence of churches on the town square is especially striking. The law is the center of the society.
Thomaston, Butler, and the next town (Ellaville) had almost identical Civil War monuments, which probably indicate some form of mass production.
Around Ellaville the land changed. The pine trees gave way to green fields and pecan orchards. I stopped off at a roadside stand to buy some fresh pecans, which I’m eating as I write this. Talk about fresh – you can almost taste the chlorophyll still in them. And they are large and almost juicy. The man I bought them from, a soft-spoken older black man, called them “fruits” and you can taste why. I mentioned to him that I noticed the pecan trees beginning about fifteen miles north of his stand, and he nodded in agreement, as if I had noticed something obvious and well-known.
Well, it ends up that I had seen in the landscape a fairly important geological shift. I had entered real cotton country, the rich soil deposits (with black soil, not red) which mark the boundaries of a late Cretaceous coastline. This part of the country got some attention after the presidential election. The Cretaceous coastal deposits led to rich soil; the rich soil led to intensive farming; the intensive farming led to large slave populations; the large slave populations led to large numbers of African-Americans; the large numbers of African-Americans led to impressive results in these areas for Barack Obama. The full story, with maps, is here.
I am spending the night in Americus, a pretty little Victorian town whose quondam prosperity is evident. It’s still doing nicely today, too. It’s where Habitat for Humanity was started and where its headquarters are located today.
I’ve had plenty to write about in the past few days, but not enough time to do it. In Atlanta I visited the Martin Luther King birth house and Stone Mountain, which I conceived of as opposites but shared more than I might have thought. And lots of other things happening elsewhere in my life. I’ll get to the observations as the days unfold.
I’m now dropping off the map a little bit, getting away from the highways to see what’s between here and the Gulf, headed in the general direction of Tallahassee. One woman (from Georgia), informed of this plan, said, “Okay, now I can start worrying about you.” Another friend, from the hills of Alabama, put it this way: “In Georgia, for every mile you get further away from Atlanta, you go back in time one year. The Florida border is more than 150 miles from Atlanta. That’s all you have to say.” In fact, as I look at it, the Florida border is more like 250 miles from Atlanta (Georgia is, after all, the largest state east of the Mississippi), which should be even more interesting.
Another friend in Atlanta gave me a jar of pennies to spend on the road. We’ll see if we can unleash all this stored-up stuff and get it back into circulation.
Bringing change to America.
… where daffodils spring up in January.
Photo: backyard daffodils in Lawrenceville, Georgia, January 2009.
The size of Georgia.
31-Jan-09I noted in an earlier post that Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi – I had heard that who knows when, on one of my trips around the country – but the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed, so I had to check it again. Larger than Florida? Yes – 57,906 square miles to 53,927 for Florida (this only includes land area, so lakes like Okeechobee take a bite out of Florida’s total). Larger than Illinois? Yes – Illinois is at 55,584 (smaller than Iowa, by the way). Even bigger than Michigan (56, 804). Seemingly large states like New York (47,214) and Virginia (39,594) are significantly smaller than Georgia.