Trendy But Casual

Lagniappe

On a similar subject to yesterday's post, my friend Ken Foster has a great piece up on Salon called We're All Oprah Fodder in New Orleans.

And Oprah must have relented about Chris Rose: his is listed as one of the Books Seen on the Show. (This category is distinct from Oprah's Book Club or Books From O, The Oprah Magazine.) So many books ...

Two Years Later

Today it’s two years since Hurricane Katrina hit. Two years ago, we were sitting in Rodney’s law office in Marksville, in front of the television – watching the city blow in the wind and fill with water. We’d arrived in central Louisiana some time after two that morning, fourteen hours or so after leaving our house in New Orleans. When we left home on Sunday morning, we passed McMain High School. A city bus had pulled up outside, and a family was getting in, all clutching plastic bags with their stuff – clothes, pillows, food, drinks. They were being taken to the Superdome, the “refuge of last resort,” as the mayor described it, expecting to spend a night there, two at most. Over the next long, hot week, I felt sick every time I thought of them.

The first breach of the Industrial Canal happened at dawn, according to the latest report from the US Army Corps of Engineers (not very popular engineers these days) – ie before the eye of the hurricane made landfall in Plaquemines Parish.

Two years on, we have the same mayor and governor and President, all making nice these days – in public, at least. Crime is up (go, crime!): apparently, New Orleans is on track to lead the nation in homicides per capita for the second straight year. And the city has between sixty and seventy per cent of its pre-storm population, though I suspect many of these people are new residents rather than returnees.

Most of the homes damaged by Katrina and Rita were in Louisiana – 77 per cent, compared with 23 per cent in Mississippi. But federal aid has not been distributed based on relative damage. Mississippi has received 50 per cent of funds from the Community Development Block Grant Program. It received $95 million for higher education relief, exactly the same amount as Louisiana, although Louisiana had more than three times the number of displaced students. Mississippi has received $280 million to build alternative housing to replace FEMA trailers: Louisiana, with two-and-a-half times the number of families living in FEMA trailers, got only a third of the money. For Louisiana’s 163 buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places, we received $6 million LESS than Mississippi, which had 130. These figures are from the Times-Picayune. Click here for today’s editorial.

In happier and stranger news, Oprah has invited Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose onto her show. Chris is the author of a best-selling book of Katrina-related columns: it’s called One Dead in Attic. However, he’s been forbidden to mention anything about his book on air – not even the title. Apparently, you can’t mention a book on Oprah because that makes it A Book On Oprah and therefore anointed in a must-buy, sacred-text kind of way.

Chris writes: “It turns out that Oprah's show today is a one-hour special on the mental health crisis in New Orleans. And, it turns out, they wanted my expertise, not as a book writer or even a newspaper columnist, but as the city's most famously depressed resident, by virtue of my 5,000-word account about battling the disease which I published in the newspaper last fall -- and which you can read in my book (am I allowed to say that?).

And, by the end of today, I will probably be one of America's most famously depressed citizens -- right up there with Terry Bradshaw and Brooke Shields -- rather than one of its new, hot, young (well, young-ish) writers.

This is what my life has come to; representing New Orleans on national TV as the city's most obviously disturbed public figure.”

You can read his whole column here.

Happy Anniversary.

This Time Last Week

This is what T. Middy was eating for lunch at the amazing Tate Modern. (He was exhausted and starving after touring the Global Cities exhibit.)

He NEEDED those fish and chips. The mushy peas - not so much.

Playing Catch-Up

We're back in New Orleans, still in the nostalgic "last week at this time we were in London, walking across the wobbly bridge/eating grilled mackerel/seeing Othello at the Globe" frame of mind. We were lucky with weather during our two-week tour of the realm, even managing a bit of a tan - very lucky, considering the terrible weather there this year. But even good English summer weather has nothing on the sweltering oven-like conditions of New Orleans. The heat index here yesterday was 110 (F). Even with the air-conditioning blasting all day, the house never felt particularly cool. Late afternoon we headed out to Metairie and the refuge of Becky's pool, where the water is tepid and even the palm tree that droops over it looks brown and frizzled.

The month in England was brilliant - great to see people and places again, and to get some work done. I have lots of pictures and stories to post.

But first: a catch-up of the vaguely literary variety. William Hill may be saying the odds of Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones winning this year's Booker Prize are 20/1. But when we went into a branch near Victoria Station to place a bet, the odds suddenly shrank to 8/1. (The guy behind the desk had to place a call to give us the new odds - I think someone at William Hill HQ just made them up.) I asked if I should pay tax on the bet up front, to avoid paying tax on my winnings, and was rewarded with a derisive laugh. "We haven't done that for years," the clerk explained. I think the last time I went into a bookies in the U.K. was on Wandsworth Road c 1990, to place a bet on a horse. My friend Martin Hemingway walked up with me: we were in a hurry, because the race was about to start. He noticed that a fire had started outside the corner shop, a Middle Eastern grocery-type place, and went in to warn them. I didn't see the fire (too busy thinking about the riches I would win after placing my two-pound bet), assumed Martin had wandered in to get a chocolate bar (he was notoriously greedy), and made it to the bookies on time. By the time Martin turned up, he was too late to place a bet, and just had to stand and watch the TV monitors while my horse romped home. He was very resentful about the whole thing and tried to claim some of my winnings, even though he'd been planning to bet on another horse. I can't remember if I shared them with him or not. I think he may have made the whole fire story up to gain my sympathy.

Back to literary news: congratulations to my friend and former classmate Rachael King for winning Best First Book (for her novel Sound of Butterflies) at this year's Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Bookman Beattie is in L.A. right now (does he ever stay home?) but thanks to him I know that Get on the Waka! Best Recent Maori Fiction has been published. It's an anthology edited by Witi Ihimaera, and I have a story in it. (Reed Publishing: I presume my copy is in the mail.)

As soon as I got back, I booked my flight home to New Zealand. Six weeks this summer was not enough. I'll be in Auckland in September (which is New Zealand Book Month) to appear at two literary shindigs: the Litera-Tea on September 9 and the Going West Festival the following weekend.

Lamingtons will be served at the Litera-Tea, and I will be eating all of them. Going West has a food-and-drink theme this year, actually. Although I am very greedy and love to cook, all my protagonists to date pick at their food and can't cook at all.

Because the last picture of T. Middy was such a hit with his many fans, here is one of him at the Globe Theatre, pondering eternal verities.

Back in London

Sorry for the lengthy absence. Since the Brussels trip, I've been traipsing about the British Isles, T. Middy in tow: we've played farmers in Hampshire; stuffed our faces in Wales; toured cathedrals in Wells, Winchester and York; bought books in Hay-on-Wye and Cambridge; visited famous graves (Jane Austen in the south and Wordsworth in the north); walked far too far in incorrect footwear over the fells around Rydal Water and Grasmere; visited friends and relations; kissed and tormented small children (offspring of said friends and relations) in five different counties; toured the Cumberland Pencil Factory, home of my favourite colour pencils; called out the RAC just once for the rented Skoda Octavia; eaten fish and chips gazing out on the North Sea; and revisited many of the places where I misspent my youth, including the University of York and swathes of South London.

We're back in South London now, imposing on my friend Huw in SE15 - though he tells me I should say it's SE23, where the property values are higher. Yesterday we bought an English edition of Mr Pip by New Zealand author Lloyd Jones, which has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize. I might take the advice of Guy Somerset and put some money on it before I leave London.

I've taken about two million photos, but right now I will post just one: T. Middy ladling a chocolate truffle into his mouth at the National Gallery restaurant today. It looks like he's feeding the tiki, but he actually ate all the truffles himself.

Meanwhile, in Brussels

Sticking with the eating theme, here is what you can eat in Brussels. Exhibit A: the usual Gallic fare ...

Exhibit B: Foreign muck ...

And Exhibit C: food that sounds confusing ...

I'm back in London now, where it's sunny; my blisters are healing, and I'm rushing to catch a train. T. Middy arrives tomorrow and we head off on our Grand Tour. If anyone is near Great Russell Square tomorrow night, I'm doing a reading at the Centre for New Zealand Studies. No address or anything useful like that ...