Trendy But Casual

Kashin

Kashin

Sad news from home today: Kashin the elephant died at Auckland Zoo yesterday. I know it’s ridiculous that I’m moved to public lament when this blog fails to commemorate the deaths of Bergman, Pinter, Antonioni et al, but I guess I’m sentimental. (And not alone.)

Kashin was one of only three elephants in New Zealand. There’s another Indian elephant, called Burma, at Auckland Zoo, and an African elephant down in Nelson, in a circus. My sister remembers Jamuna, who used to give rides at the zoo: Jamuna arrived in 1923 and died in 1965. My sister probably also remembers the chimpanzees who held tea parties: this was stopped before I was born. All I remember is the Punch and Judy shows, which involved no inconvenience to animals, apart from persistent cruelty to the puppet crocodile.

The funds for Kashin were raised by the ASB, which in those days stood for the Auckland Savings Bank. It now calls itself the ASB Bank, which seems ridiculous to me, but presumably makes sense to its new Australian owners. Kashin arrived at Auckland Zoo when she was four and I was seven, in December, 1972. A public competition came up with the elephant’s name, though it has a Hindi meaning as well, allegedly unrelated to money. My brother and I were very excited about the arrival of a baby elephant, though he would no doubt deny this now. (He has a very non-elephant-like memory.) Like almost every other child of our generation, we got plastic Kashin-the-elephant piggy banks from the ASB. We had several of them, as I recall. I’m sure that one, at least, is stashed away in my storage unit in Albany, along with all the other jumble of my childhood.

When we were children, the best thing to see in the Auckland Museum was the gigantic stuffed form of Rajah, a male elephant who lived at the zoo in the 30s until he became too violent and unruly and had to be put to death. (It was seen as the humane thing at the time, apparently, because the alternative was spending his life chained up.)  Australians are also implicated here: before he arrived in Auckland, Rajah was being terrorized by the public in Hobart, and this is now blamed for his anger-management issues. I think he’s still on display at the Museum, though the latest generation of curators despise him, no doubt, as a relic from a less enlightened age, and see the exhibit as capitulation to trashy public taste.

Today the Auckland zoo is all environments rather than enclosures; the old elephant house is rented out for parties and wedding receptions. It backs onto Old Mill Road, just where the road takes a steep climb. When we were children, we used to beg my father to drive this way at night – when we were going back and forth to my grandparents’ place in Ponsonby – so we could see the elephants. Just a glimpse of those massive dark backs, like upturned hulls, safe in their pens for the night.

The Auckland Zoo is closed today: they’re in mourning for Kashin. Here in New Orleans, it’s late afternoon, which means the McMain band is outside wailing and braying and trumpeting in the school yard, and our new next-door neighbor is practicing scales on her French horn. The sound of elephants, perhaps, but not quite the same thing.

 

New Orleans, August, Hot

On week days, when I’m alone in the house, I turn off the air conditioning – to save money, to see how long I can stand it. By four, my head starts to feel swaddled with cotton wool. I’m sleepy. I stick to things. Sometimes, clammy and oppressed, I feel almost feverish.

It’s overcast outside most afternoons: in the month since I’ve been back from the UK, there’s been two or maybe three days without a thunderstorm. On Monday it rained almost all day – the soggy shoulder of a tropical depression pushing up into the Florida panhandle. I lie in the bedroom, the coolest room in the house, and think of ways to describe the heat. Every day is sweltering. Outside the heat is a thicket, almost visible: we wade through its dense swamp in dreamy slow-motion.

If I could write my first novel, Queen of Beauty, over again, there’d be much more about the heat in New Orleans. The heat and the rain and the smell of things here. I was talking about this today with Susan Larson, the books editor of the Times-Picayune; she was interviewing me about my YA novel, Ruined. I would include more heat, more smells, and more lizards, I told her. In August, the lizards are the only fast-moving creatures in this place. At the moment the ones I see are bark-skinned and tiny, darting across sidewalks, disappearing into bushes.

TM has had various face-offs with lizards in the house in summers past, involving absurd hallway chases and daring Tupperware entrapments. Lizards particularly like the Venetian blinds in our south-facing back room, which is oven-like for six months of the year. They lie, lizard-legs dangling, on the dusty slats.

The heat won’t break for more than a month – maybe in two months’ time, maybe a little sooner. We were married in New Orleans nine years ago, at the very end of September. Knowing this place a little better now, we would never dream of arranging a wedding (a black-tie wedding, in fact) for such a volatile time of year. It’s the heart of hurricane season, the end of September. The heat is usually still ferocious and unrelenting. Last night, I met up with a few people for birthday drinks, and my friend Russell Desmond was talking about business over the summer – he owns Arcadian Books, in the French Quarter. People forget, he says, that September is still the summer here. It’s another hot, stifling month that has to be endured – survived – between the European tourists and the fall conventions.

Sometimes it’s Christmas here, and we’re still waiting for the fall.

Last night T. Middy got to indulge in a rare public rant on one of his favorite topics: the weather coverage of WDSU, otherwise known as Channel Six, the NBC local affiliate. We’ve lived here for five years, and TM continues to be outraged by the weather coverage. (Don’t ask why we don’t just watch another local affiliate: wherever we live, we watch NBC. We miss you, Sue Simmons.)

The WDSU empire has established an outpost on Channel 108, which is known as WDSU Weather-Plus News and Traffic. When TM has tired of being aggrieved at my various crimes – finishing all the wine, eating all the cashews, watching yet another past-season marathon of America’s Next Top Model – he likes to turn to 108 and complain that it’s never New Orleans weather.

Here is a transcript of a recent diatribe on this topic.

TM: No matter when I tune in, it’s Houma. Then Mandeville, then Hammond. You say it’s in alphabetical order, but, baby girl, look – it’s HOUMA, MANDEVILLE, AND THEN HAMMOND.

[Turns to another station, then switches back.]

TM: Now it’s THIBODAUX, GRAND ISLE, AND GULFPORT. And what’s on right now? GRETNA.

 [Turns to another station, then switches back.]

TM: And then it’s mostly commercials for WDSU.

[Lower-level grumbling while distracted by Tropical Storm Watch in the Gulf of Mexico.]

TM: So now it’s New Orleans. They’re saying thunderstorms at noon tomorrow. Let’s check back tomorrow, shall we? Let’s see what they say then!

[Turns to another station for quite a while, then switches back.]

TM: Just to see what’s happening, let’s turn to 108. THIBODAUX, GRAND ISLE, AND GULFPORT! This is the New Orleans metropolitan area! Why don’t they show New Orleans? They could at least show Metairie.

[Swearing and muttering.]

TM: And you know, I bet a lot of these forecasts are the same. Because it’s a ****ing tiny area!

[Turns to another station, then switches back.]

TM: Slidell. What’s next? HOUMA, MANDEVILLE, HAMMOND.

[The next day: I’m in another room]

TM: Ha! GRETNA!

Actually, I don’t know why he needs to watch the weather. It’s the same every day: mid 90s, with a chance of thunderstorms. I’ll be here, waiting for the sky to darken and for the heat in the house to simmer and thicken. Until my head aches, and my hair curls, and it’s time to turn on the air again and finish off all the wine.

New book

Last year, when I was holed up in the little flat on Albert Park in Auckland (courtesy of the very generous Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship), I worked on four big projects. One of them is published this week.

This is my YA novel, and it's published here in the US by Scholastic/Point. It's already selling on Amazon in various countries, as well as on other sites and in numerous US independent book stores like the great Lemuria in Jackson, MS. If there's a teenager in your life interested in a mystery involving ghosts, curses, murders, carnival/Mardi Gras parades, yellow fever, voodoo, New Orleans (especially the Garden District and Treme), Haiti, cemeteries, Roman society, high school shenanigans, or any of the above, please consider buying this for him or her. I'd like to crack the top 100,000 on Amazon!

If you need more persuasion, here's the starred review from Publishers Weekly:

"With this haunting love letter to New Orleans, Morris makes her YA debut, telling the story of 15-year-old Rebecca Brown, a proud New Yorker sent to live with a family friend while her father travels overseas. Ostracized as an outsider, Rebecca struggles to fit in and cope with her new surroundings. When she befriends Lisette, a ghost who has haunted the cemetery ever since her mysterious death 155 years earlier, Rebecca is drawn into an eerie story of betrayal, loss, old curses and family secrets. As Mardi Gras approaches, so does the culmination of something dark and angry that has been brewing for decades. This moody tale thoroughly embraces the rich history, occult lore and complex issues of race, ethnicity, class and culture that have defined New Orleans for centuries, turning the city into a character in its own right. Rather than shy away from the shameful or tragic moments of the past, Morris uses them to capture the city's essence. From Mardi Gras rituals to voodoo spells, Hurricane Katrina to jazz, this is a story that could only be told in New Orleans."

Note: I just checked on Amazon, and I've already cracked the top 25K - maybe I should aim higher (or lower)? Say, top 10K?