It's been a squint day. That is to say, one of those days when, if you squint sufficiently, it's easy to convince yourself that New Orleans is back to normal. The first big convention is in town, the librarians, and a couple of my author friends are in town for the occasion. I, being an upcoming author (novel coming out in the fall, details to follow), bought a badge for $25, and wandered the floor looking for librarians who might want to buy a funny novel. And, no squinting required, we were in the Convention Center, and, after that first moment when your mind reruns That Footage, you forget anything but the fact that Google seems to have the biggest display space at the library convention.
Speaking of rerunning footage, the head of the local convention and visitors' bureau has complained more than once that, when he pitches convention organizers on coming back to NO, he frequently gets this response: "But isn't your city still under water?" My friend John chooses to assign that response to the file summed up by the classic NO t-shirt slogan, "It's not the heat, it's the stupidity." I, however, having a sunnier view of human nature (but just barely), believe that people who watch the news, and see That Footage being reracked and rerun whenever New Orleans makes the news, cannot be blamed for thinking it may be current footage -- especially since, somewhere along the line, television news producers have decided to eliminate indicators such as a "file footage" designation, or, God help us, a date stamp, to tip off viewers to the fact that the footage they're seeing is months old. Of course, we saw this phenomenon in action during the Katrina event itself, when footage of a few looters was played so repeatedly viewers could be forgiven for wondering how there could have been that many TVs for sale in the city.
The American Library Association convention is the biggest in town since you-know-when, and everybody I talked to there was impressed with the friendliness of New Orleanians, officials and civilians alike. Which is as it should be, since, if this thing doesn't work out right, we might as well mail the rest of the economy home. Laura Bush is coming to speak on Monday, maybe to reprise her chump-change grants litany from the Tulane appearance three weeks ago.
It's often seemed to me that New Orleans, at different times of the year, was a different kind of feast: a feast for the ears at Jazzfest time, a feast for the eyes during Carnival season, a feast for the taste buds all the time. One keeps the horrific images of the Lower Ninth close to the mind's front burner, and yet, driving or walking the little streets of the Bywater neighborhood (where the studio lives), there are visual treats -- beautiful little cottages, trees ablaze in bloom -- around every corner. The fact about the city that keeps defying conventional logic, that makes a short answer to the question "How is it down there?" impossible, is that it's neither the one thing nor the other, it's both, all the time, and your view of it, and of life, depends at any moment on which direction you're looking -- and, of course, on whether your insurance company has completely jobbed you yet. (A major downtown law firm has hung a two-story-high banner on its building that asks, "Screwed by your Adjustor?")
As I left the studio Friday afternoon, I turned on the talk station WWL just in time to hear a friend calling in. A local landmark Baptist church had burned down the night before in his neighborhood, and his community association was trying to keep the remaining tower and wall, which an engineer had told him could be saved, from being part of the rapid-fire demolition just then about to take place. The effort failed, the remnant of the building came down, and I saw in Saturday's paper that the fire was listed as "of unknown origin." And I started to wonder, with no particular referent in mind, whether property owners, frustrated by the insurance dance -- that's not wind damage, that's water damage, no, that's not water damage, that's wind damage -- had decided that the only way to get paid off and move on is to, shall we say, invite fire damage.
Dark thoughts that scattered after a celebratory goodbye dinner with the author friends, and John and our local best friend Stephanie. This is our last night in town for two months, and it feels like leaving a sick relative. But, after days of stifling wet heat, a thunderstorm late this afternoon did what such storms so rarely do here: it brought on a mild, if not exactly cool, clear, dry evening. And the Quarter's streets were full of visitors, and Frenchmen St. had people clustered outside all the clubs, and Astral Project had two drummers (and, unlike the rest of the musical world I've ever experienced, that wasn't a recipe for a migraine), and squinting felt good.