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T. R. Johnson, "New Orleans: A Writer's City" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
00:38:13
An interview with T. R. Johnson
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Exchanges, a Cambridge University Press podcast, a joint production of Cambridge University Press and the New Books Network. I'm Mark Clovis, and today I'm speaking with T.R. johnson, author of the book New A Writer's City. T.R. welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:23]
A
Hello, Mark. Thank you so much for having me.
- [00:26]
B
Well, thanks for agreeing to be on our show. Thank you. I was wondering if you could start us off by telling our listeners something about yourself.
- [00:33]
A
Yeah, certainly. I've been living in New Orleans for almost 25 years. I'm an English professor at Tulane, and I'm also a jazz disc jockey at the local community radio station and wwoz. I live near the river here in an old part of town, and after Hurricane Katrina, started teaching a class on the literature of New Orleans. And as I got more and more involved in the subject, I. I've been living in the city about, oh, I guess six years when Katrina happened, but started teaching that class right after the storm with a new sense of urgency about what New Orleans means and trying to articulate that for students and letting New Orleans be a doorway into them to think about all kinds of profound things. That became, over the years, a certain kind of expertise that I was never really trained in formally, but that I kind of arrived at over the process of doing that course. So much so that in 2019, I was able to put out an edited collection of essays by Washington, wide range of academics on the literary history of New Orleans. And then on the strength of that, Cambridge was excited enough to say, we'd like to do a new book that's entirely in your voice and reach for general readers and really sort of skew things toward the contemporary scene as much as possible. And I thought, gosh, that sounds like a great project. I would love to do it. And so I jumped into it. Summer of 2020. You know, the city was kind of closed and shut down at that time, and it was the perfect timing to take on a project like this. And so I jumped into it, and now here we are, it is now published, and I'm excited to bring it into the world.
- [02:06]
B
I'm thinking about how your description explains nicely the voice you bring to it. I mean, there's so much knowledge that is contained in your book about literature and the city, and yet it's not academic. You don't talk in terms of semiotics or academic jargon. You basically are explaining sort of the ways in which the lives of these writers are interwoven into the city and how they help bring the city to life in a very special way.
- [02:33]
A
Thank you so much for saying that. That was what I was really seeking to do. I sort of feel like there's a lot of theory kind of behind the curtain, as it were, kind of at the foundation of the book. It allowed. I was thinking about the book in certain ways that made me want to focus on the streets themselves as a kind of public thoroughfare that gets constant daily use, but that also has kind of a rich historical and political legacy in terms of kind of dividing certain neighborhoods, joining certain neighborhoods, and that became. They're kind of living memorials that we use all day, every day. And so that's kind of the theory more or less behind it. But I really was committed to making this a book for the general reader, Not a specialist, not the colleague down the hall, not someone. Was a kind of esoteric knowledge of how we sort of theorize cities in the academic, human humanities at this point and so on. I really wanted this to be a book for everybody. And so, as I say, I kind of kept the theory sort of baked into the foundation rather than wearing it on the sleeve and getting in the way. So that's how I kind of the intellectual, kind of deep foundation of it. And this is kind of what led me to focus on the streets themselves in the city in the book.
- [03:46]
B
And that's where I was thinking as I was reading it, how this would be great as a guidebook in so many ways. I mean, it's so much more than that, but I just could envision myself with a copy in hand, walking these streets and kind of reading some of your passages and visiting those sites and kind of imagining it with my mind's eye, you know, seeing what they were. And so you basically have these chapters that are structured around these. Those streets themselves, as you just said, and how it's fascinating to think about how, as you're going through it, that there's so many ghosts, some fresh, some as old as the city itself, and how they just seem to have such. It just underscores how rich of literary heritage New Orleans possesses.
- [04:41]
A
Oh, thank you. Yeah. I'm so glad that that's your experience in the book, because that's very much what I was going for. I kind of had, obviously, in the back of my mind, the template of a sort of traditional guidebook, but that was only kind of the skeletal template. I wanted to sort of hang on that skeleton, the clothing, if you will, of, you know, kind of extended essayistic sort of Ruminations, a kind of sort of a very reflective ramble down these streets. Not, you know, not just a set of addresses and a few sentences with each. That kind of thing that's been done many times. But this is kind of the literary essays about the literature that are shaped as a kind of a ramble, as I like to call it, up and down these five really crucial streets, the streets that are the real arteries of these distinct parts of town and these distinct literary legacies. And so that's how it worked out. I'm so glad that you can imagine yourself moving around the city with one eye on the book and the other eye on the road. You know.
- [05:41]
B
Let'S start by looking at the roads themselves that you described. You opened the book with Royal Street. Now, why did you choose Royal street to open with? And what role does it play in the literary life of the city?
- [05:53]
A
Well, you know, that's. I began. I wanted to begin with Royal street precisely because it is where the literature of this city really properly begins. It's the main thoroughfare, historically, of the Vieux Carre, the Old Quarter, the French Quarter. And so the. The first really serious rumbles of what would become this astounding literary legacy really begin along that Royal street corridor. This was where a very proud Creole culture kind of sprang to life really, in the 18th century. And then it became even more intense, early decade of the first decade of the 19th century, as people fleeing the Haitian Revolution moved into the city and brought with them a very distinction culture and a very high culture in many ways that was very different from the rest of the United States. And this begins to lead to a very robust literary culture, 1840s, 50s, and 60s, that then laid the groundwork for not just sort of a proud Creole legacy, but then, as we come into the 20th century, kind of waves of bohemia began to kind of coalesce in the quarter to an extraordinary degree, the 1920s. And then again in the 1940s. There was another wave in the 60s and into the 80s after that. It becomes, you know, gentrified and touristified in ways that it's now a great destination and it's a very beautiful place, but it's no longer kind of able to. It's just too expensive to kind of be the home base of an important literary bohemia the way it was really arguably from, I would say, the 1890s up through the 1980s, with that. With that Afro Creole community being the real foundation for it in the middle part of the 19th century. So that's. That's kind of ground zero for the literary mystique, the aura, the astounding legacy and reputation of the city. It branches out from there, but that's really where it begins. And so that's why I chose to begin the book. I actually start the book with the extraordinary story of John Howard Griffin, who wrote Black Like Me, and his odyssey, his experiment, this very strange experiment in which he's a white man who used drugs and so on, to transform him, to darken his skin enough that he could pass for African American, and then wrote a book about what it was like to experience the south from that perspective in a very limited way, obviously, as you sort of in disguise. But his journey, his odyssey, his experiment begins at the foot of Royal street at the famous Hotel Monteleone. He checked in there, transformed himself into someone who could pass for black. And that's where that saga begins and becomes one of the literary sensations of the mid-1960s. That Hotel Monteleone is where Truman Capote always claimed he was born. Not quite true, but he nearly was born there. His mother was living there when she went into labor to birth him. And so it's an important kind of ground zero. There, at the foot of Royal, Tennessee Williams has work set right on that first block of Royal. And as you make your way down Royal Capote, we run into Capote's apartment, the place where Faulkner lived. Catherine Ann Porter, Robert Penn Warren, all of these. Charles Bukowski, coming into the later years, live along Royal. And even Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume. Take. Some of the main characters own a perfume shop on Royal Street. So that stretches into the 1980s. So Royal was the natural place to start. And from there I go to very different parts of town.
- [09:31]
B
I was thinking about how after reading that chapter, and there's so much literary history, not just New Orleans, but really of America concentrated there, it's hard to believe that some leftover for the rest of the city to share.
- [09:45]
A
It is really. You know, it's so funny. As I began to work on that chapter, I had that same experience. It's like, my God, the more I dig into this, the more extraordinary it becomes. And it became. You know, it's like when I first began to grapple with it because this is. I'm too unwieldy. I don't know that I can do this. And over time, it took about six months to write that first chapter. Once I handled Royal street, the rest of it became relatively easy to do. There's other corridors of incredible, incredibly dense literary significance. But grappling with that first one was the toughest. I got the hang of it. I was able to handle the other ones a little more expeditiously. But it's true. It's the layers of literary history on that dozen blocks of Royal that runs from canal to Esplanade. It's just unfathomable. And it runs really for a little over a century. It was home, as I say, to these very important newspapers through the 19th century, and then becomes, as I say, a kind of home away from home for this literary bohemia that the legacy, as you say, for American literature is hard to fathom. I mean, it's just from O. Henry to Catherine Ann Porter to Harry Crews to Charles Bukowski, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, it just. The list just keeps going, you know.
- [11:08]
B
And as you explained, though, it's not contained, you know, that Larry, you know, heritage spills over into their streets. And the next chapter, you demonstrate this with your description of St. Claude Avenue. And I was wondering if you could perhaps talk a bit about the ways in which that differed from Royal street and the literary history that's reflected there.
- [11:25]
A
Absolutely. You know, it's funny, today, the world along St. Claude Avenue, this is kind of where the bohemia has gone. So in chapter two, I take up St. Claude, and we sort of think of it as the, you know, as the kind of grandchild of that literary bohemia that was based in the Queen Quarter for so long. It's now along the St. Claude Quarter, historically a much more hardscrabble part of town. It was never home to these proud, ostentatious Creole townhouses and mansions and the kind of commercial and political hub of the city. It was always kind of a hardscrabble working class kind of stretching out into the sort of marshy swamps on what was at the. When it first began to be a place where people lived, it was a swamp land, really. There's a berm along the. A natural levee along the river that some people had sort of settled on. But very quickly, as you move away from the river and coming downstream, away from the quarter, it's marshland and swamp. Around the turn of the 20th century, they figured out how to drain these swamps and build more or less permanent dwellings on them. Of course, now, in Hurricane Katrina, we saw that, you know, the water wants to be there when the water. When the water comes this way. And so it suffered terribly, just catastrophically in Katrina. But from the early 20th century up to Katrina, it was a place where they began to build houses. And it was generally a white working class neighborhood. Initially with a lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe, but then also in the middle part of the 20th century, became a really significant concentration of African Americans. You know, most famously, Streetcar Named Desire is really an expression of this neighborhood. Stanley Kowalski, the protagonist, is an archetypal sort of Eastern European immigrant living in the hardscrabble sort of industrialized dock working culture of the city. And Tennessee Williams, you know, what is arguably the most iconic play of the American stage is in that old Ninth Ward population, that old white working class Ninth Ward population of the middle part of the 20th century, but many others, you know, as I say, the bohemia that is here now and has been really, excuse me, since the, oh, since the 70s and 80s and going back, there's just. There's a very proud African American tradition going, you know, Kalamu Yassalam, the famous African American activist and poet, essayist and cultural organizer, he grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward just down the street from a man named Marcus B. Christian, who used to correspond with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. They lived, they were virtual neighbors in the Lower Ninth Ward. When Colamu, then Valerie Ferdinand was living on St. Maurice Street. Just down the block was Marcus B. Christian, who wrote a thousand page history of black people in Louisiana and a very famous poem called I Am New Orleans and countless, you know, hundreds and hundreds of poems that are in an archive out at the University of New Orleans now. The Goodness of St. Roch by Alice Dunbar Nelson is a work of this neighborhood and a variety of works around the Desire housing project, which is an extraordinary chapter in the city's history. And Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild side features significantly here in this neighborhood right along the river called the Bywater, part of the Saint Cloud Corridor. So an extraordinary run of literature and a lot of literary activity today. I mean, there's important poets and novelists and essayists living up and down these streets. I happen to live along the St. Claude corridor. It is an incredibly vibrant literary community. The famous singer songwriter Ricky Lee Jones is just around the corner from me. And John Waters, the famous sort of indie underground filmmaker lived here in the early 70s, right before he became famous. So it's an extraordinary place. And the density of the literary and cultural history is hard to estate. Fats Domino is from this neighborhood. The Plessy vs Ferguson Supreme Court case started at the railroad tracks right here on the St. Claude corridor. So it's different from the corridor in that it doesn't have that kind of international glamour and elite kind of Financial legacy as a kind of cultural hub, but as a kind of spillover and other. The other version of New Orleans. It's extraordinary. You know, it's impossible to overstate Fats Domino's significance to the history of rock and roll. It really kind of begins with him in many ways and goes mainstream through him as it moves to Elvis and so on. But he was doing that music in the 40s to great acclaim locally, and it finally sort of jumped into a national forum a handful of years later.
- [16:16]
B
You highlight a part of your book. You highlighted a part of your book just now that I think kind of points to the degree to which the subtitle of your book is an understatement. You are writing about New Orleans as a literary city, but you're also writing a cultural history of the city. You're incorporating film and especially music into it. I think that comes across really well in the next chapter, which is on Esplanade Avenue where you talk, where you talk about. You talk a great deal about jazz in that one. And I was thinking, as you were describing, you know, what you do as a dj, I was thinking, ah, so it's so fascinating to see how that background of yours informs a chapter where you are getting not just into the literary history of New Orleans, but its musical history, which, as you describe in the chapter, you know, has these, you know, truly, you know, you know, Titanic figures were part of it.
- [17:12]
A
Absolutely. Yeah. I think, you know, the music of just that Esplanade Corridor, it's Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, it's Alan Toussaint, the king of RB composers here. And then it comes into modern times, you know, Frank Ocean and Mannie Fresh and the modern hip hop world that is kind of figured so importantly from the 7th Ward. It's interesting, you know, when I began to work on this, I kn. I just. I was going to have to talk about music. And the way I began to think of it was this is going to be, you know, about the writers of New Orleans. But I can include musicians and musical history in there because a lot of these writers wrote, a lot of these musicians wrote extraordinary memoirs that I've got to talk about. And also as songwriters, they're working with the written word. And some of them made their place in history as vocalists. And so I figure I'm really working with people who are making a very serious historic engagement with. With the word, be it written or sung, composed as part of a musical composition or as a novel. And when these memoirs by some of these musical Figures are especially profound. I call them literature and want to bring them into the mix. Sidney Bechet is an astounding meditation, almost mystical, and thinking about how he inhabits the music, how the music inhabits him. And Barney Bergard, a great clarinetist, wrote a really important memoir. And so this became folded into that Esplanade chapter, just inevitably, you know, Fats domino in the St. Claude corridor. But as I could turn to Esplanade, the dense layers of musical history along that street and the particular engagement with the word among those players and musical thinkers. I had to talk about it and had a great time with it. Esplanade was a tricky chapter, too, because the density along that. Just that few miles that run from the river out to City park, the old cypress swamp out there. There's so much to talk about. Solomon Northrup was trafficked through the slave pens, the slave markets along Esplanade. And Kate Chopin's the Awakening, the main character lives in a house basically across the street from where Solomon Northrup was trafficked. All the great extraordinary voodoo history around Marie Laveau and her daughter is basically anchored along the Esplanade corridor. And it just goes on and on. At the far end of that corridor is a place called the Colored Waifs Home, where Louis Armstrong was taken as a young boy. He was just sort of living in the street pretty freely and got in some trouble with the law. And he was taken to live at the Colored Waves Home. And that is where he first lifted a horn to his lips and obviously from there changed the course of modern music. And that's at the far end of the Esplanade corridor, just beyond an old. A potter's field, a graveyard for the enslaved and for those who can't afford the expensive mausoleums. Just beyond that pauper's field is the old colored waste home where Armstrong first learned to play.
- [20:16]
B
And this gets to another aspect of your book that we've touched upon, but it's probably worth highlighting, which is that you're not just simply writing a book about curiosities. You're not just saying, in this house was born this figure, and it was here that this person and compose that you're talking about the interaction between the city and these figures and how the life of the city, not the literary life, but the broader life, just shaped their lives and is reflecting their works. And I was thinking about how that comes out very well in your chapter on the Basin Street Quarter. I love how you open it with a Toni Morrison work and very quickly start Talking about an aspect about New Orleans life which is very famous or influenced, infamous, which is, you know, the red light district and what's going on there.
- [21:07]
A
Absolutely. You know, I'm glad you mentioned that. It's one of the surprising discoveries I made as I began to work on this book is the way the literary activity, the activities around the Word that have happened in these different neighborhoods, oddly enough, tend to cohere around certain kinds of themes such that, you know, the theme of the Royal street work is all masquerade, double identity, kind of not being quite sure who someone is. St. Claude has its own theme. So does Esplanade. And when I get to Basin Street, I was just stunned at the degree to which all of the major writing about that part of town coheres around a great preoccupation with memory, specifically the way music and memory kind of fit hand in glove. Music as a way. This comes from Sidney Bechet's biography, Autobiography. In fact, music is a tool for remembering, for coping, for managing the cataclysmic traumas of the slave trade and the New Orleans was the hub of human trafficking. Storyville, the red light district is a kind of unwitting memorial to that practice. As my colleague Joseph Roach has pointed out, a red light district is a scene of bodies with price tags, which is not to say very different from what the slave markets were. It's a rental market as opposed to ownership, but that is. It's a version of the same thing. And that kind of unwitting memorial to the past shows up in other kinds of forms all through the major literature. The great poet Brenda Marie Osby, who writes so much about the surrounding neighborhood of Treme, directly adjoining Basin Street. Her great theme is memory. It is a poetics of memory. And memory as a kind of sacred, even ritualistic form of ancestor veneration, of being in a kind of dialogue with death, with those who have gone on before us. And that the purpose of her poetry, like so much music of that neighborhood, is to honor those who have gone before us. And a kind of ancestor veneration, music as a music and poetry as in service to memory. There's a dazzling memoir, in fact, a number of them that have come out of that neighborhood. But most importantly, Albert Woodfox, an African American man who was in the Black Panther Party, was organizing Black Panther activity at the Angola Penitentiary, where he was serving a short sentence. A guard got killed. He got blamed for it. He spent. Spends 43 years in solitary confinement. He survives. He comes out in 2016, writes a memoir called Solitary that I think is one of the most extraordinary stories ever to come out of the city. And it is a profound. As a memoir, it is a work of memory, but also about the way memory worked in his project. He said how he stayed sane during those 43 years in solitary confinement was. He had a purpose, he said. He said, my purpose in keeping my head together was to honor my ancestors. He said, I did it for them. And so the heroic, even kind of mystic practices of memory in that neighborhood are so profound, it just gives me goosebumps when I contemplate them. And as I say, it shows up in the way Sidney Bechet talks about his music. It shows up in Brenda Muriasby's Poetry Street. It's at the center of Albert Woodfox's survival strategy, doing 43 years in solitary. And other chapters have their own other themes. You know, There's Esplanade and St. Claude Royal. St. Charles has a theme. And so that was one of the surprising discoveries I made. You mentioned, I should quickly interject, you mentioned the Toni Morrison manuscript. That too is about a kind of journey into African American memory, the collective memory of black America. She wrote a musical called New Orleans, the Storyville Musical, and it was never published and never performed. I found it in the Princeton, the Morrison archives at Princeton. And lead off that chapter on Basin street talking about this lost. Well, not quite lost because it was in the archives at Princeton, but this largely unknown Toni Morrison manuscript that's all about Storyville and all about the work of remembering.
- [25:31]
B
And I find the fact that the way you describe how there's evidence that the manuscript was partially burned, you have signs that it had been exposed to fire. There's something very kind of maybe poignant and very telling about it. In a way, I thought it connected very nicely to what you described in terms of how so many of these writers are coming to terms or processing or expressing aspects of New Orleans very troubled and complicated past.
- [26:04]
A
Oh, thank you for saying that. Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, it's so funny, it was kind of unwitting on my part. I didn't quite consciously intend this. But by starting that chapter describing the kind of flame gnawed manuscript of Toni Morrison's that is itself a work about remembering African American experience. That manuscript has come through fire and survived, as has the population of that neighborhood. It's a metaphor for the history that that cultural center is all about, preserving the memories, very specifically of coming through slavery. In Michael Ondagi's famous title, Coming through slaughter. Just as that manuscript came through fire to survive in that Princeton archive, the population of Treme came through the fire, the hell of slavery, to produce these cultural wonders that we know, that the world knows as the music of the city. Jazz most prominently, but R and B and gospel and rock and roll, and now hip hop.
- [27:06]
B
Now, as you continue through your book, you start to expand your focus to include other neighborhoods as well. And I was thinking of your chapter upon St. Charles Avenue and Garden District, and you start incorporating writers who casual readers might be a bit more familiar with. And I was thinking here about John Kennedy o', Toole, Anne Rice, and how they reflect the degree to which New Orleans as a writer city is not just the writer city for previous generations or for a few scholars, but is in fact one in which literally millions of readers still engage with to this day.
- [27:50]
A
Absolutely. You know, Anne Rice's case is so spectacular, as you know, as you say, she's a vital presence in the contemporary publishing industry. Her works have sold in excess of 150 million copies. I think that there is probably no single figure who has done more to shape the global, the world's popular, Popular imagination of the world of this city more than Anne Rice. You know, I mean, it's. Her work's in 80 or 90 languages now, 150 million copies out there. I can't think of anybody who has done more to shape how the world sees this place than she did. And she grew up around the Garden District in the Irish Channel, born in the Irish Channel, very close to the Garden District. And then with her astounding wealth on the success of her work, began to collect mansions in the Garden District as a kind of hobby. I think she owned six, eight, nine of them at one time or another. And they are all. Each of them are just dazzling.
- [28:48]
B
Nice hobby. If you can get it, you can afford it.
- [28:51]
A
It's not in my budget, but it was certainly possible for her. And it's an extraordinary story because she grew up in a very hard environment. Her mother had a very severe alcohol problem, died of alcoholism when Ann was in her teens. She left the family, kind of left the city when she was a senior in high school. I think partly just from the grief of. Of seeing her mother disintegrate. This way moves to Dallas and then on to San Francisco at age 19. Around 1960. And later in that decade, she began to write about vampires. She lost a daughter to a form of leukemia, a blood disorder, and became preoccupied with blood as a metaphor and so on. And by the early 70s, she had a manuscript that her husband immediately said, our lives have changed. We're going to be fabrically rich from this. And it turned out to be true. She, you know, by the mid-70s, that was well on its way to becoming Interview with the Vampire was a cult favorite. And the cult just kept growing and kept growing and kept growing until she, you know, she wrote, I think, ultimately, 35 novels that kind of spun out from around that initial project. And what a story. And it. And it is a, you know, as a story of blood and power, it kind of fits metaphorically with, you know, a kind of wider history of the Garden District and of the American. What we call the American part of town, the St. Charles corridor, which is a very different. You know, there's a lot of. It's a big part of town with different areas to it. The University District, the Irish Channel, an area called Central City that has a very important history. But Anne Rice is a towering figure, and of course, she died just a year or two ago, but particularly in the years she lived in the city, which was mostly the 90s and the first decade of the 21st century, she was just a towering figure, a person of real clout and a famous thrower of great parties and just a formidable presence in the city.
- [30:45]
B
Now, in your final chapter, you have this. You call it Outskirts. You describe the outlying neighborhoods. And yet what I noticed in it was that you were talking in that chapter about a lot of writers who. Whose association with the city was in some ways incidental. And I'm thinking here, for example, about H.P. lovecraft. You mentioned the Call of Cthulhu. I'm thinking about Alan Moore, who is famously not even American, he's English, but he is. He contributes to one of the comic book character who we associate with bayous and swamps and how, as you explain, it's very much of a New Orleans associated figure, as much as so many of the other characters that local writers have written about.
- [31:36]
A
Absolutely. You know, in Swamp Thing, Alan Moore is explicitly situating that comic book series in the swamps that are just south of the city, just across the river and down those bayous a little bit, not 30 miles outside of town. And incredibly important. You know, it's on that side of the river going that direction. William Burroughs lived briefly, much closer to the city, but Swamp Thing is just beyond that. And that's, oddly enough, the same place where Beyonce's ancestors have lived for generations and, in fact, still do. She, of course, grew up in Houston, but like many Houstonians, they have deep roots in New Orleans and Beyonce is from that same area where Swamp Thing takes place, Houma and Thibodeau, Louisiana. Again, just 15, 20, 25 miles south of the city at most. And. And it's true, I think, to really understand the city, you need to think about the way it's surrounded by swamps, with all that that implies in terms of. Swamps are very pretty much impossible to police. Hence a smuggler's paradise, as I've called it in other contexts. And a place, too, where the enslaved can dream of running away to freedom, living as a maroon. And so the swamp, swamps are a central spur to the imagination of the city as what you run into the minute you move out and away from the town. As I was talking about with the St. Claude chapter earlier in our conversation, it wasn't that long ago that the minute you left the French Quarter, you were basically heading into swamps full of maroons and pirates, smugglers, what have you. And so it's a very important. I feel like you can't really understand New Orleans without thinking about swamps. And of course, with the Alan Moore comic book, Swamp Thing, and some of some other works out there, it's a. We're really seeing in our time, in recent decades, the swamps are really getting their due in terms of cultural expression and literature that foregrounds them. Obviously, in the aftermath of Katrina, we began to. We just were newly, urgently attuned to the way water figures in our lives here. And what the future of the city holds, holds what the future holds for the city in terms of water, and therefore thinking about swamps and learning how to live with water and kind of not sort of draining the swamps and pushing them away, but learning to let the swamps kind of be with us is clearly the future of the city. Creating kind of a lot more lagoons and bayous, kind of drainage areas and holding ponds that will be filled with plants to sort of stabilize them, and they're going to look like swamps. In other words, the city 50 years now is going to look a whole lot more like it did in the 19th century, I suppose, than it has in any time since then. We're about to have to get much more comfortable with having a whole lot of water around.
- [34:29]
B
Now, you conclude your book with this excellent summary of works, and I love what you call it. Want more. And the history you describe, various works of history, various movies. For people who maybe want to get an advanced start on that before they read your book, where would you recommend they start in terms of engaging with this very rich cultural history of New Orleans? Like what One novel should they begin with as they're reading your book? Or what movie should they maybe watch before they go to the bookstore and buy this?
- [35:05]
A
Boy, that's a tough one. That is a tough one, because probably, I imagine, I bet I talk about 150, 200 different works of literature and film music in here, primary literature. What would be the first thing to read, you know, if you wanted to drop into a history? Jason Barry's City of a Million Dreams is a great general history of the whole city, aimed for general readers. And it's a quick dive into the extraordinary stuff here, particularly for newcomers. I think it would be really useful. There's a. I think the best movie ever made about the city. It was actually made in the 1980s. It's called down by Law, and it is a magical, visionary masterpiece about the city. The kind of the. The nightscape of the city and the swamps and the Orleans Parish prison. So it really covers a lot of crucial kind of nodes, if you will, crucial motifs. I say watch down by Law. Read Jason Barry, City of a Million Dreams. Go listen to wwoz, the jazz and heritage station. That is the kind of the soundtrack of life in this city with contemporary jazz and traditional jazz and gospel and all kinds of R and B and blues, et cetera. That would be the way to kind of get yourself ready to read my book and then to get yourself a ticket and come on into town.
- [36:25]
B
That sounds like a fantastic invitation indeed.
- [36:27]
A
I hope everyone will come.
- [36:30]
B
We've apologized. We thank you for the time you've taken to spend with us. Before we go, could you tell us what you're working on now?
- [36:39]
A
I have a whole bunch of little things kind of percolating. I'm writing a sort of a teacher's guide to how to teach the African American poetry of New Orleans, with a particular interest in the work of Brenda Marie Osby. So it'll be basically how to teach Brenda Marie Osby in the context of the black poetry of New Orleans. I'm also just writing a lot of poems myself these days. I'm also just playing the saxophone all the time. I was talking to my brother on the phone last night. He said, what are you going to do this summer? Now that this book is out, what are you going to do this summer? I said, my goal is to be the laziest man in Louisiana. He said, that's a high bar. I said, well, we'll see. You know, I just. I put so much work into this book over the last couple of years that my first priority is to sort of lay in the hammock and be the laziest man in Louisiana for a minute. When I'm not doing that, I'm going to play the saxophone, work on some poems, and develop this sort of teacher's guide. From there, I just don't know. I'm just gonna. I'm at a stage in my career where I'm not rushing on to the next thing. I think I'm gonna lay in that hammock and until until inspiration comes. And if that takes a minute, so be it, you know?
- [37:49]
B
Well, congratulations on reaching that point of your career. It sounds like the dream. Thank you.
- [37:53]
A
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
- [37:56]
B
Thank you very much for taking some time out of your schedule to speak with us. I hope you have a wonderful day.
- [37:59]
A
And likewise enjoyed it so much. Mark. Thank you.