Catching Up -- Trying To, Anyway

Plus el V's flying off on the 6th to Barranquilla, Colombia for their annual jazz festival. It's a great gig, and he's staying a couple of extra days to poke some more into Cartegena.
The meetings we were to have this week have been postponed due to Irene, as well as the first rehearsal for Las Vidas Perfectas. They're postponed even more so because the Barranquilla trip.

The jazz festival means lucky el V will miss the 9/11 mess. Not only the relentless sanctimonious drumbeat of terrorism rhetoric, but the horrors of having both Obama and dubya in the city on the same day. Anytime a POTUS is here it ties up eveything else. Dub, loathing NYC, spared us most of the time, but O is here a lot, playing footsies with Wall Street. Which, as you know Barbara, isn't that far from where we live, and certainly the ground routes there and back are part of our territory. These are the same routes the observers who will be hording themselves down to Ground Zero for the hypocritical performances will take, coming and going.  9/11 is going to be a local gridlock disaster.

9/11 imprisons me in my apartment again ....

Now for some perspective on our impending local gridlock 'disaster' --

Upstate and Vermont are having an awful time, and in New Jersey too, flooding is still on-going. As we have learned over and over again because so many people we know and to whom we are close have suffered hurricane and earthquake disasters, and many of them have suffered enormously -- the worst of these disasters is after the storm is over.  At some point people begin suffering too from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I suffered nothing personally. Yet, last night I dreamed all night about being in a hurricane. All of the dreams featured my new! improved! sooperdooper flashlight that we never needed. A lot of the dreams were set in Cuba. Hurricanes have become a personal terror because we have so many near and dear who live where hurricanes are constant dangers, including the Caribbean and I’ve heard so many of their horrible experiences now, for years. Not to mention the earthquake in Haiti that affected so many people we know personally, not to mention everyone else in that island victimized by capital and history.

This is the Post Climate Change New World Order, as proclaimed by bush1, as implemented by bush2, as explained by Yours Truly:

Federal government has no place in disasters, whether warning and providing preparation assistance before the disaster happens, rescue and assistance during the disaster, and after, for rescue, assistance, clean-up and financial aid. This is the function of private insurance.Also, taxes must be raised on the 40% of the population that is poor, lower and mid middle-class because these groups are not paying their fair share.

Except for paying for everything most of us are of no consequence to our government, that exists to defend and expand the rights and conquests of the corporations around the globe, which is the only function of a government.

The big September national observance of labor day, in honor of people working is replaced by 9/11, Terrorism Day.

Irene -- The End

We’ll be heading back downtown to clean up the mess I left the apartment in a little later today. Despite what was said all day yesterday, most of the subway system was operational by rush hour this morning. Gotta be sure the Stock Exchange is up and running, you betcha!

Beautiful day here. Garbage trucks everywhere collecting the tree debris. We Unruly Women of the Jumel Terrace Hurricane Irene Posse were cleaning up after breakfast (of Virginia peaches, Alabama strawberry and blackberry jams, biscuits, Maryland bacon, New York eggs, bagels, lox, and cream cheese) this morning and all going, “We have electricity! We have running hot and cold water! We have garbage trucks picking up!” It would have been a very different morning if none of those were in effect. We wouldn’t have been dancing so much to old time New Orleans blues while cleaning off the stove top, scrubbing the porcelain sink, gathering the dish towels etc. to dump into the washer.

On the other hand, by chance, the three of us women, our Hostess, her sister-in-law and I, plus Niece, all have experience of heating water without electricity, washing things in tubs by hand.  BTW, that Niece?  She's craaackerjack!  The world is going to hear from her.  We're within walking distance of her dorm, so we'll hear from her in other ways as well.

So, for us and our hosts, this turned in a mini-vacation, in which we got to spend quality time together, which we’ve all been too busy all spring and summer to do – we weren’t even able to get together for a meal

Dayem, sometimes we’re lucky.

Today, August 29th, The Failure of the Levees Does Not Stop

Today is the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Tonight at 7 p.m. at New Orleans's Duncan Plaza, across from City Hall, there will be "A Candlelight Rally of Remembrance and Resilience to Honor Pre-Katrina New Orleans Public School Employees," commemorating the only mass firing of an entire public school workforce in the nation's history.

*Hurricane Irene* El V Video - Song Written Today

Go here for the YouTube premiere a half hour after el V wrote "Hurricane Irene."

Ensconced

Left home about 7:30 AM and taxied uptown.  Air already sodden, the sky an unpleasant ashen color, with haze, mist, fog.

We've finished helping do the physical prep for the house and so on.  So now we're chilling and thinking about making dinner when the time comes.  We're hungry!  We've had a couple of periods of rain already.

However it rolls, however bad, however easy (but I'm sure it isn't going to be easy), I'm glad we're up here and not at home.  What makes it really OK is that we were able to help and will be able to continue helping our friends, and they also help their neighbors.  Not only are our friends really brilliant, intelligent and creative, they've got a community consciousness, as well as that Southern hospitality gene.  All over again I'm aware of why we love them so much.

I hope everyone is safe, but I know not everyone is.  Three people have been killed by Irene already.  She's so huge and moving so slowly.

Hurricane Irene

The mayor is telling us we should figure out now where we want to evacuate to -- preferably we're all supposed to go stay with friends and relatives out of the city. Right. The flood zones are classified as A -- most likely to flood,  B -- less likely to flood, and C -- unlikely to flood under circumstances that aren't a direct hit by a hurricane. We're not on the Atlantic side of lower Manhattan, though we're on the edge of a B zone that bleeds into the least likely to flood C zone. Our emergency shelter is a school where we vote, that's in this zone too, a couple of blocks down.

We're expected to get clobbered on Saturday and Sunday. It's not as if anything is being done to tape windows, for instance, or sandbag the basements. I would leave town now, if I had anywhere to go within the region. All our friends in this part of the world are on the Atlantic coast too. As I know all too well, it's not the storm itself that's the real danger. It's afterwards with no water, food and power. My nerves are shot. el V on the west coast isn't helping matters. He's not getting home until at least 9 pm tomorrow night. If we are to leave town it should be NOW, not Saturday, when the storm arrives.

It's August 25th, you all.  I have all too personal knowledge of the horrors of the aftermath of that flooding.

I'm trying to figure out where to go after the flooding if we can't live in the apt. for some days.  Our last greatest storm that took out the power as well as flooding the subways, left big parts of the city without electricity for ten days.  That's an impossible time to live without electricity in this city at this time. That time we were without here only about three days, which long enough in August.

I'm making lists of what to pack for the shelter, and what to pack for leaving town all together.  I'm trying to get food together that can utlized without electricty, or cooking -- stove is gas, but ?  Flashlights, batteries, candles, water -- I sure wish el V were here, and I wasn't trying to do this by myself.

Why Contemporary Written Rhetoric so Often Fails

The above use of fail is a Webster's definition, not urban / internet dictionary meaning --

"To lose strength, to weaken; to stop functioning normally; to become absent or inadequate; to become unsuccessful in a venture such as marriage or passing a test." Synonyms include 'breaking down.'

These days many a genre novel, particularly one hopeful of appeal to that expanding YA market, is narrated by the protagonist in a sort of ... what? hipster? style? This, in order to give an impression of contemporary, up-to-the-minute, I-live-in-your-world, I'm-one-of-you veneer that will urge the reader to suspend her disbelief. Secondary characters when in dialog with other the Primary and other Secondaries may resort to this tone and style to a greater degree.

We also encounter this with increasing frequence in non-fiction.

There are readers who, thus, are finding the reading experience less rewarding, their suspension of disbelief canceled to large degree by this style of writing. When it's non-fiction writing, intended to impart important information, this style and tone interferes with taking the writer seriously.

Why are writers resorting to such a degree to urban dictionary speak?

Maud Newton breaks it down here: "Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace," which itself refers back to Wallace's own influential essay that she describes as the "The ur-text of this movement ...." "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (1993 -- full text available in pdf several places online).

[ "Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument. 

Visit some blogs — personal blogs, academic blogs, blogs associated with some of our most esteemed periodicals — to see these tendencies writ large. My own archives, dating back to 2002, are no exception." ]

All this by way of now understanding why the latest works of several writers I have always liked and admired aren't working. Now these are works of entertainment. We're not supposed to take them seriously. However within the world of the novel you must take the characters seriously in order to suspend your disbelief, because the characters take themselves seriously. But this veneer of sort-of hipster, sort-of intimate, sort-of slacker has become another barrier to disbelief's suspension.

In fiction, as it is entertainment, perhaps that doesn't matter. These styles come and go, particularly in genre. But in non-fiction, when it is supposed to be journalism, this style is detrimental to our national ability to assess, analyse and understand what is happening to us all, why it is happening, and impossible to work out an approach to change it. Oooops, I just turned political. 

ETA: When it comes to genre, the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on tone, style and presentation cannot be over-estimated, in my estimation .... However, what will work on a stage or a screen, with all the other resources available to the writers, such as actors, camera angles, scene editing -- may very well come across very differently in a page of text.