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HISTORY 2216

"A Tribune Editorial: Let's Get Serious" (The New Orleans Tribune 32.1, January 2016, p. 4) urges us to us 2016 as "a chance to regroup, refocus and demand more of all our leaders  --  and ourselves.  We ought to be tired of making do, giving up, settling for less or selling out to serve selfish desires."  It would a godsend if Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond exercise is imprimatur and declared  that the editorial must be  required reading at all Masses during February 2016.  The editorial might also help us to decide whether a cross named Ted, a woman named Clinton, a card named Trump, or Sanders of the River will be the next President of the United States.  Let's get very  serious.

This is a year of terrible struggle and mercy.  We should avoid, as much as possible, walking forking paths in a digital world.  We do need to notice that families matter.  We should ask why social scientists and mass media write endlessly about the African American family, but seldom explore the enormous complexities of Jewish, Islamic,  Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and Catholic families.  Those families matter and give shape to demographic shifts. And we may understand little about unemployment in our nation unless we understand American  families, unlevel playing fields,  and the serious questions regarding global economies raised by Jeffry A. Frieden in Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006).

We need to get serious about the flaws of the criminal justice system and the ascent of  privatized prisons, inadequate attention to mental health issues and police irresponsibility,  and  the love affair with privatized public education (consult "The State of Public Education in New Orleans 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina" by Patrick Sims and Vincent Rossmeier, recently published by the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives).  We need to get serious about why the male-specificity of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) is a clear signal that the new Jane Crow enables American females to be more at risk than they were in 1916.  Can we transcend our capitalist miseducations enough to read Alondra Nelson's The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparation and Reconciliation After the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016)?  "Genetic ancestry testing," Nelson concludes, "is but one implement in an entire tool kit of tactics that, marshaled together, must be brought to the project of building racial reconciliation and social justice" (166).  When we get serious, we are forced to ask if reconciliation can manifest itself in a republic that thinks it is a democracy and if social justice in anyone's lifetime will ever be more than a beautiful theory.

I completely agree that we must "get serious about the laundry list of problems and nuisances our community faces on the local, state, and national levels" and that we must save ourselves before we can save Flint, Michigan and New Orleans.  Yes, let us get serious as the editorial wisely advises about getting serious.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 2, 2016

Reading Michael Zell

Reading Michael Allen Zell with handmade bourbon whisky

Zell, Michael Allen. ERRATA. New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 2012.

Having cycled through twenty-two unidentified roads in THE KATRINA PAPERS, I can groove as Maker's Mark and I read ERRATA.  The book belongs to a typical 21st century species of post-something writing, a genre that is not a genre.  It is an event.

Between the opening sentence "As the monk, so the socialite" (15) and the final one "Flux stars fall into the internal laws of syntax" (110), a reader is invited to meander for 22 diary days with the cabbie Raymond Russell (the printed manifestation of Michael Zell's artistic consciousness) through streets --Esplanade, Franklin Avenue, Bienville, Bourbon, Rampart, Burgundy, Kerlerec, Dauphine, Barracks, Tulane, Broad, Canal, Frenchman and Chef Menteur Highway (a street when it wants to be). One effective device some writers from New Orleans use is the catalog of street names to distance themselves from the unworthy gawking of critics.  Bears mark territory with spoors.  New Orleans writers use the shibboleth of Tchoupitoulas.

ERRATA is a remarkable metafiction, a novel that engages literacy with a vengeance.  The book is not designed for readers who don't have more than a post-Katrina charter school education, or, for that matter, more than a run-of-the-football-field American education.  Who is equipped to appreciate Zell's references to Faubourg Marigny, Bruno Schulz, "early Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets" (24), Herman Melville, Josef Vachal, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Henry Mathews, Mallarme, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernandez, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Heberto Padilla, Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Robert Burton?  If you have not read The Anatomy of Melancholy, the humor of associating Robert Burton with "The Anatomy of the Distribution of Temperaments" (100) is as lost on you as the unique humor of associating  Richard Wright's Cross Damon with Raskolnikov.  You are obviously a reader who does not merit an urn burial.

It is clever of the persona/protagonist Raymond Russell to know as Michael Zell knows damned well that there is "no market for pastiche-strewn pages"  but a tantalizing market for hyperliterate meditations glued between covers.

Zell uses ERRATA to testify that "New Orleans is one of a few cities which attracts those with versatile lives, an unexpected stop along the way for at least a little while" (77).  Therein is a warning.  If you know what it means to miss New Orleans, you are most likely a victim of "the Raskolnikov who didn't swing an axe" (101), for you have purchased the hype that "civilians shouldn't be criminals" (100). Maker's Mark and I  deem ERRATA a fine meditation on why Caucasians flock to New Orleans like predatory fowl.  They need sanctuary from the Inferno.  And the book is a mediation of something else that Creole manners forbid one to give a name.  Some dimensions of words and being in the United States are to be experienced in the absolute solitude of reading ERRATA.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 2, 2016