Fall Reading

What looked to be a profitable weekend turned out to be a rain-soaked fiasco. Not even a hard rain either. Just enough drizzle for just long enough each day to make people reconsider their plans. Oh, well, we'll try again next week.

Meanwhile, the finished books have been piling up, and I'm sure many of you have been delaying your own trips to your local library or independent bookstore until you got the good word about some new releases. Well, your fervent requests (other known as the voices in my head) have been heard, and although I refuse to do anything for the voice that keeps demanding I do physical harm to Gerald Ford (or is it Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford?), I can accommodate the rest of you.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
by Josh Neufeld
Pantheon Books
24.95

Believe me, I was very much predisposed to love this book, a graphic novelization of the experiences of five New Orleanians just before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. Artists like Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco have produced masterpieces of the genre illuminating the political complexities of revolutionary Iran, beseiged Palestine and war-torn Bosnia through personal stories and compelling visuals. And I think this book would have been more effective, and viscerally jarring, if published sooner after the fact.

Of the five stories, two (those of high schooler Kwame and French Quarter resident "The Doctor") are treated quite superficially and probably could have been edited out. The other three have their riveting moments, but nothing really new is added to the creative/literary discourse. Leo and Michelle are both described as having grown up in the city, and Denise is identified as a sixth-generation New Orleanian, but I never felt their personal or family histories with the city through their dialogue or actions.

I don't think there is any doubt that a great graphic novel can be written about the Katrina experience, whether intensely personal or grander in sweep. But I would argue that it hasn't been written yet.

1959: The Year Everything Changed
by Fred Kaplan
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
27.95

I approached this book with a fair amount of skepticism, hoping the emphasis on the year wouldn't come across as gimmicky. 1968, for instance, has been responsible for the slaughter of how many innocent forests over the last 40-plus years (the fact that it happens to be the year I was born is purely coincidence, I'm sure)? And let's not forget Bernard De Voto's 1846, or the year 1919, or 1989, other years that have had books devoted to them. But I could think of enough intriguing associations with 1959 (the Beats, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, seminal recordings by Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman) to give it a try, and I'm glad I did.

Kaplan, a Slate columnist, skillfully shows the breathtaking volume of cultural, political and technological change within the twelve-month period while resisting the temptation to force connections between them. While the launch of Sputnik looms large in the conventional history of the time, could one make the argument that the development of the microchip and the birth control pill were just as significant in terms of social evolution? What about economic impact? How to quantify such things?

The contributions of the late 1960's are often reduced by the cultural shorthand into the narrow catefgories of politics and music, but Kaplan's accounting of the accomplishments of 1959 are simply remarkable: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X made life-changing trips to India and the Middle East, respectively; Fidel Castro made a triumphant visit to New York; Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and John Coltrane's Giant Steps were recorded in the same freaking month, for God's sake (just two months after Coleman played on Davis' Kind of Blue; to me, that's like a scenario where Jimi Hendrix played on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and then turned around and recorded Are You Experienced. It just doesn't happen!).

But what about the books, Parker, what about the books? William Burroughs' surreal Beat masterpiece Naked Lunch, Norman Mailer's Advertisements For Myself (not his best work, but a crucial one in Mailer's transition from straightforward novelist to the New Journalism of Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago), and, unmentioned by Kaplan, Kerouac's Subterraneans, an autobiographical account of the author's interracial romance. Speaking of which, Kerouac wrote the introduction to Robert Frank's The Americans, a book of stark black-and-white photographs by the Swiss immigrant with a Guggenhiem Fellowship, pictures in dramatic contrast to the Mad Men-propogated glamor of the era: "He (Frank) saw the way people sat side by side at lunch counters without exchanging a word or even looking at one another. He grasped the sheer oddity of the drive-in theater, where people watched movies--by nature a communal experience--in the isolation of their cars. He took a close look at the massive auto factories, where workers were just another set of cogs in the machinery. And he gazed in horror at segregation in the South and the strange hypocricies it produced," (p. 185).

So read this book. And then read Lady Chatterley's Lover, marveling at the fact that it couldn't be legally brought into this country before 1959. Order Shadows from Netflix, dig out the Dave Brubeck and Lenny Bruce albums (now there's a man who died for his society's sins), and reflect on the last 50 years. Oh, yeah, the first two American soldiers died in Vietnam that year, as the United States government and military embarked on an effort to prop up an illegitimate and unpopular puppet regime by force, to the disastrous detriment of our and their country. I guess maybe not everything changes, after all.