2005-09-01, 2:28 p.m.: Katrina, thy name is mud. Very sad now that we did not get a chance, even an evening, to see Nola-as-was (once the bedraggled whore, now the sodden martyr) last year when we went a-cruising from there. Alas, poor French quarter, Marie Leveau, Vampire Lestat, Kate Chopin and "Desiree's Baby," glad-mournful street bands walking funerals to the resting-places, sequin-studded social club princesses, Alligator and his cajun band, "Angel Heart" and gentlemen in crumpled white linen suits, Carnivale with its beads and breasts and unavoidable public drunkenness: For better or worse, these are my ideas, my images, my clutched-in-the-hand clichees of New Orleans, my preconceived notions from either movies or books (or music) - there is nothing else. I hate to think of them being destroyed or vanishing "like the Scythians, Sarmats, Kimmeriys, Huasteks" (I've been reading excepts from Voices from Chernobyl: An Oral History of a Disaster again. Crying over the accounts of Chernobyl, of what happened then, like I cried over the tsunami - but I have not been able to spare a tear for New Orleans, not that way. I can't say why).
Beyond sad news, I have to say that this story of zombie invasions has had me most tickled (thanks MetaFilter). You can't make this stuff up (well, I spose you could but it wouldn't be as funny then):
Little did the zombies know that the "American Idol" organizers had seen the Craigslist ad.
"We've been on 24-hour zombie watch," said coordinating producer Patrick Lynn. "We thought it would be fun to have them on the show."
And that is how the zombies ended up squatting down on the concrete of the Erwin Center's second level, signing release forms to allow their images to be broadcast by Fox TV.
"Zombies, I need you back here!" Lynn shouted. "All you zombies, I need to get a group shot!" The undead complied, waving their bloodied limbs about for the TV cameras.
Even flesh-eating ghouls, it seems, want to be on TV.
2005-08-26, 5:27 p.m.: Take from the Denver Public Library annual book sale:
Pale Horse, Pale Rider - Katherine Anne Porter (Modern Library edition) (I probably already have 2 copies of this book)
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry - 1952 (One of those great, thick, small books with the ugly brown library bindings)
Tales of the Alhambra - Washington Irving (A lovely small hardback, printed in Spain in 1963 and inscribed in beautiful loopy handwriting "Lynette Emeny / Purchased in the Alhambra Palace / August 14, 1964"
The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy (Continuing my tradition of reading Thomas Hardy only in cheesy '60s paperback)
Clarissa - Samuel Richardson (another Modern Library)
The Aeneid - Virgil tr. by Robert Fitzgerald (A nice, tight hardback)
Little Men - Louisa May Alcott (I've never read this one. Pages are sadly over-yellowed)
String Light -C.D. Wright
Shadowing the Ground - David Ignatow
The Imaginary Lover - Alicia Ostriker (It wasn't till I got home that I saw this one was autographed.)
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
The Poems of Richard Wilbur
The Father - Sharon Olds (Receipt from the Tattered Cover, dated 10/23/92, still inside)
(Pretty sure I already own at least The Father, but at 25 cents all the poetry books were a pretty decent bargain)
The Arabian Nights (This is a lovely 1946 hardback with many illustrations, including color endpapers and more inside, by someone named Earle Goodenow.)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte (A very tight Everyman from 1958)
Martin Chuzzlewit - Charles Dickens (An obviously popular big HB in library binding)
From the "Better Books"/priced-as-marked room:
The Smithsonian Book of Books - Michael Olmert (It's a lovely near-coffee-table book in a case)
Angels: An Endangered Species - Malcolm Godwin
I also got about 7-8 books in the children's room. Followed by lunching at Little Anita's and my very first visit to Tattered Cover (!), where I got Phil Lesh's Grateful Dead memoir as a birthday present for P. and 2 journals I don't know, Elixir (Denver) and Harpur Palate, the latter with a story by Ryan in it.
