Test Run Librarian

Yes, NOLA = New Orleans, LA (or "La." for Tom!). Why am I not an artist? Do you know how many people have asked me that question? Well, here's the story: Since I can remember, I'v always sketched, painted, crafted, wrote stuff in journals, etc. By the time I was 18, I had amassed a portfolio large enough to be admitted as an art major at Rollins College. Long story short... I didn't pursue my degree in studio art because my portfolio full of mounted sketches, acrylic paintings, sculpted figures, in addition to my poetry and art journals, was ruined in the NOLA Deluge of 1995. Yes, all my work was RUINED. All those years under water and gone. My heart is still totally and 100% broken - It's a v-i-s-c-e-r-a-l pain. Did I use that word right, Marc with a C?! I have been able to take one low-commitment acrylic painting class, but I gave all my work away because I did not want to look at it. (I took a watercolor class, too, but I dropped it because the instructor would rub all over the women -- really gross.) A strange thing occurred the night before the flood (which I think is the night that I saw the Beastie Boys with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) -- I opened the door to my patio, and a crawfish walked through the door. I thought it was a scorpion (why?), and I beat it to death. I'm sure I looked like a crazy insane person to the married man whose tree house overlooked the yard. That treehouse had a large window in it and he exposed himself on occasion.

OK. The reason why I am here. My favorite books are the following:
1) Heart is a Lonely Hunter by C. McCullers. No one has ever come to close to capturing the depth of human emotion than this Queen of Southern Gothic.
2) Cold Mountain by C. Frazier. One of my favorite genres is Civil War fiction, and some of my favorite poems are the Cold Mountain poems of Han Shan, a Chinese Zen poet who lived in the T'ang Dynasty. This novel combines both & there really is a Cold Mountain in North Carolina. I made a point of seeing it.
3) Dream Songs by J. Berryman. Poor Jon Berryman killed himself 4 days before I was born. His father killed himself when Berryman was 11 (or 8? 10?). Berryman's Dream Songs are the mental road map of his disintegrated mind. One of this confessional poet's alter egos is Henry, a vaudeville character. Berryman also wrote a poem about his anger towards his father: the poem talks about his wish to un-inter his decayed father's corpse.
4) A Confederacy of Dunces by J. Toole. This book describes the lived & felt atmosphere of NOLA perfectly.
5) Sons of Heaven by Terrence Cheng, a new writer. It is a fictionalized account of the Tiananmen Square 'incident' of 1989. Please read this book if you can!

posted by Amanda @ Thursday, May 27, 2004