Habitus

by David Gutherz · 07/19/10

Although the mourning does not officially begin for another six hours or so, eastern standard time, the day before Tisha B’av is always a somber time. Even as we prepare to recount the official litany of destruction–destruction of the Temples, fall of Betar, etc.–each year offers new tragedies, new reasons to say aicha. Foremost in many our minds this year, despite the temporary respite from gushing oil, are our friends on the gulf coast–whether feathered, finned,  or human; jewish, goyish or uncommitted–whose lives and livelihoods have been endangered by the BP spill. JTA columnist Edmon Rodman captures the mood precisely when, interweaving excerpts from the book of Lamentations, he writes:

“On this day of national Jewish mourning, when I usually have trouble finding something over which to mourn, to fast and not wear leather, I turn on the news and gone is the joy, my “dancing is turned into mourning” (5:15).“For your ruin is vast as the sea: “Who can heal you?” (2:13)

Then I view with alarm the maps that measure the spread of the slick, or grow confused at the calculations of just how much oil. As the BP spokesmen and politicians try to soothe my pain, I hear:

“The Lord has delivered me into the hands
“Of those I cannot withstand” (1:14).
And what to say of the role of corporate profits and maintenance shortcuts?
“All around me He has built
“Misery and hardship” (3:5).

While eating a fish dinner, I think of the fishermen who now spend their time fishing for oil, and the small businessmen who can no longer make their living from the sea and think:
“The old men are gone from the gate,
“The young men from their music” (5:14).
“All her inhabitants sigh
“As they search for bread” (1:11).

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by Ekaterina Krasavina · 06/14/10

Rodger Kamenetz, the Louisiana-based author who described post-Katrina New Orleans in Habitus 04, continues to trace the city’s misfortunes. Five years ago when New Orleans was struck by the hurricane, it was the human factor that accounted for the graveness of the consequences. This time the disaster is man-made from the start, and the management of its consequences is no more effective than before. In his article for Tablet, Kamenetz compares the bureaucratic and political upheaval that followed the BP oil spill with the absurdist world of Franz Kafka.

He lived every day of his life with a persistent sense of doom—which in New Orleans in hurricane season is called watching the news. So, I think he would have had no trouble feeling his way into this hovering malevolent undersea black cloud of oil and dispersant waiting to strike. Meanwhile BP offers, for our entertainment and distraction, a dog-and-pony sideshow straight out of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.”

Kamenetz offers neither solution, nor salvation. Instead, he turns to a traditionally Jewish response in times of trouble:

It hurts so much it’s funny. In the land of disaster, even a bitter laugh is a start.

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by Habitus · 02/17/10

In the wake of the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras, we’ve come across a few interesting thoughts on New Orleans and the political implications of carnival and spectacle:

David Rieff, with whom we talked about Sarajevo in Habitus No. 2, has some observations about the threat to democracy posed by commercial culture, sparked by his experience of the symbolic power of football, its associated constellation of commercial imagery, and the casting of the New Orleans Saints as vehicles for liberal hope.

Meanwhile, Tablet magazine looks at New Orleans’ Jewish krewes, and the place of Jews in the city’s complex web of race and class. Profiled at length is Krewe du Jieux founder L.J. Goldstein, whose photographs were featured in Habitus No. 4, and pictured is outgoing King of the Jieuxs and Habitus No. 4 contributor Rodger Kamenetz.

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by Habitus · 02/15/10

At Habitus, we were very pleased to learn that this November, the Jewish Federations of North America will be bringing its General Assembly and International Lion of Judah Conference to New Orleans. JFNA president Jerry Silverman sees the city as the perfect choice for this organization of Jewish philanthropies to reflect, “as a Jewish community and family…on our collective responsibility and action together.”

We agree that it’s an inspired choice of locale.

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by Joshua Ellison · 11/16/09

New Orleans is a floating city. There isn’t much earth beneath the street before you reach water. Suspended in its basin, between the crooked embrace of the river and Lake Pontchartrain, leading out to the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is always moving and adjusting, sinking and shifting. The sidewalks and streets have been stretched mercilessly; they tilt and crack and bulge from all the changes underneath.

So many different people have laid hands on this place—empires, immigrants, slaves, and their descendants. Their imprints are still everywhere, on an unforgiving terrain that pushes back against human intervention. It’s impossible to even know what direction the city is moving in, when you try to account for all the complicated equations of past and future, culture and environment.

When Umberto Eco visited New Orleans, he saw “one of the few places that American civilization had not remade, flattened, replaced.” Where most cities are functional and orderly, New Orleans is lyrical. Just read the street signs: there’s the counterflow of Piety and Desire, parallel streets in opposite directions. Humanity intersects with both Arts and Music. Race meets Religious not far from the river. It’s a place where the imagination can float, too.

Making sense of New Orleans is a constant negotiation between time and space, expansion and limitation. History moves in its ways, the landscape shifts too, and New Orleans is their fluid sum.

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by Joshua Ellison · 11/15/09

Our friend Ned Sublette, who was interviewed for our New Orleans issue, is one of the great experts on the history of New Orleans and, better yet, is a highly original scholar when it comes to charting the city’s significance and connections around the world. Here’s a little taste of his work:

And in Spanish, too:

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by Joshua Ellison · 08/31/09

It’s been four years since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Each year the remembrance becomes more muted, which is only natural. Still, it’s an important opportunity to reflect on a terrible tragedy, a national shame, a great city. Here are a few recent articles that are worth reading (and, of course, we have much more to say on the subject of New Orleans):

• Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices
• New Orleans’ New Winds of Change
• Post-Katrina New Orleans can be a test for Obama administration’s signature initiatives, Brookings exec says
• Invisible Cities
• A Day in the Year (by our friend and contributor Ned Sublette, who also has a new book.)

And, finally, a musical moment that says it all:

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by Andrei Codrescu · 09/23/08

The Mold Song

it was one of a kind
the earliest map of the united states
it was hanging right here on the wall
the mold ate it all
in one gulp the mold ate it all
and these books the only copies
of newton franklin galileo
and this shakespeare folio
the mold ate them like they were candy
look at the satisfied grinning mold
stretching from floor to floor
like a fifties horror movie mold
not to speak of this stack of cash
I shoulda never kept around
not a zero left in the whole stack
look at me I’m growing old
I’m giving myself to the mold
it’s some kind of lesson
it’s some kind of horror story
keep collecting paper things
I knew that one day I’d be sorry
I’m not wearing a mask
I’m not wearing any gloves
I feel stupid I feel cold
I’m giving myself to the mold
halloween and suicide rolled in one
I shoulda sold I shoulda sold
only in new orleans only in new orleans
halloween and suicide all in one
a man of means

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by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08

From the roof that I had before Katrina, I have only one slate left.

It’s a jagged grey oblong, about the size of my head, thin and sharp at the edges. It flakes easily; after a hundred years, this old slate has lost most of its integrity. It’s a slate that’s been written upon: a history of wind and sun and rain. It protected me and my family, and the families before us who lived here. It was a roof over our heads.

There was a time when I had piles and piles of these slates. I was a mad collector in the months after Katrina and stacked them around my porch and in the crawlspace underneath my house. Every time I heard the shovels scraping a roof in the neighborhood, I ran over to see if I could get the Mexican guys to save some slates for me. It was always Mexican guys working on roofs in New Orleans after Katrina, which is a sad fact that people make into politics: the old Creole craftsmen who built this city by hand and pride hardly exist any more, the men who passed on specific knowledge of the wood and stone and plaster. The Mexicans came in to do the roofs, and they worked quickly and just slid the slates off the roof with shovels. As the slates cascaded to the dumpster below in a cloud of gray dust and fracture, you could feel your heart breaking with it, and the sound when they hit was like disaster all over again. But when I explained I would pay fifty cents a slate, and once they got the idea from my rusty Spanish, they seemed to like it a lot. In Mexico people understand materials and recycling and the old ways.

I became a militant slate preservationist. I didn’t really understand why, since our obsessions only look like obsessions in retrospect. It just seemed like the only thing to do. We hadn’t had much water damage at my house, but the wind had torn through the neighborhood pretty badly—130 miles an hour, some said. An amputated branch of the sycamore in front of the house shot over the driveway like a white rocket and somehow landed high up in the ginger fronds. And the wind ripped off a bunch of the hundred-year-old slates on my roof, leaving the attic exposed to wind, rain, and ferocious winged termites. I lost a lot of sleep over those slates—for me there was something fundamentally wrong about a house with an open roof. Every minute that went by, I felt more damaged.

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by Habitus · 09/16/08

For musician and historian Ned Sublette, New Orleans is a city of global significance that is also “an alternative American history in itself.” His book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, is a painstaking and imaginative recreation of the city’s first hundred years. By carefully decoding the influences that shaped it, he has created a vivid portrait of the city we know today.

Sublette approaches the history of New Orleans largely though its music, and he hears in the city an expansive dialogue that reaches back to Europe and Africa and across the Americas. “The whole history of New Orleans is Diasporas,” he tells us—a place where myriad cultural inputs were preserved, integrated, and exported to the world.

Some people call New Orleans the least American city. Your book illustrates that the city is deeply singular, but also profoundly connected to the history and culture of the nation, the region, and the world.

I think it’s the most American city. It’s as fundamental to the history of the nation as Philadelphia or Boston or New York. New Orleans is the logical outcome of competing international forces, meeting in a peculiar geography.

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