The weather in New Orleans is seductive. It's almost as if summer doesn't have to leave me. There was a waterfall of grief this time last year. However, I think acting out this summer has enabled me to embrace New Orleans, to love and sing to it in a way I couldn't do last year. I'd missed these pock-marked roads, those curling terraces, that sweet packed-full-almost-slurred accent that reminds me a little of my father at his most happy or most angry, and I'd missed those colorful houses and those dipping porches.
I may be programmed to take a step back when folks greet me with a hug or when they nod at me in the street, but it doesn't mean I don't like this foreign friendliness, this eagerness to share. It's a language I've tried learning for years. It's a language I will continue to study. Fluency may never come, not with all this time spent up yonder, but I'm hoping to become easy with this language of anecdotes.
***
I do not have the joy of working in an office but many of my friends do. And of course, I'm a huge fan of all versions of The Office and of Office Space. How true is the following? Love how it nails not only an office-type setting but basically any group of coworkers. Label me this, label me that....
Artist =
David Fullarton Piece is from
his installation in the offices of Houston radio station 90.1 KPFT: "What I do at work when I'm supposed to be working." Homeslice makes small works made from office supplies. The pieces were pinned up randomly so that they were hidden amongst other notices and memos in the office.
***
Lit. Geek Business.
"The Literary City"
This map takes quotations about or relevant to San Francisco to make, yep, the city. The quotations are placed to areas linked to/relevant to the area (i.e. the cable cars, Chinatown, etc.). Map = based on one of St Petersburg that was made by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter. The following are included in thie San Francisco map:
- Alice Adams (Second Chances - 1988)
- Isabel Allende (Daughter of Fortune - 1999)
- Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - 1969)
- Gertrude Atherton (The House of Lee - 1940)
- Albert Benard de Russailh (Last Adventure - 1851)
- Ambrose Bierce (The Death of Halpin Frayser - 1891)
- Herb Caen (Herb Caen’s San Francisco - 1957)
- Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - 1968)
- Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - 2000)
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Dog - 1958)
- Allen Ginsberg (Sunflower Sutra - 1956)
- Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli - 2004)
- Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon - 1930)
- Robert Hass (Bookbuying in the Tenderloin - 1967)
- Bob Kaufman (No More Jazz at Alcatraz)
- Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men - 1980)
- Jack Kerouac (On the Road - 1957)
- Gus Lee (China Boy - 1991)
- Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City - 1978)
- Czeslaw Milosz (Visions From San Francisco Bay - 1975)
- Alejandro Murguia (The Medicine of Memory - 2002)
- Frank Norris (McTeague - 1899)
- Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49 - 1968)
- Ishmael Reed (Earthquake Blues - 1988)
- William Saroyan (The Living and the Dead - 1936)
- John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley - 1961)
- George Sterling (The Cool, Grey City of Love - 1920)
- Robert Louis Stevenson (Arriving in San Francisco - 1879)
- Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club - 1989)
- Michelle Tea (Valencia - 2000)
- Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt - 1964)
- Mark Twain (Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House - 1864)
- Sean Wilsley (On the Glory of It All - 2005)
One of Many Sources