46: #61, #62
The Road Ahead, 5:30 a.m., Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, August 1, 2011
My first photo for the month of August. My first photo as a 46-year-old in August. Kind of grainy because it was still pretty dark out. I think I had already walked Jolie and had her back in the house by the time I took this photo. The only photo I took on Monday.
The Sound of Building Coffins, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, August 2, 2011
Several years ago, I met Louis Maistros, a New Orleans-based writer, online. I think I found him when I did a search on Holt Cemetery, a fascinating burial ground I visited in New Orleans in 1996. While I have an affinity for New Orleans, having visited twice, Louis has a deep, abiding love for the city that is evident in his writing.
Around the time I first encountered Louis, his novel, The Sound of Building Coffins was published. I bought it and eagerly began reading it, but life, etc., got in the way and I put it aside.
Earlier this summer, I picked the The Sound of Building Coffins up again and found myself entranced by it. It's the first novel I've read in quite some time (I seem to have been reading various memoirs over the last few years). It's dark, weird, hypnotic, and oddly life-affirming. And very New Orleans, at least as far as I can tell.
Ultimately Louis' book takes me back to how he and I first became online friends: while The Sound of Building Coffins is fiction, one character, the groundbreaking (and never-recorded) early jazz musician Buddy Bolden, appears in the book, or at least a fictionalized version. The real Bolden, as it happens, is buried in an unmarked grave in Holt Cemetery, the place that first led me to Louis' online presence. A sign dedicated to Bolden had been placed at Holt just months before my visit.
If my description of The Sound of Building Coffin sounds intriguing to you, I'd urge you to seek it out!