Katrina anniversary coverage: SPT

I'm proud of the work my employer, the St. Petersburg Times, did on Katrina and its anniversary.
You can see the Times' work via this link.
Times photographer Kathleen Flynn took the picture of Sadie James, which ended up on the cover of Time magazine last year. Flynn kept in touch with James and photographed her again recently. She also recorded James talking about her life since that photo. It's powerful. Access it here; click on Sadie James.

Katrina anniversary coverage: Times-Picayune

Here's a better link to six days worth of Times-Picayune coverage. Two more stories stand out. One is on the horror of the Convention Center as the storm hit. That's surely what I will always think of when I think of Katrina, the poor people just marooned at the convention center, desperately talking to the TV cameras but unable to get food, water, comfort.
The other is about a Metairie man who used his fishing boat to rescue people off the roofs of their flooded homes. The matter-of-fact way he went about helping them is touching and decent.

David Foster Wallace on tennis, again

David Foster Wallace wrote a new essay on his old obsession -- tennis -- for last week's New York Times. He waxed rhapsodic about Roger Federer. (Too bad, though: It looks like Wallace got bit by the correction bug, too, involving the mechanics of a Federer vs. Agassi match. The correction is appended to the story.)
In other Wallace news, The Howling Fantods, a fan site, says a 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest arrives later this year, with an introduction by David Eggers. The Eggers intro is a little weird to me. I like and respect Eggers (especially for his work with teaching writing to underpriviledged children), but I think Wallace is better known and more accomplished, so why is Eggers writing the intro? On the other hand, maybe Wallace asked Eggers to write the intro, because Wallace has published pieces before in Egger's literary project McSweeney's. All just speculation on my part.
I was thinking the other day how much I would like to read IJ again. Maybe the anniversary is just the occasion.

Katrina anniversary coverage: Bush's photo

Here's a case of two newspapers doing the same story with weirdly similar leads.
First, The Washington Post on Saturday. Headline: "Katrina's Damage Lingers For Bush." Lead:

For Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), three images define George W. Bush's presidency: Bush throwing out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush with a megaphone atop the rubble of the World Trade Center -- and Bush staring out the window as Air Force One traversed the Gulf Coast thousands of feet above the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
The first two images epitomize strength and resolution, the image the Bush White House likes to cultivate. But in one year's time, the last one -- of the president as aloof, out of touch, even befuddled -- all but erased the memory of the others, according to pollsters, pundits and Republican politicians who say they have suffered in the wake of the president's decline.

Next up, The New York Times on Monday. Headline: "Years After Katrina, Bush Still Fights for 9/11 Image." Lead:

When the nation records the legacy of George W. Bush, 43rd president and self-described compassionate conservative, two competing images will help tell the tale.
The first is of Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, bullhorn in hand, feet planted firmly in the rubble of the twin towers. The second is of him aboard Air Force One, on his way from Crawford, Tex., to Washington, peering out the window at the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina thousands of feet below.
If the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina called into question the president’s competence, that Air Force One snapshot, coupled with wrenching scenes on the ground of victims who were largely poor and black, called into question something equally important to Mr. Bush: his compassion.
A year later, he has yet to recover on either front.

Katrina Anniversary coverage: the weekend before

I'm going to blog this week about the Hurricane Katrina anniversary. I plan to highlight the news articles I find most compelling, interesting and insightful. Here's the first installment.
The Times-Picayune's story "On Their Own" takes a hard look at the local planning process and Mayor Ray Nagin's role. The big question: Should the government follow the lead of the people who return, or should it set the agenda for rebuilding? The TP shows that, so far, the local government has not set much of an agenda, and that's not a good thing.

Even with the huge infusion of federal aid on the way, it's unthinkable that all parts of the city will thrive, most observers agree.
At the neighborhood level, that will have unpleasant consequences.
Shortly after the storm, experts warned strenuously that in the absence of a carefully planned and controlled revival, New Orleans would succumb to the "jack-o'-lantern effect" -- a gap-toothed revival in which renovated homes were interspersed with blighted and abandoned structures that eventually would bring down the neighborhood.

The Washington Post decided to take a look at rebuilding on a single street, and was able to contact 15 of 18 families who before the storm lived on Beechwood Court in New Orleans East. The results of their survey aren't particularly heartening. Ten families said they were unlikely to return.

Many asked: What is there to come back to?
"We loved our neighborhood, we loved our life, we loved our home," said Denise Charbonnet, 53, a Navy contractor whose job was transferred from New Orleans to Memphis. "But it's not the same. There are no stores. There are no gas stations. They do have streetlights on the main streets, but within the communities, it's dark. Can you imagine being the only person living on a block?"

The Post also has a compelling story on Baton Rouge, which absorbed a great number of evacuees from New Orleans. At times, Baton Rouge's infrastructure seemed taxed beyond its means, and class differences emerged between the black communities of the respective cities.

Jeff LeDuff, the city's no-nonsense police chief, was credited by many with keeping order in the city. There was aggressive policing, officers rolling en masse to reports of crimes. "I'm willing to be my brother's keeper. That's what I said at the time," says LeDuff now, referring to the immediate aftermath of Katrina. "And I also said, 'While my brother is in Baton Rouge, he must behave.' "
Some assailed LeDuff, who is black, and his police force, saying they were too aggressive. But Mayor Melvin "Kip" Holden, who appointed LeDuff and who also is black, lauded his chief's stewardship of the department during the crisis.

The New York Times has a fascinating story on the big differences between the people who fled to Atlanta versus those who were evacuated to Houston. The NYT headlines the story, "Storm's Escape Routes: One Forced, One Chosen":

(T)he divergent experiences of those who went to Houston and those who went to Atlanta suggest that recovery depends on more than individual resources and demographics. Just as important are less quantifiable factors: a sense of welcome and connection, the presence of friends and family, even how narrowly they survived the disaster.

I'll be blogging more on Katrina as the week goes on. The anniversary is Tuesday, Aug. 29.

Cool Headline of the Day

I love the whimsy of this headline on a science article yesterday in the Los Angeles Times:

Round and Orbity? Must Be a Planet.

Id est (Mating)

Did you know that the common abbreviation "i.e." stands for "id est"? And that's Latin for "that is"? I guess I knew this already, but I was reminded recently by the novel Mating by Norman Rush. This was a book group pick (not mine). It is set in Botswana, and it's about an anthropology graduate student who decided to romantically pursue another academic, a man who has started a women-only commune sort of development in rural Africa. The novel is supposed to be a "comedy of manners." But it struck me as kind of being an object of amusement. The narrator keeps saying "id est" instead of i.e. Guess what? That's annoying!
On the other hand ... I was looking around for reviews of Mating, and I found this totally amusing blog post. This blogger loved "Mating," and what she has to say about it is pretty interesting:

A couple of people I recommended this book to were extremely annoyed by the writing-voice ... . I, however, LOVE the voice: cerebral, obsessively psychological, yearning, illogical -- It comes from right out of me. I relate.

Read her whole post here.

Cooking for Mr. Latte

I've been re-reading Cooking for Mr. Latte this week and really savoring it. It's so charming, so fun, I think it should be counted among the great food memoirs of our time. Or at least I think it should because it's youthful, exhuberant, romantic and (mostly) unpretentious.
The book drew on the first-person columns Ms. Hesser wrote about her courtship with the man who became her husband, Tad Friend, aka Mr. Latte. During this time she was also a food writer for The New York Times, so there's lots of talk about cooking and restaurants. Each episode ends with related recipes. Though I haven't made many of the recipes because they tend to involve exotic ingredients, i.e. goat's milk yogurt, etc.
I miss the author of Cooking for Mr. Latte ... Amanda Hesser doesn't seem to write much in the first person anymore, though she does still write about food for the NYT Magazine. In fact, I think she is the food editor for the NYT Mag now.
I have to conclude that I just like first-person food writing. Taste, literally, is such a personal thing. It makes sense to write about it in a personalized way. For instance, I just love Frank Bruni's blog, and he write mostly in the first person. He had a recent story about eating his way across Fast Food America that was just a hoot.

Important reporting on the environment

This week, the Los Angeles Times launched a major investigative series called Altered Oceans. It looks at the way humans are changing much of the ocean ecology through things like fertilizer run-off and garbage. These extremely disturbing stories paint a picture of environmental change on an almost primordial level.
This is not a terribly original thought, but I'll post it here anyway: My fear is not for the earth. In the long run, the earth will be fine. My fear is we'll change the climate so much that humans won't be able to survive.

No "Search Inside" - bleh! (Kafka on the Shore)

Ugh, it's sad how dependent I've become on Amazon's "Search Inside This Book" function. I use it all the time to grab quotes from books I want to write about in my blog, or just to look up passages I want to remember. And now it's failing me. There is no search inside function for Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.
This novel was so different, so strange -- almost dada-esque -- but extremely touching and filled with compassion. The narrator, a Japanese teenager named Kafka, is running away from home to avoid an Oedipal prophecy. Meanwhile, Mr. Nakata, a retarded man injured in a mysterious incident during World War II, has the ability to talk with cats. Johnny Walker (yep, the man on the liquor bottle) is a malevolent manifestation who wants to create a magic flute that will let him take over the world. Then there is the transgendered hemophiliac who runs an elegant private library. All that, and it's fun to read.
The quote I was looking for said something like this: We come closest to truth through metaphor.
I'm going to have to re-read the book now. Lucky me!
UPDATE: I just remembered my other favorite quote from KotS: The present moment is the past devouring the future.