| Andrei Codrescu |
[Jan. 5th, 2007|02:07 pm] |
I'm reading Andrei Codrescu's "New Orleans Mon Amour" right now. It's a month overdue at the library but I refuse to let go of it just yet. My jaw drops at what a brilliant writer he is even more remarkably in a second language, and how he so "gets" New Orleans, the good and the bad and why the bad and the good are sometimes hard to distinguish. Here he writes about the St. Roch Cemetary a few blocks from our B&B.
"The graves of New Orleans follow social standing, just as their residents had. I have not looked rigorously into the distribution of angels, but I assume that they were commissioned by the wealthy. Marching past St. Roch Cemetery one time around twilight, with a group of antifascist protesters, I was struck by the proliferation of angels massed in the sky. They were in flight, taking off toward each other, as animated as large winged creatures ever get. Their milky white flesh glowed, their robes came undone, the flowers they held glistened, their hair was on fire. David Duke, the racist against whom we were marching, was defeated the next day. Miracles are very much part of St. Roch: Look at the prosthetic limbs left by the faithful in the St. Roch chapel. They were healed and made strong enough to march against racists. Well, maybe. Faith may have no politics, but it does seem to belong disproportionatley to the poor. Which makes it all the more fair to employ the angels of the rich to the purposes of justice." |
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