In the latest issue of theOxford American (no longer published in Oxford, Mississippi, and, no, I haven’t forgiven them for it), Hal Crowther offers up his assessment of the future of literary New Orleans seven months after Hurricane Katrina. Crowther concludes:
I was never convinced that writing was a communal activity; only that literature often occurred in communities where observers were never starved for fresh things to observe. Nearly everyone who knew Faulkner in New Orleans said he just sat mute in the corner, watching and drinking.
What replaces the creative city, now that most communities are artificial, or virtual, or even instant, like the overnight villages developers throw up to serve subdivisions? We visited one, our first, a main street with shops and restaurants, a town square, a park, a theater, all where cows were grazing a year ago. We stopped in one of the restaurants and I could barely taste the food, I was so numb with future shock. Here was the anti-New Orleans, the work not of three hundred years but of three hundred days. Will writers write and painters paint in these suburbs, exurbs, and pseudo-urbs where there are no lives layered beneath them except gophers and moles? Is creativity an herb that will grow in any soil? Will some admirable, currently unimaginable new strain mutate and evolve? I see few encouraging signs so far.
