AtD & Katrina

[terrance fitzgerald]

Will P's new novel say something about 9-11? Who knows? Readers are free to read V.,  or CL49, or GR, or VL, or M&D,  or the Introduction to Orwell's 1984 as saying something about 9-11 or Katrina or any other topic of interest. And readers will do a better job than P can. Hell, look what a bunch of P-listers pinked out of a rolled pumpkin. And besides,  P is a great novelist and not such a great writer of things that aren't quite fictional. Perhaps if Ishmael Reed stopped writing op-eds about Katrina and let readers of Mumbo Jumbo make the connections for him, his art and his opinions on important matters, like racism in America, would have more credibility, more Jes Grew. So, while expect that readers will find connections in AtD to current and recent events, I hope they are not too clear, too direct, too explicit. We can all read Mumbo Jumbo as a critique of America's failure to respond to Katrina or The Secret Integration as a critique of Watts (Rodney King). It doesn't
 matter that the event took place after the fiction or that the author makes no explicit connections. Reading is a paranoid act and everything is connected. It's easy enough to connect the P Blurb for AtD to Mumbo Jumbo. Isn't it?  
   
    Here may be seen, jostling together, the wealthy Southern planter and the pedler of tin-ware from New England the Northern merchant and the Southern jockey a venerable bishop, and a desperate gambler the land speculator, and the honest farmer professional men of all creeds and characters Wolvereens, Suckers, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and Corncrackers, beside a "plentiful sprinkling" of the half-horse and half-alligator species of men, who are peculiar to "old Mississippi," and who appear to gain a livelihood by simply going up and down the river. In the pursuit of pleasure or business, I have frequently found myself in such a crowd. 

   
  http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/price/bear2000.htm
   
   As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boat-men, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus;
Note: [2.7] jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress
Note: [2.8] of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man. 
   
  http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/atkins/cmmain.html
   

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