Tag: White Linen Night

Don’t Stop Believin’

Thursday morning and last day in the office this week. I think I have a prescription to pick up; I neede to call and see if it’s ready or not during the day today. I was tired yesterday–I’ve been mentally weary all week for some reason–and was very happy to come straight home from work. I resisted Sparky and finished the dishes, which need to be put away tonight. It was very nice to come down to a clean kitchen with nothing on the counters and the sink empty. This kind of also puts me ahead on the weekend, too. Huzzah! I still have some filing and straightening and organizing to do around the house. The Olympics end this weekend, which means technically I can start writing again this weekend–I mean, ending a few days early on the embargo isn’t going to be the end of the world or anything, and I am kind of itching to get back to writing again. That, by the way, feels good.

I feel decent this morning, too. I’ll probably get tired at some point during the morning, and I am sure my butt will be dragging come this afternoon. I also need to get the mail today–maybe tomorrow; it depends on timing–and I do have some errands to run tomorrow. Maybe the mail can wait? Who knows? I do have a meeting tomorrow in the morning, and I made an appointment to get my labs drawn next Friday (fasting labs, and no way am I fasting all morning and not having coffee; there was nothing available for tomorrow until the time of my meeting). I feel very good about getting back on top of my health stuff, and my insurance issues are all ironed out. I have one more leftover issue from the surgery, and I hope to get that taken care of this weekend. Thank God.

In other big news, I deleted my Twitter account yesterday. I just bit the bullet, went in, and deactivated my account. I don’t care if someone else uses it because I don’t think I will ever go back there. I know, I know, I should have done it a long time ago. Being there only helps as another user to count towards advertising revenue, and I don’t want any part of that on my soul and conscience anymore. I went back and forth over the morality of being there still (friends who are only there, etc. v. being complicit with that vile company) and pondered the hypocrisy of that, while keeping my newsletter on Substack1 and actively working to build an audience there. It wound up not being that difficult of a decision, really; I realized that the only times this week I’ve been tense or irritated has been because of Twitter and morally bankrupt people there, so it’s clearly not good for my mental health. I deleted it for my own well-being in the end, but making it about ‘taking an ethical stand’ is verifiably false. I don’t like getting credit for something I don’t deserve, and there was nothing noble about deleting my account other than self-preservation. I don’t even know why I went there in the first place, to be honest. I’ve never really gotten much joy out of being there, and what joy I managed to find there didn’t make up for the absolute horror of being there. I was never targeted or swarmed, it was never anything like that…but what is allowed there under the guise of “free speech” (and they decide what is protected and what is not, with a heavy thumb down on the scale on the side of being fascist or enabling it) is horrific and shameful and disgusting.

I did enjoy removing the app from my phone, though. It was almost as satisfying as slamming down the phone receiver used to be.

We’re also still in a boil water advisory, and today’s “feels like” is going to be 110. Woo-hoo! But it’s August, what can I expect or what more can I want? This weekend is also the Red Dress Run (which is how Garden District Gothic opens, or was it a different Scotty? Sigh), and there are some other things going on around town as always–Dirty Linen in the Quarter (it’s the Quarter’s version of White Linen Night, and I really should write about both) and there’s a Drew Brees pickleball tournament (I’m not really sure what pickleball is, to be honest, and not sure that I want to, either), too. Sounds like a good weekend to stay home to me, doesn’t it? It’s going to also be horrifically and horribly hot, too.

And on that note, I am heading down into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll most likely be back at some point later.

Greg Louganis, seen here in his Olympic debut in Montreal as a teenager, winning the silver medal. I was enchanted by his incredible physical beauty.
  1. Two people I really respect in this business are still at Substack, and since they have better ethics than me and are, in general, much better humans than I am, I will defer to their judgment in this case. ↩︎

Baby, Come to Me

Yesterday was had a rather intense storm here in New Orleans; there was flash flooding all over the city, cars ruined, water inside buildings; that sort of thing. I don’t know if my street flooded or not (guess I’ll find out if my car got ruined tomorrow morning when I am ready to go to work), but we certainly were lucky and didn’t get water inside of our house. The rain is going to continue some today; there’s an advisory for everyone to stay inside and off the roads, just in case. We get these kinds of storms and flash floods every once in a while–the price of living in a low lying city surrounding by water where parts of the city used to be swamp and are now floodplains, and our pumping system tends to get overwhelmed when we get a lot of water in a short period of time. I’ve been caught out in these storms before, having to wade through water up to my hips at times. My car was flooded when I was on my way home from work the first year we lived here and I got caught in one of these storms. There’s no point in railing against these storms and short-term floods; they happen periodically and you have to deal with them, unfortunately. Last night was also supposed to be White Linen Night, an annual event every August in the Arts District where all the galleries serve food and alcohol, booths are set up on Julia and Magazine streets to sell food and drink, and people wearing white go from gallery to gallery looking at (and hopefully buying) art. Satchmo Fest was also this weekend; clearly, both annual events were cancelled yesterday because of the deluge. I ran my errands early–thank God–and so intended to spend the rest of my day inside and working on the line edit, doing some writing, and reading as well. I did no line editing and no writing yesterday; instead, I was caught up in the last half of Lyndsay Faye’s staggeringly brilliant The Gods of Gotham, and could not put it down until it was finished.

Scan 1

When I set down the initial report, sitting at my desk at the Tombs, I wrote:

On the night of August 21, 1845, one of the children escaped.

Of all the sordid trials a New York City policeman faces every day, you wouldn’t expect the one I loathe most to be paperwork. But it is. I get snakes down my spine just thinking case files.

Seriously, is there anyone who enjoys paperwork?

The Gods of Gotham is the perfect historical crime novel. I’ve read a number of them, and there are some truly excellent ones (one of my favorite novels of all time is The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy, set in the 1930’s), but I’ve also staggered my way through some seriously bad ones. But even with the bad ones, I always have tremendous respect for the writer for even trying; I can’t imagine trying, much as I love history, because there are so many gaps; so many things to research, from small to large, intricate intimate details that may be impossible to find out–or you might find them out when it’s too late. To be truly successful, a historical piece of fiction has to be completely immersive; the author has to bring that world to life but make the reader understand it and how it was to live in that period without giving in to the temptation to put everything you’ve researched into the book/story, aka hitting the reader over the head with a history lesson. Writing a convincing, involving story with characters the reader can identify with, appreciate, and root for, is hard enough without setting it in another time period.

Lyndsay Faye has managed this incredible juggling feat, and pulled it off with aplomb. The Gods of Gotham is set in New York City (obviously) in the late summer of 1845; when the city has newly created a police force, identified by the copper stars they wear (which, obviously, is where the slang term copper, and its derivative, cop, came from; this is clearly made obvious throughout the story without Faye stopping to explain; a lesser writer certainly would have made that egregious take-the-reader-out-of-the-story error). Our hero, Timothy Wilde, is a bartender when the story opens; his older brother, Valentine, is a good-time Charlie who likes to get wasted, frequents whorehouses, and also works as a fireman. The relationship between the brothers isn’t great; they lost their parents to a fire when they were children, and they butt heads alot. Valentine is also involved with the Democratic Party. After an enormous fire leaves Timothy jobless and homeless and broke, he rents a room from a widowed German baker, Mrs. Boehm, and is then pressured by his brother into becoming a copper star; a beat cop in the newly formed city police, which not everyone in the city wants or approves of. Soon, Timothy is wrapped up in a bizarre mystery involving a child prostitute he runs across one night; wandering the streets in a nightdress, covered in blood; and soon the investigation expands to involve a possible serial killer of child prostitutes. Politics, nativism, religious and ethnic and racial bigotry all play a part in this tale; as do sexism.

The truly great historical novels not only shine a bright light on the past, but thematically show how little has changed over time. The Gods of Gotham could easily be set in the present day, with Timothy Wilde as a modern police detective. The bigotry against the Irish and Catholics could easily be translated to Middle Eastern refugees and Muslims; it is truly sad to read and see how we as a society and a people fail to learn from the mistakes of the past, repeating the same errors over and over to our own disgrace. Faye has brought New York of 1845 vividly to life with careful brush strokes that never are too big or too broad or invasive to the story; her city streets are alive with noise and people and sights and sounds and smells. Her characters are all-too-real; even the worst of her villains (particularly the diabolical madam, Silkie Marsh) are believable three-dimensional and live and breathe on the page.

I hated seeing the book end, quite frankly; but there are two more Timothy Wilde novels to savor and look forward to, as well as her Edgar nominated Jane Steele (The Gods of Gotham was also an Best Novel Edgar finalist), and her Sherlock Holmes work. (And yes, my recent interest in Holmes was triggered by Lyndsay’s interest in Holmes…and there were times when this book itself reminded me of, in the best possible ways, of Nicholas Meyer’s Holmes pastiches from the 1970’s, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and The West End Horror.)

The Gods of Gotham, if you haven’t read it yet, needs to be added to your TBR pile immediately.