there, and back again (part one)

The apartment smelled kind of weird when we opened the door. My first thought was that it was a gas leak, but all of our checks proved that wrong. Perhaps the bug bombs we set off before leaving? General stuffiness? Mildew from the bathroom? By the time we unloaded the car and lit a stick of incense, the a/c was humming and the place seemed fresher. This morning, as I write this, it smells like Melanie's toasted everything bagel and coffee.

We got in last night just before midnight, after another long day in the car. Six hours from New Orleans to Houston, but we were stuck in our one and only traffic jam on the way out, and so we sat on the roasting highway for another hour and a half. Later, half-way back to Texas, we stopped in Cajun country in Louisiana, right outside of Lafayette, and Hank and Melanie ate fish while I watched and drank water. When we spied a Subway and declared it the source of my dinner, I was really, really, happy to know we were almost home. So much bread and cheese, and the smell of Subway is now gross to me. I have been craving garlic and broccoli, ginger and kale, collards, fresh spinach, dandelion and beet leaf salad, lettuces that are not iceberg.

New Orleans was okay, but I was glad, as I always have been, to get out. Everyone I have known who has lived or lives in New Orleans has loved booze and boozing even more than my barfly friends in Houston. Perhaps surprising to some of my readers, it is just too much for me. More on NOLA in a minute.

On our way out of Memphis, we stopped at the National Ornamental Metal Museum, where we not only checked out an awesome array of metal work housed in a former yellow fever clinic, but where Melanie managed to commission six of her worry beads for the gift shop, which was really cool. We drove out from Memphis and headed south into Mississippi (I kept thinking about the time I saw Charro interviewed on some lame talk show, and she kept repeating "I am not from Missy Pee Pee! I am not from Missy Pee Pee!" Feel sorry for my car-mates who had to listen to me say that over and over in my Charro voice.).

After some "Yes, we should" and "Wait, no, we should not" and more "Yes, we really should since we are here", we got off the highway and headed east to Oxford, Mississippi, home of Rowan Oak, the house where Faulkner lived and wrote for most of his life. Also in this tiny town is the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, which went through a troubling (and bloody) struggle for integration. This university was also the first university I ever interviewed with at the MLA, way back in 1998, when I barely had a chapter of my dissertation written and I was a 26-year old basket case. I would have been their Southern Literature specialist. Unfortunately, I spent too much time talking about Karen Finley shoving yams up her butt to seem like a qualified candidate. Perhaps if I had done my Charro impression, it would have worked better.

The Faulkner house was beautiful, really. Such a contrast to one most spectacular homes in the U.S. -- Elvis' Graceland (which I haven't written about). It was more the atmosphere of steam and tall cedars and pines, vineyards, magnolias than it was the house itself, although I know the two have to be combined to work. Very different from Melville's house -- Faulkner's house was a self-guided tour and you couldn't actually walk right into the rooms, whereas a tour guide took us through Melville's home. Faulkner's family did not want any sort of gift shop to be part of the house, whereas Melville's house had an extensive set of things for purchase.

If Melville is Hank's author, then Faulkner is mine. I took a class on Faulkner, Morrison, and Abjection as a junior at Syracuse and it made me think very differently about reading literature and very differently about the psychic value of filth -- how it structures so much of what we believe about ourselves. I couldn't help smiling about this as I peed in the downstairs bathroom, which was open to the public.

Speaking of filth, I should get to the New Orleans visit. (I spent some of my grad school years visiting with some friends who lived/squatted in a place called the Nest on the 4300-block of Magazine, and the last time I was there I swore I would never go back. I have lost touch with all of those people, and I learned while I was in NOLA that the Nest was recently condemned. For this reason, I was nervous about returning to a city that hold that history for me, and also about the post-Katrina devastation -- did I really want to see it?)