Katrina is a pretty name.

Monday late afternoon it began to rain in my Atlanta suburb. I was sitting writing at my kitchen table over looking the wooden balcony edged with tall trees. Water colored the pale brown wood a glossy chestnut and hammered onto the blue plastic lighter and ashtray my husband and I leave on the railing as our contribition to nature at large. I checked my e-mail because that's what I do when I'm supposed to be writing-- I call it productive procrastination. One message from a friend advising me to sit low in the bathtub in case of a tornado. No tornado, and it seemed like New Orleans was going to be spared Hurricane Katrina's wrath too because she'd decided Mississippi would do (poor three eyed double ss double pp, someone has to take the fall).
And it might have been so except the embankment in New Orleans built to curtail floods broke and now vampires and ghouls and ghosts are learning how to swim while people are being evacuated as far as Houston, Tennesee and Little Rock.

Meanwhile my balcony is all dried up.

And I'm trying to write a novel about internal dispalcement without thinking of people displaced from their homes by hurricanes, floods and tsunamis-- it seems so futile...

Beatitudes

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

This is why Vonnegut rules.

"Suburbia represents a set of tragic choices that we made collectively."

The Morning News interview with Jim Kunstler raises very issues concerns about technology, energy and why suburbia will go the way of the dinosaur. The tone of the Q & A gets more colorful as it goes along.

link via rockslinga

The Dancing Girls of Lahore

Ready Steady Book has updated its webpage and looks great. I have up a review of Louise Brown's The Dancing Girls of Lahore-- about prostitutes in the famous red light district and how they they fly and fall etc... lots of personal tidbits from my encounters with them.

The Stepford Wives in India

A school teaching one to be an ideal wife sounds a bit ludicrous and might be less offensive were a sister (pun intended) school set up on how to be an ideal husband. So far the school has seen four thousand blissful brides. (link through an on going, erratic diary)