Deluge

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, from time to time I would check in on the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, since I had been fond of the place and always tried to visit when I was in the city. Shortly after the devastation, some people who worked there set up a blogspot site in hopes of finding out where everyone was. It led to some tearful reunions (and reading).

No surprise that Cacno is up and running, but there's still a great deal of cultural rebuilding going on—or so I learn from Cynthia Joyce's Culture Gulf. She writes here about 1 dead in attic, a collection of distressing New Orleans Times-Picayune columns by Chris Rose (who, avant le deluge, wrote the celebrity gossip beat). I recommend it for your bookshelf, to fit that empty slot beside Robert Polidori's inescapable and haunting book of photography, After the Flood.