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[3.9.05] [Andrew Gallix]
THIS BLUES IS JUST TOO BIG
 Our hearts go out to the inhabitants of New Orleans, home to 3:AM's Utahna Faith. Utahna, who also edits one of the Big Easy's premier literary journals Wild Strawberries, is safe and sound in Austin. Writing to her anxious friends from Texas, she said that "the most important thing, obviously, is to somehow help those still in New Orleans, and those who are out but have absolutely no resources. There are of course the major, well-known relief organizations and many small ones specifically created for this situation. ...My friend Andrea Garland and her husband Jeffrey, who are experienced grassroots activists, are gearing up to take supplies in to NOLA. This is so brave. Please read more about what they're doing here. Now, I have a personal request. I believe my house and all my belongings (except for my laptop and a few clothes) are destroyed. My place is/was in Holy Cross in the Lower Ninth Ward, which was apparently flooded to and over the rooftops from the first day. I would like to replace some lost items in order to continue my publishing and writing business. I need a printer/fax/scanner combo, reams of paper, cover stock, ink cartridges, long-reach stapler, stamps, envelopes, etc. I want to continue with Wild Berries Press, printing and distributing issue three of Wild Strawberries and past and future issues of WS and N.O.L.A. Spleen. More immediately, I would also like to use the new set-up to help with small scale grassroots relief efforts for the people still back in the area, the refugees, protesting the slow response time by Bush, future rebuilding, etc. If anyone can afford a $5 or so donation, I would appreciate this small amount to put toward getting Wild Berries Press running again. I don't know how long I will be in Austin, indefinitely at this point, and I am driving myself mad just sitting staring at the news and worrying. I have mixed feelings about asking for help when so many people are so so much worse off. Please of course don't feel obligated, and most of all, please only help if you can truly afford to and only if it will not take away from first helping those so much more in need". Utahna has PayPal. Her email is: wildstrawberries@earthlink.net.
In Exquisite Corpse, novelist Andrei Codrescu (who was kind enough to lend us his condo in the French Quarter last year) has published a "Love Note to New Orleans": "It's heart-breaking watching my beautiful city sink, but I'm at a safe distance 90 miles away and my heartbreak is nothing compared to the suffering of people still in the city. New Orleans will be rebuilt, but it will never again be the city I knew and loved. I often compared it to Venice because of its beauty and tenuousness, its love of music, art, and carnival. The problem of engineering the survival of Venice has preoccupied the world for centuries, but very little thought has gone into saving New Orleans in the same way. ...This was the most brutal slave market in America and the northernemost point of the Caribbean trade in guns, rum, and human beings. The slaves and subsequent refugees, immigrants, pirates, and quick-buck artists brought culture with them from Africa and places they ran from. New Orleans music traveled upriver and became America's music. We've been a generator of human and cultural energy for centuries, but all this bounty brought the city no careful engineering, no thought for its future, no world-wide cry of help for its inevitable demise. The Army Corps of Engineers saved the city heroically at least once during the floods of 1927, but it was then as now a response to crisis, no forethought, no concern for the future. So here we are, sinking into the water around us, drowning in our own waste, poverty, incompetence, and the greed of those who came before us. ...It's not a time for anger, but I can't help wondering: what is going to survive of our culture? We already know who's going to pay for all this: the poor. They always do. The whole country's garbage flows down the Mississippi to them. Until now, they turned all that waste into song, they took the sins of America unto themselves. But this blues now is just too big".
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