Intersection Logs

It's no good. I haven't posted anything to speak of about Katrina and New Orleans, because I haven't anything helpful to add, but I can't stand it any longer. So here are my personal, and not at all useful, reactions.

( Read more... )

As promised, here's the detailed (and illustrated) account of what I was up to last Wednesday. A colleague and I spent the afternoon in the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas.

( Details and thumbnail pictures below )

I am getting very tired, physically and mentally, what with the all the slow walking around with heavy bags and the being in crowds and the sitting in oral sessions. Right now I'm sitting on the floor of a quiet hallway, where there is power and wireless signal, trying to unwind.

New Orleans is not really my kind of town; it's dirty and not very safe-feeling, and the night-life aspect is not attractive to someone whose idea of a good night out is a quiet dinner, a bookstore, and home by 9pm. However, there are things about it that make me smile. Yesterday I went with a colleague to the aquarium, which was delightful and deserves its own multimedia post that I'm not going to try to put together until I get home. Today at lunchtime I went wandering around the mall, buying beads and postcards and admiring amber jewellery and embroidered and lacy table-linens and grinning at the existence of a stall selling nothing but New-Orleans-themed kitty kipple. (I must admit, I have a shallow materialistic streak. Even though part of me insists that that kind of mall sells almost nothing that anyone actually needs, I do enjoy wandering around them.)

This convention center is huge; the staff get around on golf-carts and bikes and tricycles, and it's a ten-minute hike from the room with our posters to the meeting room I'm sitting outside. In my wanderings in search of the room, I passed along a glass-sided hallway overlooking, on one side, our poster and exhibit room, and on the other that for the oil-refinery people who are also having a convention here. The contrast was striking; while ours was shabby and scattered, with intermittent carpet, home-made posters and milling attendees who barely aspire to business-casual, the other side was bright with customized carpeting and colourful, professional-looking booths. Their talks don't look nearly as interesting as ours, though.

I am bemused by the existence of people who apparently make a living studying leaves in streams, as evidenced by the presence of a whole session on the subject at the meeting. No doubt they would think the same about the existence of people who spend their lives analyzing solar acoustic waves. Rather more disturbing is the cheerful matter-of-factness with which, in the room on the other side of the wall, yet other people are discussing the Sumatran earthquakes as sources of messy data, with hardly even a mention of the human devastation they caused.

[Updating via conference center wireless, with an entry I prepared earlier]

From the air, an expanse of swampy-looking land and green-brown water. On the ground, red oleanders; a tangle of elevated freeways, oddly reminiscent of Birmingham, England; a bird -- surely not a black swan, maybe a duck -- coming in to land on a canal. A clump of skyscrapers, much like any other big American city. So many poster tubes on the plane that the cabin staff made a special announcement reminding people to collect the ones in the closet.

Warm, moist, slightly fetid air on one side of the glass doors, frigid air-conditioning on the other. Moon, almost full, rising over the hotel down the street, and a glimpse of the river. Narrow streets like canyons of grey-brown stone. Flash of neon, glitter of beads and tacky voodoo-themed souvenirs and digital cameras. Red-and-gold trolley car on Canal Street. Swirling jazz music. Peppery shrimp creole and rich bread pudding that reminds me of my grandmother's cooking. Palm trees with their fronds tied up as if they've only recently been planted, with sand around their bases, and sidewalk trees trimmed down to six-foot stumps: relics of last winter's hurricane? Sign on an overflowing trash can: 'New Orleans: Imagine it Clean.

In the morning; the river flat and pale under a haze-gray morning sky.