Day in the Life of the COVID Quarter, Part 9
July 2020Books, bookstores, writing and reading: historian Frank Perez contemplates the literary life in a neighborhood that's "a world of dreams and letters."
- by Frank Perez
Saturday, July 22, 2020
5:15 am
Wake up feeling guilty. I dreamed a book on my shelf was feeling neglected. I could not discern which book it was and I’m not sure if it was sad or angry or both, but I do know it was disappointed. Struggling out of bed, I look at my custom-made bookshelf and my eyes take in the multi-colored slivers, the spines of a thousand memories.
I have nothing to feel guilty about, really, at least with regard to books. I read constantly, usually three or four books concurrently. Right now Ardoin’s Stone Motel is on my nightstand along with Boulard’s Huey Long Invades New Orleans. Berch’s The Woman Behind the Lens and Codrescu’s New Orleans, Mon Amore are on my desk, Vaid’s Virtual Equality waits in the bathroom. These are non-virgin books for me, which is to say I’ve read them before. Some books are like lovers, ones you return to again and again.
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6:05 am
Rupee materializes as I spread apricot preserves on a sourdough English muffin. His signal to wake is the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Today, Rupee has slept in; I’m already on my third cup.
6:15 am
The Stewart Butler manuscript awaits. Some minor editing and revising notwithstanding, the work is nearly complete. I hope, anyway. I still need to look over some of Stewart’s papers, which are housed at the Tulane University archives, but they have been closed since March. In the Before Time, I made regular trips to Jones Hall to comb over the Butler papers, which in archival parlance comprise 17 linear feet. Translation: a lot of personal papers. I was at linear foot 9 when the university closed.
I’ve written a few books before but never a biography. Writing about Stewart’s life and work has been an intellectual challenge—and it has given me a new appreciation for biography as a genre. I am fortunate that Stewart saved every letter he ever received, and he told his family and friends to save the letters which he wrote to them, and most of them did. It was as if he knew his life would be consequential. I spent the better half of 2018 and a lot of 2019 reading thousands of these personal letters.
8:30 am
I pause and recline my chair and my eyes fall on the shelf above my monitor. There is T. Harry William’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Huey Long. The book has remained the most significant of my life since I first read it in the eighth grade—no small feat considering it is 900 pages long. Since then I’ve read it at least two dozen times. This book seduced me and compelled me to fall in love with language, with writing, with research, with history, with politics.
For a while, when I was very young, the book even made me want to go into politics. Ultimately I became an English Professor, in no small part due to another book--The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. On the first day of graduate school, before walking to my first class, I read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: Let us go then, you and I …
After an M.A. degree at what was then the University of Southwestern Louisiana and some Ph.D. work at Texas Christian University, I landed an Associate Professor of English gig at Tarrant County College. It was the perfect job for a bibliophile.
One of Frank's bookshelves
11:00 am
Zoom meeting with the editors of a forthcoming anthology tentatively titled Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Librarianship. Looks like I’ll be contributing a chapter. It’s an exciting project but it means a few other writing projects will remain on the back burner: a collection of short stories, a play, a book about the letters of John Kennedy Toole, an anthology of history essays, a memoir, and a book about queer publications in Louisiana. All of these are works in progress at different stages of development. Of Hamlet, Polonius observed, “How pregnant his replies are!” I feel like my brain is pregnant with books.
12:45 pm
My mother calls and we catch up on our respective COVID worlds. I hang up and think about the house I grew up in. I think about my favorite place to read (my treehouse). I think about what I was reading as a teenager (presidential biographies). I think about mowing neighbor’s lawns to earn money to buy books. I think about the set of encyclopedias my parents had in the den. I remember sitting down with a pen and a notebook and rewriting the entries in my own words.
3:00 pm
Time to bring Rupee to the vet for a follow up visit. The old boy had surgery recently and is doing well. Afterward, we meet our friends at Guy and Mike’s house. Guy mixes up a round of Old Fashioneds as Rupee hangs out with his buddy, Chester, Guy and Mike’s Great Pyrenees.
Frank, Rupee and Chester
5:30 pm
On the way home, we decide to visit Jeff, who is manning the “To Go” station at Café Lafitte in Exile.
Jeff Palmquist
6:45 pm
Dinner is roasted chicken with sautéed asparagus spears and slices of salted Creole tomato.
8:30 pm
Tonight’s film is a new documentary--The Booksellers, about rare book dealers in New York. A good film that triggered dozens of memories of bookshops in the Quarter.
Back in graduate school I would spend weekends in New Orleans. I would arrive on Friday and spend the afternoon browsing Quarter bookshops—Crescent City Books, Beckham’s, Dauphine Street Books, The Librarie, Arcadian, and of course Faulkner House. I never knew what book I was looking for until I found it. The discovery was the joy. Friday night was the bars, but the bulk of Saturday was coffee and books at Kaldi’s on Decatur before moving down the street to Molly’s for pints of Guinness under the watchful eye of W.B. Yeats.
A few photos of French Quarter bookstores from the FQJ archives
Joe DeSalvo and Rosemary James, founders of Faulkner House Bookstore. Click here to read more about them and the new owners.
Joanne Sealy at Faulkner House Books
left: Russell Desmond at Arcadian Books and Prints on Orleans Street right: Browsers at Arcadian Books & Prints
Miss Geraldine at Librairie Bookshop on Chartres Street. It permanently closed in August 2019. Click here for a visit with Miss Geraldine.
Sherwood Anderson wrote in a letter to Gertrude Stein in 1922, “I came down here a month ago and am living in the old French Creole Quarter, the most civilized place I’ve found in America.”
New Orleans is a romantic city and it is therefore only natural that writers would find inspiration here. In New Orleans the muses drink café au lait in every corner café and dance in the street with mourners at every jazz funeral and exhale on every artist along the cast iron gate in Jackson Square and smile on every grave in the cities of the dead. Like the corner grocery and the corner café and the corner bar (all virtually extinct in the rest of America), literary and artistic inspiration is everywhere in the Quarter, permeating every dive bar and upscale restaurant, oozing from every Victorian shotgun house and Creole cottage, hanging thick in the air with the sweltering humidity. All one has to do to feel it is slow down and breathe it in.
To be in the French Quarter is to step outside of time and enter a world of dreams and letters, a world perfumed by jasmine and oleander with the faintest hint of mud wafting in from the Mississippi, a world where people move slowly, with catlike grace and elegance. Here, myth and reality meld to form a dreamy realm where imagination reigns supreme and care is wholly abandoned.
The Quarter itself is a poem. The souls are old here and each has to story to sigh into any willing ear.
Presiding over the bar at Molly's. Click to read more about this iconic FQ bar. photo by Ellis Anderson
