Mr. Joshua Clark This is Me

Education

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1. 1. www.bloggingneworleans.com

   www.bloggingneworleans.com/cat - [Cached]

   Published on: 12/4/2007   Last Visited: 12/4/2007

   Local literary lion Joshua Clark, publisher of French Quarter Fiction and author of recently released Heart Like Water, emailed Yours Truly and asked if I'd put up a link to his website http://www.hurricanekatrinanews.org So I went to check it out, and its motto of "everything you need and need to know is right here" seems pretty apt. At least, it's got everything you need and need to know about Katrina and New Orleans' recovery from it.

2. 2. www.2theadvocate.com

   www.2theadvocate.com/entertain - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/5/2007   Last Visited: 8/5/2007

   By Joshua ClarkSimon & Schuster, $25
   ...
   Joshua Clark could have evacuated from his French Quarter apartment before Hurricane Katrina hit.He had a car.His girlfriend Katherine had a car.There were offers of places to stay from friends out of town.Clark and his girlfriend decided to ride out the storm.He was a writer, after all, and he could get valuable interviews and material for stories.
   ...
   Clark is a gifted writer who employs a stream-of-consciousness, first person writing style that is often compelling.He describes the approach of Katrina: "Pressure was getting sucked out of the air, allowing the faintest electric gust to lift wrappers and shopping bags from gutters and overfilled trash cans, a single Mardi Gras purple ribbon dancing a tango with a plastic shopping bag four stories high between Jax Brewery and the Pontalba Apartments.
   ...
   As Clark weaves the story of his relationship with recently divorced Katherine into the storm narrative, he uses remarkably frank language, often profane and raw.
   
   He brings in other French Quarter characters who band together with Clark and his girlfriend to survive the lack of water, lack of food and lack of air conditioning.Alcoholic drinks were easy to find, not so for water.Clark describes people resorting to washing their hands in vodka.More often though, they were rinsing their tonsils with it.
   
   Early on, after Katrina passes, Clark describes the looting and the casual way those who stayed after the storm went about acquiring things they needed from stores, drug stores, bars, private residences.Necessity begat inventiveness which paid no attention to civilized rules of behavior.Clark and crew spend much time drinking and eating and drinking and visiting bars and drinking and surveying the damaged city.Clark carries a tape recorder and conducts interviews with storm survivors.He finds the land line phone in his apartment is still working.He is interviewed by NPR and other media outlets.He is having a great time.
   
   Just as there are two story lines in this book, there are two storm experiences in New Orleans.One is the party like atmosphere of the French Quarter, the other is the deadly serious world of flooded neighborhoods and armed and desperate residents.Clark eventually experiences both.If he had kept his focus on that story, this would really be a better book.It's not that the soap opera of his crumbling relationship with Katherine isn't interesting, it just requires a shifting of gears on the reader's part.
   
   And what works so well in describing the storm can be maddeningly obscure in other places.Clark describes how the stars looked over New Orleans when the power went out and most of the lights were off.He sees constellations and that inspires this overheated and pedantic passage:
   
   "I was listening as the Archer fired a shot screaming into the southern horizon through the cat's moaning eye, red Anteres, backbone of the Scorpion, its tail unwinding, gristle creaking below the shadow of some St. Charles mansion.And that, too, subsided into murmuring silence behind us as Andromeda rose straight ahead of us, chained to a roc for her mother's pride, left there to be devoured by Poseidon's sea creature, so that he should spare their coast; Andromeda's king in shining armor Perseus not yet visible, his Pegasus above her saddled by empty, on the water constellations there: the Water Carrier shimmering faint, foreshadowing the fall, a last cymbal soft as the last drops of rain this morning, and I was still listening."
   
   A few places Clark gets a little carried away.This is supposed to be non-fiction, but he describes cars crossing the Huey Long Bridge in two lines that "wobbled crazily over the thin grille that separated them from a thousand-foot drop into the Mississippi ," That particular bridge is about 150 feet above the water, depending on the river's level.
   
   He describes swimming in a canal filled with "oil-slicked, wreaking, syrupy black water."He might have meant "reeking."
   
   New Orleans is a place that invites ownership.Through the years, scores of writers, poets, photographers, artists, musicians and creative people of every sort have "discovered" the French Quarter and helped shape its tolerant ambiance.Clark is a member of the French Quarter arts community.He is a writer, editor and publisher.He is the editor of French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories of America's Oldest Bohemia, published in 2003, and this year's non-fiction collection, Louisiana In Words.Like many who call New Orleans home, he is from some place else , Washington, D.C. , but fell in love with the Crescent City and chose to live there.
   
   Despite its faults and lack of tight editing, there is no denying that Heart Like Water (the title is lifted from Lamentations in the Bible) is compelling reading.Clark's affection for New Orleans shines through the drunken haze of his narrative and everyone should find something new to learn in this alternative version of the Katrina story.It makes new a story that might be lessened by many retellings.
   
   As Clark puts it, "This, here, did not start as an unremarkable day at summer's end like that other American tragedy four years earlier, unremarkable as most of the tragedies of our lives begin.

3. 3. Gambit Weekly : Will of the Words : March 28, 2006

   www.bestofneworleans.com/dispa - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/28/2006   Last Visited: 5/26/2006

   Joshua Clark, author and editor of French Quarter Fiction, says it best when noting that the festival's "greatest asset is that it provides unparalled access to some of the city's and country's greatest literary lights, not in a boring scholarly atmosphere, but in one that rolls along for [four] days like the party of a lifetime where friendships become forged and connections made."