Page 28 - The Gluckman Occasional Number Eleven

Hurricane Latrina: It Turned a Town into a Toilet by Duncan
Saylor (Univ. of Dixie Press). When the levees, unable to contain
wind-whipped torrential rains, broke in 2003, the waters swept all
before them into the city of Belle Poitrine. That included the tanks
and reclamation ponds of the town’s sewage system. The ensuing
disaster left many citizens enraged at the failure of local, state and
federal agencies to keep the ramparts in repair. The sequelae of audits
and lawsuits fill the second half of this necessarily muckraking exposé
of missing funds, passed bucks and multi-level incompetence. Saylor,
a professor of hydraulic engineering, has written one other book
aimed at a general audience, “King Huey and the Bayou Tapestry”.
Required reading for students of how the South shall rise again.

Narchitecture: Palaces of the Drug Lords (Éditions Kibasch).
Here is a king-size book requiring an extra-large coffee table. But as
befits its subject, this oversize-format photo album justifies its size by
making us, even the most conspicuously-consuming winners in the
barely-constrained global economy, look like pikers. At the same
time, of course, anyone with aesthetic sensitivity will be aghast at the
choices made by these billionaire ganglords. “Brutalist” deserves a
new definition, given the horrendous twenty-foot electrified fences,
steel doors, lookout towers and stark expanses of concrete patio
displayed here. And the title should be “castles”, as that is what lies
between palaces and fortresses. Purchasers of the book should not
expect interior scenes: the Kibasch photographers took a big chance
getting as close as they did to provide us this barely-necessary
addition to a connoisseur’s collection. Call it a conversation piece, but
you’d better be careful who’s listening.

Mooncalves and Starfish by Taylor Bunyan (Pantaloon Press).
Bunyan’s first slim volume of poetry, “Words Fail Me”, did not come
close to winnng the Warren Pease Award seventeen years ago, but his
publisher evidently sees more promise in this new collection of
enigmatic pieces consisting entirely of punctuation marks. Unity is
apparently the overarching theme for Bunyan, expressing perhaps a
deeply-felt and obsessively-held commitment to indistinguishability:
From the first poem, “The fruit of Yggdrasil”, to the last, “The
senses taker”, the reader will experience a sense of awe and profound
disquiet at the possibility that somewhere in the intervening pieces at
least a typographical error might have occurred.