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James Nolan at City Lights May 2017 Provided photo "Between Dying and Not Dying" cover by James Nolan. Provided photo Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save "Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans" b y James Nolan, 210 pages, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press Each one of us has a pandemic story. The losses, the sacrifices, the horrors.
The agony of being alone, the ecstasy of being alone. New skills acquired, old dreams fulfilled — maybe even a baby. James Nolan, the prolific local author of fiction, memoir, poetry and literary criticism, shares his pandemic story in “Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar.
” It’s an idiosyncratic title, to be sure, one apt to cause curiosity and confusion, much like — I’m happy to report — Nolan’s writing. His memoir begins as COVID-19 has descended on New Orleans, the final days of March 2020, a city in the beginning stages of lockdown. Nolan celebrates the cancellation of Jazz Fest — it’s easy to hate a festival that quashes your neighborhood’s quiet intimacy — and makes plans to ride out the coronavirus storm contentedly sipping Rioja.
He spent his days rereading classics of plague literature and sniffing the night-blooming jasmine from the balcony of his third-floor apartment in the Luling Mansion. It’s that charmingly spooky building off Esplanade Avenue, one definitely worth circling its block-sized perimeter to take in its structural details and dream spooky dreams. Nolan’s view overlooks St.
Louis Cemetery No. 3 where generations of his ancestors reside in the Glaudot family tomb, an ominous reminder that four of his great-grandmother’s six siblings died in the 1880s yellow fever epidemics. And then there’s the Amazon-produced vampire film, “Black as Night,” being filmed downstairs.
The undead walk among us New Orleanians, so we’re told, but during a global pandemic this feels a bit on the nose. A scheduled four-day film shoot extends into two weeks due to sanitization requirements and insurance regulations. Nolan cancels his writing workshops — and the promise of a steady paycheck — after refusing to do Zoom classes, which, he writes, add a “pixilated insult to the injury of not really being together.
” And then, at summer’s end, the Luling’s new owner drops an eviction notice on his doorstep. These setbacks send Nolan spiraling into what he calls “the guitar of my imagination,” a phrase plucked from lines written by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Nolan tells of friends loved and lost, sicknesses survived, the mental and physical scars of pandemics past, almost dying and not dying.
Nolan writes of being kindergarten-aged at the height of the polio epidemic and creating an imaginary friend, Derrick, to help cope with the threat of disease. He remembers how his parents tried to commit him to a mental hospital as a teenager for wanting to be a poet. The Jan.
6 Insurrection evokes memories of teaching in Spain during that country’s military coup of 1981, during which his class on Walt Whitman — champion of poetic and American freedom — is interrupted by armed reactionaries. He recalls living in San Francisco during the early AIDS years, before scientists better understood the HIV virus and Muni passengers donned face masks when passing through the city’s gay neighborhoods. There, Nolan began praying to St.
Jude for negative tests — a practice he picks up once again. “This is what happened during the sickness,” the Greek historian Thucydides wrote in “History of the Peloponnesian War,” one of Nolan’s favorite plague reads. Your eagerness to relive those happenings, especially if you lived in New Orleans during the sickness, will depend on your capacity for stories about lockdowns, masking, variants, surges, and social distancing.
Hurricane Ida, unrecovered bodies in the Hard Rock Hotel — and an apocalyptically empty French Quarter. Some readers might be turned off by Nolan’s crankiness, a trait he owns up to (but weren’t we all a bit cranky in the past years?). He deplores mask mandates but dutifully complies.
Berates a grocery store employee, then berates himself. He also remains, above all else, empathetic, open and engaged with the world — even when all alone. If you long for the thrill of that first post-lockdown hug, this is the book for you.
Nolan is fond of quoting favorite lines from trauma-informed art of the past. Mose Allison: “Just as well the world ended / it wasn’t working anyway.” Albert Camus: “The habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
” Tennessee Williams: “I think there is going to be a vast hunger for life after all this death.” But Nolan also leaves behind a few choice quotes of his own. My favorite occurs in the final lines of his Acknowledgements: “Nobody survives times like these on their own,” he writes.
“We did it together.”.
