Reading Notes 8/19/25
Delillo, Hurricane Katrina 20 years later, grandma's house (again) but this all comes together
You know that Don Delillo book I read at the beach? 1
It got wet and I spilled coffee or beer on it or both.
And then the cover ripped.
I took the book with me to Shreveport, Louisiana. I took it with me to a nearly empty office building cafe. The lady behind the counter looked at me when I walked in and said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I said, “No, technically not,” but then I told her about how my Dad grew up here and went to high school here and lived here for 20 more years until he was 42 and then came back a few years ago and how 2 or 3 of my cousins are in jail (okay I didn’t share this part) but how my grandma had lived here all of her life in a 100 year old house.
“Ok,” she said, “you’re alright” and she made me a shrimp po-boy.
I found a high-top table and began to read again about the fictional Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, TX shooting Kennedy and then a few days later when I was done, I decided to give the book to my mom and I told her to take it to Goodwill (along with a pair of pants I had bought) and really the book belongs somewhere between New Orleans and Dallas, which is exactly what Shreveport is.
And the book wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.
Hurricane Katrina 20 years later and the post I wrote about it
So being in Louisiana stirs up all kinds of things, and one of my secrets is that I used to live in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, which happened 20 years ago on 8/29/2005. I lived there and I wrote this about it 10 years ago, (that links to Medium) which was 10 years after it happened.
I don’t have much to add except to say I went to my grandma’s house after Hurricane Katrina and stayed there a few days and then it became weeks, me and my newlywed wife at grandma’s house, and then we decided not to go back, not to move back to New Orleans, and we wouldn’t get our stuff until months later, and we moved to Atlanta instead and both had jobs by October first, just over a month later, but that was not a good decision (to go back to work so soon).
I wrote this in my journal at the time and I quoted it in the post above:
Honestly, I’m too embarrassed to quote myself from 20 years ago, my English major self oozes off the page, I can’t really re-paste it here, so click here just to read that.
I’ll finish by saying that the event altered my life in ways I’m still comprehending it all, even though I didn’t really suffer, not in the same way, but I’m acknowledging that it had a bigger effect on me than I realized at the time, that it still shows itself, and that…I’ll stop.
The profile on the writer Chris Rose at Nola.com
Oh man what a story, this guy was a huge deal in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, documenting in the local newspaper what it felt like to live there to recover there to rebuild there and I took it in from afar, but he drank too much and was depressed and the weird fame that came from it was overwhelming and then he ended up in rehab (I think?) and now lives in a tent as a park host in a Maryland state park. It’s quite a fascinating rise and fall.
Here’s the full story copied and pasted onto Reddit.
His book 1 Dead In the Attic was on my shelf for a long time, it may still be around, this trip and this anniversary makes me want to read it again, perhaps on the anniversary I’ll do a reading list of Hurricane Katrina books, his will be at the top.
Keep going-
Josh Spilker
This took me forever to read