Kirjahaku

The arc of Western civilization has always driven toward mastering the world through reason, will, craft, and objectivity. Yet shadowing this arc is another that suggests we can know more of the world through non-rational means-through spontaneity, intuition, instinct, and subjectivity. "A Taste for Chaos" explores this undercurrent of spontaneity in literature and the arts. It identifies a new metagenre where improvisation rules: texts that claim to have been written without effort or craft, like an idea that hits you in the shower, each a challenge to the mainstream, dominant culture. It argues that while once written from the margins, improvisations make up much of the Western Canon's center: John Milton's "Paradise Lost," Laurence Sterne's" Tristram Shandy," William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," James Joyce's "Ulysses," ThomasMann's "Dr. Faustus." It also offers close readings of C.G. Jung's "Red Book" and Ian McEwan's" Saturday."

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is the story of two larger-than-life characters and the son whom their lives helped to shape. Ruth Fertel was a petite, smart, tough-as-nails blonde, with a weakness for rogues, who founded the Ruth's Chris Steak House empire almost by accident. Rodney Fertel was a gold-plated, one-of-a-kind personality, a railbird-heir to wealth from a pawnshop of dubious repute just around the corner from where the teenage Louis Armstrong and his trumpet were discovered. When Fertel ran for mayor of New Orleans on a single campaign promise--buying a pair of gorillas for the zoo--he garnered a paltry 308 votes. Then he purchased the gorillas anyway!These colorful figures yoked together two worlds not often connected--lazy rice farms in the bayous and swinging urban streets where ethnicities jazzily collided. A trip downriver to the hamlet of Happy Jack focuses on its French-Alsatian roots, bountiful tables, and self-reliant lifestyle that inspired a restaurant legend. The story also offers a close-up of life in the Old Jewish Quarter on Rampart Street--and how it intersected with the denizens of ""Back a' Town,"" just a few blocks away, who brought jazz from New Orleans to the world.The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is a New Orleans story, featuring the distinctive characters, color, food, and history of that city--before Hurricane Katrina and after. But it also is the universal story of family and the full magnitude of outsize follies leavened with equal measures of humor, rage, and rue.