Three Encounters With Jazz

ONE

Our view from the restaurant—St. Louis Cathedral, and the big band playing in the square. It’s almost fitting that you can’t see much of the musicians in this video I took—in my mind, they were part of the atmosphere.

I was sitting at a restaurant on the edge of Jackson Square, its doors and windows flung open to the fresh air. The sun was out, the birds were chirping, the bells of the St. Louis Cathedral were tolling. Then—to top it all off, a big band set up shop right outside. Before long, our conversations were drowned out by the hopping, shaking, earth-quaking good music. This is the atmosphere of New Orleans, the backdrop to my prized literary adventures.

Kamryn jumped up and down in her seat. “I love this song! I was hoping I would get to hear it on this trip! It’s Little Liza Jane.”

This moment struck me—I was warmed by her joy. I’d never be able to tell one song from the next, but Kamryn recognized the song instantly. To me, the big brass bands were practically a part of the scenery, but to Kamryn, a musician in the USC marching band, this moment—this song—were an integral part of her experience. Kamryn’s excitement reminded me that each of us on this trip has our own expertise, our own backgrounds and interests, that we bring to this class. When my eye is attuned to pick out spooky vibes, Kamryn is seeing the trip through her lens of musical appreciation. We each have a “thing” that jumps out at us. Even as we embark on this journey together, our shared experiences remain entirely subjective and defined by our tastes.

Taste is, of course, subjective—but a city like New Orleans, a city driven by art and music and architecture and culture, brings to mind the issue of aesthetic values. How do we define “good” taste? Who gets to decide what “good” taste is? These values determine what character of the city gets preserved, what art is sold in galleries or on the wrought-iron fence surrounding Jefferson Park, what music is played at Preservation Hall versus Frenchman Street versus the dive bar on the outskirts of town. Aesthetic values determine which elements of culture make their way into the city’s myth-building.

Photo of Preservation Hall in full swing, from NewOrleans.com. As no phones were allowed, I was unable to get a photo myself. This official photo shows the old-school flair of the jazz band at Preservation Hall.

At Preservation Hall, we had the privilege of listening to world-renowned jazz musicians. They played for a reverent audience packed into a wooden room. We stood for 40 minutes—gladly!—behind rows of benches arranged like pews at the altar of jazz. No phones allowed—one guy even got chastised for breaking this rule—because church was in session. This was music you were meant to feel, with no filters. Preservation Hall boasts the greatest of the great, the bastion of old-school jazz, and altogether has a very high-brow feel.

But jazz wasn’t always so well-respected. When jazz first came on the scene at the beginning of the 20th century, critics disparaged the genre for being a formless, unsophisticated explosion of feelings. This criticism was blatantly racially motivated; white critics targeted Harlem specifically as the origin of all degeneracy via jazz music. Just as later generations criticized rap music as a somehow inferior genre of music, white critics have repeatedly sought to delegitimize the innovations of Black music.

Our fourth Bookpacking text, Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, personifies those early days of jazz through its fictionalization of the life of jazz trumpetist Buddy Bolden. Taken at face value, the book is a confusing read, a text meant to be experienced more than understood. With a non-chronological plot and choppy, poetic style, Coming Through Slaughter jumps between bits and pieces of Buddy’s life. Through the course of the novel, it is revealed that Buddy got in a violent altercation with a customer at his barber shop over an alleged affair with his wife Nora. Then, Buddy disappears—drops off the map for two years, until Nora hires his friend Webb to find him. Buddy has been living with another woman, and returns to playing music at home, until a mental health episode causes him to spend the rest of his days in a psychiatric institution. The form of the novel, haphazard and loose at times, coalesces into a larger narrative about violence, mental health, and music, coming together like the crescendo of a jazz solo.

Messing with the prose form to translate the experience of jazz to text feels like an undeniably high-brow move. It pushes the boundaries like all the most lauded contemporary literary fiction. But nonetheless, it’s a bold choice, and a risky one where commercial markets are concerned. Most importantly, experimenting with form to create something new, something meant to be entirely felt, is the very essence of jazz embodied. With Coming Through Slaughter, Ondaatje stays loyal to his subject matter, and in the process defies the standard conventions of what is deemed “great American literature” by the taste-makers of our time. Jazz necessitates this type of defiance to aesthetic authority, in order to keep its spirit alive.

TWO

The Second Line parade comes to a halt, but the dancing never stops. The brass band plays on.

Our next formal encounter with jazz was not so formal at all, with that homegrown feel that encapsulates the loose spirit of the music itself; we marched with the Second Line parade, just behind their marching band. All dressed in blue, the band played lively and bright, and the parade ebbed and flowed to a stop seemingly at random, meandering with the freedom of a jazz riff. It broke form, just like Coming Through Slaughter, an expression in and of itself. The parade itself added an experiential component to the jazz, but the best part of all was the happiness on everyone’s faces—a whole community come together, inviting us into their midst without question, letting us join in the dancing with open arms.

I was riding on this high when Bella and I caught an uber back to the hotel.

“Did you see the Second Line?” our driver asked. She was an older white woman and she had picked us up just off the parade route.

“Yes,” I told her, “It was beautiful!”

“Beautiful,” she said “huh.”

Bella and I glanced at each other—there was something in her tone.

“Second Line is just trash,” she said, “Look how they trash the streets. That’s all they do—trash.”

The pleasure of the afternoon came to a crashing halt in that uber. I was flabbergasted—that someone could witness what I had experienced as such an outpouring of community, joy, and resilience, and see only trash. What shocked me even more was our driver’s eagerness to tell us exactly what she thought of the Second Line.

Her words were racism, plain and simple, under the guise of an aesthetic claim. She made the implicit distinction between a “respectable” parade, one with artistic merit and aesthetic value, and a morally condemnable display. I find it hard to imagine that Mardi Gras parades don’t also leave behind their fair share of litter.

This interaction was all the more infuriating because we were reading Coming Through Slaughter, reading about the genius musician whose creativity at these very parades planted the seed that would grow into a bonafide musical revolution. In New Orleans, jazz is woven into the fabric of life and death, and it belongs to the people partying down Washington Ave, not just the people who can afford $50 front-row seats at Preservation Hall.

THREE

Francesca and I sat in our shared hotel room, frowning at each other with our respective covers pulled up to our chins. It was 11:30 PM. It had been a long day in the hot sun, and we were so tired. But it was our last Thursday in New Orleans—and Thursday was supposed to be THE night to see live jazz at Vaughan’s Lounge.

We grumbled. “Should we even go?” “Like, I’m just so tired. But I really want to.” “We’ll see other jazz. Ughhh but I really want to go!” Et cetera.

In the end, we fought against the lethargy with every fiber of our collective beings and pried ourselves out of bed and into the uber. And I can’t tell you how glad I am that we did. In the spirit of Bookpacking: Carpe Diem. Amen.

A short clip of Corey Henry & the Treme Funktet playing at Vaughan’s Lounge. Their weekly Thursday night performances draw the locals out in droves.

We pulled up at Vaughan’s after midnight, still sleepy but with spirits lifted. Opening the doors to the bar, the energy shifted. It looked like any other bar, but everyone seemed like a local. The music was loud, really loud, loud enough to fill the air and vibrate through your chest, but it was smooth on the ear like honey on the tongue. It never pierced.

As we made our way into the crowd, the barrier between musician and audience, music and person seemed to grow even thinner. I almost couldn’t believe that I was hearing this music with my own two ears—it felt like it was being transmuted directly into my head, almost too seamless to be believed. The performance was exhilarating. They played without a hitch, each song keeping me up on my feet and moving. One guitar solo could not be described as anything other than liquifying. The band, Corey Henry & the Treme Funktet, played a fusion of jazz, funk, and hip hop elements that felt wholly original, a testament to the artistic merit of these oft-maligned genres.

Our class stands in front of a mural recreating the only existing photograph of Buddy Bolden. He is highlighted with the golden halo, cornet in hand.

Even as I was dancing to the music, I found myself growing strangely sad. I was mourning even as I listened to these songs for the first time that this wasn’t being recorded. I wanted to replay that solo, that song, that moment, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to even before the moment was up.

But there are no existing recordings of Buddy Bolden’s trumpet-playing, his groundbreaking innovation, the birth of a genre. And Michael Ondaatje wrote Coming Through Slaughter without access to his sounds, only based on one surviving photograph of Buddy with his band and the testimony left in his wake. No one can ever replay Buddy either. At Vaughan’s I understood: jazz is meant for the moment, and the moment alone. It must be felt through your veins like the thrum of a crowd.

Certified Freak

In the land of Spanish moss and wrought iron, the Garden District of New Orleans is home to some of the finest mansions money can buy. Our class walked along Prytania Street, escaping the heat of the sun beneath the canopies of live oaks, admiring the lavish homes. But beneath our amazement was an undercurrent of disgust—just who the hell could afford to live here?

A Garden District mansion on the corner of Prytania and Fourth. Aunt Emily lives on Prytania Street in the novel.

Our promenade around the Garden District introduced us to the contemporary genteel lifestyle presented in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. The novel follows Binx Bolling, a stockbroker living in the humdrum suburb of Gentilly, as he navigates life, love, and movies while on “the search” for greater significance. More concerned with making money and his pursuit of the “big happiness” found in film than with the day-to-day moments that make up a life, Binx struggles to stave off his ever-present malaise. He alienates himself from the people around him, including his Aunt Emily, a wealthy woman living in the Garden District and the last line of defense for an old set of white upper-class values. As part of our Bookpacking experience, we drove through Binx’s neighborhood in Gentilly and ambled along Aunt Emily’s street in the Garden District. But never did I feel closer to Binx than when I engaged in his favorite, titular activity—moviegoing.

A poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

Late Saturday night, we attended a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with a full shadow cast and a complementary prop kit. Dressed up in the best costumes we could improvise out of our suitcases, we waited outside the Prytania Theater, a historic single-screen movie theater in the Garden District, amidst the stately gated manors and magnolias. The line went down the block, and the excitement of the crowd was unignorable—the theater received a noise complaint before the midnight show even began from an unhappy neighbor (possibly Aunt Emily, but I can’t be certain).

This theater is not only located on the same street as Aunt Emily’s uptown mansion in The Moviegoer, it is also one of Ignatius’s frequent haunts in A Confederacy of Dunces, where he eagerly goes to heckle each and every film. As our show began with a troupe of ambiguously-gendered strippers dancing to the opening credits, it was impossible not to imagine Ignatius sitting with us, sputtering his offense at the crossdressing and erotic theatrics he paid to see.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show offered a perfect case study in the difference between license and licentiousness. Here we were, in a famous movie theater in the middle of the wealthiest Old Money 'burb in New Orleans, watching a well-organized community theater performance; all of this is perfectly conventional. Simultaneously, perhaps the very reason Rocky Horror remains such a pop culture staple is because of its licentiousness, the bawdy, campy ways it sprints beyond the boundaries of what is “allowed” in society—especially for the time the film was made.

Released in 1975, Rocky Horror came out smack-dab in the middle of the Gay Liberation Movement, when “homosexual activity” was still illegal in most states. Its depiction of Dr. Frank N. Furter, the “transsexual” mad scientist, and his gang of weirdos singing along to a musical soundtrack and having various bisexual dalliances was, and continues to be, mind-blowing. Even in 2023, I’ve never seen anything quite like Rocky Horror in terms of its unapologetically perverse, rip-roaring representation of queerness; I can’t even begin to imagine how it felt to experience this film for the first time in 1975.

Sitting in that theater, exhilarated and vindicated, even amid my emotional experience Binx’s voice crept back into my mind. I couldn’t help but question myself: am I waiting to see myself on screen to give me permission to be myself? What an insecure way to live. How disloyal to myself, how removed from the flesh-and-blood reality of life. The Moviegoer pinpoints this “phenomenon of moviegoing” which Binx calls certification:

“Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

”

— Walker Percy

Binx refers to certification of place, but his theory applies to many of the ways in which people seek validation of their significance through film. Without seeing yourself on the big screen—whether that “self” means a character living in your neighborhood, a character in your community, or a character who looks and acts like you—you are unable to fully embrace the romantic potential of your life. Certification relies on film to be the arbiter of personal meaning; if your story is not told in the movies, your story is not a story at all, but a mundane afterthought. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of alienation from community, from other people, from the significance of day-to-day real life.

The lead actor playing Dr. Frank N. Furter introduces the shadow cast, from the theater company “The Well Hung Speakers.”

However, Binx’s critique of “certification” is not as universal as it may seem; for marginalized people, seeing themselves represented in media is impactful far beyond the sense of distinction Binx describes. For underrepresented groups like the queer community, “certification” begins on the basic level of validating our very existence. It is more than just a matter of elevating one’s neighborhood to the status of “Somewhere,” a setting where great narratives can take place. Rather, film representation becomes a profound recognition that queerness simply exists alongside straightness, part of the diverse fabric of reality that informs the stories we tell. Queer representation must first establish existence before it can begin to combat negative representation, let alone certify that one’s life experiences are romanticizable and movie-worthy. For marginalized groups, “certification” responds to preexisting alienation rather than perpetuating it.

The power of queer art is demonstrated in Rocky Horror’s sheer longevity, as it is now considered the longest-running theatrical release in history. In any era, to see one’s own community represented without apology is emotionally impactful—let alone such an unabashedly raunchy, sexual, un-sanitized portrayal during a time like the 1970s when anti-sodomy laws still criminalized gay sex. Rocky Horror depicts queer people as full of life and magic, as transgressively powerful, as desirous and desirable and desired. And that’s even before you get to the shadow cast—a group of visibly queer performers having the time of their lives! Watching it I felt a connection to those first moviegoers in the 1970s, the intervening decades melting away. But even beyond what I imagined to be shared feelings of excitement and healing, the 21st century is still not so dissimilar from the 1970s as we’d like to think.

A map tracking the relative severity of anti-trans legislation across the United States as of May 20th, 2023. Created by independent journalist Erin Reed. At the time of the performance, we cheered for the fact that Louisiana narrowly voted down a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, thanks to Republican Senator Fred Mills breaking party lines and voting against the bill. However, as of June 1st, the bill has been resurrected in a different Senate committee—a rare move that gives this already-defeated bill a second chance.

A map tracking bans on drag performance specifically, as of May 30th, 2023. Created by independent journalist Erin Reed. These laws criminalize Rocky Horror shadow cast performances like the one we saw.

Before the show began, the director stepped on stage to inform us that the performance we were about to see would now be considered illegal in several states. Due to a wave of transphobia and anti-drag fearmongering, over the past year discriminatory laws targeting transgender people and drag performance seek to criminalize “male or female impersonators” across the country. Bigots conflate transgender identity with drag performance and consider both a “threat” to the children, and the resulting culture war catastrophe means that the longstanding tradition of the Rocky Horror shadow cast—a ticketed performance without nudity—is illegal just nextdoor to Louisiana (whereas heterosexual strip clubs remain perfectly legal). The line between license and licentiousness is never fixed, and we are witnessing a movement to redraw that line to further demonize an already deeply marginalized community.

No matter the social and emotional importance of representation, political solidarity requires more than consuming entertainment. This was the crux of the director’s message, even as we were encouraged to celebrate and revel in the performance’s queerness. It echoes The Moviegoer by expressing the limitations of seeking liberation through “certification.” Binx does not escape his malaise through the validation of the movies, and in fact his search for personal significance to rival fiction draws him further away from the most fulfilling aspects of real life. The Moviegoer tells us that daily life can’t be a constant sequence of “big moments,” of sweeping cinematic climaxes set to a swelling orchestral score. Just as Binx must invest in “the Little Way,” so too must we as an audience divert our attention back to the true human connection that underpins it all, forming the basis for the beauty and the progress of the queer community.

“It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
”

— Walker Percy

A haphazard mirror selfie with friends, just before leaving for the show.

Nonetheless, the line between “moviegoing”—the mediated, alienated mode of experience Walker Percy describes—and “real life” is not so cut-and-dry. When we stepped foot into the Prytania Theater to watch Rocky Horror, that was real life. I enjoyed it not just because of the complex feelings of validation and certification it inspired, but in “the Little Way” too. The show was titillating and funny and entertaining, goddammit. I was sitting amongst my friends and classmates, dressed to the nines and brimming with laughter, engaged in the present moment. It reminded me of the people I love.

When the newlyweds arrived on screen, on cue, the entire audience started flinging rice across the theater. It got in my hair and my clothes and my shoes and I was still shaking it out by the time I left the Garden District and returned to my hotel room, exhausted and content.

The feeling of those little grains of rice—that is “the Little Way.” That is a simple thing worth living for.

Waking the Dead

A tarot card reader sits under a green umbrella in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

What makes New Orleans the perfect city for a vampire novel?

This was the question that guided our class discussions of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire and steered my explorations of the city’s murkier side—and I'm not talking about the Mississippi River. But this question also intrigues me for a more personal reason, as it relates to my own novel-in-progress.

I have had the pleasure of experiencing the immersion of Bookpacking triple fold; not only do I get to delve into New Orleans literature while retracing the steps of its authors and characters, I also have the opportunity to conduct research for my own writing. My novel takes place in the underbelly of New Orleans subculture—which includes, to no one’s surprise, vampires. This course has been the perfect chance to familiarize myself with my setting, to gain cultural literacy and know my references (IWTV is, without a doubt, mandatory reading for any aspiring vamp), and conduct on-the-ground research to answer that essential question. Though my novel is in its early stages yet, I hope to one day contribute my own writing to the canon of New Orleans vampire literature.

A goth-themed shotgun house in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. Traces of subculture are visible everywhere across the city.

There are many ways to answer this question; in fact, during our seminar, we wrote a list, and could have kept brainstorming if it weren’t for the constraints of time. New Orleans is a nocturnal city, with a culture of embracing and celebrating difference that has led to a proliferation of subculture. It’s a city full of opulence, of indulgence in food and drink and sex and celebration. It is a deeply superstitious place with no shortage of spirituality; tarot readers sit at card tables before the St. Louis Cathedral, a visual encapsulation of New Orleans’ unique blend of Catholic and Voodoo roots. This amalgamation of religion has created an observably unique culture surrounding death.

One cannot pass through New Orleans without noticing the cemeteries. They are landmarks in and of themselves, walled-off plots with rows upon rows of raised tombs and family crypts, like a gated community of the dead. It is no wonder Lestat sneaks off to sleep amongst these tombs; as one walks through the cemetery, eye-level with caskets sealed off from the world of the living, it is easy to imagine the grinding noise of stone on stone as a vampire emerges from a crypt. This unique style of above-ground burial is practical in origin: New Orleans’ high water table and propensity for floods makes resting six-feet-under difficult. When it floods, buried caskets rattle and bang around in their waterlogged graves. This effect is too eerie even for New Orleans. One does not have to think too hard to imagine why superstitions of vampires and the undead would catch in such conditions.

The Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District of New Orleans.

Cemetery in Houma, LA.

Ciena stands in front of an above-ground grave in Grand Isle, LA.

Funeral culture in New Orleans can also be community oriented. According to our ghost tour guide YhhYhh Universe (a self-identified “black cat” secret society member who meowed, often), some bodies are interred in public graves made of clay and later removed after a year and a day, when the heat of the Louisiana swamp has turned the tomb into an oven and the bodies have been naturally cremated. Other tombs are owned by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, membership-based organizations dedicated to mutual aid within Black communities. These clubs ensure that, at the ends of their lives, all of their members can be laid to rest with dignity, regardless of their means. And, of course, the famous New Orleans jazz funeral features a somber processional to the gravesite, and an upbeat celebration of life on the way out. At the Backstreet Cultural Museum, we learned about these Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, jazz funerals, and more; one display featured a photo of Lionel Batiste, the late jazz drummer, preserved and posed in a lifelike standing position at his own funeral.

Lionel Batiste, displayed in a standing position at his funeral wake.

The idea of a standing corpse may feel gauche or grotesque, but the practice of any sort of open-casket embalming is a relatively new phenomenon, tied to an evolution in Christian funeral culture and the for-profit funeral industry. The preservation of corpses feels as old as the ancient Egyptians, but embalming as we know it today is a modern invention, requiring the use of harsh chemicals that are both dangerous to the embalmers and to the environment, as they seep into the soil and groundwater after bodies are buried. There exists a culturally engrained idea that decay is somehow wrong, a corruption of the body that is inherently harmful to the living; that the living should be able to view the dead, perfectly preserved and standing as if in life, creates cognitive dissonance that obscures the painful but necessary reality of death. The funeral industry profits from the desire to stave off decay at all costs through the sale of expensive pressure-sealed caskets, designed to keep the elements out and provide the illusion that a family’s loved one is resting peacefully, preserved for all eternity. In reality, by preventing the emission of gas as a part of natural decay, these caskets, combined with embalming chemicals, can cause bodies to literally explode in their graves. These practices are the industry standard, but New Orleans’ above-ground cemeteries remind us that there are burial practices and traditions other than the American Christian model of embalming and open-casket wakes.

There was once a time when the lack of decay was considered more frightening, disgusting, and unnatural; as such, decay plays a clear role in early vampire mythology. In the vampire classic Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, villagers fearing the presence of a predatory vampire exhume the graves of their suspects to check for signs of decay; finding Carmilla’s body perfectly preserved, as if blood still flows through her veins, they stake her heart and kill the vampire. Even IWTV contains indications that open-casket embalming was not always the norm; Lestat tells Louis that they can travel across oceans by shipping their coffins under the guise of transporting the dead bodies of loved ones, taking advantage of the sailors’ reticence to view human remains. The Civil War marked a turning point, as sending the bodies of soldiers home to their families popularized embalming and changed the preservation of corpses from a sign of supernatural interference to a common practice.

It's no wonder that New Orleans’ unique culture surrounding death has created myths and legends of vampires roaming the streets, a wealth of vampire fiction, and a highly commercial vampire-themed tourist industry throughout the French Quarter. I could not skip a visit to the Boutique du Vampyre, the famous shop of occult wares and vampire paraphernalia, where a “fangsmith” can sculpt personalized fangs with the precision of a dentist. At the Vampire Café next door, I sipped on a red cocktail served in a blood bag, and on our ghost tour we passed a filming location from the 1994 film adaptation of IWTV. The list of spooky haunts and vampire-themed attractions goes on—but for my purposes, I wasn’t just interested in fictional vampires like Lestat, or tourist traps peddling the city’s vampire mythology. I was searching for the “real vampire” community of New Orleans.

Ciena stands in front of the Boutique du Vampyre.

Ciena sips from a blood bag at the Vampire Cafe with a copy of Interview With The Vampire on hand.

A group of people who spiritually identify as vampires trapped in human vessels, the “real vampire” community commits to the vampire lifestyle full-time. Many adopt nocturnal sleeping patterns, leaving the house only at night, use cosmetic veneers or file their teeth to get permanent fangs, and practice consensual blood drinking. This community used to be a thriving subculture in the 1990s and early 2000s, coinciding with the popularity of the goth scene. For the same reasons IWTV could only work in this city, self-identified “real vampires” in search of community flocked to New Orleans.

This group is the subject of my writing. I am captivated by the question—what kind of person does it take to not just read about vampires, to not just dress like one, but to become one? For my research, I started by asking around at all the vampire tourist spots. When I asked the cashier at the Boutique du Vampyre or the server at the Vampire Café if they had ever encountered the “real vampire” community, I was met with wariness. They were all willing to talk to me, but did not seem to want to go into detail, and were most reluctant of all to point me in the right direction to learn more, claiming ignorance. Everyone I spoke to had met a self-identified vampire—but most described negative experiences, citing everything from creepy behavior, intracommunity power dynamics, borderline sexual harassment, and even complicated webs of secret societies and occult groups that don’t get along with vampires due to some unspecified drama.

The closest lead I could obtain through my amateur investigative journalism was an invitation to a vampire speakeasy. A small card with an address and the passphrase “the vampire sent me,” the invitation sent us to a jazz bar on Bourbon Street, bumping with live music and plenty of non-vampy tourists. We wound our way to the back of the bar, past the jazz band and the bathrooms, to a quiet courtyard behind the kitchens. There were only two people out back, a guy smoking a cig and checking his phone, and a lone figure slouching at a patio table. Neither man acknowledged us. But the man at the table had long black hair and white contact lenses, so he seemed like a safe bet. Once I gave him the password and our invitation, he stood up, gave a gravelly “follow me,” and unlocked a nondescript door labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY. Then he led us up the wooden staircase and into the speakeasy. The second floor of the French Quarter townhouse had been transformed into an opulent bar, textured with velvet chairs, fancy rugs, and cobwebs. The gimmick of it all made me absolutely giddy.

Francesca and I prepare to attend the vampire speakeasy, dressed in our gothic best.

Inside the vampire speakeasy.

The bouncer, we later learned, had permanent fangs, and though he was not a self-identified vampire himself, his partner was. When I tried to pry for more information, he shrugged, and said, “if you know, you know,” a common refrain when I’ve dug too deep. It could be subculture gatekeeping, or it could be a script whose answering password I did not know. On the other hand, our server at the bar quickly identified us as the youngest, gothest patrons and was more than happy to chat with us.

She explained that the surface-level vampire tourist traps—the Boutique, Café, the speakeasy itself—are all owned by the same intimidating lady. They shuffle tourists like myself between these commercial locations. This was evident in the other clientele at the speakeasy; sadly more tourists and fewer goths than I had hoped. Sometimes, our server said, “real vampires” did come to the speakeasy to suss out potential inductees, to sort through the sightseers and identify the people who were actually serious about joining the vampire lifestyle, but there was no guarantee of ever meeting a “real vampire” at a tourist joint. The community generally keeps to itself. They especially don’t care for tourists who just want to gawk at them—which makes sense, but is sad for me, as I very much wanted to gawk at them.

Logo for the New Orleans Vampire Association (NOVA). Their website appears to be inactive since 2013, but its mission statement, as well as the events on their community forum, indicate a focus on charity and giving back to those in need as a way to thank the city of New Orleans for enabling their community to thrive.

The “real vampires”’ avoidance of tourists stems from more than just disdain; they don’t mess with us because they want to be left to their own devices, continuing to practice a vampire lifestyle consensually and with a standard of ethics. The “real vampire” community overlaps with BDSM subculture, sharing an emphasis on consent and contracts. Sanguinarians (blood-drinking “real vampires”) make formal agreements with willing donors, who are often but not always romantic or sexual partners, and use sterilized instruments to prick the skin for small amounts of blood. When put that way, one can still find this practice icky or weird, but it’s not nearly as depraved as it first sounds. Furthermore, “real vampire” organizations operate primarily as social clubs but also as charities. The New Orleans Vampire Association, for example, organized relief funds for victims of Hurricane Katrina and prepared meals for the homeless. The “real vampire” community expresses a desire to give back to New Orleans, the city which has provided them a second home, through that special culture of embracing difference which is fundamental to their existence as a community. At the end of the day, it’s highly unlikely that the “real vampires” of New Orleans are secretly evil murderers; they’re simply eccentrics, grateful to the city and glad to be left alone.

An adorable bat plushie for sale at the Boutique du Vampyre—and it can be yours for the low, perfectly reasonable price of $50!

That said, I hesitate to delve much deeper into the world of the “real vampires.” It’s a dying subculture; according to the speakeasy bouncer’s estimate, there are only about 50 vampires left in New Orleans. That is too few for me to continue to comfortably poke my nose in where it doesn’t belong. I don’t want some guy who’s convinced he’s the reincarnation of Lestat to know my face and learn my name. I just touched the surface of this world, and I have many questions left. Why is it dying? Is it the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused irreparable damage to many communities around the world? Is it the economic strain post-Katrina? Is it due to the decline of subculture, especially music-based subcultures, with the accessibility and homogenization of global culture in the Internet age? I think it might be because of the over-commercialization of the vampire world (based on the speakeasy patrons we saw, it’s slim pickings for new vampire recruits). Or is the answer something deeper—a shift in New Orleans’ culture around death? Supposedly even Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs like the Divine Ladies are no longer fulfilling their duties to maintain the graves of late members. Perhaps death, too, has been commercialized, the egoic desire to stop decay from inevitably taking hold of our bodies altering New Orleans’ community-oriented view on death forever.

I didn’t go deep enough to find out the answer for certain. But by conducting my own research, I had a richer Bookpacking experience than I could have ever hoped for. No matter what’s real—and no matter why it came about—what is undeniably true is that the “real vampire” community and its reputation has worked its way into the city’s psyche, to which superstition and spirituality is intrinsic. Even our hotel doorman, Todd, has seen them. He told us so, matter-of-fact:

“There are people who only come out at night,” he said, “Oh, yes. They walk all over town at night. I’ve absolutely seen the vampires, yes.”

Our Month of Rest and Relaxation

It was day one of Bookpacking and I’d been up since five in the morning. The day before, I woke up at five in the morning, too, to primp and groom myself ahead of my parents’ six AM arrival time in order to secure good seats for the 140th annual USC Commencement. I sat in the heat, weighed down by a stack of fragrant leis, and walked across the stage with bleeding feet to accept my diploma. My extended family came out to support me, and I made the rounds with sincere gratitude and feigned energy. The day prior I’d spent submitting finals, finishing work projects, cleaning, packing, readying myself for another journey entirely, and by the time my family cleared out and I’d helped my mother clean up the dishes and graduation-themed décor, I was more than ready to fall into bed, my alarm set for five AM sharp.

It was this on my mind as our van rumbled down the raised Louisiana highways, past cypress swamps and dilapidated telephone lines with poles listing so far to the side they looked like masts in an abandoned pirate shipyard. I was tired. Bone tired. Dead tired. Social battery drained to zero, non-recyclable, dispose with caution.

Our blue beachside cottage in Grand Isle, Louisiana. An unexpected, last-minute delight after our arranged accommodations collapsed.

I was surrounded by my new classmates, my travel buddies and soon-to-be friends, but the exhaustion was weighing down my cheeks, and all I could bring myself to look forward to is the moment I could finally rest.

Lucky for me, we were headed for Grand Isle, where, à la Kate Chopin, we had a beachside cottage waiting for us, specifically for the purpose of rest.

Kate Chopin’s novella, The Awakening, follows Edna Pontellier, an American woman navigating Creole society in the 1870s as she vacations on the beach, strolls around New Orleans, and awakens to a burgeoning independence and passion that has laid dormant within her for her entire life. The novel’s subject matter is abstract, but poignant; the “awakening” to oneself, that vague urgency that comes with the consciousness of one’s own unarticulated potential. Through uninterrupted leisure and rest, Edna awakens.

Much like Edna, this Maymester marks a voyage towards independence for many of us. Travel, and by necessity the separation from the social and material comforts of our day-to-day lives, lends itself to self-discovery and individuation. We should all hope to awaken to some inner potential—whether that’s a love of reading, our ability to forge new connections, the joy in embarking to places unknown, or simply gaining awareness of what it feels like to sit in conscious contemplation of our experiences. None of that would be possible without one essential ingredient—rest.

By divine professorial authority, we have been instructed not just to keep up with our reading, blogging, and essaying, but to learn to rest. Before we can adjust to the rhythms of the Big Easy, we must first teach ourselves to slow down. To read our books in peaceful silence. Sit on the porch swing. Feel the warm sand. Watch the waves. Sleep.

The ocean like a wide-open field, and the liminal space on the beach.

The porch swing of my Romantic dreams. If only there weren’t mosquitos and I would’ve stayed out there all night like Edna in her hammock.

As we soaked in the days in our Grand Isle home, I found that there are so many more hours in the day when all you have to do is read, write, and rest. I felt the urge to multitask, to maximize, to struggle against the passage of time finally beginning to fall away. I had time. I could change into my swimsuit and dip my feet into the water. I could cook some food. I could take a warm shower. I could nap—and I did, sometimes twice a day—on the beach or on the porch or on the couch or in my bed. It was this potential, almost more than the actions themselves, that allowed me to finally release the stress I had been carrying with me through the end of the semester and into my graduation.

All the while, I delved into Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, sitting before the same ocean vista as Edna. I found myself moved not only by Chopin’s beautiful imagery but also by the subtlety of her subject matter. The novella, like its characters, meanders, without concrete structure, anchored not by a conventional plot but rather by its exploration of Edna’s interiority. This marks a departure from the Arthurian style of fiction, where the actions of protagonists and antagonists are guided by the demands of the plot. The advent of psychology in the Early Modern period changed literature forever; in this sense, The Awakening was ahead of its time, resembling a post-Freudian interest in the novel as a psychological portrait of a character.

“She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.”

The nuances of Edna’s psychology are observed by more than just the reader; the characters around her—particularly Mr. Pontellier—react with concern and suspicion to her emergent interiority. Before her awakening, Edna’s emotions “had never taken the form of struggles,” remaining entirely internal and presenting no conflict with her ability to function as a well-mannered member of society. There existed a disconnect between Edna’s emotions and her behavior. However, this shifts after her summer in Grand Isle, when she can no longer ignore the feelings within her and takes action to align her life with her interior self. Her new behavior defies convention, an inconvenience to the people around her which prompts her husband to pathologize her discontent. Mr. Pontellier considers Edna’s unchaperoned walks throughout New Orleans such a sign of impropriety and bizarreness that he seeks counsel from a doctor, rather than recognize Edna’s frustration with the constraints of her life as a woman in the 1870s. He urges Edna to attend her sister’s wedding—to rest, to see her family, to get fresh air, and to remove her from the prying eyes of Creole society—but Edna refuses. Finally, to mitigate the scandal caused by Edna’s townhouse rental, Mr. Pontellier announces a trip to Europe in the newspaper without consulting Edna.

Art based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” whose protagonist slowly deteriorates into insanity under the restrictions of the “rest cure.”

Mr. Pontellier’s frantic actions reveal a sinister side to vacation; rest can be weaponized. Historically, rest has been used to simultaneously treat and punish atypical behavior in women. The “rest cure” was once a common treatment for “female hysteria” and other clinical conditions that in modern terminology could refer to anything from generalized anxiety and depression, to post-partum psychosis, multiple sclerosis, or even just sexual frustration. This treatment, as depicted in the famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," involved bed rest and strict avoidance of any intellectual stimulation for weeks at a time. Women who complained of ailments, displayed symptoms of mental illness, or rebelled against the patriarchal order could be locked in rooms for indefinite rest. Nowadays, it is easy for us to forget the oppressive potential of enforced rest (i.e. isolation and understimulation) when we crave it so much. Edna refuses to go on the trips her husband suggests, resisting his attempts to pathologize her newfound independence. However, it is impossible to ignore the positive influence of rest and travel in the novella, the liminal space of the beach at Grand Isle, and the uninterrupted time for rest and contemplation during which Edna’s awakening took root. Rest does create space for important growth and personal realizations, for Edna then and for us now. It is no wonder that, at the end of the story, Edna chooses to return to Grand Isle of her own volition, shedding her worldly restrictions once and for all.

In the spirit of Bookpacking, on our last day in Grand Isle, I decided to get in the water. I wanted to know what Edna felt, to feel the rejuvenation of endless sea stretching before me. I swam out far, beyond the breaking waves, and bobbed above the current. It was, to me, intentional activation of the senses. Intentional rest. Out there in the deep, far too deep to anchor my feet to the sand, Francesca spotted an ominous fin. My pleasure turned to panic in an instant. We raced back to shore. She was a stronger swimmer than I, and so I fell behind. My arms were tired. In that moment I shared Edna’s final fear of losing strength. But instead of the hum of bees, I heard my new friends laughing in the surf up ahead of me. And so I swam back to shore, slowly, slowly.