KATRINA’S FURY STRIKES THE LAND OF MANY WRITERS: We passed the hat for American Red Cross hurricane relief last night at the meeting of the Laramie County Democrats. I thought more of human tragedy than partisan politics, as Katrina didn’t pass over Republican homes to get to Democrats (or vice versa). I also thought of those writers from The Deep South who have stirred my imagination. Walker Percy of Covington, La., and his character Binx Bolling in “The Moviegoer.” He sits in darkened New Orleans theatres and hopes that movie magic will somehow banish his terminal ennui. I imagined failed hotdog vendor Ignatius J. Reilly in “Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole, possibly one of fiction’s greatest creations. I conjured Anne Rice’s vampires and Tennessee Williams’ tormented characters and Faulkner in the French Quarter, Yoknapatawpha County characters swirling in his head. I thought about the poetry of Louisiana-born Yusef Komunyakaa, set in the wilds of Louisiana and Vietnam. Katrina blasted Mississippi too, decimating places featured in stories by Eudora Welty and Rick Bass. I recalled the dark comic novels of Lewis Nordan and Patricia Henley’s striving characters in “Miss Firecracker.” I think about writing colleagues all across the South, from Maureen Seaton in Miami to Wendy Rawlings in Tuscaloosa. So I tossed some money in the hat as it passed. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
: 5:20 AM