The Blogs Eclectic- patois is not spelling errors!

New at www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com the daily rundown of some of the most interesting blogs on the web, The Blogs Eclectic, from books to food and more.

WHAT HAPPENED TO NEW ORLEANS?

THE BEATITUDES NETWORK - REBUILDING THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES OF NEW ORLEANS http://www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com

*Lyn LeJeune is helping rebuild New Orleans, specifically the public libraries. She is donating ALL OF THE ROYALTIES from the sale of her novel, THE BEATITUDES, directly to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation; that's three years of hard work You can help us, The Beatitudes Network, help New Orleans. **Simply buy the book for yourself and anyone you know who wants to see New Orleans come back as one of our great American cities. THE BEATITUDES is a great crime novel set in New Orleans. Go to Amazon.com and see 5 star reviews!

Come to The Beatitudes blog www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com and read excerpts from The Beatitudes, by Lyn LeJeune, now available at all book distributors around the world and amazon.com, of course. If you like what you read on our blog, please order the book, enjoy, and help NEW ORLEANS and the world. Again, the blog is www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com- come and join The Beatitudes Network - Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans.

"BUY A BOOK, BUILD A LIBRARY," AS QUOTED AT FREAKONOMICS, NEW YORK TIMES, 8/14/07.

One click of your mouse helps NOLA.

Merci mille fois- thanks a million.

Nita Cowart, Publicist for The Beatitudes Network at lynlejeune@cox.net

PS: if you have an organization that supports reading and libraries or are an author, please contact me and we will be happy to list you on our blog as a supporter of The Beatitudes Network **or ask for a FREE COPY OF THE BEATITUDES. JUST SEND US YOUR ADDRESS AT lynlejeune@cox.net.

excerpt:
"Have you read The Divine Comedy?" I asked the Archbishop.
"Yes. In seminary."
"Jesuit?"
"Yes."
"My father loved Dante," I said, and stood up. "Think of it, a man of the swamp, quoted Dante to me when I was a kid."
"That's admirable," said the Archbishop.
"You bet. So anyway, Dante begins his journey and faces three beasts: the leopard of disordered appetites, you know drinking, eating, lust, that kind of thing; the lion of bestial doings portends what happens when we use our intellects, our sources of good for bad, very bad things; then there is the lean and hungry wolf, that's the sins that occur when we use our intellect and capacity for good in the service of darkness, cruelty and desecration of life itself. The Holocaust, slavery, or the murder of children."
"You think I have not seen the beasts?" he asked me, moving forward in his chair.
"Yes, I think you have. But I am reminded of this passage: The power that perceives the course of time is not the power that captures all the mind. That's from Purgatorio. My friend, the one who was murdered and you prayed for recently, told me that time was endless. I don't believe my path is laid out for me. I still choose which way to go and who to go with."
"Then I hope that you have as good a companion as Dante's Beatrice as you make your journey. I will pray for you."
He was dismissing me. I moved toward him slowly, feeling Pinch moving with me. My eyes locked on the Archbishop's. He was sad, in spiritual pain, I could sense that; a man with great power who was immobilized by his position, by his belief that he could function only within the clothes that he wore, the trappings of the Church. As best he could, he proceeded mercifully. The hell of it was that the sins of omission are often greater and more damaging than those of commission. So sayeth the lean and hungry wolf.

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The Internatinal Blue Book Campaign

Carry "The Blue Book" called The Beatitudes and join THE INTERNATIONAL BLUE BOOK CAMPAIGN TO REBUILD NEW ORLEANS!

Imagine this: the great seeing eye camera from Google Earth focuses in on a man and a woman and a child each carrying a blue book. It is The Beatitudes, the symbol of the written word; it is their signal to the world that words and books must be preserved and cherished so that humanity, good humanity, will continue to exist. The phenomenon captures the media….instead of a bracelet they CARRY A BOOK; THE BLUE BOOK CALLED THE BEATITUDES. Soon, thousands, no millions, carry the book in support of the written word. People are sending messages on cell phones, iPods….You, you, my friends have made THE difference.

*I am helping rebuild New Orleans, specifically the public libraries. I don't have money, but I am giving three years of hard work and a published novel AND ALL ROYALTIES directly to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation. You can help me help New Orleans. Simply buy the book for yourself and anyone you know who loves New Orleans and likes to read! Go to amazon.com and see 5 star reviews!

Here is an excerpt from the supernatural novel, The Beatitudes, by Lyn LeJeune, now available at all book distributors around the world. I am DONATING ALL ROYALTIES to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation to help rebuild the public libraries of New Orleans. If you like what you read here, order the book, enjoy, and help NEW ORLEANS and the world.. (my blog is www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com- come and join The Beatitudes Network - Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans) "BUY A BOOK, BUILD A LIBRARY," AS QUOTED AT FREAKONOMICS, NEW YORK TIMES, 8/14/07.

excerpt: PINCH & SCRIMP LEAVING PURGATORY

We walked in a line out of the marsh and back onto a gravel road and headed into the setting sun. A soft breeze seemed to anticipate our movement down the path and the air smelled clean for a change. The sound of lost souls ceased and all was silent. Pinch walked behind me and I could feel her warm breath, the heat from her spirit. She breathes. I was comforted, somewhat.
"So, what have you learned?' asked Delcambre. "Time moves on."
"All the sins are the same," said Pinch. "All that is not sin is love. All sins are the murder of children."
"We kill our future," I said.
"Yes," said Delcambre. "Remember, there is perverted love and excessive love."
"But, are those kinds of love, love at all?" I asked.
"Remember we are free. It is what we do with love that makes us or breaks us," said Delcambre. Again he smiled.
"That's not news," I said.
"Again I say," said Delcambre. "Who listens?"
The graveled path ended in the city where the execution had taken place. The path swung out on each side and in the distance I saw large buildings and a trolley coming towards us. I looked up at a steel post with a narrow green sign with white letters. Canal Street. Pinch touched my arm and pointed toward an oyster-shell covered road to our left. A thudding sound rolled towards us carrying voices that cried out in pain. From around the corner of the building came some hundred or more people running barefooted, their feet mangled masses of flesh, blood and bone. They wore running outfits, shorts and t-shirts. "Oh, my God, " I gasped. "Their feet; how can they?
"Sloth," said Delcambre. "They may run forever."
"I'm glad I'm a ghost," said Pinch.
"Wait, wait a minute," I barked out. "Something's wrong here. I'm not an expert on Dante, but we're not following the path that he took. I thought we were in purgatory?"
"I shall clarify," said Delcambre. "Purgatory is diluted by time."
Darkness came swiftly, then a silver moon, a phantasmagoria of stars.
"Is this what the real sky looks like?" asked Pinch.
"The original," said Delcambre.
I had never seen such beauty. I raised my hands toward the sky, like a blind person who suddenly is given sight, like a child who has yet to understand the concept of space. I touched a star, a cool, energetic, lovely star. My whole life came back to me, I felt my blood rush through my veins, heard my heart beating, felt the magical protection of my skin on my heavenly body. The song of a bird, soft, inflated the silence of this world; it trilled, beckoned, and I knew we were listening to the first sparrow. Time passed on and on.
"Can we just stay here for a little longer?" I asked Delcambre.
"No, but you have this moment as a gift."
I looked at Pinch and she moved toward me and did not stop until she had entered me and we became one. We stayed until the dawn muted the stars. Pinch moved out of me, and we followed Delcambre back to where we had started the night before.
"We have one more to meet. It will be sure evidence."
A man with dark hollow eyes stood at a crossroads under the shadow of three trees. He was cutting away at a strangling vine that had wrapped around the trees. He watched us approach.
"Must kill the seed of the strangling vine," he shouted. His voice was hoarse. He held up the long knife and it gleamed brightly from the rays of the rising sun. "Need to get all this wood down to the valley to build the oil drums."
"He holds the knife of Judas," said Delcambre, as he nodded at me.
"Harlan's scalpel, pecan trees, the beginning of life," I said, nodding. "The rape of the world."
We walked past the man and I caught a strong odor of acorns. I remembered the smell of cognac on Harlan as he took my hand in his. I knew our journey was nearing its end.
All semblance of the previous night vanished as the sun became a glowing orange sphere. The azure waters of the Mississippi reflected the ozone-wasted globe. With the light behind us, my blackened shadow preceded us like the entrance to a dark and visceral cave. In the world of the self-forsaken that lay behind us, I could hear the persistent moaning of penitents.
"We are ending?" asked Pinch.
"But were we really here? Has it all been a dream from the beginning until now? Are you what you are?"
"What difference, dream or not, " said Delcambre. "Each of us is identified by the sins we commit, or do not. Seven sins, eight beatitudes, nine murders, ten murders more."
"To infinity," I said.
"Perhaps," said Delcambre. "But I will leave you with this: that it is substance as well as the numbers that you seek. Those who long for justice are blessed and therein resides your quest. Follow that path. And love." Pinch and I stood next to each other, watched Delcambre return to purgatory, or whatever world he had come from; it will be called many things. I took Pinch's hand and followed the path that led along the shaking waters and to the Noble One. We entered the other New Orleans again at the Napoleon Avenue terminal.

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The gift of giving- please help public libraries!!!!

The year after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, I enrolled in college at the University of New Orleans and had to take a two-hour bus trip on the New Orleans transit line from St. Bernard Parish out to Lake Pontchartrain. I hated trigonometry, and did not think it would help me escape my life near the Mississippi levee or the constant smell spewing from the Domino sugar plant. So I usually ended up at the downtown public library, then later I would head to Jackson Square for a couple of Jax brews. That public library was my sanctuary and worlds of adventure opened up for me through the pages of a thousand and one books. I started reading from the end of the alphabet and arrived at "V" before I realized that I would have to live many lives to read all of the wonderful books. After Katrina, I decided to finish THE book, start The Beatitudes Network- Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans (www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com) and donate all royalties from sale of The Beatitudes, Book I in The New Orleans Trilogy directly to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation to help rebuild the libraries. The Foundation gladly gave me the 501c non-profit tax number and my publisher arranged for the royalties to go directly to rebuilding the public libraries of the City That Care Forgot, The Heavenly City, The Big Easy. At www.amazon.com the Foundation is listed as the co-author, so readers may be assured that royalties flow directly to NOLA when The Beatitudes by Lyn LeJeune is purchased.

The Beatitudes Network is now part of a global campaign called The Blue Book Campaign to Remember New Orleans. Imagine this: the great seeing eye camera from Google Earth focuses in on a man and a woman and a child each carrying a blue book. It is The Beatitudes, the symbol of the written word; it is their signal to the world that words and books must be preserved and cherished so that humanity, good humanity, will continue to exist. The phenomenon captures the media….instead of a bracelet they CARRY A BOOK; THE BLUE BOOK CALLED THE BEATITUDES. Soon, thousands, no millions, carry the book in support of the written word. People are sending messages on cell phones, iPods….You, you, my friends will make THE difference.

Here's The Beatitudes: Social workers Hannah "Scrimp" DuBois and Earlene "Pinch" Washington have just started their own business, Social Investigations, to solve the murders of ten foster children in New Orleans, Louisiana. The NOPD, the Catholic Church, and local politicians has sidestepped clues that point to those who hold great power, hampering their investigation.

As Scrimp and Pinch discover more evidence, they realize that they are dealing with a force that crosses into the realm of the paranormal. They are thrown into a world much like Dante's purgatory. Soon they link the murderers to a secret organization called the White Army, or La Armee Blanc, centered in New Orleans, but rooted in medieval Europe and the Children's Crusades. Each clue leads to a beatitudes, the characteristics of those who are deemed blessed; the pure of heart, the persecuted, the merciful, the sorrowful the peacemakers, the meek, the poor in spirit, and those who hunger and thirst after justice. By the time the eleventh child - the sacrificial child-goes missing, Scrimp and Pinch are determined to prevent his death.

Racing against time and the threat of an approaching hurricane, these two bold, no-nonsense women work together to restore hope and bring closure to a city battered by sin.

As we say in Cajun country, Que le bon Dieu vous benit - may the good God bless you!

An excerpt from chapter I: "The Pure of Heart"

My best friend Pinch was murdered while I slept. The police reported that she was caught off guard, snuck up on, as Pinch would have said. I don't believe that for one blasted minute. I
know she looked her killer in the eye, sized him up, laughed, then spit in his face. It all happened before my very eyes; I had dreamed about her death over the past year. The first dream came the morning after the murder of the first foster child. Marisa was found fully clothed, wrapped in a pink swaddling blanket, as though dreaming of many tomorrows and games and parties and toys; and then eight more dreams, eight more foster children murdered, all left on the trolleys of New Orleans; then again the same dream after the presumed murderer had been arrested; and finally the last one, after I had lost my job, accused of negligence in the care of two of the slain children under my charge. And when Pinch was butchered, my dream coming horrifyingly true, my life spinning out of control, I had, for the second time in my life, lost everything, lost control, was unwittingly blown away by the winds of a dispassionate fate. Or so I thought at the time.
Pinch, born Earline Washington, had been my friend and colleague in the social work department located in Greater New Orleans for almost five years. In a bureaucracy that seemed always under siege, its employees ceaselessly dispirited, Earline was one of the few welcoming faces I encountered when I started my first day as a social worker. I had the feeling that I had walked into a hive of Sisyphean slaves; but this woman's splendid, dark face, embellished with green eyes and an earnest smile, captivated me immediately. My innate and all-consuming reticence vanished. It seemed a natural coming together, our early fraternity, as though we were soul mates. She called me Hannah love, and then our relationship grew to perfect friendship. We read each others' thoughts, knew when the melancholy clouds of sorrow from our pasts had suddenly descended upon us, even as the bright nimbus of southern nights beckoned. All of my life I had experienced Sundowner's Syndrome, but with Pinch the carmine shadows of evening became an event not without hope. We shared our failures as potential social saviors, but never allowed each other to give up.
She had grown up in a New Orleans housing project shamefully named Desire. Desire had been constructed in an isolated area northwest of greater New Orleans, bordered by industrial canals and railroad tracks. Pinch often recounted her nights as a young child lying on the floor under a matted blanket listening to gunshots in the night. Desire had been built in the late 40s over the Hideaway Club where Fats Domino had played his first gigs. Pinch swore she could hear Fats sing "My Blue Heaven" just for her. As Pinch's childhood tumbled forward, she learned survival skills. By the age of twelve, she had tried just about every street drug going and stole to keep from going hungry, acquiring the nickname Pinch. She would have been doomed to a child's death but for the help of an aged aunt. Pinch pulled herself up, finished high school, and made it through college by working sometimes two shifts as a housekeeper in seedy hotels that bordered the Ninth Ward. A city auditor once asked her why she hadn't worked in the Lafayette Square District or the famous 625 St. Charles suites. "You could have paid for a Ph.D. with the tips alone." And she replied: "Well, I guess 'dis sista just feeling mo' secure wid da brothers. Ozanam Inn be my place, homeless peoples and all." Then she rubbed his arm. The poor guy broke out in a sweat, brushed his thinning hair back with an aged-spotted trembling hand, and looked at me for intervention. Later I asked Pinch why she'd stuck it to the auditor; she shrugged her shoulders and replied: "I guess just every once and a while I have to remind myself where I come from. Pride has many forms, love." Pinch had overcome. She was the bravest person I ever knew.
My name is Hannah DuBois. I grew up on the banks of the bayous that run between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. This area was once God's breeding ground, for it held the muck and stuff from which life evolved. But by the end of the Reagan Administration, fouled by oil, gas, and the rapacious march of progress, it came to be called Cancer Alley. My grandparents did not speak English, and my mother stopped talking altogether the night my father went to town for a beer and never came back. Like Pinch, I grew up poor; I was sixteen before I ate pizza, and saved almost every dime I made. I moved to New Orleans soon after my mother died, leaving the only home I had ever known; I exchanged the precious land for the urban jungle. My grandparents had left me a little money and a small monthly income from the Standard Gas Company, so I kept my promise to my long-gone father and enrolled in college. All of my money went to school and rent, and it seemed my hunger was unending. You can eat well in New Orleans if you find the right places, places where food was cheap, good and abundant. But I also loved junk food. I guess any food. My pockets were stuffed with crackers and sugar, mustard, and ketchup packets from fast food joints. "Want not" was my motto. So Pinch nicknamed me Scrimp. We made quite a pair.
In May of 2005, the New Orleans Social Services Department finally got divine guidance and mandated that all social workers had to have a partner. The division called it "the buddy system." The new directive came as a result of what the Times-Picayune dubbed The Foster Child Murders. Nine children had been murdered in the last year; "suffocated tenderly," said the Medical Examiner, "their baby bodies placed in the back seat of the city's trolleys." He continued in his clinically obtuse, yet lyrical, way, for which he was famous: "Fragile spirits fluttering into the moss latticed oaks, riding to God on the St. Charles line." The children had already endured endless and unexplainable pain during their short time among brutal adults. Sexual abuse, torture, starvation, all criminal in their lack of connection with life. One of the trolley drivers, a black man who had worked the St. Charles Line for over forty years and had witn

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The Beatitudes: The Beginning

Jesus' Sermon on the Mount gave the world its first knowledge of The Beatitudes. Dante's Purgatorio juxtaposed the concept of The Beatitudes with that of the deadly sins.

The Beatitudes still walk among us in this modern age; they look like you and me; they act in the interests of others; they are blessed; they provide solace; they are the saviors of our souls. Look around you and in these chapters. Perhaps there is within you the seeds of at least one Beatitude.

And then, there is sin.

(see www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com for tour information....rebuild the public libraries of New Orleans. Go to www.nutrias.org to see the devastation that must be put right!)

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The Beatitudes: The Story

This world is revealed by the lives of two social workers, Hannah Dubois (white and nicknamed Scrimp) and Earlene Washington (African-American and nicknamed Pinch), who start their own business, Social Investigations, in order to solve the murders of ten foster children in New Orleans, Louisiana. The NOPD, the Catholic Church, and politicians have sidestepped clues that point to those who hold great power. As Hannah and Earlene find more and more evidence, they also know that they are dealing with a force that crosses into the realm of the spiritual. The murderers are part of a secret organization called the White Army (le Armee Blanc), centered in New Orleans, but rooted in Medieval Europe and the Children's Crusades. Each clue leads to a beatitude and each chapter defines the novel: The Pure of Heart, The Persecuted, The Merciful, The Sorrowful, The Peacemakers, The Meek, The Poor in Spirit, and Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Justice. The Beatitudes is thus a study of good and evil, and that act, the murder of innocent children, which encompasses all of the seven deadly sins.

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The Beatitudes is dedicated to Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans and is Book I in the New Orleans Trilogy. Lyn LeJeune will be on tour starting in August, 2007 as part of The Beatitudes Network. See www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com for tour information and a brief bio. The author is accepting requests for bookings of this 1 hour lecture: Katrina and Dante:Modern Mysteries, Faith and The Divine Comedy.
Many prominent authors support this effort; see blog. email lynlejeune@cox.net href="mailto:lynlejeune@cox.net">lynlejeune@cox.net