David Simon on what HBO’s ’Treme’ meant to him and what he hopes it meant to New Orleanians
▻http://blog.nola.com/treme-hbo/print.html?entry=/2013/12/david_simon_on_what_hbos_treme.html
It was not journalism or documentary. It was fictional, and the fact that it is set in a real time and place – or even that the events depicted are relatively recent ones – is not an affront by every literary standard of narrative. From Melville to Mitchell, from Fitzgerald to Doctorow, from Robert Penn Warren to James Jones, our times and the events of our times have been good grist for the storyteller’s mill, and some fine works in the canon are the certain result of such a dynamic. The turbulence and journey of New Orleans after Katrina is certainly as worthy of a storyteller’s attention as Pearl Harbor or Huey Long.
