When I got back from my excursion to the shrine of St. Vera, I tried to settle myself down to an afternoon of laborious composition. After a few minutes I heard some scuffling in the neighbor’s yard, and having no particular focus for my thoughts yet, I looked out my window. I saw two dogs […]
Category Archives: Travels
Death and life in New Orleans.
20-Feb-09The power of the sanctified dead.
20-Feb-09I had three good writing days in a row, but the city snared me again today. I served as chauffeur as my roommate, who is a bit hard up now, ran some of his errands – getting a W-2 from a former employer, then a trip to H&R Block to get his tax refund as […]
Quote of the day.
16-Feb-09“New Orleans is the only city where my brother and I were mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend – when he was 18 and I was 11.” (In conversation today, from a friend of mine.)
I headed downtown yesterday afternoon to do some bookshopping and to see some of the parades. No luck finding books by Richard Burton – I’ve now gone clear from the Catskills to the Gulf, checking all the likely bookshops, without finding a single copy of his 80 or so volumes of work. And such […]
Satire in New Orleans.
08-Feb-09One of the things that has most struck me – and which I never noticed before here – is the omnipresence of political discussion. There are strange things here, like truly local talk radio – not talking about Democrats and Republicans, but about New Orleans and its specific problems. There is an Onion-type newspaper, […]
Caro ave. Later vale.
08-Feb-09Krewe du Vieux rolled tonight. I made it there a bit late, and the first thing I saw was a host of papier-mache sperm cells swimming through the French Quarter, surrounded by huge crowds of people. As I got closer I saw they were following a huge float of a female behind with the […]
Lovely, democratic, Athenian insanity.
07-Feb-09Tomorrow rolls one of Mardi Gras’ first parades: the ribald Krewe du Vieux (pronounced croo duh voo). Its wonderful website gives you a taste of the mix of commentary, buffoonery, and transgression that characterizes the whole season. It’s like something out of Petronius or Lucilius, and yet here it is, in America. And there […]
In New Orleans.
06-Feb-09I arrived in the New Orleans area on Monday and stayed with a friend out in Mandeville, which is on the other side of (the surprisingly beautiful) Lake Pontchartrain. Yesterday I found a room in the Crescent City itself, and today I moved in, with a singer/songwriter (and apparently local legend) named Johnny Angel. […]
Geology is destiny.
29-Jan-09I drove out of Atlanta this morning. The Atlanta suburbs peter out around the latitude of Fayetteville, twenty-five miles to the south, although there are scattered housing developments among the pine trees for another fifteen miles. Around Zebulon I was in the countryside; there were scattered farms and fields. But for the most part I found […]
C. Ray Nagin
08-Feb-09You really have to give it to this guy, who makes George W. Bush look like Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. Everyone knows the “Chocolate City” comment, but he offered some later treasures such as “I am a vagina-friendly mayor,” and (about New Orleans being the murder capital of the U.S.), “it isn’t good for us, but […]