W New Orleans - French Quarter
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 5 hours ago
On this day, I will remember the heroism of the Coasties and the moment Lt.Gen. Russel L. Honore told the soldier at the Convention Center “put down that rifle, son. This is a relief mission.” I will remember the tens upon tens of thousands of good Americans who have come on their own time [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/30/2009
A Dream by Jorge Luis Borges In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/28/2009
Ok, I need to put the pages into some sort of order, an interesting exercise that requires I look back over everything I thought was suitable to bring over here. I need to figure out of some of the longer poems someone once described as “kinetic” belong with the group of short poems I’ve lumped [...]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Free subscription) | 06/25/2009
NEW ORLEANS -- Louisiana court officials involved with the case against five of six black teens accused of beating a white classmate in a case that sparked civil rights protests told The Associated Press that a plea deal should be finalized this week.
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/24/2009
Driving up Tulane Avenue to work I pass the Charity Hospital complex regularly. But first I pass under the Claiborne Avenue Expressway. Seeing these two great masses of concrete in the same frame sets my thoughts going about preservation and unintended consequences. In 1960, the Chamber of Commerce proposed a riverfront expressway as part of New [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/21/2009
It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/20/2009
Canal Street in the slow noon burn of June. Thin dribbles of tourists pass up and down, hug the narrow ledge of shade along the buildings as if some abyss yawned at the curb. A handful of hotel workers in dull uniforms colored maroon and dark blue shuffle unhappily toward work or tiredly toward [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/19/2009
Americans will probably continue to use economists’ numbers to measure recovery from the current recession. But as we debate what to do for the millions of homeowners who are “under water” — owing more on their homes than the homes are worth — we could learn from a city that knows a thing or two [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/17/2009
Please visit a local bookstore, like deVille Books, Maple Street, Garden District Bookstore, Octavia, Farbourg Marigny, Faulkner House Books. If you're not here and want to read some excellent New Orleans work, check out some of the title's below on Amazon.
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/16/2009
“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read…” – Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses. And so it is Bloomsday and there is nothing going on in New Orleans. No, that is not true. In this city there is always something [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/12/2009
Ok, I’m not crazy about memes but the delightful Grace Athas (spouse of Peter aka Adrastos) tagged me with it on Facebook so I feel I should and it seems to be on topic with the general direction of the blog lately. Fifteen Books in Fifteen Minutes: list 15 books in fifteen minutes that have stuck [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/09/2009
As I usually do when I find that the site www.everettemaddox.org has gone down, I shoot off an email to the fellow who keeps it up and let him know. And when he gets it online again I celebrate by posting up one of Everette Maddox’s poems. This being Monday the idea of actually [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/05/2009
Today one of the closet friends of one of my oldest and dearest friends died. His certificate of death will read cancer but in his story we see he was in part another victim of of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood. His story as told by Victoria Slind-Flor is here. It says, in [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/04/2009
By way of Twitter, direct from the online site of New York Magazine, which I began reading on my Blackberry but finished on my desktop while a mail and file search absorbed my laptop, which never the less managed to chime and pop up ghost summaries of emails as the Blackberry pulsed to warn [...]
Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (Free subscription) | 06/01/2009
If we seem obsessed a bit with crows of late here on Toulouse Street, well, a person has to be obsessed with something, just as stones are obsessed with their spot, plants with the day star, cats with their creeping prey and crow, well, Crow I think is obsessed with us: watching, askance and laughing. [...]
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