Status Updates From N.O. Lit: 200 Years of New ...

"I spied on him for what seemed like an hour, and nothing happened. Mr. Scheidemann just sat there, smoking his cigar. It was a disappointing experience, but it had its value. It taught me that poetry can't be hurried, and that a poet may well be a bald-headed man in suspenders, smoking a cigar."

from Hamilton Basso's New Yorker essay, 'A New Orleans Childhood, the House on Decatur Street'

"The Centaur Plays Croquet" by Lyle Saxon: great title and great story.

'While in Trujillo [Honduras], Porter [O. Henry] wrote his first collection of short stories, which has the first of his eight New Orleans stories ... Also in that book he coined the term "banana republic," ...

'He also claimed that he adopted his pen name in New Orleans ...'

from George Washington Cable's The Freedman's Case in Equity':

"Speech may be silvern and silence golden; but if a lump of gold is only big enough, it can drag us to the bottom of the sea and hold us there while all the world sails over us."