Ryan Berger’s Reviews > New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City > Status Update

"All poems teach lessons in how to be young, especially to the young, who are young but don't know how to love it."

"The Great Cities of the world are not provincial; they invite complexity, not propaganda. New York, Venice, Paris or Prague exist in literature as exemplary occasions for meditation. They invite bitterness as well as joy, comedy as much as indictment."

His 1995 essay is one of the best things I've ever read about the city and best highlights what a contradiction it is.

The most fascinating city on Earth.

"Bit Observe as they might, there is little to see. Everyone is clean, well-mannered, white, reasonably educated, and above all, banal. Once more, as Hannah Arendt put it, evil is banality. Metarie is American banality at its purest. David Duke is the boring flower it puts forth in its little window boxes."

"After all, changes in the calendar once caused riots and religious wars. Humans must not have won those wars. Whoever did rules us today."

Giving this an impromptu bump to the top because I'm visiting NOLA again next month and I need to get my fix a little early.