Feet On the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans
by Roy Blount

From the Crown Journeys series.

New Orleans has figured prominently in the lives of Andy Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, Napoleon, Walt Whitman, O Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Earl Long, Randy Newman, Degas, Lilian Hellman, the Boswell Sisters, the Dixie Cups, and Roy's scandalous ancestor William Blount, to name a few. Zora Neale Hurston studied voodoo there (as Roy has, sort of), Abraham Lincoln was shocked by the slave markets there (don't get Roy started on the history of those markets), Truman Capote was conceived there (in the Hotel Monteleone), and Jefferson Davis died there. And it was there that Roy first saw a naked woman whom he didn't know, and also where he realized that a man whom he'd thought of as his first literary friend wanted to have sex with him.

All that history--multicultural and personal--is palpably, visibly, smellably there to be walked around in, and Roy Blount Jr. brings it all to us in dollopfulls. Roy knows New Orleans like the back of his hand and is only too glad to take us to both the famous and infamous sights. He sprinkles his walk with the history, literature, and lore of New Orleans of which there is plenty. And what would a trip to New Orleans be without tasting its culinary delights and eccentricities! Roy takes us from grocery stores that sell canned baby Conch, quail eggs, and Poulpe al Huile (octopus in oil) to a fine restaurant where one waiter slaps another with a napkin as if challenging him to a duel. Roy invites us to drink chicory coffee and eat beignets, listen to a street musician and horses clopping over cobblestones and a steamboat calliope going by, while reading the world's greatest obituary pages in the Times-Picayune.

And, he informs us, there's no better way to end--or start!--a walk of the city than stopping in at Napoleans and sampling the best Sazarac in the world. However it begins or ends, a trip to this great city with Roy Blount Jr. is a thing to behold.

JC6459    Feet On the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans        $16.00

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