It's been customary to write about New Orleans as a foreign city. The tropics are often mentioned, particularly if the writer has had the bad luck to arrive in August: steamy, sensuous, tempting, vaguely dangerous. Some have dwelt on New Orleans' French origins, some on its Latin flair for celebration. It has been described as Mediterranean and Levantine. In 1960, when I first started writing about New Orleans, I told a man I knew there -- a wise man, who had spent his whole life in New Orleans, taking in the show -- that some of the goings-on connected with the...
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