“Canned food is a perversion! I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.”
- Ignatius P. Reilly/Confederacy of Dunces
“Everything in New Orleans is a good idea.”
- Bob Dylan
You know, when it rains in New Orleans in the summertime, it makes its own gravy. Ha Ha. Those of you that have been, you know what I mean. We just got back from a quick trip to the Big Easy. Kendra's been there a lot on trips but it had been 15 years for me. We went specifically to tour the WWII museum that so many friends have raved about. And of course, the food. The food. It's difficult to get a bad meal in New Orleans. You'd have to work hard to do it. We weren't disappointed.
We weren't disappointed with the museum, either. My, what an extraordinary place. It's huge and comprehensive. It's the very definition of first rate. It's a reminder for all of us what sacrifice, heartbreak and hardship looks like. They were made of different stock, those people who saved the world from tyranny and evil. I fear we would be incapable of anything close to that kind of devotion. I think we'd find it all terribly inconvenient.
If you have a chance to go, go. If you have young people in your orbit, take them. We don't teach history any longer and that will likely contribute in large part to our undoing.
Also, we took the opportunity to go by and visit the statue of Ignatius P. Reilly that sits on Canal Street. Ignatius, the protagonist in the book A Confederacy of Dunces, is one of the most memorable and absurd characters in all of American fiction. He's a thirty-year-old overweight man-child with a masters degree in Medieval studies who lives with his mother in 1960s New Orleans.
The book follows the bumbling misadventures of the slovenly misfit as he tries to negotiate the modern world in the colorful city full of equally eccentric characters.
It's generally considered a comic masterpiece. The way it came to be published makes it a fascinating story in itself. It was written in 1963 by John Kennedy Toole. He was unsuccessful in getting it published and that frustration, combined with an accelerating level of paranoia, led to his suicide in 1969. He was 31.
The following passage gives a good description of what happened next:
After his death, his mother, Thelma, made repeated attempts to get her son’s novel published. Eventually she found her way to the office of renowned author Walker Percy, who was teaching in the English department at Loyola University, New Orleans. She forced him to take a copy of the manuscript and made him promise to read it. As he recounts in his foreword to the published work, initially he read with great hesitation, but “in this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.” With Percy’s help, the book was eventually published by Louisiana State University Press in 1980, and quickly became a classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.
So there you go.
And about the food. We had some of our standard NOLA favorites: oyster po' boys, muffalletas, Zap's chips, and gumbo. The star of the show was breakfast the last day. When traveling and eating around the country I typically have three dishes I often order to judge a place. I figure if they can nail those, they should be thumbs up. Those things are - the basic cheeseburger and fries, chicken and waffles or shrimp and grits.
At Fluer-de-Lis in the Quarter, I ordered their shrimp and grits that morning. I'll be thinking about them for a long time. They will forever be the bar that others are measured by. I talked to Shawn our waitress. I told her they were the best I ever had. She said, “That's because I made ‘em.” I asked about some of the magic she had going on in them and she gave me some inside baseball. I’ve made shrimp and grits several times. They've always turned out satisfactory but not, you know, “SHUT UP!” good. But I think with the new tricks from Shawn, my game may be elevated.
I'm glad we went, but like every trip I've ever made to New Orleans, 72 hours is enough. It was time to go, and we did.
A couple from my favorite New Orleans-based bands below. Got any I need to know about?