“The nature of New Orleans is to encourage the optimum development of New Orleanians: It’s an environment for a specific life-form, a dreamy, lazy, sentimental, musical one, prey to hallucinations (not visions), tolerant, indolent, and gifted at storytelling. This goes against the very grain of American civilization as we know it. We live incongruously in the way of the thrifty, Puritan America whose concerns, including environmental ones, are driven by the logic of economies and planning. We and our ways, are marked for elimination; there is no room in an efficient future for what we embody. This is a city of night, fog and mud, the three elements against which all the might of America is mobilized.” Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans Mon Amour, Twenty Years of Writing From The City