I’m deep into my Dixie “research” by now (an awfully serious name for the pure pleasure of reading some great books for the first time, and binging on YouTube clips of Muddy Waters and Patsy Cline), and at the library not long ago I came across William Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches, a collection of short essays and fiction written in 1925 (before he hit the big-time) and published in the local daily and a regional literary magazine. Here’s a doozy called “The Tourist”:

- New Orleans.

A courtesan, not old and yet no longer young, who shuns the sunlight that the illusion of her former glory be preserved. The mirrors in her house are dim and the frames are tarnished; all her house is dim and beautiful with age. She reclines gracefully upon a dull brocaded chaise-longue, there is the scent of incense about her, and her draperies are arranged in formal folds. She lives in an atmosphere of a bygone and more gracious age.

And those whom she receives are few in number, and they come to her through an eternal twilight. She does not talk much herself, yet she seems to dominate the conversation, which is low-toned but never dull, artificial but not brilliant. And those who are not of the elect must stand forever without her portals.

New Orleans… a courtesan whose hold is strong upon the mature, to whose charm the young must respond. And all who leave her, seeking the virgin’s unbrown, ungold hair and her blanched and icy breast where no lover has died, return to her when she smiles across her languid fan…

New Orleans.