Quote of the (yester)day

Sunday Times-Pic carried a pretty good feature story on Mardi Gras and national perceptions of New Orleans. This was noteworthy.

Henri Schindler, a Mardi Gras historian and float designer, offered another quote, one he knows by heart, to sum up the city's march into a historic Carnival.

Nineteenth century writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote a letter to a friend in Cincinnati about two years after he arrived in New Orleans in 1877, during a grim period in which thousands died from yellow fever. He summed up his situation this way:

"Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio."