I finally finished Roy Blount Jr.'s Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans yesterday, and for a slim book, it sure is unsettling without meaning to be. It's partly the tragedy of timing: it was published just a few months before Katrina hit, so Mr. Roy's riffs on how unprepared the city would be for a major flood have a storybook tone to them, the way various folks jive on about the Apocalypse without really believing it will arrive in their lifetimes. Après le deluge, "disconcerting" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Also, Slick Lawson gets mentioned a fair bit in the book. I never met Slick myself, but the BYM went riding with him now and then. Again, a shade disconcerting (so to speak).

There were a couple of paragraphs I read aloud to the BYM. One was about "Olivia, the Oyster Dancer," whose routine (as described by Al Rose in a history of Storyville) consisted of "placing a raw oyster on her forehead" and then causing it to meander down her naked body until it reached her instep, "from which a quick kick would flip it high in the air, whereon she would catch it on her forehead where it started." Blount: "That is a dance I would pay to see. For one thing, if you're going to shimmy an oyster all over you, you're going to have to get pretty moist yourself, otherwise that oyster is going to dry up and drop off, reduced to how a chicken liver gets when it's foured to be fried, or worse, like a slug when it's salted. Olivia flourished before air-conditioning."

There's also this bit from Blount's diary when he was twenty-one:

Matthew said the monks at Conyers can only speak with permission, so they express their dissatisfaction at something being read or performed at meals by crunching their celery loudly. Some of them enliven masses by posing as Peanuts characters secretly and letting the others who are in on it guess who they are.

It's a very Southern book: Mr. Roy meanders and moseys among his memories and opinions as shamelessly as he does on Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!, and much of it is meant to be shambledy-shaggy-dog sorta-self-deprecating-good-old-boy funny, and then the needle suddenly slips out of the haystack, such as when (in a story about his callow reaction to a pass from a gay friend) he says, "Let's just put it in professional terms: it is not a good idea for a writer to let himself get away with consigning anybody to any category of those."

And then there's this:

I have heard people justify opposition to gay marriage on the grounds of the ick factor: they cringe at imagining what people of the same sex (pretty lesbians in some cases excepted) do in bed together. But on that basis, you wouldn't want your parents to be married. I can't think of any actual couple that I would feel right about picturing actually doing it except Elvis and Ann-Margret.

And:

A rule of thumb: Beware of anyone who is not content to generalize about categories of people -- hey, we all do that -- but must tuck the blanket in with the definite article the. "The gays," "the blacks," "the liberals." Or, for that matter, "the American people." People who may have a category in common, but who otherwise vary, are thereby squeezed into capsules -- we know who they are: them. And we know who we are: us. The hell we do.