One of my favorite books is New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City by Andrei Codrescu. A poet, essayist, novelist, and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, Codrescu is also widely known for his commentaries on National Public Radio.
Published in 2006, New Orleans, Mon Amour is primarily a collection of previously published essays (i.e., sixty-six chapters divided into six sections) spanning two decades on the city. Most run two to six pages. In these pieces, Codrescu describes selective aspects of New Orleans, including its bars, its politics, its strange characters, and the rhythms of everyday life, in an intimate and personal way.
I have visited New Orleans several times, mostly as a tourist and conference attendee, and once conducting research for a now-abandoned biography of the surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin (1905–1985).
Mise en Place
Codrescu’s central job is to acknowledge, but push back against, interpreting New Orleans as a series of myths that outsiders, including tourists, have and consume about the city. This includes the numerous spectacles they encounter, such as Mardi Gras excess, the New Orleans Saints football team (not to mention the frequent Super Bowl games held there), and jazz on Bourbon Street.
Codrescu’s counter-argument is embedded in his method. Having lived in the city for nearly two decades, he writes not as a visitor being entertained but as someone whose daily life is entangled with the city’s contradictions. The book’s thesis, never stated but consistently demonstrated, is that New Orleans can only be understood by living there and engaging with its people, customs, and events. This process enables Codrescu to move beyond the tourist gaze, which is typically superficial and superfluous.
This argument gains added weight because Codrescu is a kind of permanent outsider. He emigrated from Romania (Transilvania, no less), built his reputation partly through NPR commentary aimed at a national audience, and spent the bulk of his academic career at LSU rather than at a New Orleans institution. His insider status was earned rather than inherited, which gives him a particular vantage point: close enough to see what tourists miss, self-aware enough to know he is still reading the city rather than simply living inside it.
The Roux
The short-chapter format serves the book’s argument. The complexities of New Orleans are difficult to interpret, and Codrescu’s fragmented, episodic structure mimics the city’s own rhythm, which includes intense encounters followed by laid-back scenes. Because the chapters are largely self-contained, readers who find a particular vignette less engaging can skim and move on without losing the broader thread.
Étouffée
The best essays demonstrate Codrescu’s method at its sharpest. “Against Synchronicity” argues against the New Age tendency to read meaningful coincidence into New Orleans’s density of strange encounters. The city produces lots of bizarre juxtapositions, and pattern-seeking annoyingly prevails. One may not find his argument fully convincing, but it forces a genuine reckoning with how we interpret urban strangeness.
“Prosperity and the Devil” works through a deceptively simple anecdote: a neighbor repairing his house with old-fashioned tools inadvertently drives rats into surrounding homes. The essay uses this incident to explore the city’s paradox of maintenance and decay; the effort to restore one thing inevitably displaces damage elsewhere.
“Fried Rice” recounts the feud between novelist Anne Rice and Al Copeland, the founder of Popeyes. What makes the essay memorable is not the events, but what Codrescu draws from it: that in New Orleans, even cultural conflict gets refracted through food, property, and the specific grievances of adjacent neighbors.
The book’s longest chapter, “My City My Wilderness,” is its most ambitious. Codrescu moves through the city’s recurring themes, such as its unique food, crime, police corruption, and environmental vulnerability. Each theme is treated masterfully and in sufficient detail to give me the sense that I am experiencing the events myself.
The Gristle
The book’s recurring motifs, the humidity, local cuisine, topography, eccentric local personalities, and the figure of Baron Ludwig von Reizstein are occasionally redundant. Admittedly, this is a structural challenge when previously published essays are reprinted and brought together in collection form. What seems like texture across a couple of pieces can feel like repetition across sixty-six.
More substantively, Codrescu’s outsider-insider positioning, which is the book’s greatest strength, is also its quiet limitation. His New Orleans is densely populated with bohemians, academics, and the colorfully marginal. But readers should be aware that this is a very narrow demographic that pales against the city’s numerous working-class, immigrant, and poverty-stricken populations.
Café Brûlot
New Orleans, Mon Amour succeeds most when it resists the temptation to present the city in totally familiar ways. Codrescu’s best essays work the way good urban ethnography works. He is patient and attentive to the visual and sensory qualities of people, places, and things. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see—and that seeing more requires staying longer than most of us do.
The next time I visit New Orleans, I may try to visit some of the bars and restaurants Codrescu frequented. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see and experience, and that this requires staying longer, being more patient and aware than most of us usually are.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_0446.jpeg640530Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-03-15 20:31:362026-03-15 21:42:07Reading Codrescu’s NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR
In the United States, numerous standards have been developed for the operation of correctional facilities. States and the federal government have constitutional protections. Professional bodies like the American Correctional Association and the American Jail Association offer accreditation. Courts have weighed in repeatedly. And yet most people who have spent time inside a correctional facility as an inmate, a worker, or a researcher know that the gap between those standards and actual conditions is often great, and sometimes unconscionable.
The question is not whether American prison conditions are bad, but why we keep failing to fix them. Three obstacles explain the impasse: little to no independent measurement, no meaningful enforcement, and no political incentive to care. These failures are sustained, in part, because we ask the wrong questions, and when we ask the right ones, we ask them of the wrong people. Five questions, in particular, about prison conditions deserve more attention.
Who is collecting the information, and who controls it?
Most data on prison conditions comes from the institutions being evaluated (i.e., state corrections departments, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and facility administrators). This is a structural problem. Similar to the problems encountered with COMPSTAT (the relatively recent data-driven police accountability and crime tracking system) when the entity responsible for conditions is also the one measuring them, the reliability of that data can be questioned. We would not accept this logic in any other domain of public accountability. Thus, we shouldn’t accept it here.
Whose voices are being included and whose are being excluded?
Scholarly research and consulting reports have their place, but they are not sufficient. The people with the most direct and detailed knowledge of prison conditions are typically the inmates themselves, their families, and the correctional officers who work alongside them daily. These voices are frequently underrepresented in official assessments. Gathering these constituencies’ opinions should be done in a serious manner, and not simply be a cute add-on. This information can and should be collected in a rigorous manner, through structured interviews, surveys, and independent review processes that protect participants from retaliation.
Is the problem systemic or localized?
When conditions at a specific correctional facility come to light through litigation, a death, or a news media investigation, administrators and state departments of corrections frequently treat it as an isolated case. Sometimes it is. More often, it reflects long-term patterns that exist across a correctional system. Without consistent, comparable, and meaningful data collected at the facility level and aggregated at the state and federal levels, we have no reliable way to distinguish between the two. This matters enormously for how we respond.
What happens when findings are ignored?
Standards mean nothing without enforcement. Accreditation processes, legislative oversight, and court orders have all produced findings that were subsequently minimized, delayed, or ignored. The question of what accountability actually looks like is one that the field has never answered adequately.
What would an early warning system look like?
We have dashboards for economic indicators, public health metrics, and infrastructure conditions. We do not have anything comparable for the state of American correctional facilities. A well-designed monitoring system that tracks overcrowding, rates of violence, healthcare access, staffing levels, correctional officer integrity, sanitation, temperature, and the availability of rehabilitation programming across facilities would allow problems to be identified before they become crises. It would also make it considerably harder to ignore them.
These questions are not simply academic or those posed by prison activists. They have direct consequences for the 1.9 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, for the correctional workers who work in deteriorating and dangerous conditions, and for the communities to which the vast majority of incarcerated people will eventually return. Poorly funded, poorly monitored facilities do not simply punish the people inside them. They pose serious public safety concerns to everyone outside them.
The argument that prisoners deserve poor conditions because they committed crimes is both morally bankrupt and empirically counterproductive. People who leave prison without skills, without adequate healthcare, and without having been treated with basic human dignity are more likely to return. That’s not a liberal talking point. It is the consensus of the research literature.
We currently spend more on immigration detention than on the basic conditions of the facilities where sentenced prisoners serve their time. That tells us something about our priorities. It should prompt us to ask whether those priorities reflect evidence, or simply the political convenience of a public that would rather not think about what happens behind prison walls.
Photo credit
Title: Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, New York (2007).
Photographer: Xamreb
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Clinton_correctional_facility_Dannemora_NY_2007-scaled.jpg17032560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-03-01 05:01:172026-03-01 05:01:17What Are the Most Important Questions to Ask About US Prison Conditions?
This past week, I rescued my favorite reusable shopping bag from our own trash bin. My wife had thrown it away.
This wasn’t because it was splitting at the seams; I only noticed that after I rescued it. She threw it away because she’s never liked it. And this isn’t the first time I’ve rescued this particular bag.
I spotted it a couple of years ago in a trash receptacle at a Rewe supermarket in Berlin. A man and woman who looked like street people with substance abuse issues had used it to return bottles for refunds, then discarded it.
I immediately saw potential: it was oversized and made of sturdy plastic, with long handles that let me carry it over my shoulder rather than straining my hands with a heavy load. It also meant I could carry everything in one trip instead of juggling multiple bags.
I took it home, washed out the stale beer smell, and it became my favorite shopping bag.
It’s not a particularly attractive item. From a fashion point of view, it’s actually quite ugly, even tacky in a suburban kind of way. On one side is a poorly reproduced photo of a panda (reminding me of the DC Zoo), and on the other are supermarket vegetables.
I appreciate the small irony: it’s an Edeka bag (a competing German supermarket chain) that I found discarded at Rewe.
I’ve even packed it when I travel. It carries groceries, books, and recycling.
Most importantly, I consider rescuing and using this bag an act of defiance against a culture that treats everything as disposable.
Consumer culture encourages disposing of old items and purchasing new ones. Minimalism argues that attachment is unhealthy. But despite an overabundance of reusable bags competing for space in our pantry, I’m not in a rush to throw this one out.
The reason is simple: objects with stories resist disposability.
We live in a culture with contradictory messages about possessions. Planned obsolescence forces us to abandon rather than fix things once they show wear. Marketing constantly pushes us to want something new. Minimalism reinforces this activity by calling attachment to objects pathological.
But this bag isn’t just a bag. It’s a story about resourcefulness, recycling, and noticing what others overlook. It represents a moment in Berlin when I saw value where others saw trash. To a certain extent, getting rid of it would mean erasing that story.
This object isn’t just a utility; it’s also about identity.
I’ve noticed a pattern in what I keep versus what I discard. I hold onto clothing with stories, books I’ve read and marked up, objects I’ve rescued or repurposed, even when my wife tries to throw them away. I can let go of purely functional things that don’t carry a narrative. The difference isn’t about value or cost; it’s about whether something is identity-bearing or just useful.
This isn’t separation anxiety. It’s resistance to treating objects, and by extension, almost everything, as disposable. Maybe the pathological thing is a culture that insists we should feel nothing for our possessions, that everything should be easily replaceable the moment it shows wear.
That’s why I’ll keep using this rescued bag until it literally can’t hold anything anymore. Not because I’m pathological, but because I refuse to treat objects with stories as disposable.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Reusable-Plastic-Shopping-Bag-scaled.jpeg25602225Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-02-22 04:19:422026-02-22 04:20:28Why I Keep a Shopping Bag I Rescued from the Trash in Berlin
Reading Codrescu’s NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR
/by Jeffrey Ian RossApéritif
One of my favorite books is New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City by Andrei Codrescu. A poet, essayist, novelist, and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, Codrescu is also widely known for his commentaries on National Public Radio.
Published in 2006, New Orleans, Mon Amour is primarily a collection of previously published essays (i.e., sixty-six chapters divided into six sections) spanning two decades on the city. Most run two to six pages. In these pieces, Codrescu describes selective aspects of New Orleans, including its bars, its politics, its strange characters, and the rhythms of everyday life, in an intimate and personal way.
I have visited New Orleans several times, mostly as a tourist and conference attendee, and once conducting research for a now-abandoned biography of the surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin (1905–1985).
Mise en Place
Codrescu’s central job is to acknowledge, but push back against, interpreting New Orleans as a series of myths that outsiders, including tourists, have and consume about the city. This includes the numerous spectacles they encounter, such as Mardi Gras excess, the New Orleans Saints football team (not to mention the frequent Super Bowl games held there), and jazz on Bourbon Street.
Codrescu’s counter-argument is embedded in his method. Having lived in the city for nearly two decades, he writes not as a visitor being entertained but as someone whose daily life is entangled with the city’s contradictions. The book’s thesis, never stated but consistently demonstrated, is that New Orleans can only be understood by living there and engaging with its people, customs, and events. This process enables Codrescu to move beyond the tourist gaze, which is typically superficial and superfluous.
This argument gains added weight because Codrescu is a kind of permanent outsider. He emigrated from Romania (Transilvania, no less), built his reputation partly through NPR commentary aimed at a national audience, and spent the bulk of his academic career at LSU rather than at a New Orleans institution. His insider status was earned rather than inherited, which gives him a particular vantage point: close enough to see what tourists miss, self-aware enough to know he is still reading the city rather than simply living inside it.
The Roux
The short-chapter format serves the book’s argument. The complexities of New Orleans are difficult to interpret, and Codrescu’s fragmented, episodic structure mimics the city’s own rhythm, which includes intense encounters followed by laid-back scenes. Because the chapters are largely self-contained, readers who find a particular vignette less engaging can skim and move on without losing the broader thread.
Étouffée
The best essays demonstrate Codrescu’s method at its sharpest. “Against Synchronicity” argues against the New Age tendency to read meaningful coincidence into New Orleans’s density of strange encounters. The city produces lots of bizarre juxtapositions, and pattern-seeking annoyingly prevails. One may not find his argument fully convincing, but it forces a genuine reckoning with how we interpret urban strangeness.
“Prosperity and the Devil” works through a deceptively simple anecdote: a neighbor repairing his house with old-fashioned tools inadvertently drives rats into surrounding homes. The essay uses this incident to explore the city’s paradox of maintenance and decay; the effort to restore one thing inevitably displaces damage elsewhere.
“Fried Rice” recounts the feud between novelist Anne Rice and Al Copeland, the founder of Popeyes. What makes the essay memorable is not the events, but what Codrescu draws from it: that in New Orleans, even cultural conflict gets refracted through food, property, and the specific grievances of adjacent neighbors.
The book’s longest chapter, “My City My Wilderness,” is its most ambitious. Codrescu moves through the city’s recurring themes, such as its unique food, crime, police corruption, and environmental vulnerability. Each theme is treated masterfully and in sufficient detail to give me the sense that I am experiencing the events myself.
The Gristle
The book’s recurring motifs, the humidity, local cuisine, topography, eccentric local personalities, and the figure of Baron Ludwig von Reizstein are occasionally redundant. Admittedly, this is a structural challenge when previously published essays are reprinted and brought together in collection form. What seems like texture across a couple of pieces can feel like repetition across sixty-six.
More substantively, Codrescu’s outsider-insider positioning, which is the book’s greatest strength, is also its quiet limitation. His New Orleans is densely populated with bohemians, academics, and the colorfully marginal. But readers should be aware that this is a very narrow demographic that pales against the city’s numerous working-class, immigrant, and poverty-stricken populations.
Café Brûlot
New Orleans, Mon Amour succeeds most when it resists the temptation to present the city in totally familiar ways. Codrescu’s best essays work the way good urban ethnography works. He is patient and attentive to the visual and sensory qualities of people, places, and things. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see—and that seeing more requires staying longer than most of us do.
The next time I visit New Orleans, I may try to visit some of the bars and restaurants Codrescu frequented. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see and experience, and that this requires staying longer, being more patient and aware than most of us usually are.
What Are the Most Important Questions to Ask About US Prison Conditions?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIn the United States, numerous standards have been developed for the operation of correctional facilities. States and the federal government have constitutional protections. Professional bodies like the American Correctional Association and the American Jail Association offer accreditation. Courts have weighed in repeatedly. And yet most people who have spent time inside a correctional facility as an inmate, a worker, or a researcher know that the gap between those standards and actual conditions is often great, and sometimes unconscionable.
The question is not whether American prison conditions are bad, but why we keep failing to fix them. Three obstacles explain the impasse: little to no independent measurement, no meaningful enforcement, and no political incentive to care. These failures are sustained, in part, because we ask the wrong questions, and when we ask the right ones, we ask them of the wrong people. Five questions, in particular, about prison conditions deserve more attention.
Who is collecting the information, and who controls it?
Most data on prison conditions comes from the institutions being evaluated (i.e., state corrections departments, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and facility administrators). This is a structural problem. Similar to the problems encountered with COMPSTAT (the relatively recent data-driven police accountability and crime tracking system) when the entity responsible for conditions is also the one measuring them, the reliability of that data can be questioned. We would not accept this logic in any other domain of public accountability. Thus, we shouldn’t accept it here.
Whose voices are being included and whose are being excluded?
Scholarly research and consulting reports have their place, but they are not sufficient. The people with the most direct and detailed knowledge of prison conditions are typically the inmates themselves, their families, and the correctional officers who work alongside them daily. These voices are frequently underrepresented in official assessments. Gathering these constituencies’ opinions should be done in a serious manner, and not simply be a cute add-on. This information can and should be collected in a rigorous manner, through structured interviews, surveys, and independent review processes that protect participants from retaliation.
Is the problem systemic or localized?
When conditions at a specific correctional facility come to light through litigation, a death, or a news media investigation, administrators and state departments of corrections frequently treat it as an isolated case. Sometimes it is. More often, it reflects long-term patterns that exist across a correctional system. Without consistent, comparable, and meaningful data collected at the facility level and aggregated at the state and federal levels, we have no reliable way to distinguish between the two. This matters enormously for how we respond.
What happens when findings are ignored?
Standards mean nothing without enforcement. Accreditation processes, legislative oversight, and court orders have all produced findings that were subsequently minimized, delayed, or ignored. The question of what accountability actually looks like is one that the field has never answered adequately.
What would an early warning system look like?
We have dashboards for economic indicators, public health metrics, and infrastructure conditions. We do not have anything comparable for the state of American correctional facilities. A well-designed monitoring system that tracks overcrowding, rates of violence, healthcare access, staffing levels, correctional officer integrity, sanitation, temperature, and the availability of rehabilitation programming across facilities would allow problems to be identified before they become crises. It would also make it considerably harder to ignore them.
These questions are not simply academic or those posed by prison activists. They have direct consequences for the 1.9 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, for the correctional workers who work in deteriorating and dangerous conditions, and for the communities to which the vast majority of incarcerated people will eventually return. Poorly funded, poorly monitored facilities do not simply punish the people inside them. They pose serious public safety concerns to everyone outside them.
The argument that prisoners deserve poor conditions because they committed crimes is both morally bankrupt and empirically counterproductive. People who leave prison without skills, without adequate healthcare, and without having been treated with basic human dignity are more likely to return. That’s not a liberal talking point. It is the consensus of the research literature.
We currently spend more on immigration detention than on the basic conditions of the facilities where sentenced prisoners serve their time. That tells us something about our priorities. It should prompt us to ask whether those priorities reflect evidence, or simply the political convenience of a public that would rather not think about what happens behind prison walls.
Photo credit
Title: Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, New York (2007).
Photographer: Xamreb
Why I Keep a Shopping Bag I Rescued from the Trash in Berlin
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThis past week, I rescued my favorite reusable shopping bag from our own trash bin. My wife had thrown it away.
This wasn’t because it was splitting at the seams; I only noticed that after I rescued it. She threw it away because she’s never liked it. And this isn’t the first time I’ve rescued this particular bag.
I spotted it a couple of years ago in a trash receptacle at a Rewe supermarket in Berlin. A man and woman who looked like street people with substance abuse issues had used it to return bottles for refunds, then discarded it.
I immediately saw potential: it was oversized and made of sturdy plastic, with long handles that let me carry it over my shoulder rather than straining my hands with a heavy load. It also meant I could carry everything in one trip instead of juggling multiple bags.
I took it home, washed out the stale beer smell, and it became my favorite shopping bag.
It’s not a particularly attractive item. From a fashion point of view, it’s actually quite ugly, even tacky in a suburban kind of way. On one side is a poorly reproduced photo of a panda (reminding me of the DC Zoo), and on the other are supermarket vegetables.
I appreciate the small irony: it’s an Edeka bag (a competing German supermarket chain) that I found discarded at Rewe.
I’ve even packed it when I travel. It carries groceries, books, and recycling.
Most importantly, I consider rescuing and using this bag an act of defiance against a culture that treats everything as disposable.
Consumer culture encourages disposing of old items and purchasing new ones. Minimalism argues that attachment is unhealthy. But despite an overabundance of reusable bags competing for space in our pantry, I’m not in a rush to throw this one out.
The reason is simple: objects with stories resist disposability.
We live in a culture with contradictory messages about possessions. Planned obsolescence forces us to abandon rather than fix things once they show wear. Marketing constantly pushes us to want something new. Minimalism reinforces this activity by calling attachment to objects pathological.
But this bag isn’t just a bag. It’s a story about resourcefulness, recycling, and noticing what others overlook. It represents a moment in Berlin when I saw value where others saw trash. To a certain extent, getting rid of it would mean erasing that story.
This object isn’t just a utility; it’s also about identity.
I’ve noticed a pattern in what I keep versus what I discard. I hold onto clothing with stories, books I’ve read and marked up, objects I’ve rescued or repurposed, even when my wife tries to throw them away. I can let go of purely functional things that don’t carry a narrative. The difference isn’t about value or cost; it’s about whether something is identity-bearing or just useful.
This isn’t separation anxiety. It’s resistance to treating objects, and by extension, almost everything, as disposable. Maybe the pathological thing is a culture that insists we should feel nothing for our possessions, that everything should be easily replaceable the moment it shows wear.
That’s why I’ll keep using this rescued bag until it literally can’t hold anything anymore. Not because I’m pathological, but because I refuse to treat objects with stories as disposable.