You hardly need a literary festival to entice you to New Orleans, but it certainly does help, writes John Moran
OF ALL THE reasons to be in the Big Easy, Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival has got to be one of the easiest. No crowds in the French Quarter quaffing Huge Ass beer from plastic buckets, seats available in all the best restaurants and plenty of elbow room in live-music bars and clubs. Plus, for good measure, at this time of year it's still refreshingly cool enough to wear a jacket in the evening.
In this oasis of relative calm I settle down and try to choose between the enormous number of events shoehorned into five days at the festival's venues, which are dotted around the French Quarter.
They include the delightful Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré, on St Peter Street, where you can catch complete plays, one-act plays and selected vignettes from Williams's work.
Our opening-night gala performance features This Property is Condemned, with Stephanie Zimbalist and Rex Reed, and Steps Must Be Gentle, graced by the grand dame of US theatre, 79-year-old Marian Seldes, and Jeremy Lawrence.
Lawrence plays Williams on stage and also at some of the festival's lively social evenings. He bears a passing resemblance to the playwright and an uncanny one to the peripatetic Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, who worked as a journalist, translator and writer in New Orleans for more than a decade during the 1870s and 1880s.
It was my keen interest in Hearn that brought me to the Big Easy in the first place.
The final act on the festival stage is the ticket I buy first, Ignatius on Stage, a hilarious reading from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the wonderful, picaresque New Orleans romp that won the Pulitzer Prize for the author 11 years after his tragic death. The veteran actor John McConnell has made the role of Ignatius J Reilly his own.
The festival also offers a tempting selection of panel discussions, in which eminent writers, scholars and commentators cover subjects as diverse as the American novel, the demystification of Thomas Pynchon and the vital importance of location in short-story writing.
Williams Research Center is hosting any number of masterclasses with publishing agents and editors, who explain their work.
There are also classes on how to approach writing for music and for listening audiences. One is given by Al Young, California's most recent poet laureate and a former chairman of the judging panel for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
Out of courtesy and, perhaps, in the interest of international relations, the genial Young introduces me to the audience before speaking of Yeats and Joyce. He later fondly tells me of his enjoyment of the Irish literary scene.
Should you have any energy left after five days and nights you might enter the Stella Shouting Contest. Then the curtain comes down on tea and cake and sparkling conversation with friends you have made at events around the quarter.
On these nights out you are liable to run into festival stars. One evening we meet the elegant Marian Seldes, who strokes my shamrock button while I compliment her first-night performance.
Another evening, together with my guide, Deborah McDonald of Garden District Book Shop, who is Ireland's unofficial envoy to New Orleans, we share some absinthe over dinner at Gumbo Shop, on Saint Peter Street, with the prolific novelist Barbara Hambly.
If you need any excuse to be in the city, whether it's for Mardi Gras, the French Quarter Festival, the Satchmo Summerfest Louis Armstrong festival or New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, you need to lighten up, call for a mint julep, chew on some hot cuisine, take in those funky sounds - or just strike up a conversation with the kindest of strangers - and let it all flow. It's that easy.
Next year's Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival runs from March 25th to 29th. See www.tennessee williams.net
Go there
Delta Airlines (www.delta. com) is a good option for directness of route via Atlanta. Options are available with other airlines through New York and Boston.
Where to stay, where to eat
Where to stay
The Lamothe House (621 Esplanade Avenue, www.lamothehouse.com)
and the Frenchmen (417 Frenchmen Street, www.frenchmenhotel.com) are hotels with easy access to the French Quarter.
More upmarket is Hotel Monteleone (214 Rue Royale, 00-1-504-5233341, www.hotel monteleone.com), where Truman Capote claims he was born and which William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams frequented.
Where to go
The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (925 Camp Street, 00-1-504-5399600, www.odgenmuseum.org) is a must-see for its vast range of paintings and sculptures.
Literary walks in the French Quarter, which can be booked at tourist centres on Jackson Square and Decatur Street.
Bring the kids across the Mississippi to Algiers, to see Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World (233 Newton Street, 00-1-504-3617821, www.mardi grasworld.com). It's like Macnas but with bigger figures.
Take a walk down Magazine Street for funky bars (check out St Joe's Bar, 5535 Magazine Street, 00-1-504-8993744) and art-deco shops.
Visit Tipitina's famous music venue (501 Napoleon Avenue, 00-1-504-8958477, www.tipitinas.com).
Take a streetcar down the oak-lined St Charles Avenue and savour the fabulous mansions.
Take a Mississippi cruise on the Natchez replica steamboat (www.natchezsteamboat.com).
You can get a ticket across Decatur from Jackson Square and up to the Moonwalk.
From the same booth you can get a ticket for a bus tour of the damage done by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and by badly built levees.
Where to hear music
The best blues and jazz are on Frenchmen Street. Try the Spotted Cat (623 Frenchmen Street, 00-1-504-9433887), the Apple Barrel (609 Frenchmen Street, 00-1-504-9499399) and the Blue Nile (532 Frenchmen Street, 00-1-504-9482583, www.bluenilelive.com).
Visit Preservation Hall (726 St Peter Street, 001-504- 5222841, www.preservation hall.com) for old-time jazz.
Rock and Bowl (4133 South Carrollton Avenue, 00-1-504- 4823133, www.rockand bowl.com) combines both of these elements.
What to read
On the flight over, read A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Penguin Classics, £7.99 in UK).
For old books go to the Librarie Book Shop (823 Chartres Street, 00-1-504- 5254837), a few doors down from Jackson Square. For new books go across Canal Street to Garden District Book Shop (2727 Prytania Street, 00-1- 504-8952266, www.garden districtbookshop.com).
The city since Hurricane Katrina
VISITORS MIGHT be forgiven for thinking that Hurricane Katrina never happened, that the catastrophic flooding that left nearly 2,000 dead and 200,000 homeless after the levees broke happened somewhere else.
But travel the short distance to the Lakeside district or the Ninth Ward and you will still be shocked by the scale of the disaster.
To get a real sense of it all, take a cab to the affected districts or e-mail tours@glno. com for a tour of the worst- affected areas and to see the restoration work.
The good news is that more than seven million people visited the city last year, almost doubling 2006's figure of 3.7 million. (Pre-Katrina, the city hosted between eight and nine million visitors a year.)
The slow rate of return by those who fled the city in 2005 is still a great cause for concern, with almost 40 per cent yet to make their way home.
The population mix has been altered, with many of the Mexicans and Central Americans who came to help with the reconstruction having stayed on with their families.