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The Old New Orleans
I was locked out of Lakeview NextDoor for three days after I called out a woman who said the poor services at the West End Walgreens was likely due to “corporate DEI” goals or quotas, I forget which and can’t see her post again for three days. My first comment was, “wow, did you really… Continue reading
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Midwest Memories
A small town in Northwest Minnesota. A grandparent in the graveyard the price of full admission. My friend who lived there 20 years reading at Mass while I stood in the back with my restless child and a woman asked who he was and the other answered, oh that’s Ted F. He’s new in town.… Continue reading
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The Fall of the Towers
YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT MOMENTWHERE YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM— Samuel R. Delaney in City of a Thousand Suns Fifteen years ago I found something of promise in that quote from Delaney’s novel about a society shattered by the discovery that all of their foundational truths were lies, in the promise of the rebuilding in… Continue reading
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The Kids Are Alright
Last night at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans for Billy and the Kids, with Molly Tuttle outsigning Donna Godchaux and a fine piano player and Billy Strings in his best late 70s-80s mature Garcia voice, I could close my eyes for a minute and imagine myself at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, GA in… Continue reading
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How It All Went Wrong
Confessions of a Pill Eater Continue reading
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Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine
No serious hope of ever publishing this so sharing here for those who remember The Goldmine is an old biker bar,where Galloping Gooses once drainedOdyssean pitchers of the Champagneof Bottled Beer in the dark of afternoon. Now college girls & their boys &the old men who want to fuck thecollege girls dance in the wee… Continue reading
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Re-reading Hopscotch in the 21st Century
In Defense of the Kindle When I first read Hopscotch in mass-market paperback edition late in high school in the 1970s, I was taken by the combined celebration and critique of mid-20th century bohemia. I was drawn to it perhaps because I was also reading the Beats, and learning of the early folk scene in… Continue reading
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He Might Be The Prince of Peace Returning
https://youtu.be/2DYzLna5UzA I am not a Xian but rather an enemy of the fascist turn of the American and Catholic Xian churches. But I pray for you this day–Passover Easter or Ramadan– a day of Peace. A truce if you will. Your Jesus is not dead. He is having a smoke in an Amsterdam Cafe with… Continue reading
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The Vast White Ring Conspiracy
<img alt=”A ring of men in white hoods standing around a fire holding torches.”> * Perhaps it’s wrong to reuse a title. When I first coined this on The Wet Bank Guide it was to taunt both then-mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin and the white ring that binds it. The phrase came back to… Continue reading
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The Form of Space
I must have forgotten if I ever knew how much more quickly the moon speeds across the firmament in the opposite direction of the slower stars. I was struck by the beauty of the thin crescent Moon with Venus perched a hand span above it the other night, almost perfectly centered to the crescent. And… Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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