The A Confederacy of Dunces Excerpt of the Day

"Ignatius! So you got yourself fired."

"Please, Mother, I am near the breaking point." Ignatius stuck the bottle of Dr. Nut under his moustache and drank noisily, making great sounds of sucking and gurgling. "If you are planning now to be harpy, I shall certainly be pushed over the brink."

"A little job in a office and you can't hold it down. With all your education."

"I was hated and resented," Ignatius said, casting a hurt expression at the brown walls of the kitchen. He pulled his tongue from the mouth of the bottle with a thump and belched some Dr. Nut. "Ultimately it was all Myrna Minkoff's fault. You know how she makes trouble."

"Myrna Minkoff? Don't gimme that foolishness, Ignatius. That girl's in New York. I know you, boy. You musta really pulled some boo-boos at that Levy Pants."

"My excellence confused them."

Buy A Confederacy of Dunces.

The A Confederacy of Dunces Excerpt of the Day

I'm way overdue for one of these.

It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that his gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.
--From the Forward by Walker Percy

Book Crossing

I was leafing through an issue of Mental Floss magazine when I came upon an ad for Bookcrossing.com. Pretty neat stuff. Sort of like the well-known Where's George site does for money, Book Crossing allows people to tag books before releasing them as free offerings in some public place. The idea is that whoever finds the book and decides to take it home will go to the site, enter in the book's ID number, write a journal entry about it, and then pass it on for someone else to enjoy. As the person who registered the book, one can track the progress of the book throughout the years to see how it's touched random people's lives.

I sort of like communal things like this. Hell, every now and then, the Dalai Mama and I jokingly consider selling everything and going Zendik. While that's not really going to happen, giving away books to is. I'm starting with Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," which had a profound effect on me when I read it a couple of months ago. This one is going to be a "controlled release," meaning I'm giving it to a friend, but when she's finished with it (and after she logs it into the site), she can put it wherever she wants. Tonight I'll find something cool to release directly into the wild, like at my favorite coffee shop. If you've ever been to the Blue Moose, you know exactly what I mean by wild.

The A Confederacy of Dunces Excerpt of the Day

Ignatius rejects his mother's idea that he consider psychiatric help:

"They [psychiatrists] would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!... The only problem that those people [psychiatric patients] have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions."

"Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked."

"Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that Dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr. Becnel one of the martyrs of our age. The poor man was badly victimized."

Travels with Roscoe

At the suggestion of my buddy Josh Williams, I dropped $3 on a book called Travels with Roscoe by a writer previously unknown to me named Roscoe. I'm just getting to know Josh, but I trust his judgment anyway because I like what he says to people, and $3 is a pretty good deal for a book with a cover like this. Little did I know that the price would soon skyrocket by 33 percent (to $4 all of you Journalism or English majors out there), but I got in while the gettin' was good. Sometimes it really pays to commit to something and act without thinking too much about it.

It took a couple of weeks, but Travels finally arrived today. I immediately read it cover to cover. It's fabulous. It's pure. It's about chimps and assplosions and fishing and belligerent Amish men and jail and Confucius and Steve McQueen and Tequila and Tang and so much more ... but best of all it's about motorcycles. It's about Bob Hannah and Chuck Sun and, again, Steve McQueen. And Travels with Roscoe contains perhaps the most unique description of a motorcycle crash that I've ever read.

I make motorcycle magazines for a living, and we have a reader or two. They're gonna find out about Travels with Roscoe in our August issue. Josh, tell Repair Manual to fire up the presses.

Order this book.

The A Confederacy of Dunces Excerpt of the Day

I'm overdue on a new excerpt.

The scene: After Ignatius takes on a job as a hot dog vendor on the streets of New Orleans and eats all of the hot dogs, his boss is none too pleased. Ignatius claims the hot dogs were stolen by a kid with a gun.

"Perhaps he was very hungry. Perhaps some vitamin deficiency in his growing body was screaming for appeasement. The human desire for food and sex is relatively equal. If there are armed rapes, why should there not be armed hot dog thefts? I see nothing unusual in the matter."

"You are full of bullshit" [says the boss]

"I? The incident is sociologically valid. The blame rests upon our society. The youth, crazed by suggestive television programs and lascivious periodicals, had apparently been consorting with some rather conventional adolescent females who refused to participate in his imaginative sexual program. His unfulfilled physical desires therefore sought sublimation in food. I, unfortunately, was the victim of all this. We may thank God that this boy has turned to food for an outlet. Had he not, I might have been raped right there on the spot."

Nobody Comes

I recently stumbled onto this poem by Thomas Hardy. The second stanza is intensely sad to me, but I really love the way it reads, so I thought I'd post it here.

Nobody Comes

TREE-LEAVES labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travelers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.

A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there.
— 9 October 1924

The A Confederacy of Dunces Excerpt of the Day

If you're currently suffering the dreadful misfortune of never having read A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, allow me to give you a short moment of salvation, direct from its hallowed pages. Part 2 in a series.

"What's this hanging out your bag?" [says the policeman]

"What do you think it is, stupid? It's a string for my lute." [Ignatius, our hero, answers]

"What's that?" The policeman drew back a little. "Are you local?"

"Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?" Ignatius bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. "This city [New Orleans] is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, Antichrists, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problem with you, but don't make the mistake of bothering me."

The A Confederacy of Dunces Excerpt of the Day

This is the beginning of a new regular feature here on RtN. For those of you who don't already know, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is among the greatest books ever written. It's ingenius, shocking, hilarious, and on more occasions than I could count I was forced to put the book down, close my eyes, and shake my head at a paragraph or passage that was so perfectly written I couldn't bear to move on and leave it behind.

So every now and then I'll post a short excerpt from the book, if for no other reason than to remind myself of how extraordinary it is. (It won the Pulitzer, so I'm not the only one who thinks so.) Today, I think it's appropriate to start with the opening paragraph.

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

Mingering Mike

I get a lot of press releases, but this one, for a book that's being promoted by a music company called Girlie Action, caught my eye:

Mingering Mike
The Amazing Career of An Imaginary Soul Superstar
Publication Date: May 1, 2007

One cold December morning in 2003, Dori Hadar - DJ by night, criminal investigator by day - was digging through crates of records at a Washington, D.C., flea market. There he unknowingly stumbled into the elaborate world of Mingering Mike - a soul superstar of the 1960s and '70s who released an astonishing fifty albums and at least as many singles in just ten years. But Hadar had never heard of him, and he realized why on closer inspection: every album in the crate - as well as the records themselves - were handmade of cardboard. Each package was intricately crafted, complete with gatefold interiors, extensive linear notes, and grooves drawn onto the "vinyl" - some albums were even covered in shrinkwrap, as if purchased at real record stores.

Hadar put his detective skills to work and soon found himself face-to-face with Mingering Mike nearly thirty years since his last album. Their friendship blossomed and Mike revealed the story of his life and the mythology of his many albums, hit singles, and movie soundtracks. A solitary boy raised by his brothers, sisters, and cousins, Mike lost himself in a world of his own imaginary superstardom, basing songs and albums on his and his family's experiences. Early teenager songs obsessed with love and heartache soon gave way to social themes surrounding the turbulent era of civil rights protests and political upheaval - brought even closer to home when Mike himself went underground, dodging the government for years after going AWOL from basic training during the Vietnam War.

I'm going to have to pick up this book. Meet Mingering Mike.

On Children

This one goes out to my pal Raoul Duke and his lady C, who are expecting their first child in a couple of weeks.

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I'd like to clarify that it's perfectly acceptable and even expected to completely insist that your children are Steelers fans. It's the price of rent in my house.

Dark Tower Graphic Art books (comics)

this is so awesome. if you haven't already experience the joy of reading these gems, here comes some eye candy.

Peet's Dragon

You might not have kids, but if you regularly go to bed with somebody, you never know, so remember this name: Bill Peet. He died in 2002 at the age of 87, after a celebrated career as one of Walt Disney's top guys and, after an unceremonious departure from that relationship, as a successful author and illustrator of children's books.

But I'd never heard of the guy before finding his book How Droofus the Dragon Lost His Head in a bookstore in Vermont, and it's quickly become my favorite children's book, surpassing Seuss's The Lorax.

Droofus, the youngest in a hell-raising clan of dragons, gets lost one day in a storm and separated from his pack for good. While rummaging around for crickets to eat, he spots one trapped in a spider's web awaiting its doom. So Droofus plucks the insect from the web, but then struggles with the idea of killing something he's just saved. Ultimately, he decides to no longer eat anything that crawls, flies, or is otherwise mobile and begins to develop a taste for grass.

What comes around goes around in Peet's world, and eventually a grown-up Droofus is saved from decapitation by a young boy who chooses friendship over a king's reward. It chokes me up a little every time I read it.

If you're going to read books over and over, you might as well make them good books. I'm looking forward to exploring more of Bill Peet's work. If anyone is familiar with other Peet stories, let me know what you think.